The programme consisted of roundtables, films and interviews focused on the emergence, strategies and agency of Black curatorial practices in Britain over the past 40 years, convened for the British Art Network by curator and researcher Paul Goodwin (TrAIN, University of the Arts London) with project curation by Rahila Haque.
The Genealogies of Black Curating Project was devised in order to build on and extend out from recent work in Black British art studies. To date, work in the field has focused on exhibition histories and perspectives around ‘curating black art’. In Genealogies we sought to undertake a subtle but important shift of emphasis. This shift involves moving from the perspective of ‘curating Black art’ toward a focus on the politics and aesthetics of ‘Black Curating’. This, I would argue, requires different questions and methods. Simply put, Black Curating puts Black curators – in particular their agency and trajectories in British art worlds and beyond – at the centre of the analysis.
If Black art is now a relatively established category in British art (albeit a contested one) at least in terms of art historical recognition, how can we account for Black Curating? Indeed it is essential to begin by asking what is Black Curating, if it is a thing, and how did it emerge in Britain? The project attempted to address this by investigating the emergence, strategies and agency of Black curatorial practices in Britain over the past 40 years. The focus in this project is not on ‘histories’ per se, but rather it draws from the concept of genealogy, as developed influentially by Michel Foucault, which emphasises multiple origins, discontinuities and breaks rather than the smooth, linear unfolding of chronological time from a singular source. The multiple roots and routes of Black curating are thus seen as being enmeshed, rhizomatic, entangled and above all conjunctural in the terms articulated by the seminal cultural theorist Stuart Hall. Black curating emerged from the problem spaces of the conjunctures of the post-war, post-colonial forces of economic crisis, viral racism, aesthetic and cultural exclusion of black bodies and practices in institutions and transnational and diasporic connections and affiliations which came together in Britain the late 1970s and 1980s to produce not only what we now know as Black Art but also – the subject of this series and project – Black Curating.
Three roundtable panels were convened to address the following questions around Black Curating and its genealogies. Panel 1 with pioneering curators and artists Shaheen Merali, Rita Keegan and Hassan Aliyu, addressed the emergence of Black curatorial voices in the 1980s and early 1990s when a variety of Black and Asian curatorial practices, projects and spaces came to light. Questions discussed included: how can we account for the emergence of Black curatorial practices? How to name them? And how did they transform the landscape of British art at the time? Panel 2 unpacked Stuart Hall’s concept of ambivalent mainstreaming by focusing on the experiences of Black and Asian curators in institutions with Dr Nima Poovaya-Smith, Gilane Tawadros and Mark Miller. The discussion explored Black curatorial experiences and strategies in institutions ranging from Bradford Museums, Iniva and Tate in response to the questions: how have Black and Asian curators navigated the tricky territory of hostile mainstream institutions in Britain and how have their practices helped to reshape them? Moving beyond a narrow focus on exhibition making Panel 3 – with OOMK collective, Ajamu and Raju Rage – focused on recent contexts for understanding Black and Asian curatorial practices in the ‘expanded field’. The panel considered how curatorial collectives, archival practices, independent publishing and cultural activism are transforming notions of the curatorial and ‘Blackness’, addressing the questions: how are these practices building on earlier efforts to make space for radical alternatives to the exhibitionary complex in Britain?
To give more depth and texture to diverse Black curatorial voices and practices two films by artists Rita Keegan and Raju Rage were commissioned in a project curated by Rahila Haque. The films combined new interviews with archive images and footage to give a more in-depth and nuanced understanding of the conjoined nature of artistic and curatorial practices in the work of these two artists. The films open up questions of archiving and unarchiving, exhibition making as a collective and liberatory practice, and the curatorial as an extension of artistic practice and research.
The series as a whole does not provide definitive answers to the conundrum of Black Curating: how to define it or where it comes from. Rather it provided a valuable platform to centre the voices and critiques of a diverse range of key Black and Asian practitioners to collectively map some of the concerns in this field and lay out some important questions and lines of enquiry for further thought, reflection and research.
Paul Goodwin, January 2022
Follow the links below to watch the two artist films. Both films are available with British Sign Language interpretation.
The programme from the event is available to download here. Follow the links below to view recordings of the three panel sessions.
All events in this series
Genealogies of Black Curating in Britain | Collective Futures and the Archival (Re)Turn: Curating in the Expanded Field
Genealogies of Black Curating in Britain | Ambivalent Mainstreaming: Black Curators and Institutions
