doingcurating-blog

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Visiting Gallery Oldham

Getting to Oldham involved hopping on the tram and winding our way for around half an hour through countryside landscapes and dispersed, half-forgotten little towns. Arriving into Oldham, the landscape was littered with abandoned factory buildings that have dominated the town’s backdrop since industrial times. 

On a Thursday afternoon, the town seemed half asleep. Not many people on the street, not much going on as it used to have in the past. You wouldn’t be expecting to run into an imposing, thriving artistic and cultural centre in the heart of this place. Later on, we would find out from Rebecca, the art curator at Gallery Oldham, why and how the gallery keeps running and opening its doors to offer free access to art and culture to the local population and other audiences from outside the town. 

While she led us around the gallery spaces, through Anne Sutton’s exhibition On the Grid, the permanent collection and all the spaces in between (Including the stunning old part closed for refurbishment), Rebecca explained how and why certain decisions are made, also revealing how Gallery Oldham can keep on existing and functioning as well as the difficulties that the organisation faces. 

The take away points:

- A varied programme with a healthy mix of contemporary and traditional art and varied media,

- Themes and materials that challenge, yet appeal to the main audience, in this case the local population,

- An acquisitions policy that enables developing the current permanent collection with additions coming from a good variety of artists, pieces that are linked to Oldham and its history or that will enrich the collection,

- Having a vision and planning ahead while being aware and comfortable with the fact that plans can change and certain decisions cannot be made now,

- A sense of humour and a sense of judgement can go a long way,

- Prioritise, prioritise, prioritise,

- Making links and building networks will connect you to the right people and the right opportunities. 

I can’t help but adding a few pictures from the old building, currently closed for refurbishment, that is planned to include several exhibition spaces and other spaces that the centre and its audience can highly benefit from. Its delectable Victorian charm and the potential it holds are remarkable;

[doingcurating-blog]

Museum and the City, Hidden Manchester

Reflections about Museum and the City the theme hidden Manchester and formally curating for the first time, lifted from Options Unit essay:

An aerial portrayal of the city successfully frames the city’s outer perimeter and all the buildings and streets that lie within it, however, it is detached from the lived reality of ground level experience and thus devoid of detail, colour and animation.

Aerial shot of Manchester taken from Google Maps

Benjamin’s The Arcades Project takes the form of a massive “montage of quotations from, and reflections on, hundreds of published sources” (Eiland and Jennings, 1999), in his effort to capture and critique a true image of consumerism in 19th century Paris. However, Benjamin himself (1930) describes his work as “the theater of all my struggles and ideas”. The project had to be abandoned, is incomplete and still ongoing, further stressing the immensity and difficulty of what he set out to achieve.

In Capital: New York, Capital of the 20th Century, Kenneth Goldsmith is faced by the same difficult conditions in transferring Benjamin’s work from 19th century Paris to 20th century New York.  According to Goldsmith (2016), ‘reading the city’ is an “impossible project” and admits that his book is designed to fail, “for can a megalopolis truly ever be captured in words? Can a history, no matter how extensive, ever be comprehensive?”

My initial idea was to attempt with Manchester what Benjamin and Goldsmith attempted with Paris and New York. To emphasise the impossibility of capturing and reading a whole city, as well as the work’s appropriateness as an artistic piece within a gallery space, my book would not have a back cover to demonstrate its incompleteness.

Along the design process, [Colours of Manchester] took the shape of a book. The thinking behind this was that while the collection of colour-picture-text units presents the viewer/reader with a multi-faceted view of my experience of being in Manchester, each unit is self-sufficient because it tells the complete story of a particular moment. The viewer/reader could take in the overall effect of the repeated structure with varied content, while being able to pause and focus on a particular unit that appealed to them. As a book needs to be handled for its content to be unlocked, it encourages personal engagement with the work.

‘Colours of Manchester’ as shown during the exhibition in e-book format

Hidden Manchester was my first practical experience curating an exhibition within a formal gallery space. In The Curator’s Handbook, Adrian George states, “our contemporary definition of a curator is more broad-ranging than ever before.” Despite the imbalance of a team of five curating a relatively small show with ten exhibition pieces, this experience was valuable in terms of gaining confidence stepping into the multi-faceted role of the curator, fine-tuning my current skills and developing my ideas in relation to the curatorial role.

O’Neill (2012) aptly describes curating as “a distinct practice of mediation”. Although he refers to mediation between art and audience, his statement is applicable to numerous other senses. Curating requires continuously striking a balance between the artist’s desires, the artworks’ requirements, the possibilities or limitations dictated by the space, the audience’s expectations, deadlines and other factors such as institutional agenda and suppliers’ availability.

Being a creator of narrative, spatial manager, contact person and spokesperson for the show, I realised how the exhibition curator is the best-informed individual about the final outcome. Therefore, it was crucial to exploit this position by learning how to identify and prioritise tasks and being an effective communicator in delivering the right information to key stakeholders at the right time. 

‘Hidden Manchester’ exhibition opening in Grosvenor Gallery, 23/02/2017

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Colours of Manchester cont.

Description as published in Hidden Manchester exhibition catalogue:

Colours of Manchester is a collection of moods, thoughts and states of mind captured in pictures and expressed through colours and poetry. The work presents the real experience of the artist’s presence in the city as a tourist In November 2015 and outsider who moved in and entered the flow of life in Manchester in September 2016. 

The photographs shown in the work are a selection of 86 from a much larger album. Some of the scenes are familiar and widely photographed, some are details that the artist chose to focus on, while others arrest a momentary event. The selection encompasses an individual’s experience of the city, something that is unknown unless it is expressed.

Following the selection process, a colour was extracted from within each picture, to represent the overall mood of the picture it is taken from. A little poem accompanies every picture, expressing Manuela’s thoughts or state of mind at the time of taking the picture. Some poems recount a memory, others are purely descriptive, while others are more insightful or humorous. Each colour was then given a name using words lifted from the textual piece.

Although the work is a series of colour-photo-poem units, that takes the viewer through different moods and corners of the city, each unit works well as a self-contained whole. 

View the work here.

Some excerpts: 

[doingcurating-blog]

Colours of Manchester

With Hidden Manchester coming up in a few days (will write about that after the show), I’ve been really busy creating work for the show. As a curatorial student, the work I create cannot help but also be a curated project. Colours of Manchester presents a selection of pictures taken by myself while on holiday in Manchester in November 2015 and since I moved to the city to study in September 2016. This project captures my perspective of the city in pictures and expresses my experience through poetry and colours. 

Making it involved a selection process, a colour extraction process and a lot of writing. Then I also had to decide in which order the colours should go, which was a whole other process in itself! Anyway, now it’s here, it’s published online on issuu and ready for next week’s exhibition! :)

[doingcurating-blog]

‘Not for Navigation’ by Hondartza Fraga

Hondartza Fraga’s solo exhibition Not for Navigation at The International 3 gallery in Salford was not only insightful and a pleasure to visit, but provided me with much inspiration. I was intrigued by the artist’s way of weaving her personal experience and acquired knowledge into her practice, which, I felt, added much credibility to her work. One of Hondartza’s pieces was created as a result of her living by the sea and learning about the women who made the fishermen’s nets. I think that in an age where art is very fast-paced and not very straightforward, being easily able to connect the artwork to a context and retrace the artistic process to real experiences of the artist that one can relate to, is very important. 

My favourite piece (or pieces) from the exhibition was 365 Globes. The artist made 365 pencil drawings of globes (1 globe every day) over a year and collectively, these pieces form a whole work. 

Other than the remarkable effect that the individual drawings achieve when displayed together, I was interested in the publication bearing the work’s same name that accompanied the work. All 365 drawings were compiled into a single publication that one can buy at the price of £35 and take away a ‘pocket-sized’ version of the artwork. As the drawings are numerous and quite small, the book version of the work allows the viewer to take time to review every single one of them and zoom in on the intricate detail present in them. 

I also quite liked how a work of art can be transformed into a publication and thus the book can be considered as the work itself or, at least, an integral part of the artistic process that led to its production. The question that popped into my head when I saw this publication was; Can print versions of an art work or artistic project make art more accessible to those who want to acquire it, or even collect it, but cannot afford to do so? Or even those who do not have the space to hold a collection?

365 Globes was selling for £38,000 (not including framing) and took up almost two whole walls of the gallery space. Yet the book version sold for a thousandth of the price, could be easily taken away and stored on a bookshelf and still made for a great collection piece to have in one’s library. If I weren’t left with £10 to survive the rest of that week until payday, I would have bought it on the spot.

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Can the Engagement Room for Reading project coming up at The Common Guild be considered as a curatorial project for literature? Perhaps even a way of curating literature? Or at the very least, pairing art and literature. 

This project is definitely interesting for someone like me who is interested in books and how the curatorial approach can be applied in the literary field. 

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I’m currently reading In the Flow by Boris Groys. Terry Smith aptly describes the book as a work that “tracks the complex dialogue across a century and more between art and philosophy, politics, mass media, lifestyle, museums, and, recently, the Internet.”

Excerpt from Chapter 1, Entering the Flow, pg.17-18:

However, our art museums are no longer places of permanent collections and archives that would be able to stabilize at least these documentations in the flow. Instead, they have become places of temporary curatorial projects. [...] But what is the difference between a curatorial project and a traditional exhibition? The traditional exhibition treats is space as anonymous and neutral. Only the exhibited artworks are important. Thus, artworks are perceived and treated as potentially immortal, even eternal, and the space they inhabit as contingent, accidental [...] . On the contrary, the installation - be it an artistic or curatorial installation - inscribes the exhibited artworks in this contingent material space. The curatorial project is a Gesamkunstwerk because it instrumentalizes all the exhibited artworks, making them serve a common purpose that is formulated by the curator. At the same time, a curatorial or artistic installation is able to include all kinds of objects - some of them time-based artworks, or processes, some of them everyday objects, documentations, texts, and so forth. All of these elements, as well as the architecture of the space, its sound and light, lose their respective autonomy and begin to serve the creation of the whole, in which visitors and spectators are also included. Thus, ultimately, every curatorial project demonstrates its accidental, contingent, eventful, finite character - its own precariousness.

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Practice 1 - The Curated Room Project

Brief: Pick a theme, come up with an exhibition rationale, select an appropriate range of works, place them in the given space, create a curatorial discussion and write a thematic essay. The work only had to be presented in that order - the working process could be anything I felt comfortable with. 

I chose to work on the theme of power in masculinity and femininity, selecting a number of works, that employed the nude human body as their main subject. The human body throughout art history has always served as a powerful subject used to portray the ideals and beliefs of a particular time. My main idea was for the works to be approached and reinterpreted freely by the modern viewer living in a contemporary society that doesn’t adopt any fixed definition of what is masculine and feminine. 

I’ve never curated anything before and although I like art very much, I don’t come from an art background, so I took this assignment as an opportunity to experiment, try stuff out, delve into a theme that interested me, touch upon some art history and learn about a number of artists and their work. Have some fun with schoolwork. Work and play. Play and work.

I found myself asking questions such as;

- What on earth is curating after all?

- Should I assume that the general public is ignorant and wants to be spoon-fed or are they intelligent human beings who want their way of thinking to be challenged?

- I’m working with the theme of power...but what is ‘power’ really?

- At what height should the work be hung? Are there any general guidelines addressing this somewhere out there? Am I going into too much detail by thinking about this?

- What am I doing? Why am I on this course? What is going on?????

- How much distance does a viewer need to look at a 1.5m-high work (such as the one below) without having to crane their neck?

Paul Rosano Reclining, Sylvia Sleigh, 1974, Oil on Canvas, Tate Collection.

Some of these questions might come across as really simple and superficial, but you’d be surprised at how it’s often these questions that really demonstrate how much is taken for granted or overlooked - in this case in an exhibition scenario. 

Anyway, all in all, it was a fun assignment and it helped me find my feet a little. I know what my strengths are and I have a clearer idea of where I need to improve. Now it’s time to have a little break and resume after Christmas!

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This summer, I read this book by Gilda Williams because I thought it would be useful to learn a thing or two on how to write about art, considering that I was about to start a Masters in Curating and had never formally studied art. On Tuesday, I had the pleasure of attending a talk given by Gilda Williams at the Whitworth Art Gallery as part of the Tuesday Talks programme held at the gallery. 

She spoke about the work, life and legacy of Andy Warhol - highly appropriate since the gallery is presently showing the exhibition ARTIST ROOMS: Andy Warhol and she has recently  published the anthology ON&BY Andy Warhol.