The Curator as Guardian of Chance

For ODDNY, we meet Jip Hinten, curator and co-director of 38CC in Delft, in the midst of SET THE STAGE, the exhibition by Marta Volkova and Slava Shevelenko. On the walls hang pages from what feels like a visual diary. Amid the drawings are objects that are difficult to classify. They are not quite sculptures, nor are they quite utilitarian objects. Rather, they seem to be the result of an ongoing exchange between two artists, two biographies, and two ways of seeing.

As we walk through the space, we don’t start by talking about technology but about education. About the recognizable Russian academic tradition that shines through in the work. About drawing as a discipline. About how certain forms of knowledge are passed down through generations without ever being fully written down. Not as information, but as an attitude. As attention.

Perhaps, I realize during the conversation, curation begins precisely there.

Not with selecting work, but with the ability to look at something long enough to see what others don’t yet see.

Only then does AI come up.

In recent years, we’ve grown accustomed to discussions about artists and artificial intelligence. About authorship, originality, and the question of whether a machine can ever truly create. But as we continue talking, another thought emerges. Perhaps the greatest challenge for AI doesn’t lie with artists at all. Perhaps it actually affects the curator.

Because what does a curator actually do?

Making connections. Searching through archives. Positioning artists within historical, social, and cultural contexts. Recognizing patterns. Revealing new relationships.

Exactly the things AI is getting better and better at.

When I share this observation with Jip, she doesn’t respond directly to the technology itself. Her first instinct is to look at the source.

“A lot of art doesn’t exist in databases at all,” she says. “Not everything has been digitized. Not everything is in archives.”

She mentions graduation exhibitions that disappear as soon as they’re over. Artists who fade from view. Conversations that are never recorded. Small presentations that leave hardly any digital traces. While AI is becoming increasingly dependent on available data, a significant part of the cultural ecosystem consists precisely of things that are not—or hardly—found online.

This raises a thought-provoking question: What happens to what is not visible?

Of course, this problem predates AI. Every system of knowledge production has its blind spots. What is collected has a greater chance of being remembered. What is not collected slips out of sight more easily. Yet this dynamic seems to be intensifying as digital infrastructures become more dominant. Not because they deliberately exclude, but because visibility is increasingly becoming a prerequisite for existence.

Our conversation then turns to alternative art initiatives from the 1960s and 1970s—platforms that emerged precisely outside existing institutions and established definitions of art. What once began as an alternative, we observe, strikingly often ends up as part of the very system it set out to challenge. Experiment becomes method. Resistance becomes history. The exception ultimately becomes a category.

That is not a cynical observation. Rather, it is a recurring pattern.

In the same way, the current discussion about AI sometimes feels like a new version of an old story. Every new technology promises democratization. Greater access. Greater visibility. More opportunities to participate. And often, it partially fulfills that promise.

But at the same time, the place where choices are made is shifting.

Whereas in the past a curator determined what became visible, today algorithms, platforms, and recommendation systems take over part of that role. The gatekeeper doesn’t disappear; it shifts. “Selection still takes place, but it’s less visible who or what is making those choices,” says Jip.

Perhaps that is one of the most fundamental changes. Not that selection is disappearing, but that it is becoming increasingly invisible.

Gradually, the conversation is shifting from power to time.

Technological systems are almost always geared toward acceleration: processing more information, making more connections, generating more output. But when Jip talks about collections, museums, and art history, the same idea keeps coming up: some things only become interesting after time has passed.

A work can go unnoticed for years before it takes on meaning. An artist may only prove to be important in hindsight. An exhibition that initially received little attention may later turn out to be a turning point.

In that sense, slowness doesn’t seem to be the opposite of knowledge, but a prerequisite for it.

This brings us almost naturally to serendipity—the ability to stumble upon something valuable without actively seeking it. Anyone who has ever visited an archive knows that moment: you’re looking for one document and find something completely different. It is precisely that unexpected encounter that sparks a new idea.

Much cultural innovation arises in this way.

Not from efficiency, but from detours.

Not from optimization, but from getting lost.

And that is perhaps where the most interesting tension between artificial intelligence and curation begins. AI is exceptionally good at recognizing what is likely to be relevant. Culture, on the other hand, often turns out to depend on the improbable.

On a mistake.

A deviation.

From something not yet recognizable as important.

Toward the end of our conversation, we arrive at Constant Nieuwenhuys and his idea of Homo Ludens—the playing human. The conviction that technology would ultimately give us more room for experimentation, imagination, and play.

It’s a surprisingly timely idea.

Perhaps we are once again at a point where technology can take over a large part of the organizational work. But it is precisely this that reveals which human qualities are not so easily automated.

Curiosity.

Doubt.

Patience.

The ability to linger somewhere without immediately knowing why.

As we part ways, we haven’t found an answer to the question of what AI will do to curation.

However, another suspicion is slowly taking shape.

Perhaps the future of curation doesn’t lie in competing with machines in terms of speed, memory, or analysis.

Perhaps its value lies precisely in protecting that which cannot be fully optimized.

Coincidence.

Delay.

Physical presence.

The right to get lost.

The willingness to not yet understand something.

Perhaps this makes the curator less of a gatekeeper of art and more of a guardian of circumstances in which meaning can emerge.

And perhaps it has always been that way.

 

 

Jip Hinten is an art curator and cultural entrepreneur. Het Financieele Dagblad selected her for the FD Talents list, an annual selection of fifty promising professionals under the age of 35. As co-director and curator of 38CC in Delft, she works on innovative exhibitions and the development of young talent within the field of contemporary art.