Conferences While BAN had made provision for an annual conference in the past, shaped by the BAN team, the Research and the Museum Ecosystem conference planned for 2020 was postponed and then cancelled in light of the developing COVID situation. Selected presentations were recorded and issued online, together with an essay by Emily Pringle, Head of Research, Tate reflecting on ‘Museum research in turbulent times’. These circumstances provided an opportunity to rethink the role and direction of a BAN-led conference. In line with emerging commitments to devolved programming and expanding our sense of curation and its histories, future annual conference programmes with be led by guest convenors, working in close dialogue with the Convenor and the rest of the BAN team to explore our overarching theme of rethinking the curatorial. For 2021 we invited curator and researcher Paul Goodwin (TrAIN, University of the Arts London) to convene a programme of roundtables, films and interviews focused on the emergence, strategies and agency of Black curatorial practices in Britain over the past 40 years. The resulting programme, Genealogies of Black Curating in Britain, traces a fragmented history of Black curating in British art. The genealogical approach suggested a discontinuous and multi-perspectival take on the emergence, development and futures of Black curatorial voices in British art. The discussions opened new perspectives and cross generational dialogues on disputed histories, urgent presents and (im)possible futures. How can we account for the contributions of Black and Asian curatorial practices and voices that have been marginal until recently in British art histories? And how can we understand the complexities and contradictions of these practices and discourses in relation to the ‘expanded field’ of the curatorial?
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