In the Space Between: Curating Dispersal, Holding Difference
🗓️ Wednesday, 24 June — 12:50pm
- 1:30pm
(40 mins)
Presenters
Image
Abstract
This performative lecture proposes curatorship as an artistic research practice that constructs interstitial 'holding environments' for endangered conceptual worlds. Developed through the interdisciplinary project Synzoochory (Uniarts Helsinki, 2025), it reframes synzoochory - seed dispersal through interspecies mediation - as a methodological model for epistemic transmission: knowledge understood as travelling and transformed through contact and context, rather than accumulation and taxonomic enclosure.
Drawing on Donald Winnicott’s notion of the 'holding space', curatorial practice is approached as the creation of structured yet permeable environments in which heterogeneous materials, disciplines, and diverse worldviews encounter one another without immediate resolution. Materials such as scientific collections, current research, laboratory equipment, artworks, and archival objects are staged together, in productive tension, without being subordinated to a single explanatory frame. Difference is sustained (celebrated even) rather than collapsed.
Central to this methodology is the “curatorial interval”: performative in-between moments that suspend authoritative narration and disrupt linear sequencing. Realised through in-situ departmental exhibitions and performative elements within the Synzoochory symposia, these interstitial pauses generate conditions of attentiveness and delay, enabling embodied and affective forms of knowing to surface. Glissant’s 'right to opacity' is central here: divergent epistemologies (Western taxonomies, Indigenous knowledges, anthropocentric and more-than-human perspectives) are allowed to coexist without being made fully legible to one another. In line with SAR 2026’s focus on power, language, and minoritised knowledges, this paper argues that curatorship sustains fragile epistemic worlds by creating dialogical spaces where difference is neither erased nor hierarchically ordered, but carefully held.
Drawing on Donald Winnicott’s notion of the 'holding space', curatorial practice is approached as the creation of structured yet permeable environments in which heterogeneous materials, disciplines, and diverse worldviews encounter one another without immediate resolution. Materials such as scientific collections, current research, laboratory equipment, artworks, and archival objects are staged together, in productive tension, without being subordinated to a single explanatory frame. Difference is sustained (celebrated even) rather than collapsed.
Central to this methodology is the “curatorial interval”: performative in-between moments that suspend authoritative narration and disrupt linear sequencing. Realised through in-situ departmental exhibitions and performative elements within the Synzoochory symposia, these interstitial pauses generate conditions of attentiveness and delay, enabling embodied and affective forms of knowing to surface. Glissant’s 'right to opacity' is central here: divergent epistemologies (Western taxonomies, Indigenous knowledges, anthropocentric and more-than-human perspectives) are allowed to coexist without being made fully legible to one another. In line with SAR 2026’s focus on power, language, and minoritised knowledges, this paper argues that curatorship sustains fragile epistemic worlds by creating dialogical spaces where difference is neither erased nor hierarchically ordered, but carefully held.
Biography
Nina Liebenberg is a South African-born researcher, curator, and educator currently based at Uniarts, Helsinki. Her work explores curatorship as both methodology and material practice able to activate intersections between art, science, and public engagement. Over the past decade, she has led collaborative, cross-disciplinary research projects and exhibitions that draw on scientific and art historical collections to generate new forms of knowledge. She is passionate about the curatorial as a tool for rethinking disciplinary boundaries and facilitating inclusive, experimental research environments.
