Curating and the Legacies of Colonialism in Contemporary Iberia

* This book provides the first systematic genealogy of postcolonial and decolonial practices emerging from Iberian art spaces. * The title redefines Iberian Studies through a decolonial lens. * It expands current debates on curating and contemporary art by exploring how cultural programming has engaged with the legacies and continuities of colonialism in contemporary European societies.

Curating and the Legacies of Colonialism in Contemporary Iberia redefines Iberian and curatorial Studies by situating curatorial practice at the centre of the configuration of modern, postcolonial societies in the Iberian context.Combining postcolonial studies, curating and contemporary art, this book surveys the role played by artistic curatorship and contemporary art museums in the shaping of identities and cultural planning in contemporary Iberia. The book's main hypothesis is that contemporary art has been pivotal in the construction of contemporary Iberia, a process marked by the attention paid (in heterogeneous, not always satisfactory ways) to the entanglement of the legacies of colonialism and the present-day status of Iberian territories as cosmopolitan societies now integrated in the European Union. We argue that, at least from the 1990s, curating emerged as a key activity for Iberian societies to display and configure an image of themselves as modern and fully integrated in the European cultural landscape. Such an image, however, had to cope with the legacies of colonialism and the profound socioeconomic transformations of these societies. This book is concerned with bringing together, while redefining and expanding, Iberian and curatorial studies.