Curating Video
Chelsea College of Art MA in Critical Writing & Curatorial Practice,
Sheffield Hallam University MA Curating Contemporary Art, and The Centre
for Curatorial Studies, University of Essex
Curating Video
Symposium
22nd February 2008
Chelsea College of Art
This symposium establishes discussion on the role of video as architectural, ideological and political, and as capable of powerful experiential affect. This is something that has increasingly been attended to in video art and its curation, but the consequences of identifying video in this way have been attended to less. Taking this up we intend to discuss how determining video in this way proposes new questions regarding the politics of art, and our experience of it in the context of contemporary democracy.
If the video image can be experienced as a facet of the architectural, as material and object-based, then how do these constructs establish themselves as part of our lived reality?
To what extent can an expanded idea of curation take on and reflect new shifts in approaches to the materiality and affect of images as demonstrated in new philosophical, architectural and video-arts practices?
Can new attitudes to video and the curation of video works move us beyond an assumed understanding of shared public space (the place of ‘everyday’ experience) as authentic, real and distinct from the experiences produced through video?
How can this understanding of video and the curatorial inform and transform our comprehension of public shared space?
Special Guest speakers include:
Professor Anne Tallentire; artist, Central Saint Martins, UAL
Professor Mark Nash; Director MA Curating, Royal College of Art and co-curator
Documenta 11
Calum Storrie; architect, exhibition designer and author of The Delirious
Museum
Curating Video is along term research project established in 2003, led
as a collaboration between Dr Amanda Beech, (Course Director, MA Critical
Writing and Curatorial Practice, Chelsea College of Art, UAL) Dr Jaspar
Joseph-Lester (Course Leader, MA Curating, Sheffield Hallam University)
and Matthew Poole (Programme Director, Centre for Curatorial Studies,
University of Essex). It has included two exhibitions that have been shown
internationally in 5 locations, where each exhibition has discussed the
political affect of the experiences of lens-based media artworks and how
notions of the curatorial extend and respond to this. To date, they have
involved 3 symposia of which this is the fourth and an upcoming book due
for publication in August this year from Artwords press.