International Curating
After designing exhibitions for some of the finest art galleries and museums in the world, I became an arts administrator, first as a gallery curator, then as an independent cultural developer, all the while maintaining a lively design practice.
Two events coincided to direct my interests towards contemporary art practices about which I knew very little.
70 | 2000
The Road to Meikle Seggie
The first was Richard Demarco’s exhibition, 70 | 2000 The Road to Meikle Seggie, which I organised on behalf of Kingston University London and the Demarco European Art Foundation. Here I was drawn to the idea of exhibition as total artwork, as social entity.
The exhibition was a manifestation of Richard’s deep commitment to the avant garde, marrying conventional curating and enlightened social engineering to create a totality, a shared event surpassing the sum of its many parts.
Richard’s friends and colleagues celebrated his 90th birthday in 2020 with an online exhibition, and are now preparing a major commemorative publication. I was delighted to contribute an article about the 70 | 2000 exhibition about which I will say more after publication.
transitstation ::
art in action in art
transitstation arrived on the scene along with 70 | 2000. Devised in its first instance as a fellowship project by my colleague Dagmar Glausnitzer-Smith, transitstation was an emphatic statement of exhibition-as-event.
Between 2003 and 2010 we created transitstation in four European cities: London 2003, Berlin 2005, Edinburgh 2006 and Copenhagen 2010, involving more than 120 international artists and numerous institutions.
transitstation relaunched in January 2021 with a new website and ambitious plans for both virtual and real-space events in 2021, 2022 and 2023.
We are currently preparing voice # 1 for zoom and film: 24 artists performing simultaneously across 8 times zones, recorded for edit and public presentation. Our next voice event will be an open call research paper competition to develop and enhance transitstation’s academic and educational activities.
curating transitstation exhibition-as-event
“From the still quiet of our 10-year sabbatical transitstation prepares to meet a radically changed world. We’re ready to embark on another wonderful creative journey with transitstation artists and colleagues, old and new. It will be – it always is – an unforgettable experience of live art.”
the transitstation relaunch video, a reflection on wind and distance
