Curatorial Strategies for Collective Agency in the Algorithmic Age
Image: Laure Prouvost, WE FELT A STAR DYING 2025. Installation view at Kraftwerk Berlin. Commissioned by LAS Art Foundation and co-commissioned by OGR Torino. © 2025 Laure Prouvost. Photo: Andrea Rossetti © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2025
Date: Monday, 14 Sep 2026
Time: 3PM BST (4:00 PM CEST / 10:00 AM EDT)
Duration: 1h 30min
Open to: Everyone
Admission: Free (Registration required)
Location: Online via Zoom
Zoom link: https://northwestern.zoom.us/j/95637160674(Please save the Zoom link for direct access on the day.)
Registation form
*Please be aware that this online session will be recorded and the recording will be published on the IKT YouTube channel and website, allowing members who are unable to attend live to watch at a later date.
The recording may capture participants’ audio, video, names and any content shared during the session. By taking part, you consent to being included in the recording. If you would prefer not to appear, please keep your camera switched off and your microphone muted. Please also be mindful that contributions made verbally or through the webinar platform may be captured as part of the recording.
ABOUT THE WEBINAR
Contemporary spectatorship is inseparable from the technological and material conditions that shape it. Since the mid-2010s, the ubiquity of algorithmic technologies has produced what art historian Claire Bishop calls “hybrid spectatorship”, one that unfolds simultaneously in physical space and across networked platforms. The logic of the algorithm fosters an experience that is individualized, tracked, and accelerated, estranging the viewer from the reflective encounter with art and unsettling the institution’s promise of critical involvement and co-presence. These same conditions, however, open up new possibilities: instant global exchange and the formation of networked audiences.
This reality directly challenges the curatorial imperative to address the public as a diverse collective body, both within and beyond the spaces of cultural institutions. Drawing on a critique of contemporary spectatorship, this webinar asks: how can curatorial practice intervene in the algorithmic formation of attention and create the conditions for collective agency within this process?
SPEAKERS
Nanna Verhoeff
Professor of Screen Cultures & Society, Department of Media and Culture Studies, Utrecht University
Nanna Verhoeff is Professor of Screen Cultures & Society in the Department of Media and Culture Studies at Utrecht University. Her work centers on the comparative analysis of emerging screen media, with a particular interest in contemporary transformations in screen and interface cultures. She has published on early cinema, mobile and location-based media, interactive installations, urban media art and media architecture. Her current research develops concepts and methods for the analysis of performative technologies, situated arts and media, and urban interfaces.
She is co-lead of the interdisciplinary research group [urban interfaces] and co-initiator of the Creative Humanities Academy at Utrecht University. Her books include The West in Early Cinema: After the Beginning (2006), Mobile Screens: The Visual Regime of Navigation (2012) and Urban Screens: Situations, Practices, Concepts (2025). With Iris van der Tuin, she published Critical Concepts for the Creative Humanities (2022).
Dr Simon Sheikh
Professor of Critical Theory and Media Philosophy, HfG Karlsruhe
Dr Simon Sheikh is a curator and theorist based in Berlin. He is Professor of Critical Theory and Media Philosophy at HfG Karlsruhe, where he is also Vice-Rector for Studies and Teaching. From 2012 to 2024 he was Programme Director of MFA Curating at Goldsmiths, University of London, and from 2002 to 2009 coordinator of the Critical Studies Program at Malmö Art Academy. He was director of Overgaden – Institute for Contemporary Art, Copenhagen, and curator at NIFCA, Helsinki.
His books include Former West: Art and the Contemporary After 1989 (2016, with Maria Hlavajova), Curating After the Global (2019) and Glossary of Urban Practice (2021). He is a columnist for e-flux journal and a correspondent for springerin, and is currently completing a book titled It's After the End of the World.
Moderator
Anna Bouali
Art historian, curator and researcher; PhD Candidate, Media and Culture Studies, Utrecht University
Anna Bouali is an art historian, curator, and researcher of video and media art based in Amsterdam. She is a PhD candidate in Media and Culture Studies at Utrecht University, where her research examines how screen technologies reshape spectatorship and the politics of viewing, and how curatorial practices can enable new forms of critical knowledge production.
Previously, she worked as a curator and producer at MediaArtLab and the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, and collaborated on projects presented in conjunction with the 58th Venice Biennale, Triennale Milano, and Révélations Biennale. In 2025, she co-curated a programme with Elevision Gallery and IOGIANLITY presenting video art across 2,000 screens in London and Dubai.
She received the Innovation Prize for Curator of the Year in 2021 and taught the New Media in Contemporary Art programme at the British Higher School of Art & Design from 2020 to 2022. She is a member of IKT and ICOM and a participant in IMPAKT’s Full Spectrum Curatorship Programme 2026.