Book Launch: Not Going It Alone: Collective Curatorial Curating - Camden Art Centre

with Paul O'Neill, Gerrie Van Noord, and Matt Williams

Join Paul O’Neill, Gerrie Van Noord, and Matt Williams in conversation to mark the launch of Not Going It Alone: Collective Curatorial Curating, which collates collective approaches to curatorial practice from international practitioners.

About the Book:
In recent years, collective approaches to curatorial practice have become prominent, and ot for the first time. While the myth of the stand-alone curator has been largely dismantled in favour of recognising the myriad other actors and agencies—from artists to installers, from gallery attendants to directors—and others who make their work possible, contemporary curatorial practices encompass far more than bringing simply more collaborators together. Through a collection of essays and experimental texts, Not Going It Alone: Collective Curatorial Curating offers readers a layered and contextual understanding of this phenomenon, its debates, and possibilities across a range of temporalities, positions, and geographical perspectives.

The Speakers

The Speakers

Paul O’Neill is the Artistic Director of PUBLICS, a curatorial agency with a dedicated library, event space and reading room in Helsinki. Previously he was Director of the Graduate Program at the Center for Curatorial Studies (CCS), Bard College, international tutor on the de Appel Curatorial Programme, Amsterdam. He is notably the author of The Culture of Curating and the Curating of Culture(s) (2016), and the co-editor of Curating Subjects (2007), Curating and the Educational Turn (2010), Curating Research (2015), The Curatorial Conundrum (2016); How Institutions Think (2017); and Curating After the Global (2019). Forthcoming books include Not Going it Alone: Collective Curatorial Curating (2024); Curious (2024), and a collective of his curatorial essays called CURED.

Dr Gerrie van Noord is an editor and educator. She is interested in publishing as an environment for the articulation of and critical reflection on creative practices. Gerrie has worked on a wide range of publishing projects, including Afterlives for Artangel and ‘Fabrications’ for Book Works. She has produced several critical anthologies and works for the open-access peer-reviewed PARSE Journal. Recent projects with artists include a selection of Isabel Nolan’s writing, a website on Olivia Plender’s work, and a book on Kathrin Böhm’s practice. Gerrie was a Visiting Lecturer at the MFA at the Glasgow School of Art (2003–15), at Birkbeck (2006–19), and since 2019 contributes to the RCA’s MA Curating Contemporary Art. She has a PhD from Birkbeck, University of London (2021).

Matt Williams is the Curator of Public Programmes at Camden Art Centre. He has organised numerous monographic and group exhibitions, as well as public programmes, both nationally and internationally. These projects, developed in collaboration with artists, academics, cultural producers, musicians, publishers, and independent organisations, form an expansive portfolio of cultural initiatives and interdisciplinary engagement programmes. His recently completed practice-based PhD explores curation as a tool for the excavation of historical sites of cultural resistance through sound, featuring commissioned sound works that can be accessed at  weversions.site.