A Bond a Braid, or a Knot: An Autotheory of Embodied Curating

Bodies, birth, death, machines
Those are four immense things
We have in common
You could call it a bond or a braid or a knot

A sequel to last year’s Resident Members' Series, this talk also uses the U.S. Girls song “The Let Down” as a jumping off point to tease out some of the questions that have motivated my thesis research. What is embodiment? What is its place in contemporary curatorial practice? What are the common threads that bind us? In a time when the boundaries between the personal and the collective are constantly being renegotiated, I hope to weave together some of those threads. I expand on Lauren Fournier’s 2022 text "Authotheory as Feminist Practice in Art, Writing and Criticism", which contextualizes the blurred distinctions between art and life, theory and practice, and work and identity. Through personal reflections, the art practice of contemporary artist Claudia Cuesta, and disability scholar and activist Mia Mingus’s concept of Access Intimacy the talk identifies connections between autobiography, art theory and material practice.

Ellinee Rae Nelson (she/her) is in her second and final year of the Critical Curatorial Studies program in the Department of Art History, Theory and Visual Art. She holds a BA in Art History from Columbia College Chicago where she studied the history and theory of modern and contemporary art as well as exhibition management and curation. Ellinee has held several positions in art museums in Vancouver and Chicago, including a curatorial assistantship at the Belkin Gallery at UBC and art handling roles at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and the Museum of Contemporary Photography. She is the assistant to the director of Kaspar Art Services, where she stewards private art collections and facilitates connections between Chicago-based artists, collectors and institutions. Ellinee's research interests include embodiment, disability justice, archival research and queer feminist perspectives in contemporary art.