PUBLICS expands the activities of The Centre for Curatorial Thinking by co-hosting the second in series of four annual, interrelated, and cooperative symposia - spanning Curatorial Thinking, Learning, Instituting, and Collaborating - exploring the importance of public discourse across Finland, the Nordic-Baltic region, and beyond.

In this second symposium, titled 'Positioning A Symposium on Curatorial Learning in the Nordic-Baltic Region & Beyond', we collectively reflect on the relationship between learning, curatorial thinking, exhibitionary practices, and discourses of the curatorial.

Positioning addresses how expansion of curatorial learning has accounted for greater global awareness around a range of issues, including the need for decolonising exhibition histories alongside increasingly critical approaches to curator-centred discourse. Such debates have situated curating and the curatorialas unique forms of knowledge production and educational learning. At the same time, the understanding of the exhibition as a political space of inquiry and medium of representation has been maintained by the various turns to the “discursive,” the “educational,” the “social,” and the “relational” in the exhibitionary, curatorial, and artistic practices.

Positioning aims to reflect on some of these dynamics, and to consider learning as a process of gaining understanding, and of values, attitudes, and models of thinking brought into practice as it is transformed into new curatorial knowledge.

The Positioning series is a collaboration across a dispersed network of 100+ cultural agencies from the Nordic-Baltic regions that actively take part in The Centre for Curatorial Thinking program since 2023 amongst other Museum Why.

Registration will open end of August 2026.