Curatorial statement
Lead Curator: Szabolcs Musca, PhD
My curatorial practice operates at the intersection of contemporary performance, migration, and transnational cultural exchange. I develop programmes that foreground artists working across borders, languages, and identities, with a particular commitment to migrant and diasporic practitioners whose work challenges dominant narratives of belonging, citizenship, and cultural production. Through multi-arts and interdisciplinary projects, I seek to create spaces where artistic experimentation and social dialogue can coexist, enabling cultural production to act as a site of encounter, negotiation, and collective imagination.
Central to my approach is a socially engaged methodology that prioritises long-term relationships with artists, communities, and partner organisations. I curate projects that emerge from context- responding to local histories and cultural ecologies while connecting them to global movements of people, ideas, and aesthetics. This includes collaborative laboratories, public programmes, and research-led creative initiatives that support ethical co-creation rather than extractive participation. This work often bridges institutional and grassroots settings, bringing together cultural venues, universities, community organisations, and international networks to facilitate sustainable artistic exchange.
I am particularly interested in creative practices that interrogate power structures embedded in cultural production, including issues of representation, mobility, labour, and access. By commissioning new work, and fostering cross-sector dialogue, I aim to amplify diverse voices while expanding cultural discourses beyond dominant narratives. Documentation, reflection, and knowledge sharing form an integral part of this process, ensuring that projects generate lasting impact beyond events.
Ultimately, my curatorial vision is to cultivate transnational cultural ecosystems in which artists and audiences can engage with complex social realities through critical, embodied, and imaginative forms of artistic and cultural practice. I view curation as a form of dramaturgy: shaping conditions for encounter, care, and transformation across cultural boundaries.