What if an artwork didn’t belong to a single artist, institution, or collector, but to many? Shared Custody is a speculative curatorial inquiry into collective ownership as an artistic and political strategy. Drawing on my thesis The Ignorant Curator, the project explores how co-authorship – whether legal, symbolic, or conceptual – might serve to decentralise cultural authority, redistribute artistic agency, and unsettle dominant narratives of authorship.

Ownership here is not treated as a fixed endpoint, but as a fluid process: a series of negotiations, responsibilities, and affiliations that unfold across time and contexts. The project builds on critiques of singular authorship and institutional neutrality, engaging theorists such as Jacques Rancière, Sara Ahmed, and Roland Barthes to rethink the curator’s role not as an expert, but as a facilitator of shared meaning. Rancière’s concept of intellectual equality offers a model for curatorial practice grounded in humility – instructing, but inviting; not mastering, but co-inquiring. Just as the title of my research The Ignorant Curator gestures toward this position of deliberate unknowing, proposing a model of cultural work that resists epistemic dominance.
Sara Ahmed’s writing on complaint, orientation, and institutional friction offers a framework for understanding how structures of knowledge and ownership are felt, embodied, and contested. Her work forefronts emotional labour and the politics of refusal as key to imagining how collective custodianship might operate not just legally, but effectively and ethically. Meanwhile, Roland Barthes’ dismantling of authorial authority in The Death of the Author (1967) supports a shift toward reception and readership as generative, rather than passive modes of engagement. These perspectives converge around a shared insistence that meaning is not owned, but co-constructed.

Illustration: Specimen of Fancy Turning Executed on the Hand or Foot Lathe, 1869, Edward J. Woolsey. From the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

The project will have a clear stylistic solution, where illustration together with text takes the form of a large poster, similar to school posters that were produced as teaching materials between the 1930s and 1980s. The surface of the poster will be divided into different sections, which with the help of text tell about specific social phenomena and show different situations that happen in connection with them.
This research stems from broader questions: how is art owned, by whom, and toward what ends? If authorship is always already plural, how might we design frameworks that make this plurality visible? And how could ownership itself become a platform for accountability rather than exclusion?
Throughout the residency, I will explore how artistic and curatorial practices might reimagine ownership structures. The speculation will remain deliberately open-ended, considering hybrid forms of collective custodianship across legal, symbolic, digital, and affective dimensions. These may involve smart contracts, shared rituals, conceptual gestures, or informal agreements – each reflecting different ways of relating to art as a shared concern.
Shared Custody is not a blueprint but a proposition: an invitation to think about how we might live differently with art, not as property to possess, but as a process to share.