The Incurable-Image: Curating Post-Mexican Film and Media Arts

From the 1990s onwards the `ethnographic turn in contemporary art has generated intense dialogues between anthropologists, artists and curators. While ethnography has been both generously and problematically re-appropriated by the art world, curation has seldom caught the conceptual attention of anthropologists.

Based on two years of participant-observation in Mexico City, Tarek Elhaik addresses this lacuna by examining the concept-work of curatorial platforms and media artists. Taking his cue from ongoing critiques of Mexicanist aesthetics, and what Roger Bartra calls `the post-Mexican condition, Elhaik conceptualises curation less as an exhibition-oriented practice within a national culture, than as a figure of care and an image of thought animating a complex assemblage of inter-medial practices, from experimental cinema and installations to curatorial collaborations. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze and Paul Rabinow, the book introduces the concept of the `Incurable-Image, an antidote to our curatorial malaise and the ethical substance for a post-social anthropology of images.