Parallel Perspectives
This project sought to explore the challenges of curating visual cultures in contemporary transnational contexts, at a particular moment in London’s exhibition history.
In 2015-16, a number of the UK’s national institutions presented major exhibitions of works not drawn from the more usual Euro-American canon. Tate Britain (Artist and Empire), the British Library (West Africa: Word, Symbol, Song),and the V&A (The Fabric of India) – each of these institutions and exhibitions, more or less directly, addressed questions of representation, post-colonial legacies, institutional histories, and the status of objects in histories.
This provided an opportunity for curators, academics and others to reflect on the complexities involved in mounting such exhibitions. Is this moment of reflecting on empire and non-European contexts an accident? Is there something more telling at work in our national culture? Why is this work happening now and why hasn’t it happened in the past? And what are the opportunities that such a moment affords in thinking about arts programming?
These questions were explored through two strands of work:
-
A writers’ project which responded to exhibitions individually and collectively. These interventions have been brought together in collection of essays: Parallel perspectives: transnational curation in London 2015-16.
-
Through a conference held a Tate Britain to coincide with the opening of the exhibition Artist and Empire: New Dynamics, 1790 to the present day that addressed the challenges of working with and representing empire from academic and curatorial perspectives. One day was given over to the specific questions explored in this project, and included a round table with the writers and curators involved in the writers’ project.
Following the conference at Tate Britain , King’s has published a collection of essays on the challenges of curating visual cultures in contemporary transnational contexts. The essays consider questions of representation, post-colonial legacies, institutional histories, and the status of objects in histories – issues that were addressed by the three exhibitions at Tate Britain (Artist and Empire),the British Library (West Africa: Word, Symbol, Song), and the V&A (The Fabric of India) in 2015-16.
The aim of the collection is to provide an opportunity for curators, academics and others to reflect on the complexities involved in mounting such exhibitions; to consider why they happened at this particular moment in time; and to explore the opportunities that such a moment affords in thinking about arts programming.
Project events
Parallel Perspectives launch - 3 July 2017, Council Room at King's
The collection of essays on the challenges of curating visual cultures in contemporary transnational contexts was launched at an event in the Council Room at King’s on 3 July 2017.
The launch included a panel of leading voices from across the arts, culture and academia discussing the current state of museum and gallery curation in the UK. The publication was also posted to galleries and curators across the UK in order to maximise the project’s outreach and legacy.
Project team
The project was led by Dr Gus Casely-Hayford, Curator, Art Historian and Cultural Fellow at King’s, with support from Professor Mark W Turner, Professor of Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Literature at King’s, and Dr Ruth Craggs, Department of Geography at King’s.
Parallel perspectives: curating in London’s transnational contexts was a collaboration between King's College London, the British Library, Tate and V&A Museum.