• Submitted by: admin
• Paint and Sculpture
• 07 / 08 / 2010

Between megalomania and anonymity, the figure of art curators deserves to be placed in its fair place.

In the international circuits it is overvalued for moments, especially when one speaks of that gurúes who decide to whim, or under the dictation of created interests, what should be exposed or not in a biennial one or in a gallery.

On the contrary, there is also the tendency to ignore its function and to subtract merits, and there are cases of artists and institutions that relegate it to the role of mere mounters.

The idea of implementing, in the stimuli system of the Consejo Nacional de las Artes Plásticas (National Plastic Arts Council) (CNAP in Spanish) a Curator Award pursues to value in our surroundings a necessary professional and creative work that intervenes in the conception, projection, selection, organization and integral communication of an exhibition.

It may be opportune what tells us of this function one of the most outstanding theorist of photography, the North American professor John Tagg: "Each exhibition is a map. As such, it doesn´t just separates, defines and describes a particular place, standing out its main features and significant points and ignoring or simplifying others, but rather it also represents the territory according to a projection method: a game of conventions and rules under which the map is built.

The problem resides in that in exhibitions, as in maps, the conventional nature of the representation tends to be hidden during its use. The projection rules become invisible."

Last week, the CNAP granted the prizes corresponding to the best curator work in the last year. In the category of personal exhibitions it was distinguished the work of Cristina Vives for Nkame, an anthologic exhibition of Belkis Ayón that occupied the enclosure of the Convent of San Francisco.

The jury, presided over by Lesbia Vent Dumois, considered the rigor with which the curator articulated a huge number of pieces by this indispensable artist of Cuban visual arts who made formal and conceptual contributions to visual contemporary arts and especially to engraving. This exhibition allowed people to understand the history of Belkis´ trajectory, as it summarizes a good part of its artistic production and, also, to appreciate its promotional work, of coordination and in connection with her pedagogic work.

As for the chapter of the collective exhibition the prize was granted to Espacios, the plot conceived by Laboratorio Artístico de San Agustín (San Agustín´s Artistic Laboratory) (LASA in Spanish), headed by Carlos Ariel Candelario Luaces because it was a proposal that included an important social work meaning to integrate the community and to make participate in the artistic process; they have invited artists from different latitudes of the world that have worked for San Agustín´s context adjusting their artistic pretensions. Another achievement has been the systematization, a task that has not ceased, and that still continues with even more force.

Source:  (Cubarte)