Curating ‘Now’: Ecological Practices

‘Curating Now’ is an ongoing program series that considers distinct curatorial forms of contemporary exhibition-making through critical case studies by Australian and international curators. The fourth iteration in this series brings together Katie Lawson and Dr. Bronwyn Bailey-Charteris to consider how ecological thinking might move beyond the thematic concerns of exhibition-making to shape curatorial methods themselves.

Together, they consider how curatorial practice might respond to ecological crises through situated research, material experimentation, collective learning, and forms of reciprocity. How can exhibitions attend to the material conditions and environmental costs of art-making? What might it mean to curate through ecological processes rather than simply represent them? And how might curatorial practice foster different ways of relating to the people, places and materials with which we work?

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Katie Lawson is a curator and writer based in Toronto. She has curated exhibitions for a wide range of Canadian institutions, including the Toronto Biennial of Art, regional galleries, municipalities, and artist-run centres. Katie is currently a SSHRC funded PhD candidate in Art and Visual Culture at Western University, where she works with the Centre for Sustainable Curating. She has lectured at universities and art organizations in Canada, Mexico, Spain, and Sweden. In 2023, Lawson was awarded the Hnatyshyn Foundation Fogo Island Arts Young Curator Residency. She has also participated in residencies at Est-Nord-Est, Atelier LUMA, No. 9 Gardens, and Joya Arte + Ecologia.

Dr Bronwyn Bailey-Charteris is an Australian and Swedish curator, writer and researcher with expertise in eco-aesthetics and specialisation in water. Based on Dharug and Gundungurra Country, she is a Senior Research Fellow at UNSW and part of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society (ADM+S). Bronwyn maintains an independent curatorial practice and her first monograph was released with Routledge Environmental Humanities Series in 2024 and is titled The Hydrocene: Eco-Aesthetics in the Age of Water.

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‘Curating Now’ is an ongoing programming series developed in partnership between UNSW Galleries and the Masters of Curating & Cultural Leadership program at UNSW Art & Design. Katie Lawson’s research and travel are supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) Canada Research Training Awards Suite and the Mitacs Globalink Research Award, in association with Wollongong Art Gallery and Bianca Hester’s project A Well in a Watershed (2028).