Turba

With our eighth issue, we turn our attention to arts mediation—a crucial but often overlooked dimension of the live arts ecology. Sometimes undertaken by curators, sometimes by dedicated specialists, this role gained traction as a field of study in the 1990s and now comprises a modest network of training programs and an expanding list of publications. As with previous issues of TURBA, this collection traverses continents, disciplines, worldviews, and institutional settings.

This article originally appeared in Dance Research Journal's special issue on “Dance in the Museum,” following the first installation of Tino Sehgal's This Situation in Montréal in 2013. Three interpreters (and, as such, embodied archivists), from that edition—Toni Pape, Noémie Solomon, and Alanna Thain—explore how choreographic and conspiratorial techniques activated by This Situation rework relations of inside and outside, participant and observer, subject and object through a collective bodily attending to the situation itself. These techniques, adapted from or affiliated with those of performance as the intricate negotiation of bodies, movement, and time in relation, make up the work's ecology of practices. Sehgal's work within the museum holds movements and relations to persistently make and unmake its forms, contents, and relations—as a way of making art contemporary via dance's propensity to always begin again. We term this commitment to rebeginning Sehgal's impersonal ethics.

This article proposes cultural mediation in the performing arts as a critical and embodied practice rooted in an ethics of care. Drawing on over fifteen years of fieldwork as a cultural mediator, curator, and educator in Québec, the text challenges instrumental and extractive models of participation. It reframes mediation as a civic and artistic gesture that holds space for discomfort, slowness, and negotiation across difference. Positioned at the intersection of relational aesthetics, institutional critique, and affective labor, the article argues for a revaluation of mediators’ roles—not as peripheral facilitators, but as co-authors of meaning and experience. Through a lens of radical hospitality and micro-choreographies of relation, the piece advocates for sustainable working conditions, recognition of invisible labor, and the development of evaluative tools that honor the ephemeral and unmeasurable. Ultimately, it invites institutions to support mediation as a site of resistance, repair, and transformative civic imagination.

This article explores the evolving role of virtuality in contemporary artistic and curatorial practices, focusing on two interwoven strands. The first examines three immersive virtual reality projects presented in Hong Kong in 2025, each reconfiguring sensory perception, mediated presence, and participatory dynamics. The second draws from a series of art-tech projects I curated in Hong Kong between 2020 and 2022, during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, including online residencies, interviews, and digital exhibitions shaped by constraints. Rather than treating virtual reality as a medium, the article considers virtuality as a cultural and philosophical condition marked by disruption and transformation. Framed within Hong Kong's heterotopic context, the discussion adopts a mode of reflective inquiry shaped by my dual role as viewer and curator. Together, these case studies illustrate how art-tech mediates not only perception and relation but also care, opening space for ambiguity, attention, and shared presence in uncertain times.

Artistic mediation in educational contexts is, at its core, a practice of articulating the dynamics between teaching and learning, school spaces, artists and cultural institutions. Such convergence has far-reaching implications for advancing processes of citizenship and democracy. This article argues that Cultural and Artistic Mediation, as a development that moves beyond the historical model of cultural animation, now operates within educational territories in dialogue with contemporary curatorial discourses and practices. The growing emphasis on democratization, cooperative models and horizontal dynamics of creation and sharing supports this perspective. In this context, mediation in educational settings play a key role in strengthening the relationships between schools, artists, and cultural venues within the community. The challenges currently facing schools, which are marked by the pressures of globalization and digitalization, call for a strategy that embraces permeability, co-creation, sensorially and critical thinking. Such dimensions find renewed relevance in direct, embodied encounters with the arts.

This article explores the evolving field of music mediation in German- speaking countries and highlights a central tension between audience development and social responsibility. It traces how music mediation initially emerged to address declining interest in classical music through educational outreach and audience development. In contrast, more recent approaches shaped by community music and sociopolitical engagement seek to foster inclusion, participation, and social cohesion through collaborative artistic processes. I argue that both logics often coexist uneasily and propose(s) “doing universality” (Reckwitz) as a third perspective: a participatory, reflective practice that aims to create shared cultural meaning across difference. By negotiating what is commonly valuable, music mediation can transcend binary oppositions and contribute to both artistic excellence and societal relevance.

This article presents an ongoing conversation with Saman Hajimohammad, an Iranian artist and activist, about her journey, deep connection to dance, and her work in fostering community and cultural understanding, both within and beyond Iran. (See her earlier article “Underground” in TURBA 2.2.) Her narrative highlights the resilience of artists and audiences under oppressive regimes and the powerful role of dance as a language of social change.

In March 2013, when I left my desk job at the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in Tehran, I did so out of a simple need to contribute more empathy to the world and, well, do something a bit more humanitarian, if you will. In the mind of a twenty-four-year-old, changing the world and making it a better place does not really sound all that grand of an undertaking. Only a few weeks into the antidepressants prescribed by my mother's trusted psychiatrist upon leaving my job, I realized that my body was frozen and my psyche numbed. Time and again, an abrupt encounter with the self took me back to my roots in the written word, the world of make-believe, for want of a better word. I gathered myself slowly but surely on stage, in my body, long lost to a never-appeasing sense of not-knowing.

McKeon, Ed. 2022. Heiner Goebbels and Curatorial Composing after Cage: From Staging Works to Musicalising Encounters. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.