Corina L. APOSTOL
BIO
Corina L. Apostol is a curator and member of the steering committee of Beyond Matter, an international, collaborative, practice-based research project that takes culture to the verge of virtual reality. She currently holds the position of Curator at Tallinn Art Hall, and she has recently been appointed as the Curator of the Estonian Pavilion for the 59th Venice Biennale – due to take place in 2022. In 2019, she curated the second edition of the Shelter Festival, Cosmopolitics, Comradeship, and the Commons, at the Space for Free Arts/ University of the Arts Helsinki. Previously, she was the Andrew W. Mellon Fellow at Creative Time, where she co-edited the publication Making Another World Possible: 10 Creative Time Summits, 10 Global Issues, 100 Art Projects (2019) together with Nato Thompson. In 2018, she co-curated, with Elvira Dyangani Ose, the 12th Creative Time Summit, On Archipelagoes and Other Imaginaries – Collective Strategies to Inhabit the World, a convening for thinkers, dreamers, and doers working at the intersection of art and politics across Miami. Apostol obtained her PhD in Art History, Criticism and Conservation at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey, where she was also the Dodge Curatorial Fellow at the Zimmerli Art Museum (2010-2016). She is the co-founder of the activist art and publishing collective ArtLeaks, and Editor-in-Chief of the ArtLeaks Gazette. She has been longlisted for the Kandinsky Prize (2016) and the Sergey Kuryokhin Prize (2020).
ABSTRACT
Spooky Action at a Distance: Tallinn Art Hall’s Digital Exhibitions and Engagement Platform
What are some of the challenges we face and advantages we gain when developing a digital platform for disseminating exhibitions and events, while navigating the complex territories of art and the production of meaning? How do we create communities in a digital exhibition, and how do we make sense of the relationship between the digital and IRL (in real life)? My talk will begin to unpack these questions through the case study of Tallinn Art Hall’s recent digital exhibition platform launched in early 2020. Our goal was to create a very intuitive and manageable interface which viewers could use without going through a webinar on how to navigate it. The resulting interface responded to the necessities of showing art exhibitions when travel was not possible. It also served to make our exhibitions more accessible for differently abled people, which was the original impetus for the digital initiative. While launched during a moment of global crisis, when communication around and experiences of art and culture began to change drastically, our platform continues to offer digital experiences that will change the way we think of curating in the coming years. In this talk, I will show how the technology we developed has had shifting influence on how and where our audiences discover contemporary art, but also on its impacts on our understanding of audience engagement and participation in art.
