The aleatory object

Originating in an encounter with a psychoanalyst’s collection, The aleatory object makes visible a curatorial process that is critically oriented toward the unknown. Unfolding as an open-ended assemblage of images, objects, and ideas, it is a process that values attention over intention, curiosity over comprehension—resulting in a curatorial selection that defies easy classification. Through an intentional embrace of uncertainty, and pursuit of associative and improvisational approaches to research and presentation, The aleatory object proposes a different kind of curatorial engagement with knowledge production, one that does not simply restate what is known or strive to demonstrate expertise in any conventional sense. This does not mean that knowledge won’t be produced or shared, but rather that the process will not be so constrained, to paraphrase Freud, by the “imposition of reason on the imagination.”

The aleatory object thus occasions an unconventional co-existence between ambiguous and anomalous things, transcending normative cultural, historical, and disciplinary divides. Underlying the obvious question of how to treat “artifacts” vs. “artworks” within a single exhibition is a deeper, more vexing issue: when not much is known about a thing, it tends to languish in academic and museum contexts where value is often tied to knowability. Objects about which much is known are simply easier to teach and talk about. But what is lost to a culture that only teaches and talks about what it already knows? Ultimately the questions such a project asks may be unanswerable, but the untold possibilities it engenders are the reasons for asking.