Collaborative Curating: Journeys with 'The Waste Land'

Collaborative Curating: Journeys with ‘The Waste Land’

Our Curatorial Research Grants have allowed many exhibitions to come to fruition. To celebrate exhibitions supported by the Centre, we have invited four recipients of these grants to speak during our Summer series of Fellows Lunches. One of the speakers, Trish Scott, a Research Curator at Turner Contemporary, writes below about the collaborative curatorial process behind the exhibition Journeys with ‘The Waste Land’.

In April 2015, with the support of a Paul Mellon Grant, I joined Turner Contemporary as Research Curator to develop a pioneering new approach to a curatorial project. The result is the exhibition Journeys with ‘The Waste Land’, a visual response to T. S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land, which was partly written in Margate in 1921. The show, originally initiated by Professor Mike Tooby, has been developed in collaboration with a group of local residents, aged between twenty and eighty, who have all brought their differing thoughts and life experiences to bear on this seminal literary work. This Research Group has undertaken everything from thematic research to design and interpretation, to create an exhibition of 100 artworks and artefacts by over 60 artists, including Fiona Banner, Leonora Carrington, Cecil Collins, Tacita Dean, Edward Hopper, Winifred Knights, Henry Moore, Paul Nash, Paula Rego, and J. M. W. Turner. Just as the poem contains many voices and jumps between different moments in time, so too, very deliberately, does the exhibition.

Developing the exhibition has involved thinking about curating experientially. Rather than acting as sole decision maker, I have helped a diverse group of people to develop structures and processes for making decisions themselves, engaging with and re-thinking procedures usually invisible and off-bounds to audiences.

The input of people with different backgrounds and interests throughout the research process has led to some rich juxtapositions, which are unlikely to have come about had the show been curated in a more traditional way. For example, one Research Group member (having previously worked as a translator for a Scientific Committee exploring the history of quantum physics) proposed an archival image of sub-atomic particle tracks. This now sits in the exhibition alongside Man Ray’s 1921 photograph Dust Breeding; both reflect on the treatment of time in The Waste Land, and on what constitutes nothingness in relation to the poem’s famous words “I can connect/ Nothing with nothing.”

The exhibition is also distinctive in its layout and use of verbatim interpretation. Snippets of conversations, accessed via listening points throughout the exhibition, reflect the various viewpoints of Research Group members and present artworks as debatable propositions rather than rarified choices.

Through this collaboration, Research Group members have developed new skills and competencies, which are already yielding fresh projects, such as a public series of nearly forty events occurring across Margate in partnership with eighteen local venues. For me, the exhibition has been an opportunity to examine subjectivity in the curatorial process and to develop alternative methods for decision making, in ways that address concerns around entitlement and validation in cultural programming.

Trish Scott will speak about this exhibition at the Paul Mellon Centre on 22 May as part of the Fellows Lunch: Curator series. For more information, please see our Events Calendar on page 30.