Paper Short Abstract:

Through reflections on the author's partial engagement with contemporary artists in urban Mongolia, this paper reflects on 'the curatorial' as a method for anthropological research. Learning from artists, sensing, feeling, and caring become part of the curatorial repertoire of anthropology.

Paper Abstract:

This paper reflects on the author’s experience doing her doctoral fieldwork in Mongolia with citizens who identified themselves as contemporary artists. Based at an area-focused research institution in the UK where developing knowledge and understanding of a territorially or culturally defined place had historically been the epistemic norm, the author soon encountered the impossibility of representation as a fair or interesting way of framing her research upon commencing fieldwork and attempting to get to know her interlocutors, mainly highly critical and intellectual artists and cultural practitioners in urban Mongolia. As a young foreign woman conducting long-term ethnographic fieldwork for the first time, embodied senses of stress and discomfort and real needs to safeguard one’s own personal safety necessitated constant reflexive responses to the behaviour, expressions, practices, and social, intellectual, and artistic interests of interlocutors and research participants, many in positions of much greater relative power within the field-site.

'Thank you for caring,' my research participants would say to me. Active participation and 'doing' things with the artists soon became my default mode of research. The curatorial in this sense, then, transcends traditional ideas of curating an exhibition, visual or otherwise, in the setting of a gallery or a museum, even though such an exercise could still entail a part of the curatorial practice. The curatorial became a way of learning from research participants, namely contemporary artists in urban Mongolia, who prefer to 'just do it' before over conceptualising their ideas, and invited the author to share their art making lives.