COLLECTIVE CURATORIAL PRACTICE RUANGRUPA AT DOCUMENTA FIFFTEEN

• Main Author: Wijaya, Angga
• Format: Theses
• Language: Indonesia
• Online Access: https://digilib.itb.ac.id/gdl/view/75943
• Institution: Institut Teknologi Bandung

In recent years of the 21st century, working collectively has become a trend in art creation, not only in the production of works of art but also in the practice of curation. The term curator has now gone beyond a single definition and now occupies a much wider scope of activity, practice, and profession. Collective Curating, one of the variations of Contemporary Curating, is a collaborative curation approach between a group of curators with a teamwork structure that develops exhibition concepts together. ruangrupa (always written in lowercase and without spaces) is an artist collective founded in 2000 in Jakarta. ruangrupa was appointed as the curator for the 15th Documenta (hereinafter written as documenta fifteen), an international contemporary art exhibition with a biennale format that is held every five years. ruangrupa promotes the idea of "Lumbung" as a mechanism for managing and sharing shared resources. In its curatorial practice, ruangrupa uses a collective approach with various methods such as the Assembly (meeting room for planning exhibitions with artists) and ruruHaus (meeting room for connecting with Kassel residents). This research focuses on the discussion of curatorial practices that are carried out collectively by ruangrupa at documenta fifteen. The two main points of discussion in this research focus on two issues: First, how is Ruangrupa's collective curatorial practice developed in documenta fifteen through the granary mechanism? Second, how is the critical reception of the collective curatorial practice of ruangrupa at documenta fifteen, with the aim of gaining a new understanding of Collective Curating as a development of curatorial study discourse? The research method used in this research is qualitative descriptive research, which places the collective curatorial practice of ruangrupa at documenta fifteen as the object of its study. The theory used is Curatorial Studies and Collective Art to analyze the practice of art curation. This research also highlights Critical Reception as a way of understanding public acceptance of documenta fifteen's curation practice. The critical response analysis is based on essays from art practitioners published in online art journals. iv This study concludes that the curatorial practices carried out by ruangrupa have changed the conception of the curator, which was originally an autonomous center of consciousness and ideas, into a practice that decentralizes the agency of the curator collectively. Based on the analysis of the critical response, the decentralization of the curatorial agency also poses a risk of oversight of the curation and detail of the works being exhibited. Decentralization of curatorial agencies is not a new thing in Documenta's management because, in previous editions, it was carried out using the Collective Curating structure. However, it should be noted that previous ideas emerged from individual thoughts, while at documenta fifteen, ruangrupa works as a collective of artists with collective values that have been practiced for a long time. For this reason, it can be said that collective curatorial practices carried out by collective artists are something new for the operational system of Documenta and a new phenomenon in curatorial studies.