Penser le Présent with Paul O’Neill

Becoming Exhibition: Making Art PUBLIC

Paul O’Neill, Irish curator, artist, writer, educator and Artistic Director of PUBLICS, Helsinki, presents and reflects on the publicness of curatorial practice, cooperative exhibition-making and attentiveness.

Taking a survey overview of exhibition projects as its starting point, this lecture reflects upon an artist working curatorially and extends a conception of the curatorial to account for multiple public sites of contact, assemblages and gathering of diverse bodies and subjects as well as their discursive connections. In doing so, it opens up a concept of the formation of the ‘exhibition’ itself as a form of publicness, and as a mode of public research action in its own process of becoming.

O’Neill’s talk will look at how different points of contact are made possible when exhibiting becomes a form of escape for the artwork as much as for the viewer. Here, O’Neill identifies escape and publicness as key concepts for the curatorial which defines itself as an act of release – from something, somewhere, someone – accompanied by the wish to be transformed.

The meeting, hosted by Audrey Illouz, will take place in English.

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.