(New) Institution(alism)

<p>The present issue of <em>On Curating</em> contributes to a critical re-engagement with New Institutionalism. This conceptual framework is used to encompass a series of curatorial, artistic and educational practices that, in various places around the turn of the Millennium, developed concrete ideas to change art institutions, their mandates and formats: art institutions were to function as sites of research and socially engaged spaces of debate. The fact that discussions about the function of and demands for change within art institutions have become increasingly topical in the context of the controversial and much criticized revised Swiss cultural policy for 2012-2016, and the European-wide tendency toward budget cuts, emphasizes the importance of a critical reevaluation of these artistic and curatorial practices. Although a majority of the experimentally active art institutions that were gathered under the term New Institutionalism have now been closed down or changed their orientation, thus implying that the phenomenon was bound up with a particular historical situation, its conditions, structures and implications clearly still resonate in the contemporary organization of art. For these reasons, the present issue intends to enable differentiated approaches to the phenomenon of New Institutionalism in its various forms, by including a multiplicity of voices and analytical approaches…</p>