Event Poster

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.

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

1. Ties to colonisation and enslavement
   Natural history museum
   Funding structures
   Who actually built it
2. Weird stories
   Puma/animal inhabitants
   Old societies
3. 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:

https://www.eca.ed.ac.uk/facility/reprographics

https://www.eca.ed.ac.uk/news/travelling-exhibition-highlights-campaigns-fair-housing-conditions-scotland

* Derry Film and Video Workshop, led by Sara Greavu in collaboration with Ciara Phillips

https://www.e-flux.com/announcements/483946/field-notes-zach-ngin-on-asia-art-archive-the-black-archives-and-archives-des-luttes-des-femmes-en-algrie-documenta-15/

https://mapmagazine.co.uk/voicing-archive-edinburgh-sculpture-workshop

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.

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.