Initiated in 1994, the Curatorial Programme of de Appel arts centre aims to offer young curators a condensed package of experiences and skills that can be seen as instruments to enhance the development of their professional career.

The ten-month long Curatorial Programme exists in its current form since 2006, with a reshaped curriculum and an extended tutorial team. It encompasses a dense array of seminars, workshops, excursions (including a three-week research trip to a destination outside Western Europe), practice-related assignments and encounters with artists and art professionals.
The programme pays attention to the history of exhibition-making, diverse curatorial practices, institution building and project management. The programme is characterised by a specific focus on ´curating in the expanded field´, which is investigated through the polarity between ‘freelance ’ and ‘institutional’ curating and the notion ‘context-responsive’ curating.
The show is entitled plan B and features 8 artists and artist groups: Plamen Dejanov & Swetlana Heger, Alicia Framis, Daniel García Andújar, Jens Haaning, Matthieu Laurette, Asier Pérez González, Orgacom and Superflex. This exhibition presents the approaches of several artists to the nature of contemporary art production. Offering alternative strategies, or Plan B’s, the artists adapt societal systems and open up different fields for the production of new possibilities. These artists focus on everyday realities through the observation of present social, economical and political structures, using them to dislocate learned responses and create new relations. By creating temporary situations and relationships, these artists make transparent the strategies and processes that function in society. The communication of how these processes work are frequently as important as the final project. Both the artists and the public are participants in a system they observe and activate, collaborators in temporary projects that create new relations and open up different possibilities. However, the artists involved in Plan B do not aim to provide utopian systems, but instead suggest subjective and usable alternative prototypes. Working within different fields, but also conscious of being part of the art world, they invent new combinations and alliances, adopt unconventional approaches and intervene both within the institution and the public realm. Using the exhibition as a platform for debate, they propose tools for communication. Their focus is directed towards the processes and the means of production rather than on any physical product, thereby extending the concept of art and redefining their role as artists. Using elements of existing socio-economic structures, sometimes to a point where they barely differ from the original, these projects shift and reveal relationships which are normally concealed. The artists bring together discussions from different spheres so that they may take place within the exhibition context. Situated both in De Appel and outside, Plan B explores the multiple approaches that these artists use to provide alternative tools for interaction in our contemporary society.