The Edinburgh Companion to Curatorial Futures
By (Author) Bridget Crone
Edited by Bassam El Baroni
Edited by Matthew Poole
Edinburgh University Press
Edinburgh University Press
12th May 2026
United Kingdom
Professional and Scholarly
Non Fiction
Literary studies: from c 2000
The visual, decorative or fine arts: treatments and subjects
Hardback
528
Width 170mm, Height 244mm
In a so-called post-neoliberal world, it can seem like culture is stuck in a perpetual presentism where history and the future are but mere data points for speculative calculations of gains, and culture seems all but a string of endlessly repeating commodities. In such an environment, can we rescue the future for art, for curating and the curatorial, and for culture more generally Do we need to What function do concepts like the future and futurity play in the field of curating and the curatorial What use is 'the future' to curators and others working within the field of the curatorial The Edinburgh Companion to Curatorial Futures is the first curatorial studies volume to engage with the increasingly ubiquitous concept of 'the future' and its exponential growth in the fields of artistic research, curating, art and academia. What is it we need to know as we think towards the future
Bridget Crone (1973 2023) was a writer and curator based in London, UK. She was a senior lecturer in Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths College, The University of London, where she co-convened the Ph.D. programme in Advanced Practices. Bridget died of cancer on 28th January, 2023, before the publication of this book, for which she is the founding editor. Crone had significant professional curatorial experience in the visual arts sector stretching across more than twenty years, working in the UK, Australia and internationally. She was the artistic director of Media Art Bath from 2006 to 2011 a publicly funded research-based commissioning agency based in South West England and, prior to that, she was curator at The Showroom Gallery, London. Crone also taught at universities and art schools in the UK and Australia, including Chelsea School of Art and Design, Monash University, and Victorian College of the Arts, Melbourne, as well as giving guest lecturers and seminars at universities across the UK. She was a member of the European Forum for Advanced Practices, a Europe-wide network engaged in questions of artistic research and a COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology) Action. Focusing on the body in material and speculative terms, Crone's work explores questions of 'liveness' and the image in relation to contemporary performance art and moving image practices, and the changing relations of body, technology and ecology. Her edited book The Sensible Stage: Staging and the Moving Image, was published in a second revised and extended edition in 2017. In 2022, Fieldwork for Future Ecologies, was published; co-edited by Crone, Sam Nightingale and Polly Stanton, (2022). Recent essays include: 'Future', with Henriette Gunkel, in The Bloomsbury Handbook for 21st Century Feminist Theory (2019) and 'Flicker-time and Fabulation: from flickering images to crazy wipes' in Fictions and Futures, (2017). Recent curatorial projects include Propositions for a stage: 24 frames of a beautiful heaven (2017, Institute of Contemporary Art, Singapore), Spectral Ecologies (2017, Mildura Arts Centre) and the multiple site-based project The Cinemas Project: exploring the spectral spaces of cinema in Regional Victoria (2014, Latrobe Regional Gallery, Bendigo Art Gallery, Warrnambool Art Gallery, Mildura Arts Centre, Geelong Gallery). Bridget wrote regularly for artists and recently published an extended introduction, titled 'Wounds of Unbecoming' (addressing questions of gender and trans materiality), for Turner Prize winner Tai Shani's collected writings, Our Fatal Magic (2019).