Negotiating Equity at DAI (Dutch Art Institute Master Programme/ArtEZ Institute of the Arts) was Masters curriculum for fine art from 2009-2012 and aimed to offer a participatory platform to address the ethics and practice of curatorship as a mode of art production, asserting that these terms of engagement imply rethinking the economic and social conditions of art. Negotiating Equity drew upon theories of fairness in questioning divergent value systems and testing artistic models amongst students, curators, artists, art critics and writers from around the world. The nature and format of this project favored cooperative endeavor, while considering the implications of self-curation.
Negotiating Equity looked at ‘curation as artistic practice’ in regard to local contexts, in-situ installations and digital technologies. Specificially, Negotiating Equity addressed collaborative curation- investigating experimental and conceptual art practices under physical as well as virtual conditions. Drawing upon a wide range of artistic and art-related practices, some off the radar, undocumented and under-theorized, others representative of art historical paradigms, we examined various exhibition and presentation models along with addressing and finding other audiences, virtual or otherwise, implicitly or explicitly challenging dominant regimes of spectatorship all too often considered self-evident.
In 2009 we focused on temporary environments in Delft, where the participants could work for certain periods of time. In 2009-2010 various forms of self-organisation were researched in regard to the public sphere, including the internet and mass media, whereby each DAI participant made a TV production and public presentation at the Nieuwe Vide,Haarlem. 2010-2011 ‘Art After Space’ concentrated on all the manifold possibilities of ‘space’ as more than just a place, including the collaboration with CEMA (Centre for Experimental Media Art) in Bangalore, India during our project: Space the Final Frontier. 2011-2012 addressed the terms ‘Archive, Database, Research’, which lend themselves to platforms for creating, viewing, discussing and learning about experimental practices at the intersections of art, technology and social change.The question remains why, where and how we can construct spaces for dialogue and social interaction. The project culminated in a trip to Dakar, Senegal in May 2012 to carry out personal projects and for the Dakar Biennale, with a public presentation at Raw Material Company. From 2012-2013 onwards Negotiating Equity will be negotiated into Roaming Academy, presently first-years curriculum at DAI.
Negotiating Equity was curated and organised by Renée Ridgway, co-initiator of n.e.w.s., a collective online platform for the analysis and development of art-related activity, drawing upon contributions from around the globe. Each month at DAI, guests were invited as well as contributors from the n.e.w.s. platform to present their particular aesthetic, social and economic criteria regarding artistic production. Concomitantly, DAI participants were requested to develop their individual blog, along with reading and following n.e.w.s. This website contextualises the projects from the past years, please see the ‘blogroll’ for the research of the participants.