To take two words with a vague metaphorical reach, such as ‘transmit’ and ‘insert’, is reminiscent of the strategy of innumerable curator’s initiatives. ‘Insert’, for example, was the name chosen for a recent survey show of Croatian video art at the Museum of Contemporary Art Zagreb. It was arguably an attempt to cheaply appropriate the names and work of dozens of artists and insert them into the collection and historical narrative of the Museum, to fill a gap in the institution’s account of contemporary art caused by years of professional neglect.

Many curatorial projects seek to impose a structure and then coerce artists into inserting appropriate content. This is visible on the local level when the funding criteria and political priorities of international bodies create an artificial structure for contemporary art, acting as a market force. One increasingly popular resistance strategy is to refuse to participate in expensive projects , to resist the temptation to insert your local identity into someone else’s overarching conceptual framework. The danger is by refusing to insert, you also lose the opportunity to transmit, and without transmission , local activities are as irrelevant as l’art pour l’art.

The complexity of local responses to curatorial strategies that impose questions and set the limits for artistic actions can have interesting results – something new can emerge from the clash between the curator’s desire to insert and the ambivalent response of the artist. The project Against the Current in many ways tried to avoid the pitfalls of outside interference, inviting local curators to commission an artist to respond to Kutlug Ataman’s Kuba project, in other words , to freely insert themselves into a progressive artistic discourse on the experiences and rights of minorities in local settings. The problems included the failure to allow the experience and perspectives of the curators and artists at the stopping-off points in Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia, Croatia, Hungary and Slovakia to transmit their contexts further upstream. Miklos Erhardt’s Havana arguably offered a more active and empowering approach to the situation of minority communities than the endless tales of individual suffering highlighted by Kuba, and an implicit critique of ambiguity as a curatorial ideal.

One question facing us all is how to transmit beyond the local setting without submitting to the exploitative frameworks cultural policy makers and funders try to impose on the territory of their ignorance. The twin dangers are of a highly general knowledge that tries to apply itself to everything irrespective of difference, and a highly localised knowledge that cannot reach over the boundaries of its immediate context. The ideal is a translocal knowledge that manages to combine the insight and particular experience of the local and the specific, with a love of the comparative and the shared.