The impossibility of curating live art

This article considers key conceptual issues associated with curation and specifically live art curation in contemporary South Africa. It explores curation as mediation and as a site for the emergence of ideas that challenge dominant culture, the dangers of transferring the curation of objects to the curation of liveness, the lure and limits of curation within thematic frameworks, and the curation of live art in spaces of crisis. Most of all, it probes possibilities for a new vocabulary for taking care of live art that better reflects and keeps pace with this ever-shifting art form in a society in necessary transition.