Two UK-based arts organisations that I have been following recently are Fruitmarket in Edinburgh, a free public cultural space in Edinburgh city centre that has been providing inspiration and opportunities for artists and audiences in Edinburgh and across Scotland. The other is Shape Arts, or Shape, a UK arts charity working both in the UK and internationally, related to disability arts. Funded by Arts Council England, it provides opportunities for disabled people who wish to work in the arts and cultural sector. It trains participants and runs arts and development programmes covering all the creative arts: visual arts, music, dance, writing and performance.
Hayley Tompkins, a Glasgow-based artist recently exhibited at Fruitmarket from 22.10.2022 – 29.01.2023, describes her creative process as “trying to really see something”. She focuses on real and reproduced everyday objects, marking them with painting, photography and film, and marking them out as objects we might also like to see. This year’s latest works are in a specially designed new installation, shot on a mobile phone or using the film function of a digital camera and hovering in space on a small bespoke screen, the films look the way we do and seem to question why we look at the things we do. They combine with some of Hayley Tompkins’ most famous paintings of everyday objects: shirts, chairs, hammers, paintings on mobile phones breaking the traditional distance between things and paintings of things. Tompkins’ work is both intimate and rebellious, keeping us in touch with the world. Defying obvious categorisation, it plays on the feeling behind the mark and the energy of the art-making process.
And Shape Arts has a recent exhibition, 12 January – 5 March 2023, entitled ‘Hushed Impressions’, a solo show by artist Bianca Raffaella, who, through a series of unique perspectives and soft colours, dusty shadows Surrounded by a series of unique perspectives and soft colours, dusty shadows and smooth blanks, she symbolises his loss of sight and allows the viewer to experience the reality of the visually impaired in a visual world. Dedicated to orchestrating stories and emotions, this author responds intuitively to the themes of moving figures, tender portraits and atmospheric landscapes.
What I have learned
I have recently been reading some articles on small exhibitions. since the 1990s, SVAO, smaller structured non-profit spaces dedicated to the production and dissemination of contemporary art, have been characterised by their interest in their local communities and in urban issues ranging from new technologies to social art practices in the city. Despite potential practical and ideological parallels with artist-run spaces, community art installations and new institutions, I argue that SVAO is a curatorial phenomenon in its own right and as such represents a missing link in recent exhibition history.
With the increasing urgency of cultural production and the rapid development of contemporary art with humanistic content generating more and more different social issues from the mainstream, the role and ‘power’ of the curator is gradually expanding. It is no coincidence that the cyclical nature of contemporaneous curatorship often takes the 1960s as its starting point. Prior to this decade, curators, despite being fluent in their own time, had failed to forcefully inscribe themselves in art history, but today this is not out of reach, or even easy for some.
The idea of the ‘curator as creator’ has also emerged, along with the need for more detailed documentation of the exhibition-making process, followed by the emergence of the ‘nomadic’/independent curator, which means that there is already an inextricable relationship between the institution where the curator works and the curator who has the power to make curatorial judgements. This has changed the relationship between institutions and artists and curators, as they now have to negotiate power relations directly (especially between curators and artists).
SVAO and these independent curators are in a sense complementary, with SVAO having less academic attention and a more arduous operation, while the independent curators who have left the big institutions (out of the context of a larger art discourse) need to seek some more up-to-date platforms in order to export more specific ideas and content to showcase their wisdom.
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