Educator

dhikshana-turakhia-pering

Director: DHIKSHANA TURAKHIA PERING

I first met Dhikshana Turakhia Pering when she joined my team as Head of Engagement and Skills at Somerset House, London, in January 2020, just as a pandemic engulfed the world.

We sadly only worked together for three months, but in that time we established a brilliant, supportive working relationship and I remain a fervent champion of Dhikshana.

I love her dynamic creative leadership, cheeky sense of humour, optimism, enthusiasm, and dogged determination to instigate change for the greater good.

She is down to earth, playful, brave, refreshingly honest and takes risks to clear the way for others to thrive and demonstrate excellence.

Dhikshana has recently been appointed as the first Director of Programmes for the National Saturday Club, leading the creative direction of their education programme of national events.

The National Saturday Club enables 13–16-year-olds across the UK with opportunities to develop valuable creative and practical skills, increase their confidence, and introduce them to pathways to further and higher education and rewarding careers.

Dhikshana Turakhia Pering, Photo Courtney Hugh Campbell

At Somerset House Dhikshana focused on a new strategy for the team, with a focus on young people’s engagement and skills development, coproduction of new work with their onsite creative community and content development around the cultural programme. During 2020 she led on what a post Covid-19 engagement programme would look like and the organisation’s Anti-Racism Pledge.

Dhikshana’s career has been built in London over 16 years, working in learning and engagement across the Science Museum, London Transport Museum, and Brent 2020 – London Borough of Culture. She has led teams and collaborated with different audiences, but has found her interest lies with young adults, skills development, and coproduction, and exploring the use of digital mediums and public space in a cultural context.

Dhikshana holds two master’s degrees in History and Art History from the University of Aberdeen, Scotland and in Museum and Gallery Education from UCL Institute of Education, London.

She has lectured widely and given talks on master’s courses including at UCL Institute of Education, London, and at national and international conferences, seeking to share and learn from best practice, and actively be part of the change she desires to see.

Dhikshana is an active member and finds great solidarity, solace, and support in the Museum Detox network. Dhikshana was an elected Trustee of the Museums Association since 2016, actively working on sector-wide workforce developments and co-led and launched their Learning & Engagement Manifesto. In 2022 Dhikshana was appointed to the board of Clore Leadership.

Film still from the Future Producers' Rising: A Manifesto, 2021, Courtesy of Edwin Mingard and Somerset House Trust

What’s currently inspiring you?

So many ways to explore this question but I’m going to start with joy. If I feel joy personally then all else follows well. It starts with schmaltz, from the rom coms, coming of age themes, the montage style flash forwards, the dazzling poppy bright colours, the list could go on. From an early age I was drawn to stories, music, television, and films that fit this bill, maybe it was to escape but it also inspired me and fed into my education and career. As I grew older, I was still drawn to this genre, but it became apparent that it was not representing me or my life and that is the shift I have seen in the last few years. So right now, I have just watched season 3 of Never Have I Ever, listened to lots of music produced by Jack Antonoff and reading Brown Girls by Daphne Palasi Andreades. If I could choose somebody to write and direct a rom com of my life it would be directed by Mindy Kaling and Parminder Nagra would play me!

What are you working on?

A moment of change that is about to bring the calm I am looking for, according to my recent Tarot Card reading. I have just finished nearly 3 years of being the Head of Engagement & Skills at Somerset House. My time at Somerset House has been wild and joyful (sometimes) all in one, and I am proud of what we have achieved in the Engagement & Skills team and wider across Somerset House Trust responding to society and what is happening right now on the ground.

I am super excited to be joining National Saturday Club as their values and practice align to what I deeply believe in, which is that access to the cultural and creative sector for enjoyment and employment should not be directed by who you know or where you grew up. To be able to align my passion and experience, while I learn and grow with the participants, tutors and partners and shape the future of the National Saturday Club programme with the wider team is an amazing opportunity. Also, can I say "Mama, I have made it" a quote from a brilliant young woman I knew called Khadija Saye, who sadly passed in the Grenfell fire with her Mama, but when I got the job, I thought of her and that quote.

What are your core values and drivers that you bring to your work? What do you care about?

In 2017 I had the pleasure to take part in the Clore Leadership Short course. It was a life changing moment in my life, I was sitting on my first board, looking at what my next step may be career wise, and about to have a baby. As part of the course, we had a coaching session and my coach and I decided to write a mission statement to help me focus and navigate a lot of change.

Since then, I have manifested this mission statement several times over. I have updated the language slightly, but overall, it has stayed the same. It guides me day to day even when I don’t realise it and incorporates:

  • Life balance
  • Being my true self
  • Working in and with a team
  • Having fun in a team and organisation
  • Giving young people a voice
  • Collaboration on a vision
  • A brilliant programme – well run, effective and has impact
  • Constantly refining a programme
  • Links to popular culture and issues of our time
  • Strategy and vision
  • Representation

Can you provide an example of how you have commissioned artists recently?

In my time at Somerset House, I have worked with artists in a coproduction model in several ways, a flag and film commission linked to our No Comply exhibition with Rose Nordin for OOMK and artist Seth Pimlott. Both worked with our first cohort of Future Producers to explore the themes and create the design of the flag and the storyboard and content of the final film.

While at Brent 2020 as the Young People’s Producer the young people I worked with led a public space design and policy project called Seen and Heard. The aim of the project was to design the space for use and develop a charter and policy guidelines to advise local authorities across the country on how young people should be consulted on development in their area and be part of the solutions to social issues such a knife crime. Collaborating with partners such as LSE Cities, design collective OOMK and developer Quintain, the young people gained skills, learnt about different sectors, made a physical impact on their community and a policy impact on how young people should be seen all in a creative way.

Future Producers' workshop for Rising: A Manifesto, 2021, Photo courtesy of Somerset House Trust

How did you select them and what were the stages in the commissioning process?

I have been commissioning artists for coproduction with young people since 2015, this has ranged from exhibitions, digital content, and events. On reflection I can see whether my role was as the producer leading the planning and delivery, or the Head of Department guiding a team to commission artists, my focus is to create the right environment to enable three clear elements come together. The three elements are artist, young people, and institution together, creating exciting content that has representation and social justice at its core. I think of it like a fire tringle you need the oxygen, heat, and fuel, the content is the fire and the team that make it happen the scientists.

I set clear vision and guiding principles, so everyone is on the same page, as well as make sure as team we have collaboratively decided the vibe that we are going for across our programme to make sure there is consistency and clarity for our audiences to know what to expect. But none of this hinders the commissioning process as the content created is free to go on the unexpected journey of the coproduction, but the structures I mentioned give bumpers to slide everyone back on to track for what we are trying to achieve.

Once we have an idea about what the shell of the commission would look like we think about our networks, and wider, and then approach a few different artists to discuss the opportunity with and see if it fits for them. Things can chop and change at this point. After that we decide on who we are going with, get the boring paperwork out the way and work on session plans and timelines collaboratively and then get to the best bit making stuff happen!

Seen and Heard workshop, Courtesy of Brent 2020, London Borough of Culture

What advice do you have for artists who want to work with arts institutions and museums?

I would say reach out, say what idea you have, and what connections you may be able to make with the programme you have seen come out of the institution. Don’t spend ages on a big fancy document or brief, just share some very topline thoughts and then if it connects you may get a follow up meeting. If it doesn’t, don’t take it badly, it may just not work right now but you’re on their radar for sure!

A lot of institutions programme ahead of time (like 20 years!) so they may not be able to ever think how they can work with you there and then but learning and engagement teams have more flex. So maybe consider looking at ways you can connect with a team dreaming up and delivering exciting content for audiences visiting and to bring in new audiences.

Institutions can hold the process and practicalities for you (that boring paperwork) so the creative vison and engagement needed with the young people or community you’re engaging with can be focused on. Utilise the producer or manager you are working with to support in holding and advising on what their role can be so you can focus on the longer-term creative journey.

If entering a commission process that is a coproduction be ready to not have the final say or even know the outcome the ‘fire triangle’ model allows a collaboration that is uncharted, and the journey is as important as the final piece of work.

What risks have you taken in the past that did not go well but you learnt the most from?

A few - I started small and they have got bigger! I say to anyone I work with take a risk, make a mistake as that’s the only way we and things change and move.

In one job I thought I could change a database setting myself and ended up inviting a years’ worth of schools to sessions when we already were fully booked. I owned up with lots of apologies, and then my boss concluded that we did need to change the database, so I led on it!

Launching a brand-new programme in the middle of a pandemic (I thought we were coming out the other side, optimism on my part was high!) meant we could not set the programme up as we wanted. This resulted in a lot of online fatigue, things being paused which led to difficult conversations on all sides. After some evaluation and mediation, a clear way to move forward was presented and whilst still not perfect, there are some exciting next steps for this programme strand, and we would not have got there if we had not risked launching it in the first place.

The biggest risk recently well in the last few years that’s standing up for myself and making my voice heard. Not really a risk, right? We should just be doing that. Well one time I did it ahead of starting at Somerset House and it backfired. It led to me being ignored and belittled in front of peers and partners. It hurt a lot. I knew I could leave, which I did, but what I learnt from it was that while it was hard, and it didn’t change anything in the bigger picture, it did for me personally.

It showed me my voice should matter, but it should mater to me that I am speaking my truth and putting it out there. Since then, I have done it again and this time it was heard and changed has happened.

What would you like to change in the arts?

The duplication of programmes that are all trying to do the same thing. Some of that is down to lack of strategy in local authorities about what is being delivered in an area, some of that is down to arm’s length bodies asking for more programmes rather than joining up existing ones to have a strategic impact and finally it is funders that want new and improved programmes to secure more funding rather than seeing success and allowing funding to grow and create a strategic impact of existing programmes.

So, what would I like to see change is how we bring this all together, map it out and create a bedrock of sharing and signposting to great programmes and resources around the work of learning and engagement.

Can you tell I am dyslexic and like process and clarity? I also just like making sure no one must start from scratch!

What helpful resources would you recommend to artists?

Below is a list of organisations that will hopefuly help artists investigate organisations and bodies that are key to the work of the sector.

Resources to help navigate and deliver:

Museums Association is a membership organisation that campaigns for socially engaged museums and a representative workforce

OF/BY/FOR ALL provides tools, community, accountability, and coaching on radical inclusion

Creative People Places is a funding programme which focuses on parts of the country where involvement in creativity and culture is significantly below the national average

Paul Hamlyn Foundation is one of the largest independent grant-making foundations in the UK, supporting social change

Durham University; Creativity Commission Report and Recommendations is a joint research collaboration between Durham University and Arts Council England, set up to look at the role creativity and creative thinking should play in the education of young people

Gem enables learning across museum, heritage, and cultural settings

Engage are the leading charity for promoting engagement and participation in the visual arts

Examples of organisations doing the work:

Arts Emergency mentoring charity and support network for young people to enable them to flourish in higher education and the cultural industries.

Take Apart make great art with communities

Somerset House is home to the UK’s largest creative community working across art, technology, business, and social enterprise

National Museum Wales is charity comprising of seven national museums and one collections centre

Horniman Museum brings together art, nature, and its myriad collections

Glasgow Womens Library is dedicated to women’s lives, histories, and achievements

Museum of Homelessness exhibitions, events and research tackling homelessness and inequality run by people with experience of homelessness

Pitt Rivers Museum houses more than 500,000 objects, photographs, and manuscripts from all over the world

Company Three is a theatre company led by the ideas of their seventy-five members aged 11-19

Resolve Collective is design collective combining architecture, engineering, technology, and art to address social challenges

Ferarts is an artist-led collective platforming emerging socially - engaged creatives from diverse communities

Mindspray unites creative leaders to establish sustainable links between community, careers, and wellbeing

Culture& opens up the arts and heritage sectors through workforce initiatives and public programmes

Roundhouse provides thousands of 11–25-year-olds the chance to develop their skills and confidence through creativity in music, media, or the performing arts

Blaze Arts is a youth led, arts charity born in Lancashire

What advice do you have for people who want a career in the arts?

Don’t decide what your full career plan is. The arts, like the rest of the world are changing fast and the job you may do one day doesn’t even exist yet. The last three jobs I had were not a thing when I started my career in 2006.

Money is important. Work out what it is you need to live your life well and see negotiation of a fee or salary as a place to explore not just more money, but flexibility in how your work, where you work, annual leave and support in the form of mentoring or coaching for example. These things have value too and may enable you to live and work in a happier and more successful way.

My checklist of unlocking your power is…

  • Be your brilliant self… and own it
  • Be clear in your own guiding principles for life and work
  • Check the organisations you’re approaching to work with and for – do they fit with your guiding principles?
  • Connect with networks…most importantly the people in them
  • Listen to your gut…it speaks the truth (and tells you when your hungry)
  • Learn the groundwork, understand it from processes to how and why things are done as they are done - you can’t change the model if you don’t know how it works
  • Quiet leadership is a thing, and you can do it even before you have the ‘title’
  • It’s ok to walk away…that is power
  • Share the power…when you have it

Follow Dhikshana on Instagram @d.t.pering and visit Saturday Club

 

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Sarah-Cook-Blog-1

Interview: SARAH COOK

I first met curator, writer and academic Sarah Cook when I was Director of Exhibitions at FACT in Liverpool, in 2004. Sarah was, at that time, engaged in pioneering work, establishing CRUMB (Curatorial Resource for Upstart Media Bliss), with co-founder Beryl Graham in Newcastle and Gateshead. Together they hosted workshops and courses worldwide and CRUMB was, and remains, a vital resource and network for curators of new media art.

Sarah continues to champion international artists working with technology, always creating new commissioning, funding and exhibiting opportunities for them. She thrives on immersing herself in deep research, has an enviable ability to retain facts and seamlessly weave the contemporary and historical to address the issues of our time. Throughout her work she marries the social, political and cultural spheres in order to help us re-imagine our engagement with technology, each other and how we shape the world around us.

In 2018, whilst I was Director of Programmes at Somerset House, the Director Jonathan Reekie and I invited Sarah to curate the exhibition 24/7 with Jonathan. As always, Sarah worked above and beyond, spinning academic, curatorial, writer and editor plates between Dundee, Glasgow and London, to ensure the show and catalogue were delivered in record time, and a success. This determination and tenacious dedication to her work is reflected in her habit of taking daily swims in the cold Northern sea.

Sarah Cook is Professor of Museum Studies in Information Studies at the University of Glasgow and based in Scotland. She has curated and co-curated international exhibitions of contemporary art and new media art including: 24/7: A Wake-up Call For Our Non-stop World (2019), Somerset House, 2019-20; The Gig Is Up, V2_Institute for Unstable Media, Rotterdam, 2016; Right Here, Right Now, The Lowry, Salford, 2015; Alt-w, the Royal Scottish Academy, SSA Annual Exhibition, Edinburgh, 2014; Not even the sky: Thomson & Craighead, MEWO Kunsthalle, Memmingen, 2013; Biomediations, Transitio_MX_05, Mexico City, 2013; Mirror Neurons, National Glass Centre, Sunderland, 2012; Q.E.D., AND Festival, Liverpool 2011; Untethered, Eyebeam, New York, 2008; Broadcast Yourself, AV Festival 08, Newcastle, 2008; Database Imaginary, 2004 and The Art Formerly Known As New Media, Walter Phillips Gallery, The Banff Centre, 2005.

Sarah is one of the curators behind Scotland’s only digital arts festival NEoN Digital Arts and was founding curator of LifeSpace Science Art Research Gallery in the School of Life Sciences, University of Dundee (2013-2018), where she curated 16 exhibitions including newly commissioned work from artists Mat Fleming, Heather Dewey Hagborg and Philip Andrew Lewis, Andy Lomas, Daksha Patel, the Center for Postnatural History, Helen and Kate Storey, Mary Tsang, Spela Petric and many others.

She is the editor of INFORMATION (Documents of Contemporary Art, Whitechapel and MIT Press, 2016) and co-author (with Beryl Graham) of Rethinking Curating: Art After New Media (MIT Press, 2010; Chinese edition 2016). Sarah has held a longstanding association with The Banff Center, developing exhibitions, summits, curatorial residencies and publications including co-editing with Sara Diamond Euphoria & Dystopia: The Banff New Media Institute Dialogues (Banff Centre Press, 2011). In 2008 Sarah was the inaugural curatorial fellow at Eyebeam Art and Technology Center in New York. She was curator of new media at BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art from 2004 until 2006, hosting residencies and projects from Germaine Koh, Lev Manovich, Darko Fritz and Studer / van den Berg. For 3 years she was an associate producer with Locus+. After completing her PhD at the University of Sunderland, she also curated exhibitions for the Reg Vardy Gallery and helped establish the MA Curating programme and Professional Development short course with CRUMB.

Sarah holds a Masters degree from the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, New York (class of 1998) and is proud to have begun her professional career as a curatorial researcher in the longstanding internship program at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis working on exhibitions with Yayoi Kusama and Lorna Simpson.

What are you doing, reading, watching or listening to now that is helping you to stay positive?

During lockdown there were some new relaxing weekend routines (involving issues of Grazia and chocolate Magnums for instance) but there wasn’t one thing. Unless you count the Netflix production of Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events, which I’d been meaning to watch for years having loved the books, and it didn’t let me down. The world is quiet here. Whatever bad thing you think is just around the corner, it’s bound to be something worse. Look away.

Which is to say, I adopted a slight ‘ignorance is bliss’ or serendipitous happenstance approach to stop feeling overwhelmed, not just by the bad news, but by the amount of digital creative art content available to consume online and the pressure to be producing material to add to the discussions around it.

Given my academic post in museum studies, I should be writing about the massive change museums have experienced during lockdown. As a sometime historian of new media and digital art I should be tweeting non-stop about this thing called online art that museums are only now discovering. I am doing a bit of both, but it is not possible to do only that given the projects I have on the go and all the time-pressured tasks that come with University work (not least planning for an uncertain year ahead). Despite lockdown lifting and museums and galleries now open again, it’s still not over. I'm watching it all, taking notes, lodging these cultural shifts in my memory, they’ll come in handy later.

I’ve been able to stay positive by not guilt-tripping myself if I miss being part of a conversation thread online, or by delighting in the serendipity of checking social media and finding a link to a live discussion or performance happening right that minute and tuning in for as long as I can. I’ve given myself permission to be both present and absent. Or as Lemony Snicket would say, to do something else right now if it will save my life: “There are times to stay put, and what you want will come to you, and there are times to go out into the world and find such a thing for yourself.”

Installation view of the exhibition The Gig is Up!, 2016 Curated by Sarah Cook for V2_,
showing crowd-sourced drawings of clouds by self-employed creatives working on fiverr, by Addie Wagenknecht and Pablo Garcia

Do you have an enthusiasm, specialism or a research focus that you bring to your teaching and academic practice?

I love works of art that take pieces of information and turn them into other, often networked, experiences. I like forging connections between early works made with networks or technology, with new works, often made for collective experience.

I have knowledge of media art history - including Internet art - and of the intersection of art and science (which has patches of history of technology and philosophy of science thrown in too). This might explain my curatorial choices.

So, for example, the large-scale exhibition 24/7: A Wake-Up Call For Our Non-Stop World at Somerset House (which I co-curated with Jonathan Reekie) included (among many other things!) Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg’s Machine Auguries, a light and sound installation based on an AI-generated dawn chorus, Thomson&Craighead’s BEACON, a flap sign displaying randomly a decade’s worth of Internet searches mixed with live searches, and Daily tous les jours I Heard There Was a Secret Chord - a room where you could collectively hum Leonard Cohen’s song Hallelujah, creating a choir based on the number of people listening to the track online around the world at that minute. All of these works used innovative software coding and to a certain extent ran live, some in a generative form.

And in the spin-off of 24/7, the show Sleep Mode (an online takeover I curated in June at Somerset House because the original show at Glasgow International in April was cancelled due to COVID-19) viewers could watch Addie Wagenknecht’s online security tips disguised as beauty tutorial videos, or Hyphen-Labs compilation of yawns taken in their facial recognition photo-booth, or hear Alan Warburton talk about the digital rendering of 3D ‘natural’ landscapes in virtual space, on-screen, and how at odds that feels with our desire to collectively experience real nature, off-screen.

lnstallation view of Daily tous les jours' I heard there was a secret chord, seen in the exhibition 24/7: A Wake-Up Call For Our Non-Stop World,
Somerset House, October 31 2019-February 23 2020. Photo courtesy of Somerset House

I currently teach students who want to go on to work in the cultural heritage sector - galleries, libraries, archives and museums - and so to help them understand the practice of curating (and digital curation, which is not the same thing) I use these ‘lively’ interdisciplinary art works to foster discussion around big ideas that curators have to ask themselves, like, where is the audience? How much context is needed to understand this thing? What happens if the material a work uses is unstable – which part is worth preserving? Where or when does the art ‘happen’? Who is responsible for that encounter?

We are living through a huge shift in what we understand to be ‘cultural heritage’ if everything we produce digitally is now part of that. The cultural heritage sector has to rethink what role its institutions play in the creation of culture too. Digital art might tell us as much about the digital transformation of our lives as a defunct computer in a museum display case; bio-art might tell us as much about the major developments in life sciences as an unreadable genome sequence. The Instagram photos of the demonstrators toppling the statue of slaver Colston tell us more about this moment than the removed statue itself does. In a time of total information overload, where do we draw the line around what is a valuable piece of information and what isn’t? Is the Bristol Museum going to save the Instagram posts as well as the graffiti on the statue they dredged out of the harbour? Can we tell the difference between authentic and post-produced types of information (#fakenews)? Perhaps an artist can tell us. Or point us in the direction of the real story.

YoHa (Graham Harwood), Lungs-London.pl, Commissioned for the exhibition Database Imaginary, 2004, Curated by Sarah Cook, Steve Dietz and Anthony Kiendl,
for the Walter Phillips Gallery, Banff Centre, Canada (and touring)

What systems or processes do you use to ensure a contemporary critical teaching practice?

I follow the artists and their work. Which means, I encourage students to interrogate what an artist has done, how and why and who for. And then I question where that reading of the work has come from: Have they been misled by patchy documentation? Did anyone record a first hand experience of the work that they could consult? Is the artist’s intent recorded anywhere? I try not to reinforce an academic hierarchy between sources, but question their authenticity, and thereby encourage students to make their own documentation. In my ‘Curating Lively Practices’ class last semester I said that no one could cite a Wikipedia page in their essays unless they’d edited the Wikipedia page themselves. I think that frightened a few, which it wasn’t meant to, it was to encourage participation in the creation of resources about art, participation in the online culture we all unthinkingly consume.

What aspects of your teaching practice do you work hard at to keep consistent and why?

Probably being approachable and slightly tangential in my thinking, drawing on my own experience and offering my own connections, memory or impression of something as a document to go test the veracity of. I show I am connected to current practice, that I have seen or attended exhibitions or talked to artists or other curators, or visited museums, or tried to keep my own papers and digital documentation in order (and failed). This means I can be understood as a practitioner constantly engaged in research, and therefore that curating is an ongoing, iterative activity.

 Installation view of Bill Miller, Ruined Polaroids, at NEoN Digital Arts Festival, 2017, Installed in DC Thomson’s West Ward Works,
former newspaper printing facility in Dundee, as part of the curated exhibition Media Archaeologies

What art educators, art colleges, courses or curriculum have inspired you?

A friend who has written a book about toilets (Lezlie Lowe’s No Place to Go) was asking something about public conveniences in the UK post-pandemic, and it sent me on a deep trawl of Archive.org’s Wayback Machine to find the syllabus for a course (I didn’t take, but a friend did) at the defunct MRes/PhD programme The London Consortium (run by Tate, The AA, The ICA, The Science Museum and Birkbeck) about the history of shit and civilisation. I was reminded how much I love an idiosyncratic reading list (that combines art work, philosophical texts, historical records, museology, archival theory, sociology, film, etc.).

I think if an artist or designer wants to work with digital tools then I’d send them to the School for Poetic Computation, run by TaeYoon Choi, or Interactivos? run from Medialab Prado. Or if they want to experiment with biological materials in art I’d send them to Cultivamos Cultura in Portugal, or to Symbiotica at the University of Western Australia...There are any number of niche communities and hard working organisations out there for whatever it is an artist wants or needs to learn.

Learning from practitioners is key. I was taught by an amazing roster of curators when I was a masters student in New York last century. I particularly remember being challenged by the art critic Peter Schjeldahl to be less dashing in my disdain in my writing, and to not overthink or over-intellectualise things (still failing at that!). Dia Art Foundation curator Lynne Cooke (now at the National Gallery of Art in Washington) taught me that conversation with the artist is the most important thing - go to their studio! Diana Nemiroff, longtime curator at the National Gallery of Canada, taught me that context, facts and materials need to be properly researched and understood in order to curate, more so than (the then emerging) tomes of curatorial theory. Art historian Linda Norden taught me to follow my instinctive reading of a work down a path, articulate it. And during lockdown, a few months ago now, Canadian artist and lover of libraries, Cliff Eyland, died, and I remembered that after I’d curated a mad show about snowboard culture, he told me that my ethnographic methodology (curating outwith the bounds of my own expertise, infiltrating a scene, and trusting the experience and knowledge of others) was valid and I should continue with it. I think I have.

Nowadays I am inspired by and learn from the younger curators, curatorial assistants, exhibition producers, technicians, and digital producers that I work with, recently at Somerset House and with NEoN.  At NEoN we’ve had two recent graduates from University of Glasgow’s Digital Media and Information Studies programme join us on summer placements and I’ve learned a huge amount from them, not least about digital file management!

Installation view of Braking Matter by Michel de Broin; viewing the work are artists Sascha Pohflepp and Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg, whose work Yesterday’s Today was also part of the exhibition
(Q.E.D., Liverpool John Moore's University Art and Design Academy Galleries, September 2011, as part of the AND [Abandon Normal Devices] Festival.) Photo courtesy of AND Festival

Which contemporary artists seem to be influencing artists today and why do you think that is?

Come back to me with this question in a few week’s time after I’ve reviewed the Goldsmith’s MFA (online) degree show! I’m expecting to see work influenced by artists such as Rachel Maclean and Tai Shani (fictional+digital+persona+history+storytelling+performance+++)

What tips or exercises do you recommend to artists who have creative block?

During lockdown I tried to chat regularly with friends who were furloughed and am still checking in with them as to how they’re staying engaged when facing uncertain job futures in the shrinking cultural sector. I think uncertainty or doubt leads to inertia, so you need a routine to fall back on (even if that involves chocolate magnum ice-creams or issues of Grazia). I was reminded of Ellie Harrison’s Artists’ Training Programme which was a spoof website but had a very good daily schedule as part of it. At the time she made it, it was related to all the work she was doing about quantifying her life, and data tracking. The schedule involves always listening to Front Row - tune in after the Archers - whether you like it or not. Routine is important to give your mind time to wander. This might not get you to make art, but it might send you off down another research path which might later become part of your work.

What current issues, themes or concerns have you noticed arising in students practice in recent times? And which philosophers, theorists, writers or thinkers are influencing students today?

Those students focused on museums are deeply concerned about expertise, authority, accessibility, transparency, ethics - who decides what gets collected, what gets shown, how it gets talked about. With Black Lives Matter and the attention to public memorials and statues, anti-racist and inclusive practices of co-creation are a key concern. In rethinking the museum I’ve also been encouraging students to think about alternative spaces where culture is produced or preserved, including digital spaces, and so that includes thinking about who owns those spaces, how they are run, what they prioritise, are they held in common?

In 1968 Jack Burnham wrote in ArtForum that we’d shifted from an object-oriented culture to a systems-oriented one, where “change emanates, not from things, but from the way things are done” —museums have evolved to recognise that culture means not just looking after things but enabling audiences to engage with those things in new ways, but the artists are still ahead, always suggesting new ways for things to be done, new systems. Perhaps now we are shifting to an (inter-species? post-human?) experience-oriented culture, change emanating from how we experience the world (and all those experiences are unique, if understood to be connected). I’m not sure if this reflects what artists are working on, but I sense a real mixing of the disciplines, an intersectionality (influenced by the writings of Rosi Braidotti, Anna Tsing, Tim Ingold, Timothy Morton, all the materialist-object-oriented-speculative-design folk, and by reading horoscopes, magic spells, tarot cards, learning other knowledge systems) whether that is across social and political discourses, environmental and ethical concerns, gender and science, personal and private or collective, historical or future-oriented… COVID-19 will be part of this too, as will the Black Lives Matter movement.

So despite not having time, I’m going to dive into yet another Slack thread about how museums are responding to lockdown, in case I can convince any of them to collect some digital art made from it…

 

 

Follow Sarah Cook on Instagram @littlecurator and Twitter @sarahecook and visit her website http://www.sarahcook.info/

Please share this interview

 

 

And do subscribe to our newsletter for a monthly round-up of some useful creative hacks, insights, opportunities, and introductions. At the end of each month we host a free special 30 minute online subscriber event on Zoom, providing subscribers with the opportunity to meet and ask Ceri Hand questions about creative careers or in relation to mentoring.

The next informal Q&A session will be Wednesday 30 September 6pm-7pm  and newsletter subscribers will be sent an invitation a little closer to the time.

Feel free to email or contact us via socials @cerihand

Coming Next...

An interview with Gavin Wade, artist-curator, Director of Eastside Projects, and Senior Research Fellow at Birmingham City University. His curated and co-curated exhibitions include Sonia Boyce: In the Castle of My Skin, (2020), This is the Gallery and the Gallery is Many Things X, (2018), Display Show, (2015–16), Temple Bar Gallery/Eastside Projects/Stroom den Haag; Painting Show (2011–2012), and Narrative Show, (2011) at Eastside Projects.

Harold-Offeh-Blog

Interview: HAROLD OFFEH

I first recall learning about Harold Offeh’s work when I worked at Grizedale Arts in 2003. I have enjoyed watching his playfully challenging practice unfold ever since.

He is committed to tugging at the edges of things and drawing them and us in closer. He is a shapeshifter, a cuttlefish prepared to make a spectacle of himself for us, to swim in the darkness to reveal the shafts of light.

He reminds us of what is at stake in the perception and consumption of the body, of images, of our relation to each other. I love his commitment to truly engaging with people and place, of keeping it simple, stupid. Sometimes wild, sometimes tragi-comic, his work has the catch of a stellar earworm pop track by an alternative band - meaningful, surprising, yet cheekily catchy and accessible.

Harold Offeh, Selfie Portrait in the Studio, 2020

Harold Offeh is an artist working in a range of media including performance, video, photography, learning and social arts practice. He employs humour as a means to confront the viewer with historical narratives and contemporary culture.

He has exhibited widely in the UK and internationally including Tate Britain and Tate Modern, South London Gallery, Turf Projects, London, Kettle's Yard, Cambridge, Wysing Art Centre, Studio Museum Harlem, New York, MAC VAL, France, Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Denmark and Art Tower Mito, Japan. He was a Paul Hamlyn Visual Arts Award Recipient in 2019.

He studied Critical Fine Art Practice at The University of Brighton, MA Fine Art Photography at the Royal College of Art and recently completed a PhD by practice exploring the activation of Black Album covers through durational performance. He lives in Cambridge and works in London and Leeds, UK where he is currently a Reader in Fine Art at Leeds Beckett University and a visiting tutor at the Royal College of Art, Goldsmiths College and The Slade School of Art, UCL, London.

Upcoming projects include a new video commission exploring the redemptive power of joy through social dance for the Wellcome Collection's (London) season, 'On Happiness'. Offeh will be exhibiting as part of 'Untitled, Art on the Conditions of Our Time' a major group exhibition of British artists of African descent at Kettle's Yard in Cambridge, UK. Hail the New Prophets, will see Offeh realise his first major public sculpture as part of the Bold Tendencies exhibition in Peckham, London.

He is a Trustee of Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridge, UK; Peckham Platform, London, UK and Pavilion, Leeds, UK.

Selfie Choreography, 2020, Workshop and performance presented for Eastside Projects, Birmingham, UK, Photos: Ashley Carr

What are you doing, reading, watching or listening to now that is helping you to stay positive?

I’ve been watching lots of random stuff on YouTube, an eclectic mix of political commentary on the upcoming US election, Solange's music videos, gardening tutorials and too many reaction videos. What keeps me most positive is just speaking to friends and other artists. Oh, and food!

Object Action, 2018, London College of Communication, London, UK

What are you working on and how have recent events affected your ideas, processes and chosen medium?

I've been working on a couple of projects that were due open in May. They have both been postponed till next year, but I’ve been agonising about the relevance of the initial research I did pre-Covid. One project is a commission for the Wellcome Collection. I've been looking at the history of social dance as healing for societal trauma. This has led me on a journey from medieval dancing plagues to 90s AIDS dance marathons. I was about to shoot a film with performers that was about collective bodies and movement, sadness, and joy. I'm most unsure about the process of making this work. I'm sure I’ll find a way, but like all of us it's about coming to terms with a whole new societal context.

Bodies International, 2013 Art Basel Miami, USA 

What do you usually have or need in your studio to inspire and motivate you?

I would say I need books and music. When I was writing my PhD thesis last summer I would have to listen to Alice Coltrane whenever I was stuck. This has continued into other projects, particularly writing proposals. I thank Alice all the time!

What systems, rituals and processes do you use to help you get into the creative zone?

I procrastinate a lot. But I've learned to embrace this. Whenever I'm meant to work on something that is difficult or I just can't get a handle on, I procrastinate by doing something else. That could be cooking, watching 90s music videos or as I mature, its gardening

What recurring questions do you return to in your work?

I'm really interested in histories and narratives and who shapes the structures of history. I'm interested in the body as a primary tool of investigation and discovery!

Industry is a Drag, 2017 Middlesbrough Art Weekender, Middlesbrough, UK

What do you care about?

Education!

Copyright Christmas, 2011, Barbican Theatre, London, UK

What risks have you taken in your work that paid off?

Performing naked, it was a risk because it's such a cliché in performance art.

Covers, 2008-2020

What risks have you taken that perhaps did not go so well but you learnt the most from?

I've made a lot of mistakes with installing work. Often, when I'm consciously trying to do something different or trying to stick to some rules of displaying. I've learnt to be less worried about it, those mistakes have helped me develop a greater sense of what is my practice.

Selfie Choreography, 2020, Workshop and performance presented for Eastside Projects, Birmingham, UK, Photo Ashley Carr

What is your favourite exhibition, event, or performance you have participated in and why?

I was in The Shadows Took Shape a group show at the Studio Museum in Harlem looking at the Afrofuturist legacy of Sun Ra. It was amazing to be in the company of Sun Ra and so many other amazing artists and at a museum I love and respect.

Covers. After Funkadelic. Maggot brain. 1971 (V2), 2013

What would you hope that people experience from encountering your work?

It depends on the work, but generally I hope they experience curiosity. But I’ll take anything, even indifference

Could you tell us a bit more about at a time when you felt stuck and what you did to help yourself out of it?

Apart from listening to music, when I’m stuck, I find it helps to just talk through the issues. It's particularly helpful if it's an issue of conceptualizing or researching a project. There are few people who I can always bounce ideas off. Being forced to explain a problem to someone else allows you to process the issue and get some perspective on it.

What kind of studio visits, conversations or meetings with curators, producers, writers, press, gallerists, or collectors do you enjoy or get the most out of?

The best studio visits and conversations with arts professionals have been when there is a genuine shared interest and open dialogue. As much as I like talking about the work itself, I really enjoy the conversation that happens around the work. Thinking about histories and contexts. I hate studio visits that are like interviews.

Selfie Choreography, 2020, Workshop and performance presented for Eastside Projects, Birmingham, UK, Photo, Ashley Carr

Do you have a trusted muse, mentor, network, or circle of friends you consult for critical feedback?

I have some go to people. Often, it's the curators I'm working with at the time. George Vasey, Melanie Keen, Zoe Whitley, Adelaide Bannerman, John Kiet Eng Bloomfield, always have amazing insights. On a day to day level, my studio assistant and artist in his own right Jack Scott is amazing.

Which artists or creatives do you feel your work is in conversation with?

This could be a very long list. This summer it has been Michelle Williams Gamaker, Zadie Xa, Tanoa Sasraku. Oreet Ashery, Tai Shani, Anne Duffau (aka A--Z) but I could go on and on

Mindfully Dizzy, 2019 Science Gallery, London, UK

How do you make money to support your practice?

I teach and love doing it. Currently, I teach Fine art undergraduates at Leeds Beckett University and Postgraduates in Contemporary art Practice at the RCA.

What compromises have you made to sustain your practice?

Over the years, relationships. Art practice is very all consuming and demanding. Not everyone wants to be with that. I've never been into dating other artists, but I see the appeal.

What advice would you give your past self?

Be honest about what you really want and keep going.

 Pinatopia Mountfolly, 2013 Pavilion, Leeds, UK

Can you recommend a book film or podcast that you have been inspired by that transformed your thinking?

Book: Radical Happiness by Lynne Segal
Film: Bataaxalu Ndakaaru (Letter from Dakar, 2019, by Morgan Quaintance
Music: Kokoroko's Carry Me Home
Podcast: Kalki Presents: My Indian Life

Follow Harold on Instagram @harold_offeh Twitter @haroldoffeh and visit his website http://haroldoffeh.com

Please share this interview

 

 

And do subscribe to our newsletter for a monthly round-up of some useful creative hacks, insights, opportunities, and introductions. At the end of each month we host a free special 30 minute online subscriber event on Zoom, providing subscribers with the opportunity to meet and ask Ceri Hand questions about creative careers or in relation to mentoring.

The next informal Q&A session will be Wednesday 30 September 6pm-7pm  and newsletter subscribers will be sent an invitation a little closer to the time.

Feel free to email or contact us via socials @cerihand

Coming Next...

An interview with Sarah Cook, curator, writer and researcher based in Scotland. She is Professor of Museum Studies in Information Studies at the University of Glasgow.

She is editor of 24/7: A Wake-up Call For Our Non-stop World (Somerset House, 2019) and INFORMATION (Documents of Contemporary Art, Whitechapel and MIT Press, 2016) and co-author (with Beryl Graham) of Rethinking Curating: Art After New Media (MIT Press, 2010; Chinese edition 2016).

gillian-jackson-blog

Interview: GILLIAN JACKSON

I met Gillian Jackson at Somerset House a few years ago, but knew of her work at Livity well in advance and have followed her career ever since. I was bowled over by her sunshine energy, enthusiasm, determination and truly impressed by the scale of ambition of her public projects, especially with young people.

She has an extraordinary skill at getting to the heart of the matter with individuals and collectives, creating exciting contemporary creative programmes, enabling skills development and establishing creative careers. She is brilliant at blending grassroots activism, analogue and digital processes and content to address the issues of our time, and generating public and private income to make it happen. Her knowledge and experience inspire me and continue to confirm the furlongs we still need to travel in arts organisations, to connect more deeply with our audiences, produce content with them that is more in tune with their daily lives.

Gillian works seamlessly with audiences, organisations, funders, and brands, to create a deeper engagement with the pressing issues of our time and encourage responsibility in us all. I am positive we will work together at some point, hopefully in the not too distant future.

Gillian Jackson is Director of Engagement at the House of St Barnabas, where she leads the brand, engagement, and cultural experience of its supporters. Previously, Gillian was Head of Engagement at social enterprise Livity, focused on aligning profit and purpose whilst building and strengthening relationships across Livity’s network. She has worked in music, culture programming and events for the last 15 years, leading long-term projects to develop new thinking via the cross-pollination of arts, culture, and technology. She is a Trustee of Culture24, a charity supporting arts and heritage organisations to connect meaningfully with audiences.

What are you doing, reading, watching or listening to now, that is helping you to stay positive?

The last few months have been incredibly hard, and I found the need to retreat and get off social media to stay positive. I have been reading a lot and have mixed my reading to find escape alongside educating myself further on some of big issues the world is facing right now.

I’ve just finished Educated by Tara Westover, which explores her spiritual and often physical upbringing alongside her drastic journey into education as someone who was entirely self-taught.

I’ve been enjoying Renegade: The Life and Times of Darcus Howe which explores his role in the defining struggles in Britain against institutional racism in the police, the courts and the media whilst providing a localised view of Black British History in London. As a Brixton girl, I grew up knowing about Howe as a friend of my dad’s, so his history feels incredibly poignant to me.

I also really enjoyed Slumming: Sexual and Racial Encounters in American Nightlife, by Chad Heap, which is a colourful account of a history that I didn’t know much about. It illustrates the racial history of gay rent parties in the prohibition era in Harlem, and how it helped to reshape the understanding of class and race amongst the cabaret community in New York.

Emerge Festival, London, 2019

How have recent world events affected your ideas, processes, habits, ambition, or methodologies?

I have reflected a lot on what is within my power to change and have been focusing a lot around two things - diversity in the arts more broadly, and around belonging and inclusion for all. The murder of George Floyd has created seismic waves in all aspects of my life, both personal and professional, and it has made me even more driven as an activist and creative to use my platform for good.

We are also in a digital renaissance and the World will never look the same again as a result. Lots of my practice lives in the physical world, although I have always been driven by how we bring the real world into the digital, so I am finding it a really challenging yet exciting time for change.

During lockdown I started at House of St Barnabas as Director of Engagement and have set out a strategy to reshape their approach to diversity across the board. I have also joined the Board of Trustees of Culture 24 and have also joined their board of diversity.

I also developed a programme of work for Livity called 'Livity In Future', where we got together 100 amazing young activists, creators, social entrepreneurs from all corners of the UK to come together and create change in response to Covid. We have developed an events and mentoring programme and will be working on a digital project together which is exciting.

Lovebox Festival, 2019, Photo @franxisaugusto

What will you do more of?

I will do more digitally, but also, I will consider my digital practice in a new way. Technology was built by a white man, and is one of the most non inclusive forms of creativity, and we all need to ensure we consider how we can use tech meaningfully to drive inclusivity and conversation.

As a Black woman, I have campaigned to open more doors for people of colour in the arts, but this is something I want to do more of and go further doing. I think there is a huge risk that we move to a place of racial capitalism following this movement, where organisations appear to reflect diversity without changing their practices or internal strategies.

What will you do less of?

I am doing so much more now that it is hard to consider what I will do less!

What recurring questions do you return to in your work?

The biggest question I have been asking recently is one around race and what my role is as a Black woman in a senior position within the arts. I still cannot see the perfect arts organisation, or brand that I believe in and I think that most organisations have a long long way to go to change their internal structures and strategies.

Livity Open House Festival, 2020

What risks have you taken in your work that paid off?

My practice involves taking risks and trusting collaborators to realise projects, and often the biggest successes have come with the biggest unknowns. At the end of last year, I worked on a project with Culture 24 called Emerge Festival, which was a museum lates festival that took over several different museums and cultural spaces around London. We programmed a headline venue at Banqueting House in partnership with artist Flohio and had an incredible line up of artists including Gaika, Green Tea Peng, Elheist and Glor1a to name a few. We brought together over 80 young people to deliver the project and trusting the skills of everyone involved resulted in something special.

What risks have you taken that perhaps did not go so well but you learnt the most from?

Sometimes the biggest successes come from the failures that you learn from. Working with young people for the last 7 years at Livity has helped me to grow in my own practice and understand my craft as a cultural programmer and the risks I have taken have taught me the most!

How would you like your work to lift others up?

I have built a creative practice based on providing a platform for others. At Livity, I am currently working on a project to help to connect 100 changemakers from around the UK to build projects, businesses and events that change the world. At House of St Barnabas, I have access to a space that will provide access to creatives and thought leaders to share their views. Every corner of my work is based on ensuring that I change systems and processes to make the world a more inclusive space for all.

Brixton Design Trail, Photo @marianap.res

Could you tell us about at a time when you felt stuck and what you did to help yourself out of it?

Whenever I get stuck in my creative process, I go for a run, or I sleep on a problem with a notepad by my bed. I find that the best ideas I have come when I am dreaming or running!

What compromises have you made in your work?

If I had all the money in the world, I would set up my own cultural institution. This is a long-term goal of mine. Cultural Institutions do not reflect the culture of their times and do not create spaces for young people from diverse backgrounds to belong in. It is a compromise not being able to make this dream into a reality! This is a five-year goal of mine.

What advice would you give your past self?

Believe in yourself, do not be afraid to be creative and speak out about what you believe in.

London Design Festival, 2019, Photo @sleame69mage 

What career hacks or useful nuggets would you give to aspiring creatives?

Go out there and start creating. If you don’t know how then find an organisation that can help you start your dreams. Check out Livity, Create Jobs, Social Fixt, GUAP, Spiral Skills to name a few.

Can you recommend a book film or podcast that you have been inspired by that transformed your thinking?

Be More Pirate by Sam Conniff Allende is a brilliant book about creating Good Trouble and looks at how 16th Century Pirates were the first social entrepreneurs that broke the system to create the change that they wanted to see. I could not recommend this book more.

Follow Gillian on Twitter @gilliantalking @HoStBarnabas @Culture24 @LivityUK and visit https://hosb.org.uk/

Please share this interview

 

 

And do subscribe to our free newsletter for a monthly round-up of some useful creative hacks, insights, opportunities, and introductions. At the end of each month we host a FREE 1 hour online subscriber event on Zoom, providing subscribers with the opportunity to meet and ask Ceri Hand any questions about creativity, creative careers or in relation to mentoring.

This month’s event will take place on Friday 28 August at 6pm-7pm. Subscribe and send your question in advance to ensure it gets answered!

Feel free to email or contact us via socials @cerihand

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