In The Curatorial Condition, Beatrice von Bismarck considers the field of activity and knowledge that relates to the exhibiting of art and culture. The curatorial, in her analysis, is a domain of practice and meaning with its own conditions, rules, and procedures.

Tensta Museum: Reports from New Sweden was a kaleidoscopic curatorial project run by Tensta konsthall from 2013 to 2019 that dealt with the history and memory of the Stockholm suburb of Tensta and its inhabitants. The late-modernist suburb can also be said to be part of “New Sweden”—a place of diversity, struggle, contradiction, and solidarity distinct from the image of the twentieth-century social welfare state.

Exhibitions are tightly intertwined with the processes of historiography, creating dynamic and plural relations between and beyond all participants, both human and non-human. Thus they are able to connect different histories while writing history themselves, their reciprocal relationships making them a complex object of and transforming agent in historical research.

The questioning of thingness is an integral part of presentation and has informed and shaped the social relevance of the field of the curatorial. Immanent to presentation as a mode of being (public) in the world, the curatorial has the potential to address, visualize, and question the central effects of the changing status and function of things.

The applied research project and publication The Archive as a Productive Space of Conflict deals with archival practice and its spatial repercussions. Inquiring whether any accumulation and organization of knowledge is productive—to the effect that it generates a narrative and/or history—the project focuses specifically on archives becoming productive due to their spatial framework.

A curatorial situation is always one of hospitality. This publication analyzes the curatorial within the current sociopolitical context, through key topics concerning immigration, conditions along borders, and accommodations for refugees.

“Museum Off Museum,” the two-part exhibition at Bielefelder Kunstverein, explored the concept of the museum from an artistic and outside perspective. This book documents each of the exhibition phases, investigating the subjective potential of museum-based narratives and the current interest among artists in the “museum” as a space of reflection within global circumstances.

Focusing on time instead of the typically predominant category of space, this publication—the second volume in the Cultures of the Curatorial series—takes up the key aesthetic, social, political, and economic issues of the early twenty-first century running through the field and framed by the axes of exhibiting and the temporal.

Because the curatorial has clear performative sides, ones that seek to challenge the status quo, it also includes elements of choreography, orchestration, and administrative logistics—like all practices working with defining, preserving, and mediating cultural heritage in a wider sense. Is curating therefore essentially an act of translation? If so, with what purpose, and can it be performed elsewhere?

Cultures of the Curatorial assumes a curatorial turn in contemporary cultural practice and discourse. Coming from a variety of disciplines and professional backgrounds, the contributors exemplify the entanglement of theory and practice, consider recent developments within the curatorial field, allow self-reflexive analysis, and explore the conditions—disciplinary, institutional, economic, political, and regional—under which art and culture become public.

Selected Maria Lind Writing brings together twenty-two essays selected by Beatrice von Bismarck, Ana Paula Cohen, Liam Gillick, Brian Kuan Wood, and Tirdad Zolghadr.