Practices and tactics in encouraging young curators and artists
ROUND TABLE

On the premises of the Institute for Contemporary Art in Zagreb, Kralj Tomislav Square 20, on May 16th at 19:00, the art history students’ web portal Kulturflux is holding a roundtable session in which the possibilities of encouraging young curators and artists in the field of art and culture will be discussed.

At the end of their studies or at the end of their formal university education, young prospective curators and artists should be ready for a huge professional jump – from college to a gallery or an atelier. However, the jump often does not occur because of the shortage of jobs for cultural workers, and those who are able to get a chance to work in their profession are faced with various difficulties in curatorial or artistic practices, both in the form of applications for public galleries to showcase their work and in the form of technical adjustments and adequate equipping of gallery spaces for the exhibition of different artworks.

Because of compressed curricula of university studies, where professors usually don’t have enough resources or possibilities to intervene in the practical knowledge of students, the students’ own professional training in the art world remains a burden on their own backs – they have to fill in the gaps of knowledge acquired at university and have to throw themselves into the lion’s den made of applications and reports, technical sheets and royalty agreements.

For young curators and artists who can’t find work in the profession, the question often arises – where and how do you start looking for a job? It is important to ask oneself how to start a hunt for a job in one’s own field of expertise or how to get to the starting point where one can help edit or create art exhibitions.

When talking about vocational training, the institutions in charge of preparing students for their vocation are often left out of the discussion – their goal should be to encourage aspiring curators and artists to acquire competences for their specific vocations or programs by giving them access to the most basic information on the jobs they will later be working in. Thus it is important to include all cultural institutions into the discussion so that they could serve as allies in the process of rethinking the practices and tactics of encouraging young artists and curators.

For this reason, we as Kulturflux are organizing this roundtable to reflect on the burning issues of young curators and artists in search of their own place in the art scene. In light of that, we invited different curators, artists, gallery and institution leaders to join us in order to find out how to encourage young students to work, which practices and tactics are used to promote other young artists or curators and how they, as experts, believe the gap between the knowledge gained through university programs and the competences needed for further professional development of young artists and curators in their vocations can be closed.

The speakers at our roundtable are Janka Vukmir (President of the Institute for Contemporary Art), Lovro Japundžić (Curator at the Miroslav Kraljević Gallery), Koraljka Kovač Dugandžić (Full-time Professor at the Faculty of Textile Technology) and Marina Paulenka (Art Director of Organ Vida).

The moderators of the roundtable are the portal’s very own journalists Buga Kranželić and Mihaela Zajec.