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The group has finished two events in the last two days: the first one, Simon’s Talk, on 22nd April at 10 am, and the second one, Closet for the Curious: CRC Edition, today at 11:30 am.
Today’s event was a great success, with our colleague Thais introducing our research project and organising a tour of the archives brought to us by Rachel, the CRC’s archive administrator, who was kind enough to help set up the tour, which was an incredible thrill to see a real piece of history as we stepped into the classroom. During our research, we had to resort to the internet to find images, and we had just seen these archives in person today. After visiting the archives, the group members, in turn, completed presentations on the archives in their order.
Scholars browsing the arhives and discussing their thoughts
One of the most intriguing archives to me was the architectural layout of the Old College, which is also the largest of all the archives, as we could smell the scent of a historic drawing aged and see the yellowed paper. The design of the drawing is ingenious; in part of two floors, the author added a small strip of paper to the raw paper, which can be separated for the viewer to open. Hence, the author lends a three-dimensional view of the architectural design of the old college in such a way that it can be folded.
College of Edinburgh, Plan of the First Floor; Coll-13
In addition, Sophia Jex-Blake’s Certificate was scanned and electronically illustrated, with each letter self-explanatory, as if a machine had printed it. However, when I looked closer today, I could see that each letter, and even the background decorative drawing of the paper, was outlined by hand, one stroke at a time, especially for each letter of the English alphabet, where very faint pencil drafts could be seen outlining it neatly. These archives have been given life, precious memories that our predecessors carved down with warm hands and left to future generations.
Certificate Presented to Sophia Jex-Blake, Dc.3.103
At this point, our research placement came to an end. Looking back on this meaningful placement, members of the group worked together to bring our small ideas together into a nearly perfect display and events, despite the difficulties we faced in the middle of the process (images accidentally dropped, errors found in this text two days before the event……), which will become the most important lesson for me to learn to become a curator: collaboration, research, feedback, looking back. Thanks to my colleagues Thais, Amy, Weile, and Haowen, and thanks to Maryam and James, we had such a great time together.
As the group has recently been working on completing the writing of the texts, the subject focus of our meetings has shifted from images to texts for the time being. After Maryam and James helped us restructure the texts the previous time, they were finalised in five editions and sent off to the printers for layout and printing on schedule. We chose to use blue text on a pink background for the typography and paint the exhibition space walls in Klein blue to create a sense of mystery.
The group’s first image draft display
The group’s final image draft display
When it came to naming our display, James provided us with the following keywords:
Nature’s Canvas: Empowerment Through Art
Evolutionary Voices: Resisting Enslavement
Art of Survival: Educating Through Nature
Animal Allies: Empowering Evolutionary Narratives
Resilience Revealed: Art, Evolution, Empowerment
Attending to Transformation: The Uneven History of Old College
Evolving Pictures of Old College
After incorporating these keywords and referring to the central theme of our display, we came up with the final title: Closet for the Curious: Uneven Evolutions; meanwhile, we also completed the layout and design of the images, from which our colleagues chose a few representative images for collage, thus forming our poster. On 21 March, the team worked to decorate the blank wall with the pictures. With the design and display over, we completed a large part of our work.
Group Display Poster
The remaining steps were to continue expanding on the details of the event. Our projected invitation list contains James, Maryam, Tessa Giblin, Haowen, Weile, Amy, Thais, Sim Buck, Lisa Williams, Rene Winkler, Liv Laumenech, Claire Walsh, Rachel Hosker, Alina Sinelynk, but the list is still in flux for a variety of reasons. However, seeing a fledgling campaign with a concrete framework and methodology is gratifying. The practical implementation of the project far exceeded our expectations; the confusion and fatigue of the past vanished as white light was projected onto our carefully paired wall of images.
Certificate Presented to Sophia Jex-Blake, Dc.3.103, 1894.
In the context of Orientalism and white patriarchal centrism, the European and Northern American worlds occupied absolute superiority in the depiction of art history. Art historians have portrayed the exotic Oriental world with extraordinary imagination. They carried out indiscriminate colonisation of Africa, Oceania and Asia to establish a global colonial history and artistic history that belonged to Europe. Consequently, throughout the over 500 years of colonisation, people have grown accustomed to narratives based on Western perspectives. As the notion of post-colonialism emerged, scholars turned to another way of approaching artistic history. They came up with new ideas, such as the history of feminism being excluded from Western art history (Linda Norchlin) and the Third World having its own biennial/triennial. The nation, state, and national culture should become possible (Geeta Kapu). While museums and galleries have started to rectify this perception in the twenty-first century, it is not negligible that there is no “pure” oppositional practice vis-a-vis the contemporary museum, nor museological context wholly uncontaminated by the circuits of capitalism or the history of the power of the western museums.
The traces of colonialism in contemporary museums/galleries are somewhat less evident than in more established museums such as the British Museum, where they may appear not necessarily in the categories and origins of the collections but also in the museum/gallery architecture. The Talbot Rice Gallery was built on the former Natural History Museum site at the Old College. Before that period, as the Natural History Museum, the space was imbued with a sense of colonial narrative, and its collections were sourced from all over the world. During his 50 years as director of the museum, collectors like Robert Jameson used his connections to bring in a vast array of plant and animal specimens, most notably platypus specimens and a live puma. It might seem like for a first-time visitor to Talbot Rice Gallery, when we come across the puma and platypus signs, we feel confused and do not understand why a modern, contemporary gallery would have a plush animal that should be part of a history museum. When I first stepped into Talbot Rice Gallery and tried to understand the story behind the gallery, I was also plagued by this little problem.
The Talbot Rice Gallery, re-established in 1975, no longer holds these colonial artefacts; the collection has long since been transferred to the National Museum of Scotland. In recent years, Talbot Rice Gallery’s exhibitions have been devoted to contemporary and futuristic art, depicting themes ranging from geography and nature to women and the surreal, and the colonialist ethos has been undermined by a new practice of modern and contemporary art. However, as we step into the gallery space, the domed roof, the honeysuckle flower frieze adorning the columns and the Doric order can be seen as traces of the architect’s fetish for aesthetically appealing orientalism. But suppose more clues and stories are waiting to be uncovered when we gather our attention to the colonial traces in these buildings.
Furthermore, as the Enlightenment-influenced pioneering thinking spread to Edinburgh, there was an emerging number of scholars, such as the renowned philosopher David Hume, who studied at the University of Edinburgh and started his philosophical career there. These brilliant scholars came together at Old College, Edinburgh University, and undertook to establish a new educational and scientific framework for the dissemination of Enlightenment ideas. However, its legacy regarding women’s education tells a different story- one marred by discrimination, exclusion and discrimination, the other marred by the lack of a proper education. One marred by discrimination, exclusion, and resistance to change.
Female Students like Sophia Jex-Blake applied to the University of Edinburgh during the middle of the nineteenth century. The Academic Committee initially rejected the application for reasons of her gender. Sophia embarked on a lifelong campaign, starting with her application for a place in the university. Inspired by David Masson and David Russel, she resorted to advertising to the Scotsman to encourage more women to apply. She delivered multiple applications to the university to secure a place. She successfully managed to recruit more women students to join her team: Edith Pechey, Isabel Thorne, Emily Bovell, Matilda Chaplin, Helen Evans, and Mary Anderson, whom we call Edinburgh Seven.
Matriculation Signatures: Sophia Lousia Jex-Blake , Mary Edith Pechey, Helen Evans. Matilda Charlotte ChaplinMatriculation Roll, 1861-1874 EUA IN1/ADS/STA/2
Matriculation Record, Isabel Thorne. University of Edinburgh Centre for Research Collections. Matriculation Roll, 1861-1874
As a matter of fact, women confronted difficulties at the step of enrolment only, not to mention the challenges of attending the university while studying. The main perpetrators of these difficulties are male students who had brought difficulties to female students. They disrupted female students’ exams, constantly threatened them with expulsion, and sent them countless obscene messages and profanities in the mail.
In the Enlightenment-inspired hall of the Old College, these forms of inequitable gender discrimination were allowed to exist and develop with impunity. The Universities (Scotland) Act of 1889 gave more autonomy to the regional universities in Scotland, and the terms of the law helped pave the way for women to attend the universities. In 1892, following the provisions of the Act and the pioneering work of Sophia and other women, Scottish universities finally allowed women to be enrolled. This initiative gave universities a more extensive resource of talented students, which resulted from Sophia and others fighting for women’s access to education. When we appreciate Old College through the viewpoint of educational development, we can read the story of liberalisation and gender equality in this structure. While the Old College eventually opened its door to women, its history reflects a broader resistance pattern to equality and diversity. As we look back at the stories behind the architecture and history of the Old College, we continue to deepen the remarkable story of our forefathers’ decolonisation and struggle for gender equality.
Bibliography：
Kapur, Geeta. “Strategies for Curating in the Postmodern Scenario.” Art India4, no. 2 (1999): 50.
After a short holiday, the group is simultaneously expecting to prepare a simple display of campaign ideas and images for next week, so this week, we’ll be completing the screening and validation of the images in anticipation of putting them together next week.
Based on the large number of essential comments James gave in our last submission of the initial text draft, this week, we will re-edit the text content and make the following changes:
General Goal: to provide information and history in a digestible format
Ties to colonisation and enslavement
Natural history museum
Funding structures
Who actually built it
Weird stories
Puma/animal inhabitants
Old societies
Where to go from here
How can people continue to engage with the space
What areas to dig into that we haven’t
Reflection space for visitors
At the same time, reflective work is going on in parallel.
-How are we going to structure decolonisation?
The decolonisation of art museums has been in high demand since the 21st century, and the group’s research on decolonisation was mainly in the buildings and collections of the Old College, the predecessor of the Natural History Museum.
-What kind of image display do we need?
In this five-part narrative text, James inspired us with a hand-drawn diagram. He suggested that by placing the Old College building in the centre of the image, the ” backstory ” could be unfolded like a radiogram, like a tree of knowledge.
James’ Suggestion for structuring the text
David Hockney once suggested that “collage” is “about the bigger picture.” This led to the idea that we could refer to Dadaist artist Hannah Hock’s well-known work Excising Germany’s Last Weimar Beer Belly Cultural Era with a Dada Chopper by collaging images into overlapping, irregular forms.
Exciting Germany’s Last Weimar Beer Belly Cultural Era with a Dada Chopper, Hannah Hock, 1919 – 20, a montage of photographs, collage, mixed media, 114 x 90 cm, Neue Staatliche Kunsthalle, Berlin, Germany
Maryam also showed us some URLs with her suggestions, which impressived us a lot:
Glasgow Women’s Library Logo https://womenslibrary.org.uk/
The Glasgow Women’s Library (GWL) is a representative community archive whose collection is exclusively concerned with women, i.e. it is a monolithic, female community archive collection. Furthermore, this building depended on donation channels and volunteering, mirroring the women’s movement in the Glasgow area in the late twentieth century to fight against oppression in society and promote self-education of women.
It used to be a grassroots arts organisation founded in 1987. Initially, it was named “Women in Profile”, which changed its name to the GWL in 1991, intending to promote the contribution of women’s groups to Glasgow’s history, life and culture while it also aims to address gender imbalances in historical narratives and provide a platform for women’s voices. It started with no financial support and relied on the efforts of volunteers and women to construct it. Only through its subsequent endeavours and funding from the government and charities could it progressively increase the collection size and establish its unique mode of operation.
With its particular structural way, the library was once seen as an unstable institution. From Anne Gilliland and Andrew Flinn’s perspective, unease over ‘community’ is familiar and relates to a lack of clear definition, its ubiquitous use in government policy speaks and its associated potential for being used in an ill-defined fashion by media. (Anne Gilliland and Andrew Flinn, 2013, 3) Today, the GWL is a registered company with a limited guarantee and has been recognised as a charity by Revenue Scotland since 2000, keeping its status stable. All of the GWL’s collections come from individual or institutional donations, as mentioned in its strategic program: people from all community sections donated books, journals, magazines and ephemera.
Apart from its collection strategy of donation, the GWL arranges various events and activities like exhibitions, programs, workshops, talks and community engagement initiatives to examine women’s issues, celebrate women’s achievements, and raise awareness about gender-related topics to promote the acknowledgement of gender equality. Not only that, but the library also positively engages in community activities, providing a space for women to discuss, learn, and collaborate by providing resources, educational programmes, and supportive community networks. Here are two examples of the library’s typical activities.
Activity as an exhibition:
Two Decades of Changing Minds at Glasgow Women’s Museum, hosted by the Centre for Contemporary Arts (CCA) from Saturday, 22nd September to Saturday, 13th October, 2012.
September 2012 marked the 21st birthday of the GWL, and the institution decided to celebrate with exhibitions, reading workshops, walks, and talks. To achieve this goal, the library invited 21 women artists to do new work inspired by GWL’s library, archive and museum artefacts like campaign badges, knitting patterns, suffragette ephemera, album covers, feminist newsletters and lesbian dime novels. (Helen, 2012) The show also invited 21 women writers to create new pieces using GWL’s collections as inspiration. “Two Decades of Changing Minds at Glasgow Women’s Museum” is the title of this exhibition, which encompasses the organisation’s reflection and retrospection of itself over the past 21 years. To expand the 21 Revolutions exhibition’s implication, the exhibition was also exhibited at the prestigious Royal Scottish (RSA) Academy during the Edinburgh Art Festival in 2013.
This initiative realised the library’s attempt to wriggle out of the primary mission and the venue’s physical confines to create a more impactful, parallel radiating artistic achievement to broadly influence the surrounding areas, thereby drawing more comprehensive attention to promoting women’s issues in the Scottish context. By bringing the exhibition to the big stage of an international art festival, the institution also achieved GWL’s original mission.
21 Revolutions Exhibition Poster
Activity as a workshop:
“Women and Education in the Long Eighteenth Century”, 8th September 2016.
On 8th September 2016, the GWL organised a seminar called “Women and Education in the Long Eighteenth Century”. According to the workshop, while many papers argued that a woman’s education was valued and socially necessary during the eighteenth century, the idea of girls being educated to prepare them for marriage, particularly in middle-class families, was a prominent theme. (Brianna, 2017) Similarly, in the second session, Mark Towsey addressed the significance of women reading history to build their essential social skills of demonstrating knowledge and clear understanding. (Brianna, 2017) The seminar’s key topic was women’s education, with music as its focus. Scholars from different countries addressed case studies from different historical contexts, bringing ideas on women’s education from Glasgow to the global level.
This seminar profoundly discussed the educational rights and the construction of women’s social status by music in the eighteenth century while prompting reflections on modern women’s right to education. Just like Lucy E. Bailey and Karen Graves mentioned in their article:
During and after the 1970s, feminist interventions in education and research were instrumental in highlighting women’s exclusions from educational practice and knowledge and dislodging artificially linked conceptions of biology as “destiny” from social processes that constrained and prescribed women’s and men’s development. (Bailey, Lucy E., and Graves, Karen, 2016. 688)
The GWL is more than just a feminist community archive; it fulfils this primary function while demonstrating multidimensional exploration and innovation. The library’s collection was sourced from donations, which has led to diverse content covering up to 27 different subject categories, providing it with great flexibility and broad coverage. This rich collection base offers maximum support for the library to organise various arts activities.
The GWL also makes full use of its archival collection status to widely disseminate its contents, as well as its mission, vision and values, through diverse formats such as exhibitions, workshops, lectures and seminars. Through these activities, the library becomes more than just a static archival storage space; it becomes an active community centre dedicated to promoting gender equality and women’s rights in all areas.
This integrated approach aims to protect women’s fundamental rights while promoting social change by advancing women’s education. With its unique and diverse collection and rich programme of activities, GWL not only meets the need for information delivery but also serves as a place of gathering and exchange, providing opportunities for people within and outside of the community to gain insights into, explore, and discuss issues of gender equality.
Bibliography
Bailey, Lucy E., and Graves, Karen. “The Changing Attention to Diversity and Differences: Gender and Education.” Review of Research in Education 40, no. 1 (2016): 682-722.
Bell, James. “Postcards from the Past: Archives, Art and Activism at Glasgow Women’s Library.” Conference paper presented at the Queering Memory, Annual Libraries, Museums and Special Collections Conference, Berlin, 2019.
Gilliland, Anne, and Andrew Flinn. “Community Archives: What Are We Really Talking About.” Paper presented at CIRN Prato Community Informatics Conference, 2013.
Helen. “Two Decades and 21 Revolutions.” Published 9th July, 2012. Glasgow Women’s Library. https://womenslibrary.org.uk/event/21-revolutions-exhibition/. Accessed [January 23, 2024].
Marney, L. “Mango.” 21 Revolutions: Two Decades of Changing Minds at Glasgow Women’s Library, Centre for Contemporary Art Glasgow, 21 Sept – 13 Oct 2012. Exhibitions.
McMullan, Shauna. “21 Revolutions, Two Decades of Changing Minds at Glasgow Women’s Library.” Centre for Contemporary Art (CCA), Glasgow, 2012. Show/Exhibition.
Robertson-Kirkland, Brianna. “Women and Education in the Long Eighteenth Century Glasgow Women’s Library, 8 September 2016.” Eighteenth Century Music 14, no. 1 (2017): 171-73.
I attended a workshop with my colleagues this week with James at the Talbot Rice Gallery on Writing didactic texts for Talbot Rice Gallery displays and exhibitions. The workshop provided insight into effectively writing educational texts for a non-specialist audience and corrected our vision. Over the past two weeks, despite working together as a group, our writing habits and presentation styles differed due to our respective cultural backgrounds, and our draft texts appeared to be overly narrative and critical rather than the ‘non-narrative’ that James had initially intended for us to present.
In addition to the workshop, we also came up with some new ideas for the exhibition programme, including:
– Use some objects in the exhibition so it doesn’t feel so text-heavy
– Create a walking tour
– Create a Walking guide map
– Create leaflets for visitors to take away
– Make our exhibition booklet
– To have a suggestion box
……
Activities that we came up with
These exhibition activities are all feasible at this point, and the group has shown a great willingness to participate in designing these exciting ideas. We put extra effort into discussing the concept of a walking tour of the gallery and developing a booklet, and based on our previous research into the history of the gallery’s architecture and the uniqueness of the gallery’s Greek stone columns and bas-reliefs about the overall space, we proposed to mark the unique architectural design and design a tour route, taking into account the gallery floor plan that James had given us as a reference.
Talbot Rice Gallery will officially present the new exhibition next week, and we have great expectations for it.
Over recent weeks, group members have each explored and edited fascinating drafts based on their themes. We were preparing for our recently arrived informal group presentation. In our initial division of labour, we overly followed our themes, and thus, the entire exhibition storyline was neatly divided into four more fragmented and weakly related parts. We then gathered in the top floor office of TRG to brainstorm and fine-tune the storyline, sorting out the themes of architecture, education, finance, and society and dividing up the work.
The next step was to consider which relevant scholars and curators to invite to join us in this display and make constructive suggestions. Moreover, Tessa Giblin and James Clegg participated in our group meetings, with Tessa suggesting the importance of the project’s coherence and encouraging us to continue to unearth more of the lesser-known stories buried in the vast archives. James, on an ongoing basis, has helped us to correct our perspective. Not only that, but we also attended the Archival Research Skills Workshop with Rachel Hosker to improve our archival searching and efficiency.
As we sorted through these textual themes again, another question became apparent. How do we cope with the large amount of textual and archival information and consolidate it into concise, short texts? For this, data needs to be sifted through. In the case of the story of the Edinburgh Seven, for example, information about the leader, Sophia Jex-Blake, would be enough to sustain an entire text. However, the Edinburgh Seven is much more than one character. It contains the life stories of the seven women, their learning experiences, their career paths, and the relationship between Edinburgh Old College and the Edinburgh Seven.
Team members go to the gallery together.
Moreover, we began the initial selection of collection images in parallel. In the group blueprint, we will compose a colossal image, collaged separately with smaller pictures or words and images corresponding to each other. In this way, each individual must attach roughly ten images to expand our material.
In addition, James used a very intriguing method to build up our understanding of the exhibition design. He used three different coloured Post-it notes to brainstorm/consider the purpose we view behind our display, what we would like to include, and strategies to achieve this. The role is as follows:
Identify your key responsibilities and list the main areas of work you have been involved in.
As a member of the TBG team, my main research focus has been to explore aspects of the Old College of Edinburgh that overlap with the history of the struggle for gender affirmation, specifically looking at the impact of gender on access to education.
Our shared goal was to develop a comprehensive research proposal by investigating with my teammates, including display, images, literature review and workshops. In that way, I have extensively researched TBG using resources such as the National Library of Scotland and the official TBG website throughout my studies. I have used ‘The Normal’ as a case study, an installation dealing with racism and feminism. It exemplifies the successful fusion of modern art installation and classical architecture.
The team also enjoyed visiting the gallery last week and having an in-depth conversation with James, who showed us a floor plan and gave us a brief overview of the gallery’s past function as a natural history museum. James used three different coloured Post-it notes as three narrative perspectives of the curatorial process. He supported us in brainstorming and expanding our ideas to find art collections that fit the research theme. With this in mind, we revisited our respective goals and added Enlightenment narrative threads to link the Old College and research projects. We began to conceptualise the presentation of the results of this research, which will consist of short essays and a considerable number of images of the collection.
As we advance, I will continue to focus on my primary enquiry into gender and access to education. This includes continued offline access to rare literature archives on gender affirmation and online literature searches. In this multifaceted project, I aim to contribute meaningfully to the team’s collective understanding and deepen my knowledge of the intricacies and complexities of curatorial practice in different cultural contexts.
Looking ahead, list your key objectives for the GRP. 3-7 SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Timed) objectives with realistic timescales and focused outcomes should be noted.
1. Travelling together to libraries and galleries to learn about the history of the TRG when it was conceived as a natural history museum, to deepen our understanding of the TRG as a building, to make connections to the critical issues written about in the group’s brief, and to read widely on related materials that can be used as examples for individual or group stories.
2. liaise actively with the TRG team to develop the research themes we will be exhibiting next March and complement each other to start compiling an inventory of the collections.
3. The group expects to have completed a cursory study of the collection by December and will liaise with the CRC in an attempt to contact the superintendent for a tour of the collection in January, as well as start to work on an Excel spreadsheet to establish a list of images to be eventually displayed. This should be completed by February
4. according to my plan, I expect to collect documentation on the Edinburgh Seven, including the legal requirements for women’s enrolment in Scotland, by December. As I have already selected the Edinburgh Seven as my case study, I will be focusing on Sophia Jex-Blake’s exploits, including the legal limitations of her application to university and the trials and tribulations of her enrolment, which do not appear to have a solid intuitive connection to Old College, which means that I will need to spend more effort finding potential links between them.
Discursive self-reflection
Our team completed two library group discussions, extensive data searches, offline discussions at TRG, and productive interactions with James. Through these interactions, I understood the social construction of TRG as a multi-purpose exhibition space that embraces architectural nuances, historical and cultural contexts, and the logic of modern and contemporary art. In our pursuit of individual sub-themes, I focused on exploring the history of access to education, particularly emphasising how gender affects this access. I discovered the exciting story of the Edinburgh Seven through a literature search, through which I found common ground to use in writing my story from three perspectives:
the official website of the University of Edinburgh
the official website of British Legislation
The History of the Enlightenment
Reflecting on my role in teamwork, I see that my strength lies in active participation in workshops. Over the past four years of my internship experience, I have continued to improve my productivity. I have become proficient in writing and analysing data and articles through new media operations and statistics expertise. However, I have one distinct weakness: I tend to be less articulate in seminars, often listening rather than actively sharing my opinions, mainly because I am not confident enough in my English. From now on, I acknowledge the need to communicate more proactively and build deeper connections with teammates and staff in partner organisations.
At the same time, I suggest utilising the unique strengths of each team member to improve team performance. For example, Thais, with her buoyant cheerfulness and efficiency, can lead the team, criticise and provide feedback to our managers. Amy’s local expertise made her an invaluable resource in deepening our understanding of Edinburgh’s history, culture and art scene. Given my proficiency in writing exhibition programmes, art criticism and information gathering, I can contribute to organising documentation and producing texts. With internships in significant galleries, Hao Wen is adept at communicating and collaborating effectively with staff, and Weile’s knowledge of community art brings a new perspective to our art research.
Discover the problem: How to integrate modern art installations in a building with historical architecture?
Analysis: The artist attempts to restore the inner world and pain of the victims with emotional art installations, presenting and displaying their demands to the modern world in the old art building.
Introduction
Since 2010, the Talbot Rice Gallery has hosted 71 exhibitions, with only one successfully held in 2020 amid the profound disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. As international conditions improved in 2021, signalling a resurgence of art and culture, the gallery triumphantly presented three exhibitions. “The Normal,” the inaugural art exhibition of 2021, grappled with themes unmistakably pertinent to the post-pandemic era. As life resumed, artists and art exhibitions sought fresh narratives, steering away from the prevalent focus on the epidemic.
One particularly intriguing installation, “This song is for…,” caught the attention for its relevance to the post-epidemic era and its exploration of violence against black, brown, feminine, queer, and vulnerable bodies. Gabrielle Goliath, the artist behind this thought-provoking work, employed integrated media to portray the potential dangers faced by this generation. (James Clegg, 2021) What captivated me more was the curator’s astute use of lighting and the site, seamlessly blending the work’s atmosphere into the gallery space. This transformed the interior of the classical building into what appeared to be a malleable white box space despite its inherent architectural characteristics.
Curating exhibitions within classical art buildings often presents two challenges: first, the delicate task of harmonising the relationship between the exhibits and the ambience, and second, the necessity of preventing the inherent artistry of the building from overshadowing the narrative structure of the exhibits. The success of the curation at Talbot Rice Gallery in navigating these challenges is evident in the way they curated “This song is for…,” creating an immersive experience that seamlessly merged the contemporary with the classical. This showcased the art world’s resilience in the face of adversity and underscored the gallery’s ability to adapt and innovate within the ever-evolving landscape of post-pandemic art.
figure 1 Gabrielle Goliath
This song is for …, 2019-ongoing
Single-channel projection with dual stereo audio
Talbot Rice Gallery introduces “The Normal,” a curated exhibition that dynamically captures the essence of life during the pandemic. Developed in real-time, it serves as a vibrant reflection of our collective experience amid the challenges of the past years. The exhibition delves into themes of hope, grief, survival, violence, and solidarity through diverse artworks, seamlessly situating our lived experiences within a broader global artistic dialogue.
Artists featured in the exhibition explore nuanced concepts, such as the halting of societal progress, the resurgence of communities, the growing proximity between humans and wildlife, and the disproportionate impact of the pandemic on social, economic, and racial grounds. This exploration takes place against the backdrop of a pressing need for a profound reorientation toward planetary health, prompted by the stark wake-up call of the pandemic.
One particularly compelling contribution to “The Normal” comes from South African artist Gabrielle Goliath. Goliath reimagines the conventional dedication song in collaboration with women and gender-queer musical ensembles. Each song is devoted to a survivor of rape, with Goliath working extensively with groups of survivors who contribute their voices, colours, and text to the artwork. The result is a powerful space for reflection, challenging the ‘normalcy’ of rape culture – an issue acknowledged by the UN as a ‘shadow pandemic’ due to a global increase in domestic abuse during the coronavirus crisis.
Background
In crafting her artwork in South Africa, a country grappling with one of the highest rates of rape globally, Gabrielle Goliath addressed the deeply entrenched issue of sexual violence. Within the context of a society shaped by patriarchal norms, these gender constructs contribute significantly to the perpetuation of a culture of rape, often exacerbated by ineffective and complicit institutions tasked with addressing and penalising perpetrators. (James Clegg, 2021, 42) Goliath’s commitment to confronting this pervasive issue led her to immerse herself in the lives of survivors, resulting in a collaborative effort where images, sounds, lights, and other fragments of the installation artwork were co-created. The very essence of the artwork reflects the lived experiences of the victims, making every detail a poignant echo of the prevailing rape culture.
In the artist’s own words, “This song is for…” serves as a resistance against the systemic violence that routinely objectifies black, brown, feminine, queer, and vulnerable bodies. Its overarching goal is to subvert the norms embedded in patriarchal systems, particularly the structural violence that thrives on dichotomies and fixed identities. Instead, the artwork strives to carve out a space for nuance, empathy, and emotion, fostering a critical dialogue that challenges the status quo and encourages reevaluating societal norms.
Ironically, the political satire in the work positioned it in opposition to classicalism, yet it found a powerful and resonant home within the confines of the Talbot Rice Gallery. The juxtaposition of contemporary social commentary within a classical space proved compelling and thought-provoking, earning unanimous praise for its ability to challenge conventional artistic norms.
figure 2 Gabrielle Goliath
This song is for …, 2019-ongoing
Single-channel projection with dual stereo audio
Key Point
Upon encountering Gabrielle Goliath’s artwork, a profound question emerged: how do historic spaces and modern artworks blend classical and contemporary? Talbot Rice Gallery, with its cream-white walls, wooden floors, soaring arched doorways, and Greek stone columns, forms a canvas ideally attuned to the warm yellow sunlight. “This sound is for…” challenged to strike a delicate balance between these classical elements and a contemporary video art installation that would ensure the integrity of the artwork without destroying the enduring relationship between the gallery and its various creations.
This narrative installation, a testament to the post-epidemic era, serves as a catalyst for reawakening the human self-consciousness that may have remained dormant for two years. A pivotal question surfaces in this uncertain post-pandemic landscape: where do we navigate from here? Will the hardships endured during the pandemic gradually fade as it recedes into the past? Are the expressions witnessed reflective of genuine instincts in the context of a pandemic? It compels us to introspect, prompting a return to the core essence of humanity, akin to children seeking solace in their mother’s embrace. We are also endeavouring to explore how modernity can embrace the classics.
During a turbulent social environment that tests our rationality, this introspection allows us to reevaluate ourselves. As we engage in this self-examination, we inevitably question the contemporary and the classical intersection. This inquiry transcends the confines of the gallery walls, echoing a broader exploration of the evolving relationship between tradition and innovation in the ever-shifting landscape of art and human experience.
The Normal is full of dialogue. There is an invisible bond between the audience and the works, which allows them to have a conversation and interaction with the gallery when they are in the exhibition. This sound is for… was presented to the audience in the gallery. Still, it is a dialogue between the audience and the gallery from three perspectives: the light and shadow in the video artwork, the natural light and atmosphere of the gallery, the song’s content and the real world, and the dialogue between the artist and visitors. We should not only consider the problems exposed by the epidemic as a trigger in the post-epidemic era but also see the problem that continues to grow along with the present era: feminism.
In a similar vein, young Chinese curators have applied the specificities of this context to open up a new narrative perspective in the post-pandemic era. Taking my internship exhibition as an example, two young curators constructed a feminist, surrealist and mythical exhibition by incorporating the concepts of the Taoist doctrines of “Xuan”, “Mare”, and “Great Mother Goddess”. As this is an online exhibition, the curators expanded the scale of the show to a national level, with artists from all over the country and 100 pieces of shortlisted works. The curator’s initial approach to the theme was general and vague. Still, as the diversity of the artworks inspired us in real-time, we adjusted the categories and forms of the exhibition, eventually deriving a game with some of the artworks as the main content and an exhibition webpage.
This emerging curatorial model significantly adapted to the drawbacks of the epidemic and gave the exhibition a broad platform to provide viewers with a more comprehensive and exciting format. However, compared to the more traditional and typical curatorial model of Talbot Rice Gallery, such a curatorial model also brings more uncertainty, as we cannot predict the quality and quantity of the artworks, nor can we expect what direction the curatorial programme will eventually go in. As mentioned above, the measure effectively mitigated the issue of blending historical space with contemporary artworks.
In the initial seminar of this project, we were provided with the Talbot Rice Gallery research guide. Our objective is to uncover the narrative behind Edinburgh’s Old College. In our discussion on “How can a contemporary art gallery establish productive and critical connections to its historical spaces while engaging audiences?” we engaged in a comprehensive discourse on this fundamental subject. Focusing initially on the keywords “contemporary” and “history,” I focused on the building itself in the first place. Edinburgh’s Old College was founded during the Enlightenment to promote education and facilitate communication. Furthermore, it once served as a Natural History Museum, housing exotic animal specimens such as platypuses and a puma from distant lands. When it merged with another white box space to become the gallery in 1975, it took on the responsibility of showcasing modern and contemporary art.
During our research division, I chose to explore “The History of Access to Education,” explicitly examining how gender has influenced educational opportunities throughout time for my eight-month-long research topic. After class, I began envisioning various possibilities for presenting this extensive subject matter – through a piece, audio, or installation artwork. Following brief discussions within our team, we decided our first step would be delving into library resources.
Fortunately, ample documentation is available regarding TRG’s architectural history; therefore, after obtaining permission from the library authorities, we spent an afternoon brainstorming amidst numerous documents to establish a solid background for our overall research by identifying relevant aspects of our topic.
Notes on group division of labour
Our highly efficient team enables us to advance the entire project with just two weekly courses and meetings. We acquired numerous innovative ideas during our visit to TRG and meeting with James. For instance, can we delve into the intricate details of the historic college buildings, including Greek stone columns and three-dimensional reliefs? Furthermore, an initial concept for a display began to take shape; we intend to design a compact exhibit featuring pictures and corresponding text that can be easily accessed from a shelf-mounted archive at any given time—a genuinely artistic installation. When considering how viewers will interact with this display, our team devised engaging activities for gallery visits. Leveraging James’ provided floor plan and distinctive architectural markings, we aim to explore the gallery’s architecture while guiding visitors in reflecting upon its colonial cultural elements—stimulating their contemplation of the space.
