OSK Summer School ‘The Curiosity Cabinet. Critical Perspectives on Art, Nature, Knowledge, and Display’.
Dates: May 2025: First session. 16-20 June 2025: Summer School. 10 or 11 July 2025: Final session and Evaluation
Venues: tba
ECTS: The course represents a course load of 6 ECTS. A certificate will be provided by the OSK after successful participation
Open to: OSK ReMa Students and PhD researchers
Convenors: Dr Tessel Bauduin (UvA) and Dr Ingrid Vermeulen (VUA).
Instruction language: All discussions and presentations will be in English
Registration via website and send a CV and short letter of motivation to osk-fgw@uva.nl.
Deadline for applications: 1 December 2024
The curiosity cabinet is not only an early modern phenomenon but also a critical point of reference in the modern and contemporary periods. Places of marvel and wonder, cabinets contained objects of art and nature. They are furthermore sites of knowledge formation and dazzling conspicuous display, sourced in the exploits of global trade, imperialism and colonialism. Contemporary artists make use of the cabinet format or its aesthetic regime to decolonize the gaze as much as collection practices, even as museums reposition their own heritage of having – or even having been – a cabinet or curiosity collection and its attendant ideas about who gets to acquire, collect, order, and display the natural and cultural world, exotic or otherwise.
During the summer school we will analyse together case studies of the curiosity cabinet from the past and the present, taking a transhistorical approach. We will critically assess histories, theories and legacies of the curiosity cabinet and its inherent epistemological assumptions. While aspects of the nature and impact of the displays, the knowledge patterns resulting from the mixing and ordering of objects, and networks of collectors, artists, scholars and curators are our main focus, broader thematic issues such as artistic approaches, transformations in scholarship, museological questions, global markets and capitalism will be addressed too, as well as colonialism and decolonization.
The programme consists of several excursions (to location in the Netherlands), sessions with guest speakers, and seminars to debate recent literature on the topic. You will complete the school with a presentation about an intervention (for instance, in the form of a virtual display or otherwise) on a topic of your own interest.