The first curation workshops - a plan

There are many strange dynamics amongst workshop groups, it always takes a while to warm up, too rigid a plan can go horribly wrong, and the best experiences for all are to be had if everyone approaches the sessions as equals  – with schoolchildren this can be tricky, they are used to being the target of directed education, it can take them a while to realise that there is no ‘right or wrong’ in this situation and that their well honed avoidance techniques aren’t going to be needed.

Structure
The structure of the initial workshops placed an emphasis on the students themselves to decide: why they thought exhibitions happened, what a collection was, how they read images and sequences of images and what aspects of the exhibition influenced their reading of the work.

To begin with a very general, open ended discussion was encouraged where any comment was valued and elaborated upon – we made it clear that the group were defining their own rules for the subject. Whenever the subject  got close to a ‘traditional’ curatorial issue we would seed the discussion with tricks of the trade and watch the new information become normalised amongst the group. The discussion was very lively, and familiar – it became clear that the students were extremely sophisticated in the way that they analysed the visual, and had very clear opinions – that they were fully accustomed to critique, but had not seen it as having a constructive value. As they became aware that their familiar banter about what they are looking at was one of the main skills of the curator, the creative development of the subject took off. 

We purposefully allowed a good amount of time to relax into a flowing discussion, like any family gathered around a T.V. set might, with orchestration this chat covered such complex concepts as the flow of the eye into an image, the significator in an image and the way it varies between people, the form and the content of the photograph, implied narratives across unrelated images, the idea of a conscious collection and an inadvertent collection and how significances change within a collection.

By the time the discussions ended most of the students felt sufficient ownership of the subject to curate a collection for themselves – the next part of the workshop.

The students were presented with a very large number of random unrelated images ranging from a few classic art prints, through fairly ordinary stock photos of ‘interesting items’, to the discarded snaps from old rolls of film.

In small groups they were asked to select an unspecified number of images that made some (if any) sense to them and construct a quick exhibition on blank wall spaces in the gallery – adding, removing or changing images as they saw necessary – negotiating amongst themselves for agreement on what should be placed where.

Finaly the entire group was toured around these ‘new exhibitions’ and the creators were asked to explain their reasoning, this was followed with discussion and critique in a similar way to our exploration of the original show.

I should add that throughout the process an emphasis was laid on the quality of exploration rather than the slickness of the display skills, we all understood that this was an exhibition in principal, notes for an exhibition.

Reposted from Exegesis | Art, location & Culture