As part of an on-going partnership with London’s Courtauld Institute, the Arts Council Collection works with postgraduate curatorial students to facilitate lending of works from the Collection for their end of year exhibition. In our latest blog, MA students Saskia Flower and Naomi Polonsky reflect on their experience of working with the Collection to stage this year’s exhibition, There Not There.
Whilst studying the Curating the Art Museum MA programme at The Courtauld, students are asked to put on an exhibition in The Courtauld Gallery using works from The Courtauld and Arts Council Collections. In just six months we must choose a selection of art works from the tens of thousands at our disposal and develop a theme.
The Curating MA programme is designed to include students with very different interests and tastes in art. One member of our group has a particular interest in Dutch Golden Age painting, while another has a penchant for contemporary Korean art. Although our meetings sometimes resembled scenes from ‘The Apprentice’, the process was a crash-course in teamwork and collaboration.
In previous years, the MA Curating students have been asked to respond to The Courtauld’s main exhibition: in 2017 it was Bloomsbury Art & Design, in 2016 Georgina Houghton: Spirit Drawings. This year, however, because of The Courtauld’s major redevelopment project, Courtauld Connects, there was no main exhibition to respond to. We were given an almost completely open brief. It consisted of two words - ‘making space’ - which was linked to The Courtauld’s impending two-year closure. We set out to curate an exhibition that marked this transitional moment in The Courtauld’s history.
The process of coming up with a concept for the exhibition was somewhat ‘chicken-and-egg’. We wanted the art works to lead us to a theme, but we needed a theme in order to narrow down art works. Our exhibition theme went through dozens of iterations before we finally settled on our concept: There Not There.