A critical and creative exploration of data through curation
This online exhibition presents the final works from students in the Curating Data course, part of the Critical Data Studies program at Aarhus University. It is both a learning archive and a collective exhibition, where each student’s portfolio acts as a small curatorial experiment — a space for thinking critically about how data can be collected, interpreted, and communicated.
Each portfolio gathers the students' three core assignments: dedicated to collecting, categorising, and visualising data. These works are brought together through an individual curatorial statement, a framing text that reflects the student’s perspective on data as a cultural material. Together, the portfolios reveal diverse approaches to what it means to “curate data” from representing experiments in interpretation and storytelling, to organising content on the web page.
Late curator Okwui Enwezor once described curating as “participating and witnessing histories unfold.” In that spirit, this online exhibition invites reflection: What histories unfolded in the students’ own learning this semester? What does it mean to curate data — to make choices, frame contexts, and communicate complexity?
Following the Curating Data methodology, students engage in a process of critical curating: exploring data as something situated — shaped by context, perspective, and lived experience. Through this work, they curate data — and, in doing so, curate ways of knowing.
Course teachers:
Magdalena Tyżlik-Carver and Midas Nouwens