This year’s symposium is focused on expanding an ethics of curatorial practice, with a particular emphasis on alternative modes of education, research, and indigenous knowledge. We begin here by asking questions like: What is the relationship between ethics, education, indigeneity and the institutionalised practices of curating? Can the institution exert moral agency? How does this change the way we practice as curators and researchers: how we look, speak, read, write?

In the Aotearoa New Zealand context, we are specifically concerned with critique of the colonising logic of globalisation, acknowledging that processes of knowledge sharing, propagation and maintenance are always conditioned by context, and that curatorial discourse is in large part a legacy of our colonial past. It is important to stress that the conversation about indigenous knowledge is both particular to this place, and in common with other indigenous peoples, and is interconnected with conversations about alternative educational methodologies more broadly. With regard to the latter, we have at ST PAUL St Gallery through recent exhibition programming and related research attempted to focus on creative practices of knowledge, and on knowledge that does rather than is, as fundamental.

We turn to an alterative conception of education as the centre of this discussion, one that prioritises not information or formal knowledges: market-ready products. Rather, as Irit Rogoff has written, it may exist in forms of coming together “not predetermined by outcomes but by directions”.1 A local touchstone is the Māori term, practice and concept of wānanga, a forum for discussion and exchange with the aim of arriving at a deeper understanding.2

Te Ahukaramū Charles Royal writes that wānanga is “the word we can most closely associate with the idea of the creation of new knowledge”.3 An understanding of how this knowledge comes into being is a crucial part of the Māori worldview. It is not something produced, but rather “the pursuit of knowledge concerns the progressive revelation of depth and understanding about the world rather than the construction of new knowledge as one constructs an object.”4

The possibilities opened up by thinking about knowledge as distinct from production, as existing between the analytical and the experiential, the known and the imagined, is primary within a broad ground of discussion for the symposium. This implicates alternative perspectives on education, learning, modes of knowing, all through the lens of a “powerful horizontality” and in critique of the abiding institutional (academic, economic) paradigm.5

The structure of this year’s symposium is integral to its content focus. Subsequent to the keynote presentation, we plan to spend one day in the auditorium with formal presentations. The second day’s proceedings, facilitated by the collective Local Time, will take place at Piha on the West coast.

Abby Cunnane and Charlotte Huddleston