Thomas Cury

Breath Variations is a new body of work created by Irish artist Christopher Steenson for Flat Time House, the former studio-home of late British conceptual artist John Latham.

Using sound, video, and transmission-based methodologies, Breath Variations will explore the materiality of time – its permanence and evanescence – and the power that attention has over its transmission and state of matter. By manipulating and extending the sonic dimensions of Flat Time House, Steenson investigates the capacity of breath as a ‘least event’ – Latham’s term for the shortest departure from a state of nothingness – to punctuate linearities of time and space.

Artist: Christopher Steenson

MA Curators: Thomas Cury, Cindy He, Salomé Jacques, Romy Lagesse), Napas Mangklatanakul, Ariana Martin, Liyin Wang, Hyora Yang

12–6pm, Friday 12 & Sunday 14 May: Exhibition open to the public

6–8pm, Friday 12 May: Exhibition preview

3pm, Sunday 14 May: Artist in conversation with exhibition curators

Further information is available here.

Breath Variations is part of the MA Curating Contemporary Art Graduate Projects 2023, Royal College of Art, in partnership with Flat Time House. 

My curatorial practice is rooted in collaborative methodologies that aim to redistribute knowledge and power. As a curator, I seek to hold space for difference while also attempting to facilitate consensus-based decision-making processes which actively incorporate the perspectives of all involved. Guided by my experience in community organising, I am dedicated to opening up the curatorial as a space in which to critically reflect and address interlocking forms of oppression that structure our world. Decolonial thinking shapes and grounds my practice, as I constantly seek to question and challenge Eurocentric curatorial norms which are embedded in many institutional settings. However, I acknowledge, as activist group Strike MoMA put it, that “no one is pure in a colonised world”– as such, I always try to be aware of the ways in which I am implicated in the very same forms of oppression that I aim to confront.

My current curatorial research centres on the decolonisation of the museum. I am particularly interested in addressing the issue of how decolonial discourses have become collapsed into a reformist framework that does not fundamentally challenge the core logic of the museum. At present, I am investigating how the curatorial device of polyphony- the use of multiple, diverse, and sometimes conflicting voices- can call into question monologic forms of meaning-making in the museum. Furthermore, I am researching how the structural elements of museums– namely, their governance, funding structures, and policies– prevent or foster radical forms of decolonial curating. I hope to expand upon this research in the future, especially through exploring the question: is the only way to confront the seemingly inevitable neutralisation of radical forms of decolonising the museum to abolish the institution altogether?