Angels and Engineers: Art, Artists, and Exhibition-Making in Distracted Worlds

What does it mean to live under a canopy of thousands of partially interconnected engineered satellites circulating above us? Freedom is an outdated word that was used to describe a feeling of non-oppression, of movement, of choice, of potentiality to act, of self-determination. Freedom of individual choice, however, is no longer freedom in the era of predictive statistics of the algorithm that engineers attention toward personalized choices, the invisible prisons of our cell phones that produce chronic distraction; and freedom of expression is no longer freedom in the era of mass narcissism that relentlessly requires us to produce creative and expressive tangible and intangible goods. In this process, the urgency to safeguard artistic freedom becomes ever more prescient. Artistic freedom could then be the Angel of History—an intellectual, imaginative, tender horizon that produces online and offline, singular and collective consciousness. While crossing through the ruins of expression, artistic freedom produces worlds. Here lies the supreme and welcome outdatedness of the theme of freedom, its libations. And satellites, like stars, like exhibitions, are the stuff of angels and engineers.

Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, former director of the Castello di Rivoli Museum of Contemporary Art and artistic director of many biennials and international exhibitions, including the Sydney and Istanbul biennials and dOCUMENTA 13, is considered one of the world’s most influential curators. We are honored to have her deliver our Distinguished Global Curator Lecture.

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