Frontier Imaginaries: Curating, Settler Colonies, and the Critique of Dispossession

The term ‘frontier’ is often casually invoked in critical discourse, and yet the quality and significance of this concept remains an area in need of greater research. This thesis studies how, in the wake of European colonial projects, the notion of the frontier continues to shape global social relations, not only economic and political but also aesthetic. Strategically the project leverages the global expansion and appeal of contemporary art since the 1990s in order to resource projects that renegotiate the shapes of global connection carved by European and settler-colonial projects. Of concern is how colonial norms and forces ‘appear’, how curating is implicated, and how social gatherings, exhibitions, images and spatial forms can contest the worlds they inhabit.