The Office For Curating

The Office for Curating is the generic name for a curatorial practice and an agency, formalised and established in 2012 by Niekolaas Johannes Lekkerkerk, and is currently active in and from Rotterdam, The Netherlands. The name and the seeming neutrality of this hybrid institute have been instigated to generate a buffer between oneself and the world, but foremost to be inclusive and responsive towards different complexities and conditions, and to allow these influences to enter the frame and approach them curatorially. In that, The Office for Curating acts as an assembler of a growing programme of exhibitions (including publications, texts and speech acts) and as a support structure for initiating exhibitions as a rise to the occasion – presented in different shapes and configurations, along different temporal structures and rhythms, as hosted by different institutes. Preceded and represented by the image of a desk – commonly referred to as The Kidney, or sometimes The President Desk – designed by Cees Braakman in 1962, The Office for Curating is looking to expand and advance the potential methods and ways of working a physically grounded desk structure can put forward. Here, the desk’s surface facilitates an assembly of resources and their subsequent reshuffling and displacing from within a single space to a multitude of external locations, from fragments into analogies of examples and social assemblages. In that, The Office for Curating takes a strong interest in curatorial practice as a tool for thinking contemporary society through artistic practices. It examines social and political issues such as daily living and working conditions, cultural norms and ideologies – often intersected and informed by fictional devices and texts (scopic and non–scopic, audible and inaudible) as a means of approaching exhibitions more dimensionally, and to foreground a speculative response towards addressing complexity and working with it.