Week 12: Finding My Title & Tightening Up Public Programming

Finding my title: Mending the Mutilated World

preliminary sketch design of poster

Through my research I came across the exhibition The World that Belongs to Us, co-curated by Aziz Sohail and Deborah Robinson at the New Art Gallery Walsall, which explores similar themes to my own project, though looking at identity and belonging through the lens of activism and community building. Given this, the effective title communicates a sense of agency and action, empowering publics to consider notions of belonging and to break down barriers between diverse communities and groups.

This exhibition helped me arrive at the title for my project: Mending the Mutilated World. This title seeks to communicate how the artworks in the exhibition offer opportunities to mend the divided world through intercultural dialogues and negotiations of diasporic identity; the use of “mending” seeking to demonstrate how this process is ongoing and embodied through these artists’ practices. While Zagajewski’s original poem sought to offer resilience through recognizing beauty in a fraught world, this title reflects the need to move one step forward, to enact action in our day to day lives to mend the divisive and fragmented contemporary world.

While The World that Belongs to Us was a well-conceived exhibition exploring these themes in a nuanced way, the primary public programming being a symposium undermines the necessity for accessible dialogues for wider publics, re-invigorating my focus on publics who often feel excluded from institutional spaces.

Updated Programme & Publication

Updated budget for Publication & Poetry Reading Performance Fees

This week I realized I had forgotten to include rates for the partnership I am proposing with Scottish BPOC Writers Network for a poetry reading and to support work for the publication. As such, I have re-envisaged my budget based and publication based on their suggested network rates:

As such, the closing night performance will include a reading from 4 authors/poets from the network who will also be invited to submit previously published work for the publication. The closing night performance will include an open mic for poets/authors from the local community to share their own works related to the exhibition theme, followed by Kinaara’s music performance.

The publication will include writers’ contributions alongside exhibition texts and ephemera/contributions from the artists’ practices and works. I have been highly influenced by the publication for De Ateliers’ Offspring 2018 exhibition Good Morning Midnight, curated by Tom Morton, which fuses artworks, writing by artists, and texts about the exhibition in a book form which is accessible, though more akin to an artist’s book than the often-discursive and strictly supplemental exhibition catalogues.

Collage of spreads & cover of Good Morning Midnight exhibition publication. Morton, Tom and Boogerd, Dominic van den, Good Morning Midnight / Offspring 2018, Amsterdam, NL, 2018

References

The World that Belongs to Us, co-curated by Aziz Sohail and Deborah Robinson, New Art Gallery Walsall, Walsall, UK, 24 November 2023 – 9 June 2024

Offspring 2018 Good Morning Midnight, curated by Tom Morton, De Ateliers, Amsterdam, NL, May 16–27, 2018.

Zagajewski, Adam. “Try to Praise the Mutilated World”, trans. Clare Cavanagh, from Without End: New and Selected Poems (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002)