THOUGHTS ON WORK, LIFE, WITHDRAWAL AND THE ART WORLD
In the context of the newly published book Things in Contemporary Curating: The Aesthetics of the Right to Assemble and the Need to Withdraw, author Sidsel Nelund talks with writer, researcher, and long term friend Mirene Arsanios to unpack what it means to write – especially in these times of crises. Why write at all? They also walk us through their relationship with work, life, withdrawal and the art world, and how words play a crucial part in transforming the dark times into a way of being in the world.
Mirene: Mirene Arsanios
Sidsel: Sidsel Nelund
Mirene: Hi Sidsel, Could you begin by telling us what Things in Contemporary Curating: The Aesthetics of the Right to Assemble and the Need to Withdraw is about, and share what has been the most challenging and rewarding part of writing the book?
Sidsel: Things in Contemporary Curating is grounded in the observation of a surge of exhibitions that explicitly use political ways of assembling as a curatorial gesture and implement it in their title – think forum, assembly, congress, hearing, parliament, ministry etc.
I call them aesthetic things because they encompass all three of the old European language meanings of the word ‘thing’: an object (art work), a topic (the common concern that the exhibition is about) and an assembly (an actual gathering to discuss the common concern).
My first question in the book is why are we witnessing these aesthetic things now? I point to developments in global exhibition history like Third World conferences, and that the role of the artist has been moving towards being that of a socially and technology-oriented sense and sensation maker.
I argue that this, along with a general contemporary political alienation, led to looking for new places in which political citizenship could blossom, i.e. the exhibition space. The next question is how do aesthetic things take shape? Here, the book looks at exhibitions that have a strong drive to assemble, like Home Works Forum in Beirut and a hearing during The Anthropocene Project at Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) in Berlin. The last question is with whom? Here, the book delves into practices that actively bring in voices from the margins of democracy, or voices that firmly say NO to how power works in “Western” society, such as Tricia Hersey’s The Nap Ministry project or Parliament of Bodies at Documenta 14. This last part on withdrawing is one that has really been challenging for me to express, yet has been the most vital for me to include, and as a result has great resonance with readers.
Sidsel Nelund. Photo: Jenny Sundby.
Mirene Arsanios. Photo: Press.
Mirene: I think your book does really important work in identifying tropes of political assembly in contemporary curating and placing them within a historical lineage. I find it intriguing, but also not surprising, that most readers seem to respond precisely to the act of withdrawing.
People working in this field live in a fraught double bind, in which visibility and constant production are both desired and loathed at the same time. In that sense, your book offers models in which these seemingly contradictory impulses coexist, while highlighting moments of refusal within this production-oriented economy. You write: “That withdrawing is a mode of gathering is a rhetorical contradiction and throughout working on this book, the expression of withdrawing as gathering has been the most difficult to voice and the most both problematic and tender to readers and listeners.”
I was also thinking that in order to be effective within an art field or discourse, withdrawal as absence has to be made visible, a cessation of productive activities that demands visibility.
Sidsel: Yes, that is a paradox. I want to stress that visibility is vital in certain contexts. This is clear in the chapter on exhibitions as assemblies. It shows that it has been urgent to claim public space for art production in Beirut, for instance, or to put climate change on the political horizon at HKW a decade ago. I entertain a larger terrain in which assembling and withdrawing is like a double vision of situated knowledges, to refer to Donna Haraway, and they each take form according to circumstance. Yet I see them as mutually supportive and strengthened through their coexistence.
“When talking about withdrawal needing to be made visible, my question would be, to whom? What are the power dynamics inherent in who decides what is visible?”
When talking about withdrawal needing to be made visible, my question would be, to whom? What are the power dynamics inherent in who decides what is visible? Those with whom you share your withdrawal see you. To them you are visible. Some years ago, when I was living this question myself and voicing my then fearful concerns to a therapist – a withdrawn artist herself who was visible in the 1970s – she answered: “But we are many living a great life here.” And it is true. Life and art exist really well, perhaps even better, in places that are less visible according to normative standards.
Mirene: If we look more closely at withdrawal, how can it serve not only as a reset button (a necessary break that ultimately enables bodies to be operative anew) but as a method to ultimately abolish structures in which withdrawal is perceived as lack or deficiency? How does withdrawal, for instance, intersect with abolition?
Sidsel: When speaking about abolition of the system that neglects rest, you’re speaking to my heart. There’s a vision growing in me, namely that art and academia act from a rested, connected and kind place. That might not sound very revolutionary, but for me, to be rested comes with purpose-led action, to be connected comes with clear boundaries, and to be kind comes with knowing and expressing your needs. All of this takes courage and uncompromising fierceness, and has to be alive across the ecosystem. It’s not a one-person thing. I feel joy in my body when I speak of this vision. It’s a context I want to live in and I totally believe it is possible, step by step and slowly. And probably beyond my lifetime.
This vision runs as an undercurrent beneath Things in Contemporary Curating in exactly the way it embraces paradox in its structure, form, and argument. So as an indirect answer to your question, the book shows a process of self-abolishment or un-learning of disembodied academic ways of writing and analysing. In the first chapter, I write as a historically oriented voice with an overview and care for the archive. In the second chapter, I showcase an ethnographic participatory researcher with presence and analytical attention to detail in the midst of abundant information, so much so that this part develops a clear-cut methodology. And in the last chapter, I bring about a body rooted in vulnerability that has survived the system that neglects rest, taking that experience into her analytical and aesthetic endeavour.
“I wish to normalize that a sovereign voice can also be vulnerable and that academic reflection can also be connected openly to experience, the body and emotions. These are the paradoxes that give way to a holistic language on how aesthetic things appear.”
I wish to normalize that a sovereign voice can also be vulnerable and that academic reflection can also be connected openly to experience, the body and emotions. These are the paradoxes that give way to a holistic language on how aesthetic things appear.
Mirene: Coming back to the paradox of withdrawing and assembling, perhaps you could also say something about the way you navigate the ‘demands’ of the field according to your own terms? Or even say something about the holistic language you’ve developed – via your own experience – in which vulnerability and bodily care is so central?
Sidsel: When I say survived, I mean that literally in different ways, because instances such as a natural catastrophe, disabling illness, and critical illness have brought me close to death in a way that makes me appreciate life, my body, and creative and academic expression in radiant ways. As occupants of the creative and cultural professions, we get to explore and expose, dream and envision, test and sketch, discern and refine in a collective, public space that others desire to partake in. How impactful and full of wonder is that? In that way, my desire to abolish, or should we say energetically challenge, the rest-neglecting system comes from the joy of and gratitude for life.
Now, pursuing this joy doesn’t come without friction, there are sacrifices to make and impossible dreams to grieve over. And little to no external or public appreciation! Yet, for me, there’s no way around it. I’m here to be alive to the world and co-create it with others the best way I can.
Have I answered the question?
Mirene: Yes you have!
And I see how it resonates with the theoretical and methodological approach of Things in Contemporary Curating. I appreciate how paradox and what you call “promiscuous theory” are embraced as a defining element in your book, both in the history you retrace and the stances taken towards the professional expectations of the fields of academia and art.
You say, “What I call promiscuous theory is flirtatious engagement through desire and with hopes for theoretical procreation beyond the fidelity to the deep theoretical roots in the structures that are crumbling. Promiscuous theory holds a fierce YES to the future and a loving NO to the no longer serving.” I admire the ability to both say yes and no at the same time, albeit to different things. I tend to be more of a purist (yes or no).
“I couldn’t withstand the art world so I left it and decided to focus on my writing practice instead, but I now realize that no field is immune to the demands of hyper productivity, and that all fields have silent or loud warriors who, from the inside, try to establish new parameters that are viable for all bodies and conditions, racial or class backgrounds.”
I couldn’t withstand the art world so I left it and decided to focus on my writing practice instead, but I now realize that no field is immune to the demands of hyper productivity, and that all fields have silent or loud warriors who, from the inside, try to establish new parameters that are viable for all bodies and conditions, racial or class backgrounds. And perhaps, with all its flaws, this is what the art world allows us to do: radically question what it is, how it operates, and for whom.
Sidsel: These questions about how the art scene operates, why and for whom, resonate deeply and are at the centre of Things in Contemporary Curating! You have also written about these questions in relation to withdrawal in the book Dictionary of Night, co-written with Maryam Monalisa Gharavi, an ABC of sorts that addresses various modes and reflections on sleep. Writing practices like yours, and also Haythem El Wardany, Joanna Hedva and Hamja Ahsan’s, gave me literary ground in writing about withdrawal in an academic context. May I ask what made you embark on this project and what was the process of writing or giving expression to sleep?
Mirene: Monalisa Gharavi and I were commissioned to write something for the last edition of Home Works Forum, which had the word ‘night’ in its description. The word stayed with me, and Monalisa and I started thinking about the night, its relationship to work, what darkness is, both as technology and as an imaginary trope. I was pregnant back then, and I knew I was going to be ‘out of commission’, so to speak. I was a little anxious about ‘withdrawing’, and the book enabled me to understand my anxiety as the product of a system in which rest or retreat isn’t tolerated. We read the book 24/7 Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep by Jonathan Crary. I was also inspired by a trial Marx mentions in Capital regarding the definition of the ‘night’ (when does it end or begin in terms of work hours, etc.). Dictionary of Night allowed me to understand why those who need to withdraw or can’t work for any given reason end up in such ‘unheld’ positions.
Sidsel: So, I hear you say that giving expression to withdrawal at a moment of preparing for it via pregnancy gave some solace or release or power, albeit through the insight into its ‘unheld’ position?
Mirene: Yes, definitely, and in continuation of that, I’d like to ask you something about the night and the ‘unheld’ position. Throughout these past years, you’ve developed several holistic practices (yoga Nidra, a guided meditation, for example) that helped you find your way back to health while staying grounded in your body and present to yourself. Would you mind telling us a little bit more about the tools you’ve developed, and their relationship or non-relationship to the fields of academia and art?
Sidsel: The answer to your question lingers in the threshold between withdrawal as an escape from a chaotic, invasive creative environment, and withdrawal as a conscious practice leading to a calm(er) creative life with (more) boundaries. I grew up in a creative and, to me, chaotic environment, and when I encountered yoga Nidra in high school – the gymnastics teacher would see that we teenage girls were tired during class and send us off to a separate house with a cassette to practice recorded yoga Nidra – the practice grew on me. Yoga Nidra is essentially about safety as a gateway to surrender, and as I got more and more involved in academia and the art world, I needed that space of safety more and more.
As you say, withdrawing from professional life as a result of pregnancy and motherhood felt ‘unheld’, and yoga Nidra gives exactly the opposite: holding in a grounded and aligned way to connect with one’s own desires rather than those of one’s surroundings. Academia, for example, is to me externally directed; you follow certain externally defined guidelines for what you should feel rewarded by or not. Knowing how a safely held space catalyses creative force and learning – for instance, I did yoga Nidra daily during my PhD process, with clarity and purpose as a side effect of also getting some slow theta brain wave rest – it became obvious to incorporate principles from yoga Nidra and a cyclical understanding of life into my teaching and leadership endeavours. I am, for example, open about the fact that sleeping in my classes is taken as a compliment, as it means the person feels safe.
“Safety is a prerequisite for learning, and from teaching theory at the art academies in Denmark I experienced how theory made the majority of the students feel unsafe.”
Safety is a prerequisite for learning, and from teaching theory at the art academies in Denmark I experienced how theory made the majority of the students feel unsafe. So yes, I responded very much to that sense of being ‘unheld’ in the visual arts profession, and aimed to induce presence into a conscious and more safely held opportunity for withdrawing, as a path to learning and creating rather than the route of escape or neglect.
Mirene: Can you describe more concretely how you counter the escape and neglect you just mentioned?
Sidsel: So, where the withdrawal strategies I describe in Things in Contemporary Curating are conscious and aware, literally saying up front, “my body, mind and work are available, but not on these terms, I therefore choose to go elsewhere,” the escape and neglect route, as I see it, is the route you take when you’re not aware of what is working for you, or not capable of establishing the boundary where it is needed. I want to stress that I have compassion for that. It’s not something that many people learn growing up, and it is definitely not something the art world teaches either.
During the beginning of MeToo, I worked at an art academy in Denmark. The unspoken and unheard voices of the abused, neglected and misused compiled over decades, together with the silencing of it all, was energetically loud in my ears. Despite my leadership position as head of institute, and doing what I could within the framework of the institution and the boundaries of my life, there was very little I could do. The disempowerment and frustration of witnessing what happened and what did not happen demanded that I reckon with it.
During those years, what I had heard described by friends and colleagues became clear to me at a whole new level, and I realized anew that the real life situations of burnout, substance abuse, mental illness, economic issues, etc. among colleagues, students and myself are fuelled by coercive systemic dysfunction in the art world, which is intimately interwoven with the social fabric of how the art world is managed, taught, curated, written about, etc. by art practitioners and society as such. I also see how the powers alive in creative expression of presence and precision, discernment and direction get disturbed by these systemic dysfunctions.
An example would be a young artist who told me that there had been periods when they didn’t sleep out of fear that when sleeping they wouldn’t be working, and as a part of that insomnia they also suffered from long periods of intense depression. It obviously touched me, also because the conscious practice of doing nothing and the liminal space between waking and sleeping is potent in its creative capacity.
What I want to point at is not only that unwell-being is unhealthy and unsafe for the individual – no, it also and importantly undermines the creative process itself and thereby creative expression and the purpose of supporting and celebrating creativity in society as such. A question therefore arose: Is it essentially possible to surrender into nothingness without illness, burnout, breakdown, hangover or something else making you collapse into it? I started wondering what a creative life and environment would look like if I didn’t have to be coerced into un-wellbeing by that systemic dysfunction.
Mirene: And what does a creative life and environment look like, now that you’re less directly coerced into un-wellbeing by systemic dysfunction?
“For me, the main thing in living less coerced into unwell-being is going slow and protecting the flow. This has purpose at the level of the individual, the art system and art’s place in society. I want to go so far as to say we need to go slow in the service of art itself.”
Sidsel: All of this reflection led me to withdraw more permanently from professional contexts, and shortly after I was diagnosed with stage two cancer and got an insurance payment big enough to spend the summer with no other purpose than having a body and respecting its cyclical nature of sleep and menstruation. Stress, sleep and hormones are intimately intertwined, so being present with these cycles was a simple and deep healing experience. It was a great summer. Not necessarily an easy summer, but I needed that total nothingness, which to me was a privilege to have access to, yet which I am aware many experts suggest not to pursue due to the stress of insecurities – I had no job to return to, nowhere to go, no clear way out. It was a complete reset that I could not but trust. Interestingly, as I surrendered into this ‘nothingness’ and gave up controlling, changing, fixing my work surroundings – this is important, because I participated in and was/still am coerced into the systemic dysfunction as well – I started being invited to exhibitions and to contribute to journals by artists who wanted me to express more on sleep, cyclical living and withdrawal.
For me, the main thing in living less coerced into unwell-being is going slow and protecting the flow. This has purpose at the level of the individual, the art system and art’s place in society. I want to go so far as to say we need to go slow in the service of art itself. And that’s why I’m here to support that for myself and others through my writings and the growing practice I have of 1:1 visioning processes, workshops, group programmes, and facilitating safer space for creative expression to gain further force and for artistic and curatorial leadership to take place. I can now fully hold space my way to face the abuses and neglect that keep creative expression down, and it is resulting in fantastic practices and projects taking more space, cultivating a clearer voice and resting in own purposes rather than upholding the systemic dysfunctions. There is so much power in this! …and, I believe, this is why well-being is perceived as a threat to the existing order.
“I can now fully hold space my way to face the abuses and neglect that keep creative expression down, and it is resulting in fantastic practices and projects taking more space, cultivating a clearer voice and resting in own purposes rather than upholding the systemic dysfunctions. There is so much power in this! …and, I believe, this is why well-being is perceived as a threat to the existing order.”
Now, how does this connect to Things in Contemporary Curating? Well, it does in refined ways as the ‘aesthetics of the thing’ – the main concept I develop in the book, meaning exhibitions that include a gathering around a chosen topic – has to do with why, how and with whom we gather or not. The difficult part of the NO of withdrawing from unhealthy contexts is that most people see it as a no to them and not a yes to oneself or something greater. There’s a responsibility in how to voice the NO and for now that is for me to unfold the YES. It comes back to the promiscuous theory of flirtation, desire and choosing a past and a path that aligns with the yes.
Mirene: I love how your answer retraces your own story: from childhood to academia to illness, to finding your body and attuning yourself to its cycles and finding there a generative anchor, allowing you to withdraw from messy and exploitative environments with clarity, intention, and a lot of self-respect. All you say deeply resonates with me: I think the practice of finding a space in which we are held no matter what is truly essential to navigating the upheavals of what it means to be alive in general! I’d like to insist that ‘safe space’ is not so much a shelter from adversity but a deep anchoring in the intuition of selfhood and the wisdom of the body, a place that equips us to face adversity rather than eradicate it at all cost.
Sidsel: Yes to that! And one of the reasons why I am grateful to talk to you in the context of Things in Contemporary Curating is that you are familiar with many parts of it, for instance Home Works Forum that plays a significant role in the book and which we have attended and participated in many times together. Also, as with Dictionary of Night, you have given expression to withdrawal and you have taken a stance toward the visual arts. What I’m curious about, and in continuation of the YES, is: what makes it crucial for you to write at this moment in time, knowing that you also voice discontent with the practicalities and conditions of being a writer?
Mirene: I’m interested in the question of narratives and choosing a narrative that we embrace rather than one that defines us from the outside. At the same time, I also believe that certain forces do shape the way we experience the world. I firmly believe, for example, that if parents were more supported with extended parental leave, guaranteed health care, free education (in the USA, these basic rights are not granted) then people would be better off.
They would probably still feel ‘unheld’ in other ways and experience psychological wounds that are divorced from material conditions, but I also believe that individual psychological wounds are shaped by larger systemic forces such as patriarchy, histories of colonial violence, slavery, etc. They intersect. In other words, giving people universal basic income or granting reparations to historically marginalized groups might not grant universal happiness but it would certainly alleviate, for most people, some of the burden of living on this planet.
Sidsel: Absolutely.
Mirene: In that sense I think that new narratives must be reflected or must lead to new conditions, and for new conditions to be achieved under capitalism, there needs to be some kind of politicized struggle. I really like what you say about surrendering in “nothingness without illness, burnout, breakdown, hangover or something else making you collapse into it?” What if structures themselves surrendered into this nothingness? What if institutions disrupted the flow of productivity and receded into nothingness, as in within non-work, less profit, more attention and care, etc?
My impulse to write is informed by both discontent with the world and joy in the writing experience, in which wounds get to be transformed and reach others through poetic expression. In an interview she gave in 2015, Anne Boyer talks about being a single mother and a writer. She says: “The experience itself informed everything I think and care about – without it, I would have possibly not noticed the way the world is made of unwaged labour, not begun to think about things like care and the nature of the family. While the situation has so often been prohibitive of writing, at the same time, it gave me the things that have been worth writing about.”
As a writer (not all writers write in the same way) I am mostly drawn to the exploration of these conditions, how they affect us, and how to keep finding language to process, integrate, accept, transform everything that hurts us into a linguistic experience that provides new embodied insights about both intimate wounds and social violence. I also like what Bertolt Brecht says:
“In the dark times,
Will there be singing?
There will be singing
of the dark times.”
But back to the book! You seem to have invented your own language; a mix of political theory, aesthetics, biographical material, disability studies, and holistic healing. Can you say more about the writing process – as in having to negotiate the demands of different kinds of fields and readerships – and what kind of other writing you’ve been exploring lately?
Sidsel: The Brecht quote is beautifully fierce and I see how it maps onto the case studies of Things in Contemporary Curating – that all the examples gather people in aesthetic ways to sing with each other in their individual voice in relation to a topic from the dark areas of life – those areas that the curators and participants as citizens wish to problematise: perpetual crisis, environmental issues, and marginalization and exploitation of specific bodies. And this is the paradox, as I see it, of both the Brecht and Boyer quotes – that the dark times or the limiting conditions are those that give rise to creative expression as a new possibility of life, as what makes us move forward, differently.
This has been true about Things in Contemporary Curating as well. The research in it goes 15 years back and all the difficult moments I have mentioned in this conversation have fuelled the book and have had a chance to be transformed into a theoretical position and a practice.
“The invitation to write it came just before Covid, and the writing coincided with pregnancy and two years of full-time mothering. Writing the book has therefore taken place in these strange, collectively withdrawn times, mostly in the presence of my sleeping son, either in the belly or in the sling on my belly.”
The invitation to write it came just before Covid, and the writing coincided with pregnancy and two years of full-time mothering. Writing the book has therefore taken place in these strange, collectively withdrawn times, mostly in the presence of my sleeping son, either in the belly or in the sling on my belly. This trance state induced by his sleep, the broken way of writing for an hour or an hour and half with an unpredictable frequency, together with listening very carefully to my energy levels – during the three-year process I more or less didn’t write during autumn and winter – all inform the text. Things in Contemporary Curating is an academic book that is nevertheless also a talisman of a cyclical, creative and slow writing process.
In this broken, withdrawn state I also had to be pragmatic and lean into the strength of the moment – trance, intuition, dream, flow, ground, body, rhythm! I had to leave academic reasoning and be more immediate with the process, words, structure: work with what I had and accept that this was enough. The power of this way of working is that all the non-writing time gave me the chance to check in with the vision and purpose of the book, which I had a clear idea of from the beginning: to unfold and uplift the ways in which exhibitions and art can take collective responsibility in a time where human life on the planet urgently needs aesthetics as a way of sensing the world and responding to it. So I could be very focused when writing, because I knew where I was going, and I trusted the process and how it worked me to write the book that was asking to come through.
I sense that the result of this is that readers so far have been having a sense of both receiving academic work and rigor AND meeting a human in there. Many – especially women thinkers – have paved the way for this, like Anne Boyer, Susan Sontag, bell hooks, Jennifer Doyle, Sara Ahmed, Audre Lorde, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. Their work life and way of taking a stance has had a profound impact on me. Because, as I unfold in Chapter 3, the democratic tradition is founded on keeping women and other disturbing, suppressed voices silent. There are a lot of covert and overt violent reasons to keep your mouth shut even today, as Mary Beard has shown in her work on how ancient Greek traditions of silencing are perpetuated. In that context, I also chose to reach out to a lot of readers to sense how the text resonated outside my withdrawn bubble, how to make it stand up for its cause in the best way possible and to find support in the quite raw and vulnerable process it is to write a book. I am forever grateful for that.
Mirene: How do you imagine the readership for this book?
Sidsel: It is with purpose that I showcase myself as an author in different personas that are nevertheless parts of who I am.
What I hope for in terms of readership is that just as I as an author have hybrid voices and expressions, readers have hybrid ears and capacities for digesting written words. And these hybrid forms need not be segregated into different books or genres. As I say this, I see the potential for a wholesome writing potentially leading to wholesome readership – as you also mention in terms of creating and taking on new and own narratives.
It suffices to say that having had a pandemic bring vulnerability and withdrawal into everybody’s life together with the current economic insecurity, multiple social unrest, military interventions and increasing urgency around dramatically changing the way humanity treats the planet, have definitely helped prepare the readership for the thoughts and practices that I have been forming over the past decade and more.
As an overall sensation, I see the book as a baton; there was a request, I gathered much of my research into new connections with new material and now – go on and use it your way, put it to use in your sphere of impact. I trust the reader 100% here to pick and choose and adapt to circumstance and own urgencies. In that way, it’s a practical book with a straightforward purpose; let’s sharpen the potential for how to gather in the visual arts and thereby bring the qualities of art into the social fabric and beyond.
Mirene: Thank you so much, Sidsel.
Sidsel: Thank you, Mirene!
Things in Contemporary Curating: The Aesthetics of the Right to Assemble
by Sidsel Nelund
Softcover, flexbind, 228 pages
Full colour diagrams
Published by RSS Press, 2023
Mirene Arsanios (b. 1980) is the author of The Autobiography of a Language (Futurepoem, 2022). She lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Sidsel Nelund (b. 1980) (PhD) is the founder of (art re.search). She lives and works in Elsinore, Denmark.
