Acts of Remediation : Curating contemporary art in cultural heritage sites

Abstract: Increasingly, contemporary artists are invited to create artworks responding to and located in cultural heritage sites such as national parks, national monuments, historic landmarks, and historic buildings. This thesis examines the nature of contemporary art production, display, and encounter in cultural heritage sites. The research is directed by the question: What are the conditions of curating contemporary art in cultural heritage sites?   The analysis builds from the idea that the meeting ground of contemporary art and cultural heritage produces a curatorial zone, and explores the implications of the interplay between these two fields for curatorial labor in cultural heritage sites specifically. A set of conditions that are central to both curating and cultural heritage management forms the methodological starting point for a comparative analysis of ten contemporary art projects in cultural heritage sites, including one in-depth case study.   The comparative analysis reveals that this curatorial zone is characterized by conditions that arise from conceptual tensions between the fields of contemporary art and cultural heritage. Specifically, a set of conditions I have termed change, temporal, interpretive, site-specific, and instrumental conditions actively shape the act of curating contemporary art in cultural heritage sites.