Fatos Ustek, independent art critic and curator, currently lives and works in London.
Received MA Contemporary Art Theory from Goldsmiths College, BA Mathematics Bogazici University. Has curated Here..There..Abroad.. in ifa,Stuttgart, ifa,Berlin and rum46,Aarhus; Moment of Agency in Kunsthalle Basel and Kunstmuseum Bern; Art-Actually in Istanbul, among others.
Currently working on the third leg of a trilogy of exhibitions. The trilogy is based on readressing the time relations in the framework of socio-cultural and political aspects of the contemporary times. That is to say, The Lost Moment - first leg- looks back to the recent past in order to evaluate today from a different perspective and influence future actions; whereas Immortality sustaining the present the past the future looks towards the future and brings an analysis of today. The third leg will be on the immediacy and the affect of ‘now’ through the investigation of the distribution of sensible, in encounters.
Has been publishing texts for catalogues, magazines internationally (Turkey contributor to Tema Celeste, turbulens, Genis Aci,...). Initiator, co-editor of the online Contemporary Art Magazine Nowiswere, as an accumulation ground for socio-political aesthetic realities of the present. Nowiswere is a gathering of artistic, authorial positions of the status quo with a wide range of participants from Europe and abroad.
Has given lectures in HFG, Karlsruhe; NBK, Berlin; Martin Gropious Bau, Berlin; Europist, Istanbul; among others.
Short Statement:
I would like to articulate my position as curator through discussing the terms: curating, curatorial, and institutional practice. Curating and curatorial are two different notions related to the politics of display: curating spans the domain of bringing together, forming a gathering of art works in a certain narrative; whereas curatorial is distinguished by the positioning of the exploration of dynamics of production which always produces knowledge. In other words, Curatorial practice is not only composed of domains of displaying and exhibiting, or does not function only as an agency of visibility of art production, is also a position in the acknowledgement of doing and making. Thus, curator does not only place art works in the exhibition rooms but catalyzes the encounters through framing ‘what to come’, and ‘what to take place’.
As is named today, auteur-curating influences me the way in which curatorial practice composes around applying an aestheticism, a craftsman’s ingenuity and political shrewdness to making exhibitions through thinking over and discussing the distribution of the sensible. Exhibitions are displays which are made public, they are not just simple monitors of visual production in space but a complex entanglement of different interests and precise conditions, which underline the strength of the visual and the fact that theory is the practice that belongs to the language of‘daily’. I position the curatorial as a process of thinking through traditional disciplines of art history, and a cause of small change of the universal through producing ‘new’ commonalities of visual, physical and mental experience. Thus, for me notions of display, public realm, antagonism of participation are issues among others that need to be articulated during the processes of contextualisation of a project.Working in an institution requires certain sense of awareness, responsibility, continuous positioning of criticality. An art institution is where committed movement takes place. It is not only embracing movement of bodies through its premises but movement of thought and understanding through its productions. I aim creating permanency through temporary experience, thus producing collective memory on and about an art institution as an accessible domain of knowledge production. Hence running an institution can be intellectual and within the ‘everyday’.