Author name: Saskia Clarke

As She Conquers the Art World, Curator Carolina Edman Remains in Pursuit of Its Infinite Layers text Anna Mikaela Ekstrand In this conversation, Swedish curator Carolina Edman reflects on her own practice and others that are defined by curiosity, rigour, and a refusal of easy solutions. Working between New York, Paris, and Stockholm, she is always looking to the future, but learning from the past. Anna Mikaela Ekstrand: You are pictured at Elizabeth Street Garden and the Temple of Dendur. Why are these places important to you and your curatorial praxis? Carolina Edman: Elisabeth Street Garden is a place of wonder and tranquillity apart from the intensity of New York. To me, it transcends a mere green space; something living, something real is taking place in everything. The garden has a series of stone sculptures, including the Goddess of the Harvest, Hermes the Messenger, Sphinxes, and a reclining Lion. Medusa in a corner stands as a symbol of survival. These elements are of historical and artistic significance. The seasonal changes interact with the sculptures; the flowers in the summer and the glossy green ivy leaves turn brilliant shades of orange, red, and crimson in the fall, becoming part of the composition. I believe that we can never be separated from nature and that humans and our culture are always interlinked with the site around us. The garden’s elements are interrelated, creating an environment, a holistic sculpture, if you will. But I am interested in the garden not as a kind of Eden, or the idea of equilibrium in Western mythology. There is never a clear division between us and the interface with our surroundings, and it is about the dynamic interplay. The fundamental part is the resilience of the constantly self-changing system that is evolution, and I believe there are many parallels here to artists. I am proud to have been part of the community that saved the garden from being demolished. photography Danilo Laura fashion Nicole Yang ‘Edman played a critical role by contributing her expertise in the history of art and its legal aspects to lay out the ideas to protect the garden. It is an irreplaceable physical and social sculpture, which she helped our community articulate and express’ – Joseph Reiver During the past years of calling New York home, the Metropolitan Museum of Art has been another core pillar of my life in the city. I often come to seek a specific object, or to simply meander. For good and for worse, this huge accumulation of objects stands out from any other museum in the world. Being able to sit in their presence is unique. Walking through the galleries creates temporal axes across millennia and ancient civilisations. It is precisely these bold curatorial dialogues that fascinate me. It is an approach to art that is at once generous, rigorous, and entirely thought-provoking. I am looking forward to how this will be developed by Frida Escobedo’s vision for the Tang Wing. The current exhibition of Giacometti at the Temple of Dendur is a case in point. It succeeds in an ahistorical homage to human artistic expression through history, an unforgettable curatorial juxtaposition, only possible at the Met. It demands a new way of looking at Giacometti. Of course, pairing more recent art with ancient artefacts is not a novel curatorial move. One of my favourite exhibitions is Harald Szeemann’s A-Historische Klanken [Ahistorical Sounds] at the Museum Boymans-van Beuningen in 1988. It visualised the form of jolting dialogues made possible by placing objects from across time in proximity. I believe today, with the broader flattening of time, these exhibitions are more relevant than ever. AME: Your writing and curatorial ideas centre around what you have called the ‘nonfinite’. Tell me more. CE: I am interested in the ‘nonfinite’ as a distinct aesthetic mode. This is not about interruption or artwork which is unfinished. It is about artwork that is not retained only in the brain, but is, somehow, an energy. It is art that incorporates and invites the observer in its creation; it has the capacity to elicit imagination, or a form of alterity within, and sustain a continuous, mediumistic openness. Since our minds cannot properly conceive the infinite, and indeed recoil from the very thought, we settle for the nonfinite. The world we inhabit extends beyond what can be seen; we live in a palimpsest of ‘structures of feeling’, in rooms framed by the longing of the soul. This largely invisible architecture creates a vessel for the world to arrive into. We always have the ability to access the plane where possibility takes shape, where contradictions are unified, and it is possible to reconfigure and reframe that which shapes our thoughts and actions. That plane is radical because it assumes there is always a way beyond.  At this moment, my confidence in the purpose of aesthetics, and that there are things only art can give us, by means specific to it, rests in the knowledge of its unendedness. The nonfinite evokes the sense of ordinary, or elemental, magic of life. It borders on the impossible, often eccentric, pursuit of beauty across art, science, architecture, politics, agriculture, theology, and fashion. So, I am looking for something beyond the mask of contemporary society. Something otherworldly. How do we access that? How do we ask better questions? Or, ‘How do we flood the gate?’ as Arthur Jafa has put it. AME: What is participatory imagination? CE: Consider seeing Turner’s painting with the mythological scene of Ulysses. In reality, it is merely a conglomeration of pigments and compositional parts, but we complete it in our minds; we wonder where on the journey the scene takes place; we experience an entire world in the eye of our mind.  Participatory imagination describes how meaning emerges through our encounters. We make art come into existence through observation, based on personal experience and collective consciousness. This does not mean that it is all constructed, but simply that the essential character, or aura, of a