Àngels Miralda Tena
Independent Curator and Writer (NL, ES)
Àngels Miralda Tena is an independent curator and writer. She is based in Amsterdam and Catalonia, and grew up between Barcelona, Cambridge UK, Philadelphia, and Princeton NJ.
Àngels Miralda describes her curatorial practice as a secret politics of materiality with the belief that materials contain embedded meanings, relating to global chains of extraction, trade, and industry. Her recent exhibitions have drawn on art historical research into Arte Povera, neo-materialisms, and the roots of Installation Art to create parallels between artists' materials and planetary phenomena. She has realised residencies and new productions in volcanic craters and sulphuric pits with artists Regina de Miguel and Paul Rosero Contreras. Based on observations of how biotechnology interacts with our world as well as our own bodies in changing and sometimes violent manners, she has imagined speculative sculptural futures with artists Julia Varela and Andrej Škufca. Her projects with Débora Delmar have addressed matter in its consumer form as a market commodity with economic and cultural repercussions. She has organized exhibitions at the Tallinn Art Hall (Estonia), MGLC - International Centre for Graphic Arts (Ljubljana), De Appel (Amsterdam), Galerija Miroslav Kraljevic (Zagreb), the Museum of Contemporary Art of Chile (Santiago), Museu de Angra do Heroísmo (Terceira - Azores), and the Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art (Riga). Miralda regularly publishes her writing for Critics' Picks at Artforum and is the current Mondriaan curator at airWG (Amsterdam).---
[...] Why did you become a curator?
I loved museums as a child and later studied art history and journalism. It was not a coincidence that all of my friends were artists throughout my life. I started curating before I knew that it was a possible profession and in University I discovered art theory where I developed my practice based on landscape and identity- which are now themes I like to expand through exhibitions and commissions.
Have you encountered any issues related to tokenisation within public programmes/institutions so far, and have you developed any tactics to challenge them?
I find this one of the most important discussions that's happening at the moment. Not only in the UK, but also where I'm based, in the Netherlands. We're in a moment of crisis where institutions and directors don't know how to deal with current discussions on diversity and inclusion, and the first thing to go is the moral compass.
The young generation is way ahead of them and they can't catch up. Tokenization happens naturally in environments where different voices have never been present, and at some points it may be useful to generate discussion and a starting point. Institutions are problematic though, because we are always relying on them but they are also our biggest constraint, and tokenization affirms an incorrect belief that simply because you belong to a category you care for the wellbeing of people in that same category - this is not the case. I recently had a terrible experience in an institution run by women who didn't want to speak or hear about instituting policy for the safety of women. I was working in that institution and simultaneously had an external individual, who had nothing to do with the institution, who was stalking me. The institution did not help to make that space safe for me and I encountered forms of tone policing for instance using the fact that I am a "white woman" to justify why I was not allowed to feel unsafe. This ignores the constant layers of vulnerability that surround group dynamics.
It should become more common for institutions to question their ability to provide safe environments for people before inviting them. This is part of the work that institutions need to do and they have so far failed. Institutions in crisis care more about preserving their image than about changing for the better so they prefer to fight against people who file complaints than to reflect on the reason for the complaint. This is a lack of self-criticism and self-awareness that leads to an institution becoming stagnant. Instead, we need to commit to constant change which is why I don't believe in any specific formula for curating but only the self-awareness and generosity of listening and perceiving what is around you and how your actions affect others.
In terms of tokenism I always remember a crucial moment in my career, it was the second exhibition I ever curated.Due to delays and cancellations I found myself curating an all male show, and I really didn't know what to do. I realised at that moment, I hadn't been thinking properly: if you're not constantly thinking about inclusion, then the situation will always tend to go towards the majoritarian status quo.
Inclusion, diversity and representation always have to be on our minds as curators, no matter what the theme of the exhibition is, but not as a tokenistic way of scrambling at the end to fix a mistake, but as a seed for the idea to recognise your own unknowns from the beginning of the concept through the end. Having blind spots is not embarrassing, it is not recognising them that is embarrassing.
Another thing that is important to me is the collective dynamic and the sense of community. Caring for others means being sure that others are comfortable but also that uncomfortable topics can be safely addressed without excluding people. The large majority of the art world is living in conditions of exploitation, so if you are not having fun and you are not enjoying it - you are doing it wrong. In this sense, resource allotment is also crucial, especially if you work in different places around the world and you realise how artists work in say, Latin America versus Europe, you become aware of the enormous waste of European institutions in every aspect of their functioning. We also need to be aware of who we invite in terms of where they live and work and the emancipatory potential of inviting artists from somewhere economically and politically removed from a European field of vision.