Meet the Makers: Ward Janssen

Stine Deja – Thermal Womb (2021) – Installation view of exhibition ‘Prepper Paradise’, Bureau Europa 2022.

For this Meet the Makers session, freelance curator Ward Janssen will discuss how curators—as artworkers—are always striking a balance in creating possibilities to present exciting art to audiences. While working closely with artists, networks of other artworkers, and partners in the cultural field, curators must also be able to manoeuvre within institutional policies, financial structures, and numerous risk factors that can make or break cultural projects.

Creating artistic concepts, articulating varied discourses to multiple stakeholders, and safeguarding the artistic freedom for artists are all integral parts of curating art today. As such, curation is an exciting artistic practice, but also one where the possibilities to fail are abundant: you can fail in the fundraising rat race, you can fail in fully supporting artists, you can fail in bringing a concept into production, and you always risk failing in engaging the audience in just the right way. While these risk factors might feel overwhelming at times, the rewards of curating are thankfully high: creating the possibility for (new) artists to produce and show their work.

This Meet the Makers session will address the demands and power systems at work in the contemporary Dutch cultural field for a freelance curator. The discussion on the inherent risks of artworking as a curator will be frank and will present a range of examples of working with and within these systems. The session will be moderated by Dr. David Gauthier.

Ward Janssen (1981) is a freelance curator working in the fields of digital culture, contemporary art, and design. He works on exhibitions, design projects and specializes in artist commissions, addressing a diverse variety of topics and phenomena on the forefront of innovative and activism-driven technological explorations in art and design cross overs, such as: digital materiality in post internet art, digital art artifacts and trends, virtual reality and augmented reality experiments, design fiction, contemporary theatre and light art cross-overs, and most recently technological poetics in nature as subject-discourse of anti-innovation re-appreciation of wildness, and the many visual languages of dystopia fascination.

With a background as museum curator, aside from creating exhibitions, he has acquired digital artworks for museum collections, curated the official art program of a World Expo, and worked on the launch of a new museum curating the inaugural exhibition. He serves on national and local funding advisory committees, advises art organizations on artistic integrity and fundraising, and works with a selection of artists on funding and career trajectories. He currently works as artistic director of a light art festival focused on commissions to artists and theatre creators of many disciplines, as guest curator of special design projects for Next Nature museum and is developing an exhibition and research project about futurity-shaming – a response to science fiction-washing through design-solutionism of futurity in the age of permacrises – at Bureau Europa.

If you wish to attend this event please RSVP via this form.  

~ ~ ~

Meet the Makers is a series by The Creative Humanities Academy, a platform that fosters collaboration and knowledge exchange between cultural and creative professionals and academic researchers and students. Here you will find the full Meet the Makers programme and archive.