Hosted by Steven Henry Madoff, Founding Chair of the MA Curatorial Practice at the School of Visual Arts in New York City.

The Curatorial Roundtable, an international forum for curators and institutional leaders to discuss formative and current projects, is hosted by Steven Henry Madoff, Founding Chair of the MA Curatorial Practice at the School of Visual Arts in New York City.

Doreen Mende is a curator, writer, public scholar, and, since 2021, director of the Research Department at the Dresden State Art Collections. Between 2015 and 2025, she was professor of curatorial politics at the Department of Fine Arts at HEAD Genève in Switzerland. She is a founding member of the Harun Farocki Institut in Berlin. Mende completed her doctoral thesis at the Visual Cultures Department of Goldsmiths, University of London, and is currently completing a monograph, In Transit: Geopolitics of Exhibiting (forthcoming in 2026). Her most recent exhibitions and projects include Candida Höfer: Contexts. A Dresden Reflection (Kupferstich-Kabinett, Dresden, 2024); The Missed Seminar (the Paul and Eslanda Robeson Archive, Berlin, 2022-23) and Steve McQueen (Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, and the Albertinum, Dresden, 2022-23); a series of exhibitions in the context of "Decolonizing Socialism Entangled Internationalism," funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation, in collaboration with blaxTARLINES in Ghana, Oralities Research Lab in India, and the Van Abbemuseum in the Netherlands, among others (2019–2024). Recent book projects include Navigation Beyond Vision (with Tom Holert), as well as numerous scholarly and essayistic articles published by e-flux Journal, Sternberg Press, MIT Press, The Oxford Handbook for Communist Visual Cultures, Jerusalem Quarterly, Archive Books, and spector books.

Under the title "The Curatorial-Archival Complex," and departing from a series of exhibitions with contemporary artists intervening in the State Collections of Art Dresden that have been organized by the Collections’ Research Department over recent years, the talk will consider the emergence of futurities within a 500-years-old European museum complex. These transhistoric forms of knowledge navigate between the authority of canonized research (historicity) and knowledge yet-to-come that is situated below, nearby, or beyond institutional categorization. It is precisely at this conjuncture of epistemic systems (the canonized and the muted, or the exhibited and the inhibited) that are fueled by a geopolitics of memory in the global twenty-first century that the curatorial-archival complex becomes significant for a politics of making public. How do we navigate between archival law and outlaw knowledge? What can exhibitions do to make cultural normativity visible while creating spaces for potential imaginaries or knowing otherwise? Is it possible, and if so, how is it possible to decolonize futures from a coloniality of history?

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