On Practice

ABOUT MA CURATORIAL PRACTICE, THE SCHOOL OF VISUAL ARTS, NEW YORK

MA Curatorial Practice at SVA

Hosted by Işın Önol, February 5th at 12 PM EST. Featured panelists are Hoor Al Qasimi, Charles Esche, and Ruth Estévez.

What happens before, between, and after the public life of exhibitions? There is an invisible ecology that both strains and sustains curatorial work, that often goes unacknowledged, and that can be described as an expanded notion of practice. Işın Önol brings together three renowned international curators—Hoor Al Qasimi, Charles Esche, and Ruth Estévez—to discuss this conception of practice, opening the way to a broader understanding of how curatorial work becomes possible and legible within complex institutional and social systems. They’ll address the ways in which infrastructures, epistemic systems, and institutional norms influence the negotiations, commitments, and compromises that practitioners have to make—decisions that are formed, deferred, or withheld long before cultural projects ever reach the public. This wider view of practice sheds new light on the curatorial field and how we can operate productively and proactively within it. Hoor Al Qasimi is the President and Founding Director of the Sharjah Art Foundation and is President of Global Studies University in Sharjah, United Arab Emirates. She also serves as President and Director of the Sharjah Architecture Triennial, and is a board member of Kunst-Werke Berlin and Ashkal Alwan, Beirut. She chairs the Advisory Board for the College of Fine Arts and Design at the University of Sharjah. In 2024, she was appointed to head the Sharjah Creative Quarter (SCQ). In recognition of her significant contributions to arts and culture, Al Qasimi was named an Officer of the Order of Arts and Letters by the Embassy of France in the UAE in 2025. She is the Artistic Director of the 25th Biennale of Sydney, Rememory, opening in March 2026. Charles Esche, the former director of the Van Abbemuseum, is a writer and curator based in Amsterdam. His work focuses on decolonial thinking, exhibition histories, and the role of contemporary art in shaping new forms of global dialogue. Esche is an advisor at the Jan van Eyck Academy, Maastricht, and a professor of contemporary art and curating at the University of the Arts, London, where he is a founding editor of the journal Afterall, works on Afterall’s Exhibition Histories series, and is a member of L'Internationale Association. He will be a resident at Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris, in 2026, and is the author of the upcoming fifth volume of the Thoughts on Curating series, published by Sternberg Press. Ruth Estévez is a curator, educator, and set designer. She currently serves as the Co-Director of the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, whose work spans performance, architecture, and experimental exhibition making. Previously, Estévez was the artistic director of Amant, an alternative art space in Brooklyn (2020–2023), senior curator of the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University (2018–2020), and co-curator of the 34th São Paulo Biennial (2021). She is on the faculty of the MA Curatorial Practice program at the School of Visual Arts. Işın Önol is a New York City-based curator, writer, and art educator. Since 2009, she has worked independently, producing exhibitions, conferences, public programs, and community-engaging projects across Europe, South and East Asia, the Middle East, as well as the Americas. She has served as a guest professor, critic, and curator at the University of Applied Arts, Vienna (2022-2023 and 2016-2017), as well as at Montclair State University (2017-2022), and as a research scholar at the Center for the Study of Social Difference at Columbia University. (2016-2020). She was the director and curator of the Elgiz Museum of Contemporary Art from 2006 to 2009. She is on the faculty of the MA Curatorial Practice program at the School of Visual Arts.

On Practice

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