Curating Public Programs After-Hours: methods for being together Otherwise

Public programs push the museum’s opening hours into the night with curated events not otherwise possible during the day, with talks, performances, sounds and music that aim at engaging with a wider public, as well as diversifying institutions’ voices. Public programs have taken “centre stage” in museums and galleries, and their relationship to curating as a discipline is debated (McDowell 2016). This paper explores the role of public programming to challenge traditional models of knowledge production and experience in museums, by producing alternative time-zones for communities that are hosted in and out of dominant timeframes. In the first part of the paper, I introduce the transformation of curatorial practice, understood as being exhibition based, by public programming. Through analysis of the project Freedom of Sleep that I curated during the Covid-19 Pandemic, with public programs organised before, during and after the exhibition over a year-long period, I argue that normative understanding of curatorial time and its exclusionary mechanisms can be challenged by curating public programs out of time: de-synchronously from an exhibition’s opening hours and durations. I draw on Michelle Bastian’s understanding of communities’ need for shared time rather than shared space (Bastian 2014, 150), together with the rhythmic nature of public programs, to explore possibilities for being together Otherwise, by rhythming Otherwise—meaning differently from the norm, for developing a critical space. The public programming methodology in Freedom of Sleep demonstrates a radical slowing down of institutional timeframes, one that allowed the creation of a community of practice and opportunities for developing audiences over time.