MLitt Curatorial Practice School of Fine Art
Leo Hajducki
Curatorial Statement
Leo Hajducki is a curator and artist whose practice moves between feminist ecologies, multisensory storytelling, and speculative methods, using lived experience as both material and method. Their work often inhabits the liminal spaces between performance and exhibition, treating these thresholds as sites for reimagining how art can be felt, shared, and understood.
Do Rocks Remember Lava? (DRRL), their latest project, is a curatorial publication and sonic listening event that reframes relationships between human and more-than-human worlds. Merging personal encounters with stone, field research, and critical theory, it draws on deep time, ecological entanglement, and the politics of extractivism. Influences include the deep listening practices of Pauline Oliveros, the elemental compositions of Annea Lockwood, the embodied vocal explorations of Elaine Mitchener, and the site-responsive work of Ilana Halperin. The resulting publication—layering audio recordings, text, and visuals—becomes both a portable artwork and an accessible archive, while the sonic launch invites performance, dance, poetry, shared meals, and conversation.
Positioned within Hajducki’s broader curatorial trajectory, DRRL extends their commitment to adaptable, inclusive, and relational exhibition formats. Past projects, such as Synaesthesia at Summerhall (2023), foregrounded neurodivergent perspectives through immersive soundscapes, interactive installations, and collaborative authorship. This emphasis on sensory multiplicity continues in DRRL, where both publication and soundscape are designed to be transportable and resistant to the exclusivity of fixed, static exhibition models.
Alongside independent projects, Hajducki works with Counterflows Festival – building on a curatorial internship with them – now working on an environmental strategy initiative in collaboration with the Future Music Infrastructure Group. This research supports grassroots and experimental music organisations in understanding and communicating their environmental impact, supporting climate action alongside interwoven social justice aims.
Informed by a background in philosophy and politics, and shaped by collaborations with grassroots arts spaces, collectives, and experimental music networks, Hajducki’s work treats curating as a form of lived research. Through DRRL and future projects, they aim to cultivate spaces—physical, printed, and sonic—that hold space for slow attention, antidisciplinary dialogue, and ways of knowing that honour both speculative imagining and material realities.
Biography
Leo Hajducki is a Scottish artist and curator based in Glasgow’s Southside, working across a wide range of experimental media. Their practice is grounded in feminist and decolonial ecologies, multisensory storytelling, and speculative methods, often developed in community to create politically resonant, inclusive, and adaptive work.
With a background in Philosophy and Politics from the University of Edinburgh and an MLitt in Curatorial Practice in Contemporary Art from the University of Glasgow and Glasgow School of Art, Hajducki explores the liminal spaces between performance and exhibition to open new possibilities for engagement.
Their largest project to date, Do Rocks Remember Lava? (DRRL), is a multisensory curatorial publication and sonic listening experience that reframes human–non-human relationships through meditations on deep time, ecological entanglements, and the politics of extractivism.
Influenced by people like Audre Lorde, Pauline Oliveros, Annea Lockwood, Elaine Mitchener, and Ilana Halperin, DRRL combines sound, text, and visuals in an adaptable, accessible format with a live launch incorporating performance, dance, poetry, shared meals, and conversation.
Earlier projects include Synaesthesia at Summerhall (2023), a collaborative exhibition foregrounding neurodivergent perspectives through immersive soundscapes, interactive installations, and collective authorship. Hajducki works with Counterflows Festival and the Future Music Infrastructure Group developing environmental strategy supporting grassroots and experimental music networks.
Photographed by Norman Villeroux 25
Photographed by Norman Villeroux 24
Photographed by Andy Phillipson 23
Do Rocks Remember Lava?
Conceptual Origins
(DRRL) is a curatorial publication and sonic event that situates stone, rock, and earth as active participants in human and more-than-human worlds. It frames rocks not merely as material objects but as collaborators, witnesses, archives and keepers of memory, inviting readers and listeners to engage with their agency and temporal depth.
DRRL emerged from an iterative, reflective curiosity: how might geological forms—often considered static and inert—be understood as storied, responsive entities, and how might attending to their rhythms inform human ethical and political practice? Drawing on Heidegger’s notion of being-in-the-world, Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Materialism, and autotheory’s blending of personal, critical, and embodied reflection, the project foregrounds the curator’s positionality and relational responsibilities while situating rocks as interlocutors. The title itself is a speculative question: do rocks “remember” their molten origins, their shape-shifting histories? This provocation challenges anthropocentric assumptions of memory and agency, prompting an attentiveness to material temporality and deep time.
Rather than offering a fixed narrative, DRRL unfolds as a layered, porous assemblage—like geological strata. Its grouped themes—Veining, Stratification, Isostasy, and Attrition—bring together contributions in drawing, writing, photography, sculpture, sound, and mapping, each conceived as co-constructed and interdependent. Artists, geologists, writers, and musicians contribute not merely objects or outputs but lived perspectives, entwining disciplinary, subjective, and embodied knowledge. The project spans print, sound, and conversation, generating relational encounters across conceptual, physical, and political terrains.
Animated by care, reflection, and reciprocity, DRRL asks what it means to honour stone as relation rather than resource, and to cultivate slowness, attentiveness, and ethical engagement in moments of rupture. It is not a conclusion, but an invitation: to listen otherwise, to remember otherwise, and to inhabit the lithic with both imagination and responsibility.
The intended audiences included artists and researchers at the intersection of geology and art, as well as local community members interested in sound, art, lithic materiality, and socio-environmental justice. Both specialist and grassroots publics were considered throughout the project’s design, ensuring accessibility and engagement across knowledge levels.
Curatorial Methodology
The project embodies an autotheoretical curatorial approach, foregrounding the interplay between personal reflection, embodied experience, and critical inquiry. Artists were selected for practices that intertwine the subjective and theoretical, aligning with the project’s commitment to merging lived experience with critical frameworks to interrogate the ethical, political, and environmental complexities of working with the more-than-human world. Following Alicia Reymond’s conception of the curator as instigator rather than sole author, DRRL privileges relationality, actively incorporating the voices of artists, geologists, stonemasons, and others whose practices engage directly with stone.
This relational approach challenges conventional hierarchies of curatorial and artistic authority, positioning stonework—quarrying, carving, and handling—as practices that are simultaneously aesthetic, material, and political. In doing so, the project aligns with Amelia Jones’ vision for decolonial, socially engaged curating, resisting the instrumental logics of neoliberal systems.
Interdisciplinarity operates not as a neutral mixing of media but as a generative dialogue between knowledge systems. Geological research, sound, poetry, and visual art are treated as co-constitutive frameworks: field observations shape sonic rhythm, while artistic mark-making informs scientific diagrams. Through this reciprocity, disciplinary boundaries are destabilised, and multiple forms of expertise and experience contribute equally to the unfolding curatorial narrative.
Future opportunities to extend the project and seek funding beyond the university have already emerged from our launch. These ongoing afterlives of the work feel consistent with autotheory’s openness to transformation—the idea that both the project and the curator remain in motion, reshaped by the relationships and contexts that arise from the work itself.
The project affirmed my capacity to adapt under pressure, think and make creatively in response to challenges, and sustain collaborative relations, while Do Rocks Remember Lava? continues as an evolving autotheoretical inquiry— interweaving lived experience, the lithic realm, multisensory storytelling, and ethical curatorship— and will inform my future curatorial practice through an expanded interdisciplinary network, a deepened commitment to inclusive, critical, and speculative approaches.
FLUID SPACES: ART ACCESS and AUTONOMY
Fluid Spaces: Art, Access & Autonomy
This was a co-curated exhibition aiming to inspire dialogue on how gallery design should evolve to better serve everyone’s art experience, with a focus on neurodivergent individuals and people with disabilities. Featuring the work of Waffle Burger, an artist whose creations navigate the thresholds of liminal spaces, where the familiar blends with the unknown.
The exhibition’s central explorations look at how accessibility, comfort, and environmental factors shape an audience’s engagement with art and encourage visitors to envision a more inclusive future for art spaces.
The exhibition features three distinct spaces that represent different approaches to art display, prompting the audience to consider how the design of a space influences their perception and interaction with artwork. We want to encourage visitors to observe and actively participate in reimagining the possibilities for more inclusive art spaces. Through the final space’s interactive component, we invite audiences to share their insights, helping to build a collective vision that reflects diverse perspectives on accessibility.
The feedback we received was compiled into a research resource, allowing us to analyse audience responses and understand the broader needs and preferences that can shape future gallery designs and accessibility improvements.
Space One: A traditional “white cube” space housing a single painting with a small label (Font under 12pt) showing only the artwork’s title and the artist’s name. This space represents conventional gallery displays.
Space Two: Showcases current efforts to improve accessibility.
Here, you’ll find larger font labels, a printed handout providing context for the artwork, and a captioned video with headphones of the artist discussing her work. This space showcases contemporary changes made in pursuit of greater inclusivity.
Space Three: A space designed to engage you in reimagining what accessibility in galleries could be. Through prompts, we invite you to share your thoughts, ideas, and suggestions on creating inclusive art spaces. This space evolves with your input, becoming a collective art piece that reflects our audience’s vision for the future of accessible curation.
Importantly, Waffle Burgers’ work remained the same in all three spaces; the size of each room was roughly the same, and the white background, lighting and flooring remained the same, which was to help people imagine the potentially subtle but very real impact of the changes that were implemented.
How the participation works in the third space
Feedback Wall Mural in Space Three: We provide a wall where visitors can write or draw their thoughts on accessible design using colourful markers, sticky notes, and prompts (e.g., “What does an inclusive art space look like to you?”). This space evolves with your input, becoming a collective art piece that reflects our audience’s vision for the future of accessible curation.
Questions Asked in Space 3
How did the changes between spaces 1 and 2 affect your engagement with or access to the artwork?
What aspects of the exhibition made you feel more or less included or comfortable engaging with the artwork, and why?
In what ways did the exhibit challenge your views on accessibility and inclusivity in art spaces?
What suggestions do you have for curators to make future exhibitions more accessible or engaging?
We also displayed two QR codes: one for the online feedback form and the other for our ‘Resources for Designing an Accessible Exhibition’ document
About the Artist
Waffle Burger’s work invites viewers into liminal spaces that hover between the familiar and the surreal, offering a quiet yet unsettling reprieve from an overstimulated world. Her depictions of empty rooms, ceiling fans, staircases, and lone doorways create almost uncanny sanctuaries – an eerie respite – where the usual bustle of human life is notably absent.
Beneath the quiet allure, Burger’s work possesses a satirical edge: her focus on “nothingness” appears as a striking, tongue-in-cheek contrast to the present-day insistent demand on productivity and stimulation. This focus on the more uninviting spaces challenges and questions the relentless pace of capitalist culture, inviting contemplation of stillness, isolation, and even absurdity in environments that resist consumption. The desire to record these spaces of nothingness suggests a desire to reach towards and feel less stimulated in this increasingly overstimulating world.
Burger’s practice draws from pop culture, interweaving objects like nunchucks, X-Files memorabilia, wrestling merch, odd snack wrap-pers, and bodybuilding magazines. These artefacts are familiar and bizarre, reminding viewers how strange everyday objects become when viewed in isolation. Through this uncanny collection, Burger seems to playfully suggest the absurdity of our world—a world that, if seen through alien eyes, would appear both wildly humorous and perplexing. If aliens had gathered these artefacts to archive human existence, they would have drawn extraordinary conclusions about us – Burger’s art invites us to laugh at our peculiar habits while also creating a space for deep reflection on the relentless oddity of the human experience.
“Something happened, and then it was as if nothing had transpired at all. The atmosphere feels weary, post-consumerish. No one seems to possess anything.
We see the components and how they fit together, taking us on unexpected paths and into other lives we might have known if circumstances had been different. When you finish a work and share it with the world, you lose control over it.
People may take away something I never consciously intended or even something contrary to my intentions. I can’t say whether I’ve communicated what I wanted to but that’s the nature of the work. I’m constantly trying to communicate something I can’t verbalise.” – Waffle Burger, 2024
Waffle Burgers Socials
To follow Waffle’s process and stay updated with their craft, follow her on Instagram @waffle_burger – https://www.instagram.com/waf-fle_burger/?hl=en
To see more of Waffle’s work and purchase her paintings, please go to: https://www.sarahmessenger.co.uk/
THANK YOU’S
Thank you to Karen di Franco and Alexandra Ross, lecturers on the Mlitt in Curatorial Practice in Contemporary Art, for inspiring this conversation through excellent teaching.
Thank you to studio assistant Dougie and Hugh from the media team.
Thank you to Tzipporah Johnston at the Neuk Collective for collaborating on our resource handout: ‘Resources for Designing Accessible Exhibitions’.
Thank you to the creativity and camaraderie of Xuefan Liu, Claire Atkin, Kelsey Cronin, Leo Hajducki and Yuezhang Gu, whose collective efforts helped realise this project.
Interview ‘In the Studio with Waffle Burger’, Filmed and edited by Leo Hajducki.
