Creating conditions for conversation across institutions and continents
In the shadow of the 61st Venice Biennale, a quiet but consequential gathering is taking shape — graduate students from five art institutions across Europe and North America convening to ask who holds the power to shape what the world sees, and why. Organized by the EARN Curatorial Studies Workshop, the International Curatorial Students Assembly is less a public event than a deliberate act of intellectual infrastructure-building, creating space for the kind of critical reflection that rarely crosses institutional or national borders. It is one visible moment in a broader, decades-long effort to distribute curatorial knowledge across continents rather than concentrate it in any single city or canon.
- Curatorial authority has long been concentrated in a handful of cities and institutions — this Assembly directly challenges that geography by bringing together students from Milan, New York, Gothenburg, Riga, and Iași for a shared critical conversation.
- The closed-session format signals urgency: these are the conversations that get lost in public programming, and EARN is deliberately protecting space for them.
- A wave of new publications — some from major academic presses, others freely open-access — is simultaneously expanding the theoretical vocabulary of curating and making it available beyond elite institutional walls.
- EARN's calendar is accelerating: Venice in spring, South Africa and Zambia in September, and a major cross-network gathering in Vienna in November signal a field moving fast toward genuine internationalization.
- The question animating all of it — what does it mean to curate at the scale of a biennial, under institutional and political pressure — is landing not as an abstract debate but as a practical, urgent concern for the next generation of curators.
In Venice this spring, graduate students from five art institutions — NABA in Milan, the School of Visual Arts in New York, HDK-Valand in Gothenburg, the Art Academy of Latvia in Riga, and the Doctoral School of Visual Arts in Iași, Romania — are gathering for a closed, focused conversation about how large exhibitions get made and who gets to decide. Organized by EARN Curatorial Studies Workshop in partnership with Università Iuav di Venezia, the International Curatorial Students Assembly is timed to coincide with the 61st Venice Biennale, using the world's most prominent art event as a backdrop for the kind of critical thinking that rarely travels across borders.
The Assembly is one node in a much larger network. EARN has been convening conferences and symposia across the UK, Latvia, Romania, Italy, Finland, Sweden, Thailand, and the United States for years, and events are already planned for South Africa and Zambia later in 2026. In November, all EARN working groups will gather in Vienna for 'Harvesting Otherwise,' a cross-regional meeting whose call for contributions closes May 20.
Running alongside this activity is a significant publishing effort. Carolina Rito's 'On the Curatorial' series from Floating Opera Press is tracing the theoretical debate about what curating even means, with volumes by Mick Wilson and Paul O'Neill already out and Beatrice von Bismarck's forthcoming. Steven Henry Madoff's 'Thoughts on Curating' series, through Sternberg and MIT Press, includes voices from Terry Smith, Zdenka Badovinac, and Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung. Notably, several major works — including a reader on AI and curating edited by Joasia Krysa and Magdalena Tyżlik-Carver, and a co-edited volume by Cătălin Gheorghe and Mick Wilson — are available open-access, making serious curatorial scholarship freely available beyond institutional subscription walls.
What the full picture reveals is a field in deliberate motion — not centralizing curatorial authority, but distributing it. The Venice Assembly is a single, visible moment in a project that is quietly reshaping where curatorial knowledge is made, who holds it, and how far it travels.
In Venice this spring, a network of curatorial educators is gathering graduate students from art schools across Europe and North America for a day of focused conversation about how large exhibitions get made, who decides what gets shown, and what it all means. The event, called the International Curatorial Students Assembly, is being organized by EARN Curatorial Studies Workshop in partnership with the PhD in Arts program at Università Iuav di Venezia, timed to coincide with the 61st Venice Biennale. It's a closed session—just students and faculty—designed to create space for the kind of critical thinking that doesn't always fit into public programming.
The Assembly brings together graduate students from five institutions: NABA in Milan, the School of Visual Arts in New York, HDK-Valand Academy of Art and Design in Gothenburg, the Art Academy of Latvia in Riga, and the Doctoral School of Visual Arts at the National University of Arts "George Enescu" in Iași, Romania. The conversation will center on what it means to curate at the scale of a major international biennial—the curatorial choices, the political dimensions, the institutional pressures and possibilities. It's the kind of work that happens in seminars and studios, but rarely gets documented or shared across borders.
This Assembly is one piece of a much larger ecosystem. EARN has been organizing conferences and symposia for years across the UK, Latvia, Romania, Italy, Finland, Sweden, Thailand, and the United States. Events are already planned for South Africa and Zambia later this year. What's emerging is a genuinely international conversation about curatorial practice—not centered in any single city or institution, but distributed across continents and languages.
Alongside the Assembly, EARN members are launching new publications that map the theoretical terrain of contemporary curating. There's a new series called "On the Curatorial" from Floating Opera Press, edited by Carolina Rito, which traces the debate about what "the curatorial" even means—a conversation that gained momentum in the mid-2000s. The first two volumes are out: Mick Wilson's "On Discourse and the Curatorial" and Paul O'Neill's "Beyond Caring: Para-Hosting as Curatorial Escape," with a third by Beatrice von Bismarck coming this spring. Another series, "Thoughts on Curating," published by Sternberg Press and MIT Press under Steven Henry Madoff's editorship, includes work by Terry Smith, Zdenka Badovinac, and Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, with more volumes forthcoming.
The publishing landscape is notably open-access in places. Cătălin Gheorghe and Mick Wilson co-edited "Curating beyond Exhibition: On the post-exhibitionary condition in a post-political," available free through the Vector series. Gheorghe and Lorena Marciuc put out "Under the Last Magnetic Sun: Practices of (Counter)Research Imagination" through the Doctoral School in Iași. Joasia Krysa and Magdalena Tyżlik-Carver edited "Curating Superintelligences: A Reader on AI and Future Curating," also open-access, in the DATA browser book series. Steven Henry Madoff has launched a new open-access online journal called "The Curatorial." These aren't niche publications—they're serious scholarship being made freely available to anyone who wants to engage with contemporary curatorial thinking.
Other recent work includes Andris Brinkmanis's study of Asja Lācis, the Latvian theater director and revolutionary, published by Meltemi Press in Italian. Steven Henry Madoff also brought out "Unseparate: Modernism, Interdisciplinary Art, and Network Aesthetics" through Stanford University Press. Henk Slager has a book forthcoming, "Collateral Concepts: A Provisional Vocabulary for Artistic Research," in the Contemporary Condition series.
What's striking about all this activity is the scale and the intentionality. EARN isn't a single institution or a conference series—it's a working group that's deliberately building infrastructure for curatorial discourse across borders. The Venice Assembly is one moment in a much larger project. Later this year, EARN members will travel to South Africa and Zambia in September. In November, all the EARN working groups will gather in Vienna for something called "Harvesting Otherwise," a gathering designed to bring together people working on curatorial questions from different regions and perspectives. The call for contributions to that event closes May 20.
What emerges from all this is a picture of curatorial studies as a field that's becoming more internationalized, more theoretically rigorous, and more deliberately distributed. It's not about centralizing curatorial authority in any one place. It's about creating conditions for conversation, publication, and shared learning across institutions and continents. The Venice Assembly is just one visible node in a much larger network.
Notable Quotes
The Assembly will foster dialogue among international participants, exploring the curatorial, political, and institutional dimensions of large-scale international exhibitions— EARN Curatorial Studies Workshop announcement
The Hearth Conversation Another angle on the story
Why does EARN need to gather curatorial students specifically at the Venice Biennale? Why not just hold seminars at their home institutions?
Because the Biennale is a living text. You can't really understand what it means to curate at that scale without being in the room where it's happening, seeing the exhibitions, talking to people who are thinking about the same problems in real time.
But it's a closed session. The students aren't engaging with the public or the artists or the curators of the Biennale itself?
No, they're not. It's deliberately closed. That creates a different kind of space—one where you can be critical, where you can ask hard questions about institutional power and curatorial politics without performing for an audience. Sometimes you need that.
The publications seem to be a big part of this too. Why is EARN investing so much in books and journals?
Because curatorial practice needs language. You can't think clearly about what you're doing unless you can articulate it, debate it, read what others have written. The publications are how the thinking gets shared and built upon across institutions and countries.
A lot of these books are open-access. That seems deliberate.
It is. If you're trying to build an international conversation, you can't gate it behind paywalls. Open-access means a student in Iași or Lagos or anywhere else can read the same texts as someone at SVA. It democratizes the conversation.
What's the difference between what EARN is doing and what a traditional art school does?
Traditional art schools teach students how to curate. EARN is building a field—creating the theoretical frameworks, the publications, the networks, the spaces for dialogue that allow curatorial practice to evolve as a discipline. It's more ambitious than training. It's about shaping how people think about curation itself.
And the fact that they're expanding to South Africa and Zambia—what does that signal?
That the conversation isn't staying in Europe and North America. It's deliberately moving to places where curatorial practice might look different, where the institutional contexts are different, where the questions might be different. That's not tokenism—that's a genuine reorientation of where the work happens.