
What kind of documents do curators produce? Contemporary cases from Estonia.
Curator, the Museum Journal 2023
What forms of documentation emerge when preparing an exhibition? And what can an art document do to other things and professionals? This article studies curating as a way of producing documents. By looking back retrospectively to the array of documents produced during my art projects and reviewing theoretical approaches relevant to the development of archival documentation, I discuss how art documents can be constitutive of both knowledge and relations. Curation activities demand a proactive documentation and archiving since documents play a key role in consolidating the aesthetic value and relational potential of artworks. Art documents help to account of and multiply the knowledge that is mobilized during the making of an exhibition, but they also have performative efficacy as connectors—contributing to reach different audiences, to involve diverse participants, and to bring together dissimilar things.