On Monday 13 June, Anna Jamieson chaired an event titled “Curating Mental Health” for the Centre for Museum Cultures, featuring curator Clare Barlow (Science Museum) and research lead Michaela Ross (Bethlem Gallery). Key topics of discussion included the ethical and practical dilemmas that curators working in the field of the medical humanities and “mental health” face, and what other issues are at stake within these types of displays.
Clare Barlow talked about her work on the Wellcome Collection’s Being Human exhibition, which opened in 2019. First considering the various contested definitions of “mental health”, Barlow described the intensive consultation process with stakeholders, and the tensions between the medical gaze and the social model of disability, the latter proving an important curatorial framework. Also important to Barlow’s curatorial practice was creating an “emotional arc” for the visitor, providing quiet and reflective moments where visitors could feel held and secure. Michaela Ross discussed her work as research lead at Bethlem Gallery. She drew upon her close personal ties with several artists and service-users, building upon Barlow’s discussion of the importance of trust when working with artists in exhibitions of this nature. She raised issues of care within the curatorial process, for artist, visitor and staff member alike.
On the evening of 26
November, the virtual common space of Birkbeck’s Centre for Museum Cultures and
UCL’s PPV (Perverting the Power Vertical) was filled with almost two hundred virtual
guests. They came to discuss the impact of the exhibition which had stirred the
audiences and museum corridors in Poland ten years ago, and which reverberates
in the museum world until the present. Ars Homo Erotica, curated by Paweł
Leszkowicz, and shown at The National Museum in Warsaw from
June to August 2010 was the first large scale exhibition which openly championed
the equality of the LGBTQ+ community in
Poland by demonstrating the endurance of homoerotic themes and aesthetics in art across time and space. It was also
a manifesto of the Critical Museum, the new model of the museum institution which,
rejecting neutrality claims, takes an active part in the struggle for equality
and pluri-versality. The concept of the Critical Museum, which anticipates the current
radicalisation of the definition of the museum, was devised by the then Director of the Warsaw Museum, Professor Piotr
Piotrowski (1953-2015), the author of ground-breaking books about
Eastern European avant-gardes. This event was devoted to his memory.
Ars Homo Erotica: Ten Years
Later was organised by Piotrowski’s Deputy at the Warsaw
museum at that time, Kasia Murawska-Muthesius, Birkbeck, co-editor, with Piotr
Piotrowski, of the book on the Critical
Museum, in co-operation with the originators of the Perverting
the Power Vertical series of seminars at UCL: Michal Murawski, SEES/ UCL,
Masha Mileeva of The Courtauld Institute of Art, and Denis Maksimov.
The event, moderated by
Michal Murawski, assembled a panel of distinguished speakers, from Poland,
Britain and the US, all of them either directly or indirectly involved in the
exhibition. The Curator of Ars Homo Erotica Paweł Leszkowicz presented
the political agenda of the exhibition and its scenario, made of sections
focused on homoerotic themes in art, such as ‘Male
Nude’, ‘Saint Sebastian’, ‘Lesbian Imaginarium’, ‘Transgender’, and history,
from ‘Homoerotic Classicism’ to ‘The Time
of Struggle’, focused on art and LGBT activism in East Central Europe. He also
claimed that the operation of queering museum collections, initiated in Warsaw,
should be continued in all museums, all the way up to Vatican. Maura
Reilly, who listed the exhibition among the most significant shows on gender
issues in her award-winning book Curatorial
Activism: Towards an Ethics of Curating, contextualised Ars
Homo Erotica’s impact in Poland within the politics of the feminist and
LGBTQ+ movement. The philosopher and civic activist Tomek Kitliński, and the Scottish
painter Angus Reid, whose exhibition of gay male nudes Parallel
Lives is now on show at Summerhall, Edinburgh, talked about
the current protests in Poland, focusing on the
political dimension of gender and queer in Eastern Europe. Anastasiia
Fedorova presented her Instagram exhibition of the Russian
queer revolution. Finally, Kasia Perlak, a Polish artist
active in London, showed extracts from her poignant films which rework the most
heteronormative forms of culture, folk songs and
the wedding ceremony, as
sites of queer resistance, amidst the escalation of homophobic violence in
Poland. Lively discussions followed. Among the topics raised were the political
dimension of queer, the issue of intersectionality brought up by Erica Lehrer,
the concept of curating love, as well as the idea of nomadic shows in provinces
untangling and endorsing homoerotic love, proposed by Natalia Romik. The
informal conversation with Sarah Wilson ran long after the event was officially
closed. A recording of the event, by William Haggerty, is accessible at Ars Homo
Erotica – Ten Years Later.
Ars Homo Erotica at the National Museum of Warsaw.
The event was organised jointly by Birkbeck’s Centre for Museum Cultures; PPV (Perverting the Power Vertical), a research and art platforms based at the FRINGE Centre (UCL SSEES/Institute for Advanced Studies) and The Courtauld Institute of Art.
In June 2020 we were delighted to host the artists Blast Theory for a presentation and discussion of their work on pandemics and contagion. An edited recording of the event is now available to watch online.
During the event two videos by Blast Theory were shown separately. Each video is introduced during the recording, so we recommend pausing the recording at the relevant points to watch the videos.
Mapping Museums is a four year research project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. It is based in the Department of History of Art and the Department of Computer Science and Information Systems at Birkbeck.
The research team:
collected and validated data on over 4,000 museums
devised a new system for museum subject classification
designed a database that allows that information to be browsed, searched, and visualised in nuanced ways
analysed the data and identified patterns in the emergence, distribution, and closure of museums, produced a findings report
investigated trends in the data through historical and interview-based research
A bottle of Camp Coffee on a shelf in Mr Straw’s House, a National Trust property in Worksop, is the starting point for this short talk by Silke Arnold-de Simine that covers colonialism, sexuality, and propaganda.
In May 2019 Centre for Museum Cultures hosted a discussion about the exhibition with Anthony Bale, Joanne Rosenthal, and Marc Volovici. Anthony Bale, Professor of Medieval Studies at Birkbeck, David Feldman, Professor of History and Director of the Pears Institute, and Dr Volovici, Pears Institute Early Career Fellow, acted as academic advisors for the exhibition.
On 1 March the Centre for Museum Cultures hosted what proved to be an engaging and animated lecture by Wendy Shaw, Professor of the Art History of Islamic Cultures at the Free University of Berlin.
Shaw opened her talk with images of birds with multi-hued plumes preserved in their thousands at a natural history museum in Berlin, describing the systematic collection of thousands of creatures culled from various parts of the world and now housed in a form of feathered purgatory. She described the cabinet storage and display strategies designed for the delectation of the western gaze as the entombment of dead objects in the museum.
The speaker drew parallels between the collection, categorisation, curation and display of these artefacts and the processes that now define Islamic art in the museum space. She observed the lingering presence of Hegelian approaches to the production of history, and specifically art history, in modern curatorial practices. Hegel’s Philosophy of History in particular, a lecture series given in alternating years starting in 1823 delineated, she explained, a vision of history that naturalises empire, emphasising the racial and geographical superiority of the West over the East, and of Protestant Christianity over everything else.
Highlighting the colonial legacies of museums, Shaw noted that the acquisition and categorisation of objects had been carried out without an understanding of the cultures concerned. Pointing to the mismatch between the original purposes of collections of material artefacts and the manner of their display today, she underlined the necessity of acknowledging and critiquing Hegel’s legacy within the museum context. No number of contemporary exhibitions or the rewriting of museum narratives can change these structures of empire that remain embedded within the episteme she contended, arguing that the decolonisation of minds can only be achieved by the rewriting of institutional structures, not merely words.
Shaw noted that while the category of Islamic Art emerged largely in Germanic art historical discourse, with the emigration of several of its proponents to the United States the essentialist biases of several writers, curators and critics began to shape the ways in which Islamic art has been understood in the ‘West’. She argued that through these practices, and the processes of modernity, such material objects – now absorbed within notions of a ‘universal’ language of art – were effectively rendered silent. Raising the question of how to recover the voices of such worlds, Shaw problematised the development of contemporary exhibition strategies. A lively exchange of views and questions followed the lecture.
Dr Vazken Davidian
Dr Davidian recently completed his PhD at Birkbeck on the subject of The Figure of the Bantoukhd Hamal of Constantinople: Late Nineteenth-Century Representations of Migrant Workers from Ottoman Armenia.
The Museum Cultures group with Dr. Lucy Peltz (right)
On a grey Monday evening in December, a small group was treated to a private tour of the warmth and colour of Gainsborough’s Family Album, the latest show at the National Portrait Gallery. Including paintings never seen in public before, the exhibition includes almost all of Gainsborough’s paintings of members of his family.
Dr Lucy Peltz, an Honorary Research Fellow at Birkbeck and curator of the show alongside David Solkin, guided us through the different rooms of the exhibition with an illuminating commentary on the paintings and their sitters. Lucy also discussed the work involved behind the scenes, with considerations ranging from the different possibilities for arranging the paintings to the selection of wall colours, and the considerable work involved in arranging loans. Despite six years of planning, last-minute adjustments still had to be made when a painting of Gainsborough’s wife Margaret – first sought years earlier – surfaced just weeks before the show opened.
This ‘Meet the Curator’ event was organised by the research centre. Find out about forthcoming events and to be notified in advance, sign up for the mailing list.
Tristram Hunt lectures at Senate House. Photo by Mark Liebenrood
As part of the fiftieth anniversary of Birkbeck’s History of Art department, we welcomed Tristram Hunt, the director of the V&A, for a lecture at Senate House. He began by outlining the museum’s origins in the nineteenth-century design school movement, such as the Government School of Design once based at Somerset House, and the Museum of Manufacture. The spur to the creation of the South Kensington museum, the forerunner of the V&A, was the Great Exhibition of 1851, which aimed to celebrate ingenuity and imagination. That purpose continues today, with around 38% of the V&A’s visitors coming from the creative industries.
The aims of the South Kensington Museum were in part to perpetuate the 1851 Exhibition. Its first show was a display of bad taste, with the purpose of educating the public to make better aesthetic choices. Dr. Hunt wondered whether such an exhibition would get the green light today. He went on to discuss the V&A’s role in education more generally. It has its roots in such radical educators as Gottfried Semper, an associate of Henry Cole and once a lecturer at the Government School of Design. It also has links with Birkbeck’s foundations as a place of education for technical workers. The V&A holds works by Richard Burchett, a student at the Birkbeck Mechanics’ Institute who went on to become a tutor at the Design School. The V&A’s collections were also themselves used as teaching aids. After the Queen loaned the Raphael cartoons to the museum, every student at the Royal College of Art would go there to draw from them.
The collections are growing continually. Some of the most recent acquisitions are a 3D-printed gun, a Burqini, and a Jeremy Corbyn T-shirt. Some acquisitions attract considerable criticism, and Hunt defended the museum’s decision to collect part of the Robin Hood Gardens housing estate. The acquisition was widely criticised, both on the grounds that Brutalism was not worth collecting, and also that the V&A was effectively condoning the destruction of social housing. Hunt pointed out that the V&A has always collected domestic interiors, and the museum would be neglecting its duties as a museum of design were it not to have collected a signature example of Brutalist architecture.
The V&A is expanding to new locations, and the lecture was given just over a month after the opening of V&A Dundee, already attracting large numbers of visitors. Dr. Hunt looked to the future, with V&A East in London’s Olympic Park planned in collaboration with the Smithsonian, and Here East, a project to relocate the museum’s storage facilities to East London with plans for provision to allow some degree of public access to those collections not normally on view.
As Hunt ruefully acknowledged, Brexit presents a big challenge. The rural/urban divide that the Brexit vote highlighted is an encouragement to the V&A to lend more widely across the UK, and that lending is also a response to the collapse in funding for local authority museums. He also pointed to the drastic fall in take-up of arts and technology subjects at GCSE, and highlighted an initiative to lend to regional museums specifically to support GCSE teaching of art and design subjects. The Museum of Childhood in Bethnal Green is also due for a revamp, and the project is being planned in collaboration with local schoolchildren.
In conclusion, Tristram Hunt summed up the role of the museum in challenging times: championing cosmopolitanism, maintaining a trusted factual basis of knowledge in the public sphere when ‘post-truth’ is a growing phenomenon, continuing its role of museum as educator, and not least celebrating wonder and beauty in art and design.
