Getting the most from Curatorial
Topics guides.topics.hero.title_accent
A theme that outlives any single show. Topics gather your materials by idea rather than by project, so a line of thinking can follow you from one exhibition to the next.
The theme that crosses projects
A project is a show. A topic is a preoccupation — the concern you keep returning to across shows: labour, the body, a region, a material. Projects are how a curator organises deliverables; topics are how a curator's thinking actually holds together over years. Curatorial gives that thinking a place to live instead of scattering it across unrelated projects.
Name a topic
Create a topic and describe the thread it represents. Give it a status — active while you're working it, paused when it's on the back burner, archived when it's had its moment — so your list of preoccupations reflects where your attention actually is, not just everything you've ever thought about.
Creating a topic
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Gather materials into it
Add materials to a topic and tag them, so a source can belong to a project and a topic at once. The catalogue you used for last year's group show can also sit inside your ongoing topic on regional practice — the same material, doing double duty, without being duplicated.
Materials collected under a topic
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Tags are the quiet workhorse here — tag consistently and a topic can pull in relevant materials almost on its own.
Connect topics to shows
A topic can link to the exhibitions it has fed. When a preoccupation finally becomes a show, the topic is the through-line between the years of research and the exhibition it produced — and the record of which shows a long-running interest has already surfaced in.
A topic linked to its exhibitions
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Keep the list honest
Sort your topics by priority to keep the ones that matter now at the top, and let the rest sit paused or archived without cluttering the view. Over time this becomes a genuine map of your practice — what you're on, what you've set down, what you keep coming back to.
The topics list, sorted by priority
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Projects vs. topics
Use a project when the unit is a show with a deadline and a checklist. Use a topic when the unit is an idea with no end date. Most serious curatorial work is both at once — a specific exhibition drawing on a long-held interest — and Topics is what lets the long-held interest accumulate instead of resetting with every new project.
A topic makes a great seed for a Notebook — start a notebook from a topic and it arrives already stocked with the relevant sources.
What comes next
Put a topic to work
Notebooks
6 minA focused workspace for a question — add sources, chat with grounded answers, generate briefings and timelines
Connection Mapping
5 minDiscover relationships between your materials with interactive graph visualization
Projects & Library
5 minWhere everything lives — organize exhibitions as projects and build a searchable library of materials
Give your themes
a home.
Create a topic and let a line of thinking accumulate across your shows. Free to start.
Try it free