Emily Zimmerman is a curator and arts leader, with an extensive and multifaceted background in museum curation and arts education.
Exhibitions are sites of embodied inquiry that nurture a pre-linguistic curiosity, a space to explore concepts that resist language. The spatial politics of artworks and their arrangement in an exhibition speak directly to the body, and it is precisely that difficulty of articulation that gives them force. An exhibition can speculate about possible worlds, and assert, in embodied terms, what the world might look like. Once that vision takes up space, it has consequences.
Over twenty years and more than fifty exhibitions, I have continually returned to the multiplicity of conditions that surround perception, affect, and the kinesthetic presence of the viewer in space. I build projects collaboratively with artists and audiences, with the belief that the process of creating an exhibition is as important as the resulting exhibition.
Much of my curatorial work has taken place at the intersection of digital media and embodied experience, through commissioned works, experimental formats, and sustained engagement with communities. I am drawn to the places where digital media and the body meet uneasily, opening dialogues about perception, and where artists are able to trouble what counts as knowledge and who it serves.
