No Storage Help
Kunstlicht’s Online Curating – special online edition
On 7 November, 19:00 – 20:00 CET
Part of distant.gallery festival.
No Storage Help, foregrounds online exhibition projects and curatorial practices that engage with the instability and precarity of their environments. By exploring the potential of these digital environments processes of optimisation and commodification turn into spaces for experimentation, creativity and alternative modes of interaction. Across diverse approaches—from Denise Twaites’ Full Stack Fabulator and Carly Whitaker’s Iterative Manifestations to Marialaura Ghidini’s concept of curatorial interference—the curators, artists and researchers reveal how online curating redefines the exhibition as an adaptive, processual, and self-reflexive act of making and unmaking meaning. Chiara Tomborini’s reading of DMV Color, Naomi van Dijcks’ Nested Ideologies, and Lívia Nolasco-Rózsás, Erika Marthins & Patrick Keller’s study of hybrid exhibitions trace how operational and hybrid practices reshape access, authorship, and authenticity, revealing curating as a continuous process of rewriting within unstable systems. While Vanessa Lai Wing Yan’s The Library and Lorena Berrueco Rodríguez’s A People’s Atlas of Nuclear Colorado show how non-linear archives cultivate memory and care through participatory, multisensory engagement. At the same time, Lisa Marie Sneijder explores how design decisions can help to find, hold and engage the online audience amidst the non-stop stream of data and the ever-growing ecology of (mostly commercial) websites. Meanwhile, the projects described by Bilyana Palankasova, and Pita Arreola-Burns & Elliott Burns examine the economies of visibility and algorithmic circulation that govern contemporary artistic labour, situating curatorial practice within systems of content value, virality, and machine spectatorship. Susana Vargas-Mejía & Juaniko Moreno’s reflections on MAMBO’s digital residencies and Floris Paalman’s revisiting of MHHK demonstrate how institutions negotiate continuity and obsolescence, embedding digital experiment within shifting socio-technical and local contexts. Taken together, these essays ask how memory can persist—and evolve—when both physical and digital realms are co-opted, collapsed, or rendered hyperreal. In an era of “no storage”, where infrastructures break down or become obsolete as quickly as they emerge, online curating becomes not only a mode of display but a practice of resistance and renewal—one that addresses how to continue to curate, care, and remember under intensifying socio-political and economic strain. At the same time, being inside fragile and interlinked worlds, these online curators “help” a move towards a more sustainable collective imagination.
This selection is based on the special issue “Online Curating” by kunstlicht journal for visual culture (ed. Annet Dekker). Expanding on the written contributions in the print journal it brings back the online curating discourse to the web. Embracing the fleeting nature of the web, excerpts of the texts are accompanied with screenshots, images, video or still functioning embedded websites. Everything is held together by the sounds of The Library by soundpocket, the background of Tara Kelton’s No Storage Search Engine (2023), first presented at Unproductive Solutions, and from which this page borrows its title.
Colophon.
[writers Online Curting]
Bilyana Palankasova
Carly Whitaker
Chiara Tomborini
Denise Twaithes
Elliott Burns
Erika Marthins
Floris Paalman
Hsiang-Yun Huang
Juaniko Moreno
Lisa Marie Sneijder
Lívia Nolasco-Rózsás
Lorena Berrueco Rodríguez
Marialaura Ghidini
Naomi van Dijck
Patrick Keller
Pita Arreola-Burns
Susana Vargas-Mejía
Vanessa Lai Wing Yan
XenoVisual Studies collective
[editorial collective Kunstlicht]
Annet Dekker
Anastasia Shin
Daniela Tenebaum
Fleur van Suijdam
Gabriela Encheva
Hannah Geurkink
Joëlle Daems
Lisa Petersohn
Lisa Marie Sneijder
Lorena Berrueco Rodríguez
Manuela Zammit
Martine van Lubeek
Noelle Derksen
Olivera Bucalović
Patricia Nagtzaam
Paula Chang
Paula Rodríguez Sardiñas
Rebeka Erdélyi
Online Curating was designed by Corine van der Wal.
Cover image: Tara Kelton, No Storage Search Engine, 2023. First presented at UnProductive Solutions, 2023. Courtesy of Tara Kelton.