The Valletta 2018 Curatorial School is a one-week intensive lecture and workshop programme featuring leading curators and experts from major international arts institutions. The course includes daily lectures for the whole group and workshops for smaller groups of students. This is a great opportunity for students to further their curatorial career development through insightful lectures and professional networking opportunities.

The theme for this year’s Curatorial School is ‘Social practices in contemporary art and curating’, which will focus on artistic and curatorial practices which engage directly with audiences or specific groups of people. Social practice art is typically collaborative, performative and interdisciplinary, bringing together various fields like ethnography, community arts, activism and experimental forms of curating.

Presentations by individual speakers and workshops will deal with topics such as how a curator may produce projects that include participatory elements and manifest in the museum over a period of time, how political involvement within and beyond institutions can be formulated and staged with the aim to stimulate social change, how we can build a collective understanding of a territory when territories are fractured, how curators can activate and intervene in real-life contexts, and how art practice can intersect with politics and activism meaningfully.

During the interactive workshops which will be held daily, participants are offered the opportunity to respond to tasks put forward by guest curators and receive extensive feedback on aspects of curating, researching, producing and presenting new ideas. Each workshop is intended for a small group of students, who must indicate their preferred workshops in the application form (in order of preference 1-3). All students will be allocated at least one workshop (not necessarily first preference).

Guest speakers are Irish curator, artist, writer and educator Dr Paul O’Neill; international artist Jeanne van Heeswijk; the Curator of Public Practice at Tate Liverpool and Senior Lecturer in Exhibition Studies at Liverpool John Moores University Dr Michael Birchall; art historian, curator and writer Nina Möntmann; curator and artist Kelly Large, and writer, curator and broadcaster Alfredo Cramerotti.