Curating Data

Student Portfolios 2025

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 student’s three core assignments: on collecting, categorising, and visualising or archiving 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 critical investigations of power, and representation to experiments in interpretation and storytelling.

Late curator Okwui Enwezor once described curating as “participating and witnessing histories unfold.” In that spirit, this 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 visually represented in Curating Data Diagram, 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.