Author Archives: bduchgimenez

Marketing an exhibition: how hard can it be? – Sophie Ridsdale-Smith

A lot of work goes into marketing an exhibition, from nailing a creative brief to hitting the upload button on Instagram, there are many steps in between which are all as equally important. 

As someone who spends more hours on social media than I care to admit to, taking on the role of marketing for the exhibition seemed a responsibility not too far away from the social media I knew. As long as we had a graphic designer on board and some beautiful images of the artwork, I anticipated minimal hiccups. I had a fantastic partner (and friend!) sharing the load – shoutout to Julie – and together we naively navigated the world of press and marketing. 

Our first task was to find a graphic designer. This sounded simple enough but with the added difficulty of a pandemic and lockdown, this was more of a challenge. Many hours were spent on Zoom calls with the rest of the gang, pitching potential designers and figuring out how we wanted the exhibition to look and feel. We eventually locked down (pardon the pun!) Mathilda Della Torre, who as it happened, had worked with the MA Curating group of last year and roughly knew how the exhibition process worked, though obviously this year was very different with no physical exhibition taking place. Mathilda was set to work, designing the beautiful posters and various other assets that are across the website and marketing materials. We are so pleased with the work Mathilda produced, and Julie and I definitely developed our problem-solving skills and the importance of taking a lead on something, particularly when it came to making decisions!

I can’t write a blog post on marketing without mentioning the press release. Once again, this was something both of us were completely new to but was such a valuable learning experience for us as well. We took advice from Ashleigh Toll, the marketing guru for the Courtauld, and drafted the press release, collated a press pack which included key artwork images and our events programme details. Personally, it was incredibly interesting seeing what goes on behind the scenes in order to get journalists interested and provide all the information they would need.  Communication was key here, because of the multiple partners involved in our exhibition project. It was vital that everyone approved and was happy with the material we would make public. 

Posting on social media was probably the most familiar task to us, and something I really enjoyed doing. We could get a bit creative on Instagram Stories and hopefully enthuse others enough to visit the exhibition. I will admit that after the show had launched online, it was harder to keep the momentum going on social media. I think this would have been very different had we been in a physical gallery space. A challenge we are currently figuring out is knowing when to stop posting about the exhibition on social media all together, we are now in full dissertation mode, yet the exhibition website is still up and running (and will be until June 2021).

A definite highlight for all of us was being featured as the ‘Exhibition of the Week’ in Jonathan Jones’s ‘Art Weekly’ article in The Guardian. Being recognised by one of the most well-known art critics in Britain is something I will not stop talking about for a long time! 

As I mentioned at the beginning of this post, I’m not sure myself and Julie really knew what marketing an exhibition actually looked like, and although we made some obvious mistakes throughout the process, it was a fantastic learning opportunity and one I would certainly sign myself up for again, perhaps not in a global pandemic though.

A word about interpretation – Elizabeth Keto

Hello there. I’m glad you’re here. My name is Elizabeth, and I’m one of the curators of Unquiet Moments: Capturing the Everyday. In this space, we’ll have a series of blog posts exploring aspects of our exhibition-making process from ‘behind the scenes’.

My two primary roles on the exhibition were coordinating our text interpretation – basically, serving as a general editor for the project – and licensing the images of the artworks, so that we could legally display them on our website. Although copyright is a crucially important protection for artists and other creators, I’m afraid that a blog post focused on the ins and outs of image licensing would be about as thrilling as reading an air-conditioner repair manual backwards. So I will focus instead on interpretation.

Although writing captions might seem to be one of the aspects of an exhibition least affected by a transition to an online platform – text is text, whether online or on a gallery wall – the pandemic did create an unexpected dilemma for us. How do you write about something you’ve never seen?

As any art history professor will tell you, writing about a work of art without seeing it in person is a thoroughly suspect practice. One of my professors was famous for requiring students to spend no less than three hours before a work of art before even beginning to compose their essays. Since we were still finalising our list of works when COVID-19 precipitated the closure of the collection stores and the relocation of many of the students away from London, only one of us was ever able to see any of the works in person. And like us, all of the visitors to our exhibition will view the works of art only through the pixelated veil of a computer or smartphone screen.

Interpretation – the written words that help explain, contextualise, or translate the work of art – seems to hold the danger of increasing that sense of separation. The root of ‘interpreter’ is a Latin word meaning a go-between, an agent, a negotiator. ‘Interpretation’ in the museum carries that same sense of bridging a distance: a text that mediates a conversation between artwork and viewer.

Yet what we were most concerned to preserve for our viewers was that very sense of closeness and contact that was most threatened by the online space. We were determined that the works of art still be able to touch viewers, to hold their attention – a task made more difficult given the siting of the exhibition within the internet’s empire of distraction. How then to interpret in a way that lessens the distance, rather than increasing it?

My hope is that our interpretation functions less as a thing (or as a description of a thing, so two things, really) than as an event, as a certain type of mental action. I’d like to foreground the idea of ‘reading’ as an open-ended, ongoing practice, rather than as a finished, self-contained text – ‘a reading of the work’. I’m eager that you should come with me on this voyage, this act of crossing between shores. Our interpretations, if they work as they should, are simply invitations to you, dear reader.

All things audio – Matilda McEvedy

I’ve been reflecting on the exhibition over the last three weeks. It’s almost easier to spend time interrogating our curatorial process in hindsight than it was when we actually doing it. As the lead on creating the audio content for the site, in particular I’ve been listening to the audio pieces over and over again on the website. I can even quote some of them word for word at his point.

Audio was something we were very passionate about including, especially after an introductory session to how art museums use audio for exhibitions by Sam McGuire, Interpretation Curator at Tate. There was a danger, more so now that we were making the move online, that the experience of interacting with the artworks would be bland, flat, lifeless. Although these are concerns for any exhibition, virtual and physical alike, that immediacy and life is already inherent to a physical exhibition. It’s the experience of being there and then, with the works so close you could touch them if you wanted. You are surrounded by other people all talking and moving and actively looking.

We were very conscious that visitors would be experiencing Unquiet Moments very differently. Maybe sat at home, alone, in front of your computer. Something was needed to lift these works off the screen, to give the site a voice, and tell stories to the visitor.

It was this emphasis on companionship and conversation that guided our audio journey. Having all become well acquainted with Zoom calls, I set about interviewing the other nine curators for pieces focussed on guided looking. Similarly, I asked various people, both individuals and families, to reflect on their personal experiences. The stories that emerged were surprisingly intimate windows to their lives, memories and musings. Alongside Berthe Morisot’s intimate etching of herself drawing with her daughter, I interviewed mother and daughter Kim and Daysee Thornton. They talk openly about how they’re relationship has grown over the years and laugh about Kim’s wish for a son. It is this raw and real storytelling alongside Morisot’s touching print that allows us to come to it with our own experiences and relationships and connect with the work.

Another audio accompaniment that I love is the commissioned sound piece for Kathy Prendergast’s sculpture, The End and the Beginning, 1996. Sound artist, Iris Mathieson responded to the artwork by looping together sounds of her hair being brushed and old tapes of her chatting with her mother. The result are these mesmerising layers of sound, that hold a distinct nostalgia and personal resonance.

I’ve learnt a lot about the power of listening during this project. I constructed multitudes of interview questions over the lead up period, often unwittingly attempting to lead the speaker in a direction of my own choice. However, when I left the questions short and open and dictated solely by the speaker’s experience, I was surprised and delighted by the humour and profundity of their responses. Their responses moved me with how powerful these everyday moments and relationships really are.

Things lost, things gained – Annie Birchenough

At a time when we are looking for new visions for the future, we must tap into these feelings of disquiet and of turning in to each other and our surroundings. Coming up with new visions relies on imaginative thinking which is nourished by creative practice: that’s why art and the way it masters the imaginary appear ever so important to me right now.
—Mikhail Karikis, 2020

In March 2020, London ground to a halt. Museums, galleries and cultural centres closed their doors, and we were all left out in the cold, told to return home and await further instruction. The city sat empty, eerily post-apocalyptic. The pandemic has in many ways united the world, bringing human kind together in a rare moment of collective vulnerability. However, the past four months have been different for everyone. Each personal pandemic-tale will be passed between friends for years to come. It has been a time of immense difficulty and devastating loss for so many people, the wake of which will be felt across many generations.

As a group of nine young curators, caught up in the global pandemic whilst studying for a Masters, our story is not one of such devastation. In the context of the world situation, we have been incredibly lucky. We have been able to complete our programme on time, we have continued to learn and work closely as a group, and we have even walked away with new, unexpected skills and expertise that will arm us better than others for the world that awaits.

Producing Unquiet Moments as an online exhibition was not something we ever expected or planned for. Collectively we experienced our own sense of loss, mourning the months of friendship and study in London we had hoped for, stopped in our tracks with the closure of the museums, libraries and archives we had envisaged living among. Above all we seemed to have lost what for many of us would be the first exhibition of our careers. The launching moment of life as a curator.

Four months later, we are on the other side of the great unknown that had stretched before us and we are able to reflect upon and appreciate the things gained by those lost; the windows that opened when the pandemic bluntly slammed the front door shut.

In my role working with the Arts Council Collection and liaising with all our living artists, the greatest gain has been in the relationships and communication made newly possible. Unquiet Moments brings together the work of 25 artists, 19 of which are alive today. We spent time speaking at length with almost all of those artists, which, for a student exhibition sourcing loans through National Collections is remarkable.

We have been astounded by the generosity of these artists to help us with our thinking and inform our interpretation and curatorial approach. It has been a joy to hear their thoughts on the move of their work online and discuss the poigiency of their practices in the pandemic moment. Almost without exception, all have been invigorated and excited by the opportunity to be shown alongside each other – as well as old masters from The Courtauld Collection – made possible by the digital liberation from atmosphere controls and display conditions.

Relationships between the artists have also been gained. Mohini Chandra and Karl Ohiri, whose practices and interests overlap in a multitude of ways, met for the first time this month, and the conversation between them, recorded and archived for years to come, marked a moment of artistic collaborative conversation we never expected. Likewise, Andrea Luka Zimmerman and Mikhail Karikis, old friends and admirers of each other’s work, will come together this week, an event never physically possible due to their geographic separation.

If I were to continue writing about the opportunities of imagining this exhibition online, you would be stuck reading for hours. But this does not render the physical irrelevant. As museums begin tentatively to reopen, the human need for physical cultural encounters will appear clearer than ever. However, I believe we are moving into a world where these two things must live in parallel, where the focus is no longer on replacing that which is lost, but maintaining what has been newly acquired.

When I am asked in years to come where I was during the (First) Great Lockdown of 2020, I expect I will respond that I was on the vanguard of a new moment of cultural experience, learning what might be gained in the face of loss.