Context and Display

Co-ordinated by Reshma Chhiba

6 May 2019

Primarily focusing on archives, historical laws or acts and biographies, this course examines the context and display of art as key areas of exhibition making. It focuses on three exhibitions as examples of different curatorial strategies to unpack ideas of unsettling erasures, re-writing or re-staging gendered biographies, questioning narratives of apartheid in the current moment and disruptions of the timeline as a curatorial strategy. The course examines how art exhibitions and curatorial interventions, in different social and political milieu, enables various kinds of artistic and institutional critique.

Working with two different curatorial prompts, students created displays as one of the components of their course outcomes

Prompt A: Making use of the archival material, biographies/biomythography, performance residue and/or historical documentation, create a mini-exhibition using strategies of archival and timeline disruptions, re-enactments and re-staging in response to the artwork /artist of your choice.

Prompt B: In thinking about your curatorial framework, use either a book, song, pod-cast, poem, film of historical significance as a starting point for your mini-exhibition. Draw out the core concepts, themes and/or ideas from this reference material to respond to an artwork/artist of your choice to create a display.

Photography by Reshma Chhiba