Public Programming: A Critical History

'Public Programming: A Critical History' is a multi-year research project initiated by Dr Janna Graham (Goldsmiths, Department of Visual Cultures), Dr. Valeria Graziano (University of Rijeka, Centre for Advanced Studies ) and Dr Susan Kelly (Goldsmiths, Department of Art). To date, the project has taken the form of 4 public workshops and seminars, a publication in Performance Research (2016), recently translated and re-published in Italian edited collection (2025), with three more substantial publications in preparation. About: Public programming has long served as a vehicle for cultural institutions to engage audiences through a variety of discursive formats beyond exhibitions, catalogues and more traditional research outputs. Forms of public programming range from the classically delivered speaker talks and symposia to gallery education programmes and more experimental pedagogical initiatives such as artist-led workshops, summer schools, world cafés, reading clubs, speakers marathons, citizens’ assemblies, and many more. Though by now a routine and often unquestioned dimension of curatorial practice, public programming has, since its inception, been shaped by often unacknowledged ideological struggles, political pressures and institutional constraints. In its acceleration over the last twenty-five years, the hosts of such programmes have often made claims on the one hand, to the importance of public programming as a site of public engagement around urgent contemporary questions, and on the other, their neutrality, offering platforms to express ‘both sides’ of debates. During this same period, cultural institutions such as contemporary art organisations, universities and festivals have become increasingly funded, structured and organised in ways that entangle them firmly within the relationships, logics and injustices of corporate capitalism, exposing a much more active set of alignments with what Tariq Ali has termed the ‘extreme centre’ (2015) This simultaneous appeal to criticality and neutrality reveals a deep tension at the heart of public programming, between its stated democratic ambitions and the entrenched institutional conditions that sustain it. Such contradictions have opened new fault lines amongst the agents and participants of public programmes, provoking both spontaneous protest and deeply rooted attempts at structural change in a discursive landscape increasingly embroiled in the aporias of the so-called ‘culture wars’.