So You Want to Curate?

Introduction

For those interested in curation, ArtSU has teamed up with Node Centre who offer online learning programs for those studying and working in and around exhibitions, art management and curation.

Designed to equip you with skills you can apply directly to your career, we invited two students to take part in the Queer Art and Queer Curation NODE course.

Interested in curation or professional development during your studies? Then read on to hear more about their experiences, queerness and the art world and the insight and perspectives we all have that can contribute to a successful curation career.

What is curation?

Curation is the strategic research and selection of work to tell a cohesive story through art. The role of a curator can be broad. From researching, acquiring and managing a collection of art, to turning that collection into engaging, cohesive exhibitions.

Curators are responsible for deciding what art, stories, voices are seen and heard and each curator has their own life experience that informs their perspective. This is especially important as diverse life experiences and varying perspectives make for more representative, meaningful and impactful exhibitions and displays of art. 

We spoke to students Tina (BA Fine Art) and Alis (BA Illustration and Visual Media) to find out what the Node Course was like for them, what insight they learnt and about how their experiences inform their curation.

Why Queer Art and Queer Curation?

Tina: A lot of my own practice surrounds exploring the clash between my different identities. These segments of myself as a daughter in an intercultural family, a Chinese person growing up in an European environment, as a queer person in a heteronormative society. All these identities need to be reconciled to form a whole. What I hope to achieve within my artistic practice is a resolution between these conflicting identities.

Alis: I am interested in curating a digital space, to cultivate a space for Malaysian and other Southeast Asians of similar cultural backgrounds. This platform would share information and queer history to inspire, whilst also being a designated, accessible and needed) anonymous space for artists of all stages, starting from the peers that I know, to promote their stories, artwork and experiences. This is about bringing together a community that is actively hidden in a country that has not received the same freedom as others around the world.

Why did you sign up to the course?

T: I'm inspired by artists such as Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, Sin Wai Kin and Lu Yang, I signed up to learn how to modify conventional art spaces.

A: This course will help me best navigate the institutional and social barriers that exist in such a landscape.

With these curatorial skills plus the range of gallery connections I have fostered through active participation and internships back home, I hope to have the power to move these quiet forms of pride into a physical and established gallery space, such as the Ilham Gallery in Kuala Lumpur, and even to allow such a from home to be brought to UK spaces.

What role does your identity play in your curation and art? 

T: Being a queer second generation immigrant, lots of my own practice surrounds exploring this unique clash between my different identities. These segments of myself as a daughter in an intercultural family, as a Chinese person growing up in an European environment, as a queer person in a heteronormative society all need to be reconciled to form a whole. What I hope to achieve within my artistic practice is a resolution between these conflicting personal identities.

A: Being Malaysian, where it is still very illegal to be queer, exploring gender and sexuality has always been an incredibly personal, covert and, frankly, privileged experience. I am not blind to the social and economic privilege I have, the security of finance and education, the protection and acceptance of loving family, that have allowed me to be openly bisexual and a muslim. Reconciling those two seemingly opposing factors of myself hasn't been simple or clean, but I often consider, had I been born into a slightly different situation, I may have been amongst those who never got the chance to even think about being true to themselves. 

What resonated for you on the course?

T: Although titled “queer art and queer curating”, the course was far more expansive when it comes to the definition of queer. Our lecturer Sylvia Sadzinski worked very hard to show us how the term queer could be opened up and applied to a wide range of other marginalised groups, using the term queer to ultimately go beyond gender and sexuality, but more as an umbrella term to resist assimilation to societal norms. We also discussed how queer could be used as a verb, to better help artists, curators and practitioners to become more inclusive and reflective in their own working fields.

A: I found it interesting and exciting to see how, with a new understanding of queer, I could have drastically different views on what explicitly seems queer and on what doesn’t seem queer at all to begin with. With an understanding that queer (in Queer Theory) concerns things that question and challenge the norm, you start to question things that are, on the surface, considered progressive. For example, the course leader brought up the idea of marriage - while someone fighting for queer rights would want to fight for the right to marry, a queer theory activist would question the standard of marriage as the definition of love.

In terms of curation, the course encouraged us to consider exhibitions themselves as a practice that could be ‘made queer’. It taught us to separate the queer identity of the artist from the artwork itself - for example, the Southeast Asian show in Bangkok I mentioned (Spectrosynthesis ii in 2020) featured a lot of queer artists, but the exhibition itself, we discussed, adhered to a very typical, austere, Western form of exhibition-making. So, it could be argued that the exhibition itself was not queer.

What was your favourite moment?

T: Within the second to last session, artist Precious Okoyomon came up as a case study. I had a cute discussion with the group since my unit 1 project took many inspirations from Okoyomon's works. It was interesting to have a pseudo-crit with peers from different backgrounds, such as curators and art historians and hear their feedback.

A: I was really surprised and like, in a like a good way, the course wasn't exactly what I expected because when I came into it thinking like, oh, queer history, I was kind of expecting just like lectures about like kind of, you know, queer history, the queer canon of like queer art, right? What I got most excited about was the fact that I realized that the course is a lot more productive in the way that it gives you a toolkit to look at art differently for the future. So instead of it just being like recounting queer artists in the past, you're taking away a change of mindset of what queer art can be, and that felt the most meaningful experience from what we've learned.

You can follow these artists below to see more of their work and upcoming projects.

Tina Forsyth (BA Fine Art)
Instagram: @they.call.me.tin Website: tinaforsyth.net

Alis Zainab Ehzan (BA Illustration and Visual Media)

Instagram: @abb.lebi