FLIP-FLOPPING: Beyond Care Towards Para-hosting 

Can contemporary art museums, and the established art institution more widely learn from contemporary art curating, small-scale organisations and debates around hosting, escape and publicness? Oscillating between speculation, critique and serious proposition, this lecture takes a few twists and turns while engaging with notable paradigm shifts in contemporary art, knowledge production and the perception of curatorial framing. Building on concepts of “the curatorial” – a particular mode of practice, rather than an adjective – as a form of research-in-and-with-public attentiveness, this book outlines Para-hosting as an attentive and cooperative means through which not only curators but also art institutions / museums / academia/ organizations can practice Publicness.  Para-hosting is proposed as a methodology of institutional support through self-organisation without absorption. Through its explicitly collaborative dynamics, para-hosting offers a potential for Escape with transformative possibilities for museums to account for what happens beyond their extant power structures. Ultimately, the lecture proposes forms of Institutional Flip-flopping, which consists of a switching out, turning things upside down and inside out of the existing agential paradigms of the art institution.

Dr. Paul O’Neill is an Irish curator, artist, writer, and educator. Paul O’Neill is the Artistic Director of PUBLICS, since September 2017. PUBLICS is a curatorial agency, contemporary art commissioner, event and exhibition space with a dedicated library and reading room in Helsinki. Between 2013-17, he was Director of the Graduate Program at the Center for Curatorial Studies (CCS), Bard College, New York where he also curated We are the Center for Curatorial Studies, at Hessel Museum, (2016-17) and The Visitor Talks Programme (2013-17). The Paul O’Neill Archives are part of the Irish Museum of Modern Art Collection, Dublin.

Paul is author of the critically acclaimed book The Culture of Curating and the Curating of Culture(s), (MIT Press, 2012), which has been translated into many languages. Paul has co-curated over 70 shows across the including: 24 Hour Tony Cokes, Amos Rex, Helsinki (2025);  the year-long Coalescence Happenstance with All Due Intent, Shimmer Rottterdam (2024-25); Coalesce Sometime Later, The Showroom, London (2024); ADN Platform, Barcelona (2023); and an on-going series of COUPLING shows at PUBLICS. Paul is widely regarded as one of the foremost research-oriented curators, educators and scholar of curatorial practice, public art, and exhibition histories, and most has authored and co-edited numerous agenda-setting anthologies on curating. Most recent co-edited books are: Not Going it Alone: Collective Curatorial Curating (Apexart, New York, 2024), and CURIOUS (Open Editions, London, 2024) co-edited with Gerrie van Noord et al.

Since 2017 Paul has been a visiting professor in MA Curating at the Latvian Academy of Fine Arts. Between 2005 to 2017, O'Neill was a visiting international tutor at de Appel Amsterdam. He was an international research fellow with The Graduate School of Creative Arts and Media, Dublin from 2010-2013. From 2007 until 2010, O'Neill led the major international research program, 'Locating the Producers', at Situations, University of the West of England, Bristol. He has previously held lecturing positions on the MFA in Curating, Goldsmiths University of London since the late 1990s amongst others and in Visual Culture, Middlesex University, where is received is PhD in 2007. Between 2001 and 2004 he was the Curator of London Print Studio Gallery. From 1997 to 2006 he was Artistic Director of Multiples X, an organization that commissioned and supported curated exhibitions of artist's editoins.

Paul O’Neill is currently working on two new publications of his curatorial texts called Flip-Flopping Beyond Care Towards Parahosting, and CURED planned for publication later this year. 

Photo credit : © Aman Askarizad