Image: Calligraphy Battle, Chung Yu-Ting and Roy Palmer, 19th January 2023

Curating Contemporary Art's first one-year programme MA cohort explores the role of contemporary curating in confronting the contradictions of our transnational experiences. Working in six groups, the students responded to briefs set by internationally important UK arts organisations, Artangel, Chisenhale Gallery and Delfina Foundation. The briefs considered commissioning in changing urban contexts, curating with communities of lived experience, and the experience of international artist residencies respectively.

Home: A Domestic Fiction proposes a card game to explore the complexities of home within the transnational spaces of the art school and the artist residency. Similarly concerned with the precarity of home, reciproCITY’s mission is to create awareness of the effects of intentional displacement caused by the lack of affordable housing in London. Questioning the speed of urban change, the Parade of Pause invites us to experience the multiple tempos of our present. Closer to home, Pidgin asks how we can decentre International Art English and multilingualise the  art school. The Archive of Losing in turn considers when something is lost in translation or transition as poetic moments for unlearning. In Un/tied, forms of family that extend beyond traditional biological frameworks are explored to highlight existing queer relations while searching for new possibilities for contemporary kinship.

Testing these proposals through the curation of displays, research spaces, workshops, talks and performances, the students have commissioned and worked with over thirty artists, designers, videographers, performers and speakers, demonstrating that the one constant of contemporary curating is collaboration.

In conjunction with the displays there is a full programme of live events, performances and screenings taking place in the Gorvy Lecture Theatre, Battersea:
CCA Projects Showreel
How to Live in an Unliveable City
Parade of Pause
Un/tied: Cult Trans & Kinships
A Day as a Work of Art
Home: a domestic fiction

With special thanks to Artangel, Chisenhale Gallery and Delfina Foundation for developing this year's CCA MA1 curatorial briefs and generous feedback throughout.