About PREFIX: RE

Prefix: RE is a curatorial project shaped by decolonial, feminist, crip, and queer frameworks that understand care as both an ethical commitment and curatorial method. The project aims to examine how these frameworks are already present within cultural institutions and organisations, while also addressing the gaps and exclusions that continue to shape cultural value, access, and visibility.

My curatorial approach within this project is grounded in listening, slowness, and relationality. Rather than positioning curating as a form of authority or extraction, I approach it as a process of shared inquiry and knowledge exchange. Conversations with curators, artists, researchers, and organisers form the core of the work, privileging lived experience, situated knowledge, and practical strategies over prescriptive models.

Care-centered decision-making shapes every aspect of the project’s structure. In shifting away from a programme of public events, I made a deliberate curatorial choice to prioritise sustainability, consent, and access for contributors, audiences, and myself. Conversations take place in familiar or remote settings, adapting to capacity and access needs, and are documented in ways that respect ethics, agency, and accountability.

The resulting digital and physical publication functions as both an archive and a living resource. This project resists linear narratives and singular interpretations, reflecting the complexity of the framework it engages with.

Prefix: RE seeks not to offer definitive answers, but to open space for reflection, solidarity, and re-imagining how curatorial practice might be enacted with care, integrity, and collective responsibility.

Available for order: Here

CURATORIAL POSITION

Keely McLavin (she/her) is an Irish multidisciplinary artist, writer, and curator whose practice spans visual art, curatorial projects, and research-led writing. Working across disciplines, McLavin explores the intersections of womanhood, language, collective memory, and community knowledge, with a particular focus on how patriarchal, colonial, and institutional frameworks shape these.

Her practice is rooted in collaborative, care-centered methodologies and materially engaged research processes. Through these approaches, McLavin investigates how personal and cultural histories are formed, preserved, and transmitted, and how certain narratives, bodies, and ways of knowing are marginalised or erased. She is especially interested in the politics of memory: who is remembered, how remembrance is enacted, and what forms of knowledge are deemed valuable or legitimate. Non-discursive learning and the exploration of embodied knowledge, as well as modes of storytelling that exist outside of written or institutional forms, are of particular importance to McLavin’s practice.

Across her work, McLavin created poetic-political gestures that challenge dominant narratives and propose empathetic, relational forms of resistance. She engages deeply with archives, oral histories, and intergenerational skill-sharing, using these as sites for re-imagining cultural inheritance and collective authorship.

McLavin’s practice integrates curation, visual arts, and writing to examine how stories, skills, and knowledge endure across time and community. Her work takes the form of exhibitions, publications, workshops, and collaborative events, which prioritise accessibility and care over scale or spectacle. Through these varied outputs, she cultivates spaces where knowledge can be shared, preserved, and reimagined.