Format: One-day Symposium
Panel Discussions + 1 Keynote
Location: MuseumsQuartier (MQ), Wien (confirmed)
For Whom: Austria- and Vienna-based Curators and Scholars
When: 15th November 2025
This one-day symposium brings together Austria-based curators and theorists to discuss the ethics and aesthetics of ambiguous orders.
In contemporary art, the notion of giving is more than a metaphor—it structures the relational economies of curating, institution-building, and artistic labour. Yet giving, as a seemingly benevolent act, is never ideologically neutral. It is always entangled in histories of extraction, systems of recognition, and economies of attention. To give, in art, is also to frame, to delimit, and to condition the terms of reception. The question, then, is not only what is given, but how, by whom, and under what institutional conditions.
This symposium asks what forms of giving might still interrupt rather than reinforce dominant systems—what it means to give without subsuming, to host without absorbing, to support without smoothing over contradiction. Can we still offer the aesthetic strategies of humour, irony, or opacity without their immediate assimilation into the attention economy? In a field where funding is tied to legibility and participation is framed as inclusion, curators must keep inventing grammars—ones that make space not only for the unspeakable, but for the unclear, the unoptimized, the unresolved.
Format: One-day Symposium
Panel Discussions + 1 Keynote
Location: MuseumsQuartier (MQ), Wien (confirmed)
For Whom: Austria- and Vienna-based Curators and Scholars
When: 15th November 2025
This one-day symposium brings together Austria-based curators and theorists to discuss the ethics and aesthetics of ambiguous orders.
In contemporary art, the notion of giving is more than a metaphor—it structures the relational economies of curating, institution-building, and artistic labour. Yet giving, as a seemingly benevolent act, is never ideologically neutral. It is always entangled in histories of extraction, systems of recognition, and economies of attention. To give, in art, is also to frame, to delimit, and to condition the terms of reception. The question, then, is not only what is given, but how, by whom, and under what institutional conditions.
This symposium asks what forms of giving might still interrupt rather than reinforce dominant systems—what it means to give without subsuming, to host without absorbing, to support without smoothing over contradiction. Can we still offer the aesthetic strategies of humour, irony, or opacity without their immediate assimilation into the attention economy? In a field where funding is tied to legibility and participation is framed as inclusion, curators must keep inventing grammars—ones that make space not only for the unspeakable, but for the unclear, the unoptimized, the unresolved.