A Decade of British Art Curating | Perspectives on a Decentred Decade – Local and Global

Categorised: Conferences

Tagged: 2012-22: A Decade of British Art Curating

Tuesday 22 November 11.00 – 16.00 

Bluecoat, Liverpool and online

Convened by Bryan Biggs, Bluecoat, Liverpool

Speakers include artists Matthew Cornford and Mohini Chandra, artist-writer Derek Horton, art historians Alice Correia and Ella S. Mills, Anjalie Dalal-Clayton (Decolonising Art Institute) and Skinder Hundal (British Council)

The challenge to shift the focus away from a linear Western narrative of art history and contemporary practice towards an accommodation of difference, the peripheral and a wider geographical embrace, has long been central to postcolonial discourse, expressed through countless biennials and exhibitions around the world over the last four decades. Indeed, it has been argued that ‘the globalization of the art market played a greater role than postcolonial theory in encouraging art historians to adopt a globalized approach’ (Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel).  In the context of British art, the ‘postcolonial turn’ had particular resonance for artists and curators from culturally diverse backgrounds, born or based in this country, whose early attempts to reshape the map of British art were generally met with institutional indifference. The past decade has, however, witnessed initiatives that are shifting the discourse and decentring the conversation. The imperative to decolonise is especially impacting on British art, particularly in relation to funding, programming, scholarship, and artistic and curatorial practice, however the effect here, and the extent to which there has been meaningful structural change, are yet to be measured …

Timetable:

11-11.20 Welcome & introduction (Bryan Biggs) 10-20mins

11.20-12.30 Session 1 (Mohini Chandra and Skinder Hundal) 70mins

12.30-1.10 Lunch break: 40mins

1.10-2.20 Session 2 (Alice Correia & Derek Horton and Matthew Cornford) 70mins

2.20-2.35 comfort break

2.35-3.45 Session 3 (Anjalie Dalal-Clayton and Ella S. Mills) 70mins

3.45 final comments

ABSTRACTS

Mohini Chandra

I will talk about how my work on post-indenture Indian diaspora experience in the Pacific, expressed through photography, evolved into an exploration of maritime ‘tragedy’ in the colonial period. My recent work on shipwrecks in the Southwest of England has been informed by ‘site’ as much as museum archives and archaeological artefacts. Here, the land and the sea provide the location for a revaluation of geography, history and memory at the heart of empire, in relation to global migration, both forced and voluntary. I will discuss recent projects such as Paradise Lost (2020) and Tall Tales and Wonder Rooms (2022), made in collaboration with Plymouth-based organisations including the SHIPS Project archaeology group and the moving image archives of the Box Museum.

I will also discuss the Empire and Place Research Network, a project supported by the Arts University Plymouth in collaboration with local museums including the Box. I will consider how arts organisations from the museum and education sectors can collaborate on projects which support decolonising initiatives within their respective organisations.

Paradise Lost was a still and moving image installation, exhibited at the Chennai Biennale 2021-22 and at MIRROR, the Arts University Plymouth in 2021. Tall Tales and Wonder Rooms was awarded the 2021 Arts Institute Film Commission in collaboration with the moving image archives of the Box Museum and screened at the Jill Craigie Theatre, University of Plymouth in 2022.

Skinder Hundal: ‘Shaking the centre’

The last ten years have seen seismic shifts in the arts and wider society, and I will reflect on these by sharing my personal journey, observations and experiences. As Director of Arts at British Council since 2021, my transition into this position, with a remit to lead a multi-artform programme working across 200 countries, has not happened by luck or through privilege.

Previously, as Director of neighbourhood contemporary arts space New Art Exchange in Nottingham, I championed the expression of people of colour, communities disadvantaged by the stigma of postcodes, mainstream stereotypes and survival, and I will share this history that disrupted all expectations. My new challenge is levering the power of global institutional scale with site specific ingenuity to enable a fertile cross-pollination where art, culture, heritage and enterprise actively inform a world obsessed and driven by technology, economic growth and status.

My motto, ‘think and deliver the new’, developed at NAE, is helping shape national cultural policy, supporting new models of cultural entrepreneurialism and a new generation of arts pioneers. I will share my philosophical intent – and its pragmatic reality – to reveal how the periphery voice of marginalisation is informing and shaking the centre, engaging new narratives of healing and recovery at a time of political turmoil and global challenge.

Dr. Alice Correia and Dr. Derek Horton: A Tall Order! Rochdale Art Gallery in the 1980s

During the 1980s, Rochdale Art Gallery, a small, civic gallery in the northwest of England, led by Jill Morgan with a small and changing team that included Bev Bytheway, Sarah Edge, Lubaina Himid and Maud Sulter, created significant opportunities for previously marginalised artists and groups, presented its historic collection in new and critical ways, and forged dynamic approaches to the function and purpose of a ‘local’ art gallery. In this paper we will introduce the ways that Morgan and her team engaged with ‘issue based’ work and actively regarded exhibition making as an intrinsically socially engaged activity.

Exhibitions at Rochdale Art Gallery reflected the socio-political climate of the time, addressing major social and political events including the Falklands war, the Troubles in Northern Ireland, racial tensions and riots in several British cities, the Miners’ Strike, the AIDS crisis, and the representation of gay and lesbian identities in the wake of Section28 legislation. The expansive and collaborative curatorial vision of Morgan and her colleagues at Rochdale was explicitly feminist, and created a space for previously marginalised or excluded artists to articulate their own experiences, opened-up opportunities for education and engagement with the local community, and demonstrated the potential for galleries as a tool for social change.

The exhibition stemming from this research, A Tall Order! Rochdale Art Gallery in the 1980s will be staged at Touchstones Rochdale, 4 February – 7 May 2023.

Matthew Cornford: The Art School Project

Art schools have played a disproportionately large role in the cultural life of the UK, yet while their contribution is widely acknowledged, the focus often remains on a handful of elite institutions and their star alumni. The Art School Project that I am collaborating with John Beck on seeks to explore the national network of art schools that emerged during the nineteenth century and remained a prominent feature of the educational and cultural landscape until the end of the twentieth century. There were still over 150 art schools in the UK in the mid-1960s, but after waves of amalgamation and closure, most art and design education is now to be found in the university sector.

The spine of the project is the production of a photographic record of every art school building or the site upon which it stood. More than simply a visual record of the buildings, the photographs are contemporary, they register the ways in which times have changed. Grand Victorian art school buildings may still be in use by local colleges but are just as likely to have been converted into private accommodation, left empty for years or, in some cases, demolished. The project is not just about the past but is concerned with how we approach the past in the present. The photographs provide a context through which we are able to explore local history, the role of art education in the area, and wider issues surrounding the role of public institutions in the social and cultural life of the community.

Anjalie Dalal-Clayton: Interviewing Tam Joseph: Re-centring the art object to decentre whiteness in art history

Stemming from my archival research of the Bluecoat’s rich programme history, I will present a discussion on selected paintings by the artist Tam Joseph (b. 1947), whose work featured in Bluecoat’s landmark 1985 exhibition, Black Skin/Bluecoat. My reading of Joseph’s work has developed from a two-pronged approach that attempts to centre the art object and the strategies and contexts of its production, whilst also being directed by the artist’s own interpretations and reflections. Key to this approach has been an interview with Joseph himself. I will therefore also reflect on my experience of interviewing him and on the potential of the artist interview as a scholarly and/or curatorial method for decentring whiteness within contemporary British art and art history.

Ella S. Mills: A Methodology of Listening

Now a decade since Lubaina Himid’s Thin Black LIne(s) exhibition at Tate Britain, that pivotal show came amidst renewed interest in Black artists within British art history, most prominently the Black British Arts Movement. I registered with a keen, critical interest that moment at which the archive of the 1980s was being constituted, in Stuart Hall’s words, that moment of danger. Coming to the movement as an outsider on several levels, interviewing the artists seemed an appropriate and logical route for research at the time. Artist interviews are funny things, being at once both moments of artistic inner truths, and staged productions. I sought new ways to interview within the art historical boundaries, and began drawing upon the social science method of grounded theory (GTM) to inform my interviewing. This approach is a methodological intervention, working towards new frameworks of analysis in unfolding Black artists within British art history. I have found this approach to form part of my ongoing methodology of listening where it can serve to decentre art’s histories in a myriad of ways. This paper seeks to introduce some key elements of GTM, outline some of the benefits and problematics of being interdisciplinary, and discuss a current project, Spaces to Speak, where GTM has been involved with Black and Brown artists.