Curatorial Analysis: ATLAS Arts
Theme development
Continuing from Francis Davis Week 5 lecture focusing on place-responsive curatorial programming through the analysis of ATLAS Arts, a contemporary arts organisation that produces a variety of arts programs across Scotland’s West Highlands and Islands.
ATLAS arts, having a specific location in which projects are based, focuses on the specific narratives, histories, and perspectives that arise from the particular locations where these projects take place. Looking further at the Samhla project by Lauren Gault— the focus of the seminar discussion—we can see that there is a particular emphasis on unearthing the narratives of Skye (the project location). This is explicitly clear in the way that Gault chose to take an extra disciplinary approach, collaborating with experts in fields that share commonalities with the land in a physical way, such as archaeologist Giacomo Savani, and palaeontologist Dr Elsa Pancirolu, as well as in a narrative sense by working with classicist Dr. Katherine Earnshaw and local folklorists. With this lens, art works displayed as part of this project can be appraised as ways of changing how people interact and appreciate the land through revealing a wealth of information, which typically is taken for granted.
I found the work in Silmuir and Stenscholl Church particularly interesting. It was an indoor exhibition that brought together sculptures exploring different materials that related to the landscape, including mineral lick buckets, printed fossils, and braided dog leashes. It is possible that by uniting these artefacts from the land, items that are common and taken for granted, such as the ubiquitous mineral lick bucket become conceptually elevated in the mind of the viewer. Perception of these parts of the landscape in future reappraisal become overlapped with the experience of the exhibition, and as a result are regarded in a new way. This is especially intensified as at the end of the exhibition, all the works were gathered back and variously repurposed or returned back to the landscape and its users.
Education and communication also form a valuable element of this project, as made evident through the prevalence of artist talks, walking discussions, and other informational conversation events that are listed as part of the Samhala project. Additionally, the website documentation for the project makes specific references to pedagogy. In 2014 Ivan Z. Stojilovic and Slobodan Markovic completed a study examining the effects of informational lectures on the aesthetic appreciation of the landscape, finding that there was strong evidence to suggest that naïve individuals that participated in an informational session were more likely to appraise the art that they were educated about as more aesthetically appealing than individuals who had not received the same information. The question also becomes how this effect can extend past the limitations of painting. In the case of Gault’s project, which exposed the histories of the land to public consciousness, it may have also had a similar effect. As participants learnt more about the Isle of Skye through the lens of expert analysis, they may have gained a greater appreciation and reverence for the land.
Action:
If I hope to work with ecological narratives, then the work of ATLAS art offers some useful concepts of how to engage with the community and develop an advanced awareness of space. With the inclusion of elements of the landscape, in the form of focused workshops, walks, or having a prominent role in the exhibition, we can create a direct path of focus for the audience, who would be able to recognise elements of the work beyond the boundaries of an exhibition. As a result, in my curatorial project I know that the exhibition space will be accompanied by a selection of workshops, and both artworks and events will engage with recognisable components of physical ecology, with the ambition of presenting the audience with a new way of understanding the world around them.
Hi, Harry. Your blog has a lot of mind maps and theoretical references that allow me to better understand your ideas for the exhibition, which is really great and has inspired me a lot. Especially after viewing the three blogs Theme development- Artists identification-Project space I have already visualised an exhibition in my mind about anti-climate change and anti-colonialism. What touched me most was that in the future section of Artist identification you chose the contrasting themes of sadness and hope, which reminded me of British photographer Nima Sarikhani’s work Iced Bed (a lone polar bear asleep against an iceberg), which made me feel that global warming will not only bring disaster to human beings, but will also cause other creatures in nature to lose their homes, which is a heavy topic. Of course, it is exactly this kind of straightforward artistic expression that will stimulate people to reflect more, and inspire hope in the midst of the heaviness. If possible in this section I think it would be possible to add some more visually striking or immersive experiences to guide the viewer’s reflections. Finally, I thought your choice of space was really great, with enough sunlight to match the theme of your exhibition, and the angle of the sunlight at different times of the day would be a great effect if it could interact with the works in your exhibition, and also in line with the ‘sensory experience’ that you mentioned in your previous blog.