The Royal College of Art (RCA) announces four Curating Contemporary Art (CCA) graduate shows taking place in April and May in collaboration with leading UK art organisations Flat Time House, Gasworks, LUX and Southwark Park Galleries. This highly influential MA programme at the world’s number one art and design university is recognised as an international leader in curatorial education and places importance on collaborative group project-based work as a way of sharing knowledge and cultures.
Graduating students from the CCA programme will present their final projects which act as important testing grounds for new curatorial forms of working with artists and the public in a ‘live’ setting.
Southwark Park Galleries partnership, To Be Here With You
earth pigment on canvas, 2022
To Be Here With You (22 April – 5 May) embraces practices of ritual to create a space of shared knowledge, gentle hospitality and open collectivity. Situated at Southwark Park Galleries and engaging with the surrounding park, the project consists of five free workshops. Artists have been invited to each develop a workshop that begins with an exploratory walk in the park, followed by guided activities in Lake Gallery’s Salter Space. Each session opens a pathway for audiences to appreciate the spaces we inhabit, to rediscover the spiritual aspects of nature, and to value our intimate rituals as something sacred.
Artists: Gail Dickerson, Hannah Lees and May Hands, Alice May, Rie Nakajima, YEWANDE 103 with Rudzani Moleya
MA curators: Caspar Danuser, Ana Paola Escoto Esteva, Seven Feng, Julia Jiang, Esther Liu, Sophie Nowakowska, Youjia Qian, Marjian Tsatsaros Tyagi, Nathan Yeomans
LUX partnership, One Time Only
Responding to the late British artist and theorist Ian White’s performances in nightclubs, One Time Only (O.T.O) (11 May), in partnership with LUX, is an event using the space of the nightclub to activate the intersections between music and the moving image. New commissions by artists Tarzan KingOfTheJungle, Anna Clegg and Adam Farah-Saad, alongside existing work by Ahaad Alamoudi and David Hall, will use media including film, video-jockeying and lighting to unravel how music videos shape, and are shaped by, our digital, geographical and personal identities.
On Wednesday 11 May (7pm – 1am), these live works will be presented as a club night at FOLD, supported by Futur.Shock. with DJ sets by HabibTati and Hellikisto, created in conversation with the artists. The project themes are also explored in works commissioned for social media by Hugo Hutchins and Maria Mahfooz and in a free online, interactive publication featuring critical essays, speculative writing and interviews.
Contributors: Ahaad Alamoudi, Anna Clegg, Adam Farah-Saad, Hugo Hutchins, Maria Mahfooz, Tarzan KingOfTheJungle and DJ sets by HabibTati and Hellikisto
MA curators: Malak Alhajri, Guanchun Chen, Elizabeth Langton, Sukii Lu, Siavash Minoukadeh, Ambre Panhard, Nikki Ramirez, Anqi Zhang
Flat Time House partnership, Breath Variations
Breath Variations (12 – 14 May) is a new body of work created by Irish artist Christopher Steenson for Flat Time House, the former studio-home of late British conceptual artist John Latham. Using sound, video, and transmission-based methodologies, Breath Variations will explore the materiality of time – its permanence and evanescence – and the power that attention has over its transmission and state of matter.
By manipulating and extending the sonic dimensions of Flat Time House, Steenson investigates the capacity of breath as a ‘least event’ – Latham’s term for the shortest departure from a state of nothingness – to punctuate linearities of time and space.
Artist: Christopher Steenson
MA curators: Thomas Cury, Cindy He, Salomé Jacques, Romy Lagesse, Napas Mangklatanakul, Ariana Martin, Liyin Wang, Hyora Yang
Gasworks partnership, Blue Space: The Changing Currents of Resilient Waterways
Blue Space: The Changing Currents of Resilient Waterways (24 – 27 May) in partnership with Gasworks responds to our evolving relationship with nature and climate change. Artists Priysha Rajvanshi and Elise Guillaume have collaborated together to produce a provisional shelter that gives voice to the natural environment. Large cyanotype sheets created in the River Thames by Priysha Rajvanshi have been adapted to form the tent’s canopy with a related projection across the interior walls. An original soundscape produced by artist and filmmaker Elise Guillaume incorporating the vibration-based audio of plants and water alongside spoken word creates a speculative conversation between humans and nature. Blue Space: The Changing Currents of Resilient Waterways is an invitation to visitors to slow down and listen to nature, to hear its perspective as we look to adapt to our changing world.
Artists: Elise Guillaume, Priysha Rajvanshi
MA curators: Aleda Wood Roberts, Blythe Thea Williams, Genevieve Fisher, John Dougan Nealon, Kangin Park, Nathalia Oliveira, Wanlan Chen, Zihan Wen
©2023 Royal College of Art
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