In collaboration with the Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory, the Museum of Anthropology, the Interdisciplinary Graduate Program, and the Faculty of Arts, the UBC Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery is pleased to present Barbara Fischer as part of their ongoing series of lectures on contemporary curatorial practice.

Barbara Fischer is the Director/Curator of the Justina M. Barnicke Gallery at Hart House, University of Toronto, as well as Senior Lecturer in Curatorial Studies in the Department of Art, University of Toronto. Fischer is the curator for the Canadian Pavilion at the 53rd Venice Biennale, 2009, featuring artist Mark Lewis, and is the recipient of the 2008 Hnatyshyn Award for Curatorial Excellence in Contemporary Art.

Fischer has taken an interest in the development of Curation as a “discipline” in the academy. It is on its way to becoming a discursive field, perhaps even engendering a written history. The growing interest to move beyond personal narrative and biographical curatorial presentations gives cause to reflect on the why and the what of the profession itself. Curating tends to be driven by interesting, compelling, and urgent causes. With the immediate cost of administrative overload, attempts at narrating from outside of the discipline are often side-swiped before they begin. Fischer will situate her particular curatorial thinking within specific contexts and histories of contemporary art and from there, sketch something of a history of curating.