The term 'curator' has undergone significant transformation
An interview with Joasia Krysa, the curator of the second edition of Helsinki Biennial
Joasia Krysa, a UK-based, Polish-born curator, researcher and scholar, has been appointed the new curator of the second edition of the Helsinki Biennial, taking place 12 June – 18 September 2023. Celebrating a synthesis between art and the environment, the biennial will return to the unique surroundings of Vallisaari Island in the Helsinki Archipelago, whilst building upon its inaugural edition through a greater presence on the mainland in locations across the city. Free and open to all, the Helsinki Biennial continues to build connections between artists from Finland and around the world and is committed to responsible exhibition-making and inclusive principles.
Joasia Krysa works at the intersection of contemporary art and technology. She served as artistic director of Kunsthal Aarhus, Denmark (2012–15), and was part of the curatorial team for Documenta 13 (2012). She was the co-curator of Liverpool Biennial 2016, has previously worked with WRO Media Art Biennale in Poland, and has presented online exhibitions at Tate Modern and the Whitney Museum of American Art, amongst others. She is currently Professor of Exhibition Research and Head of Art and Design at Liverpool John Moores University and holds an adjunct position at the Liverpool Biennial. Krysa was part of the advisory committee of Helsinki Biennial 2021.
Arterritory invited Jaosia Krysa for a conversation about the role of the biennial on the Helsinki social and environmental map and a future coexistence of AI-curated exhibitions and human-curated ones, in the biennial format among others.
The Helsinki Biennial is part of the city’s plan to make Helsinki a more diverse and international city for culture, tourism and events. After the first edition, a research report was commissioned to examine the impact of the Helsinki Biennial from a socio-cultural, environmental and economic perspective. How does it impact your vision as the curator of the Second Helsinki Biennial? What could we learn about the current role of similar-scale art events in general from this report?
It is the case with most biennials, of course, that they are tied to these broader notions of socio-economic and cultural regeneration, as well as environmental sustainability. Not least, these various measures of impact help direct the effort and public financing. But it is also very clear that culture and art can make a difference not just economically but also contribute to people’s well-being and help make Helsinki a better place to live and work. At the same time, with over 200 art biennials in the world attracting global art tourism, one can’t help but think about their direct environmental impact and sustainability in the broader sense. The consideration of these various tensions inherent to biennials is very much at the heart of my thinking for the second edition, as it has been for the Helsinki Biennial in general from its outset.
What are the advantages and challenges of a biennial whose location is an island?
The island location makes the Helsinki Biennial rather unique on a structural level but also has metaphoric potential. Islands are semi-autonomous, separate yet at the same time connected — by sea and by undersea land, and this goes for biennials too. They are part of a largely interconnected network of art biennials, as well as distinctive and separate each in its own way, with their own very particular character and typology. The island of Vallisaari in the Helsinki Archipelago makes a fascinating site in this respect, with its specific ecology and history connecting to wider issues that are related to environmental concerns and the industrial-military complex (resonating with historical and contemporary political conflicts). It’s a unique location, and it is not common to encounter art in surroundings like this where nature – the weather and specific ecology, for instance – has a direct influence on the experience and understanding of the artworks. And, of course, as an island, one of the challenges is accessibility when it comes to the ferry traffic, topography and services, and the more pragmatic considerations of how and by whom art can be accessed (if art can be broadly understood to be an island). But rather than focus on the island as such, I would like to think about the Gulf of Finland where the island is situated to highlight the broader context and connections — close to the city of Helsinki but also to Tallinn, Stockholm and St. Petersburg, connected through transport routes, by nature, water and the complex history of the region. In this sense, my focus is not the island per se but rather the connections to other places and issues, the various things held in common.
The international visibility of the first Helsinki Biennial was severely affected by the coronavirus pandemic. The ongoing status quo of uncertainty has been further intensified by the war in Ukraine. What is your vision for future art biennales – is it globality or localness?
It has to be both, in varying proportions: the local is necessarily embedded in the global but also vice versa — what some call ‘glocal’, although I’m not particularly keen on the phrase. It seems that the challenge for biennials is to negotiate these relations between these two coordinates — the inside and the outside, responding to global issues and the ‘art world’ and, at the same time, their position in the local environment and everyday life. At the same time, I am keen to move away from binary thinking here and also challenge the terminology in use — not so much ‘global’ as ‘planetary’, for instance; to move away from the overriding associations with economic globalisation and stress the relation between humans and the environment in which they live, as well as the damage they cause. A further alternative is to talk of ‘worlds’ to point to the possibility of creating alternatives, avoiding the separation between humans and their environment — the practices of ‘worlding’, as feminist technoscience puts it. That’s a much larger discussion, of course, but biennials operate across these tensions between people and environment at different scales: between humans and nonhumans, between local and global, and thereby might in some small way help draw attention to details that we might otherwise overlook (what Anna Tsing calls ‘noticing’ the small details), thereby suggesting other possibilities and other worlds.
The challenge for biennials is to negotiate these relations between these two coordinates — the inside and the outside, responding to global issues and the ‘art world’ and, at the same time, their position in the local environment and everyday life.
How do you see the role of curator as a profession in the current changing cultural and socio-economic landscape?
That’s a big question. One thing for sure is that the term ‘curator’ has undergone significant transformation, to the point where it becomes applicable in almost any context, including curating populations or economies, or social media posts — moving from a traditional custodian of a collection of cultural objects and working with artists to the role of what some describe as ‘influencer’ in wider culture. In the art field, there are ever more university courses (including in Finland), and the curator has taken on an increasingly prominent role in cultural production ‒ the curator as a creative practitioner in their own right, exemplified by the figure of the curator of global biennials. I am both wary and really interested in this discussion, recognising the need to open up cross-disciplinary collaborations with others, including nonhumans, moving away from singular and centralising descriptions. The significance of this is that the curator does not simply curate things in the world but also is able to develop new worlds, and this is a big responsibility, and at the core of it is the idea of care – for others, for relations, for environment, and for opening up possibilities to shape new directions for the world. In this sense, despite what you refer to as the changing cultural and socio-economic landscape, care is the one aspect of the role that does not change.
The potential of machine learning and artificial intelligence are well known in areas like medicine and education. Right now, stimulated by the pandemic, but not only, many museums, galleries, art collections and art events are also exploring and using these tools. What interests you the most in the intersection of contemporary art and technology?
Yes, this is exciting, and it is also timely that museums and art institutions in general have finally opened themselves up to technology outside of their marketing and communications departments. What interests me here is not so much the use of tools — as in the case of the digital humanities for instance — but how this allows us to think about new spaces, new forms for art, and new forms for curating. I should say this is, of course, nothing new as there is a whole history of institutions, curators and artists embracing and experimenting with technologies in this way, although admittedly more on the fringes of the artworld. Today, engaging with machine learning and artificial intelligence specifically allows us to reflect on what it means to learn, to be a human or a machine, to be intelligent or not, to produce other kinds of knowledge, of creativity. Engaging critically with these technologies helps test their limits as well as explore their ability to open up new questions about institutions, creative practice and curating, and about agency – the ability to act, act with others, human and nonhuman, and to make impact. This is what art can do. With these ideas in mind for Helsinki Biennial 2023, I have tried to open up the curatorial process to include what I have called ‘curatorial intelligences’.
Today, engaging with machine learning and artificial intelligence specifically allows us to reflect on what it means to learn, to be a human or a machine, to be intelligent or not, to produce other kinds of knowledge, of creativity.
How do you see a future coexistence of AI-curated exhibitions and human-curated ones? In the biennial format, among others.
I don’t have an answer to this, no actual predictions. I’ll leave that to predictive algorithms and fortune-tellers. Rather, I’d like to stress that all technologies, both historical and future ones, challenge our precepts and the ways we are entangled with them, and with the world through them. This was already the case with curatorial practices in the past, where various technologies were employed to influence the process in one way or another. In this sense, curating is already a technology. With AI, there is a chance to reimagine what curating exhibitions and biennials might be, might look like, not to replace one with the other but to question the ways we think about the various models we tend to take for granted ‒ both in contemporary art and computer science. This might lead to new forms and possibilities where humans and nonhumans might acknowledge their co-existence and mutual dependence, helping dissolve hard distinctions between humans and machines, or between the physical and the digital (and I quite like the new term that I came across used by some artists – the ‘phygital’). Very much in the spirit of a thought experiment, I have recently collaborated on a project called “The Next Biennial Should be Curated by a Machine”, which set out to explore the way machine learning algorithms might help envisage alternative models of exhibition-making (and curatorial agency). The point was not meant to be literal ‒ and remove humans from the process ‒ but to acknowledge what machines might add and suggest alternatives to human-centric notions of curating. Speculative models like this can help us imagine different possibilities beyond the here and now, much in the same way as art can, through telling stories free from constraints.
With AI, there is a chance to reimagine what curating exhibitions and biennials might be, might look like, not to replace one with the other but to question the ways we think about the various models we tend to take for granted ‒ both in contemporary art and computer science.
Human emotions play a huge role in both creating and viewing art. The current forms of AI cannot have their own emotions. At the same time, can it be capable of understanding how art makes people feel? Could it ever truly understand what we are looking for in art, and does it need to ‒ from the perspective of the evolutionary process?
This continues to be a challenge for AI and subject of ongoing research and discussions, not simply to establish that machines can think (as Turing did), or even curate, but to find out how they can activate the senses. Art confounds received understanding in this way and generates complex emotions. Isn’t that part of the point? I recently read the text Towards a Poetics of Artificial Superintelligence: How Symbolic Language Can Help Us Grasp The Nature and Power of What is Coming by the American writer Nora Khan – a must-read for anyone interested in these issues!
