English language offer
*Microcredential Internationales
This workshop addresses the evolving relationship between artists and curators at a moment when authorship, power, and responsibility in exhibition-making are increasingly shared, contested, and renegotiated. Drawing on Yuko Hasegawa’s concept of the egofugal and Carolyn Christov Bakargiev’s notion of the curator as draftsperson, the workshop proposes a model of the artist–curator liaison as a multi voiced composition and an ongoing draft, rather than a fixed hierarchy or a finished script.
Egofugal combines the idea of a centered ego—each participant arriving with desires, convictions, and a strong standpoint—with a movement of fugere: to move away and forward. It resonates with the musical fugue, where a theme appears in one voice, is taken up and transformed by others, and progresses through repetition, variation, and counterpoint. In this sense, the artist–curator relationship becomes an egofugal choreography: two distinct centers that repeatedly decenter themselves to respond to each other and to the evolving exhibition. Christov Bakargiev’s metaphor of the curator as draftsperson emphasizes process, tentativeness, and revision. The curator generates sketches—conceptual, spatial, discursive—within and around the artist’s work, knowing that these drafts will be reworked, contested, or erased in dialogue.
The curator generates conceptual, spatial and discursive sketches within and around the artist’s work. Yet these drafts are to be reworked, contested or erased in dialogue with the artist. This view resists curatorial over authorship: the exhibition is not a final drawing imposed on the artist but a palimpsest of drafts, traces, and negotiations between artist, curator, institution, and public.
Taken together, egofugal movement and curatorial drafting offer a productive framework for early career artists to understand and navigate their liaisons with curators: not as one sided judgment or service, but as a dynamic, co authored process of composing, revising, and sharing meaning.
The workshop follows a structured yet dialogical format, putting into practice the collaborative model it reflects upon. It begins with an introduction to the curatorial role in exhibition-making, considering its historical development and its shifting understandings of authorship and responsibility. On this basis, we will explore various curatorial approaches and examine how an artwork changes as it moves from the studio into the exhibition space, where context, mediation, and spatial arrangement actively shape its meaning. Participants will take part in focused exercises that address the presentation of their own work and the development of exhibition ideas. They will learn to articulate their positions with clarity, intellectual depth and critical awareness.
Throughout the workshop, a collaborative methodology is emphasized: curators are approached as partners in an ongoing process rather than as external authorities. Participants are encouraged to remain attentive to their central concerns while cultivating critical thinking, mutual trust, openness, and flexibility.
Nirith Nelson is a contemporary art and design curator and art educator. She teaches Curatorial Studies at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design and is Curator of Contemporary Art at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem.
Registration from May 1, 2026 here.
This workshop is aimed at HFBK students in their final year and graduates up to 5 years after graduation.
