Skip to main content
Curating Contemporary Art (MA)

Yue Yu

Home: A Domestic Fiction 

Our project proposal, titled Home: A Domestic Fiction, aims to challenge the logocentric modes of curatorial communication and explore a non-hierarchical process of care in which artwork, artist and audience are situated as equal. Understanding the groups that we exist in to be both intentional and unintentional, we see ourselves as an “Unintentional Collective” as a model for rethinking social relations.  

Responding to a brief from Delfina Foundation as the Unintentional Collective, we have developed a card game designed to explore the complexities and multiplicities of the idea of ‘home’ within our globalised world. Giving agency to the personal histories of participants, a complex, intricate network of narratives can be built through gameplay, out of which a live archive of what may constitute a ‘home’ develops as new cards are added to the pack. We have commissioned artists David Blandy and April Lin to design the first two sets of five cards. Through this potentially ever-expanding card deck, the geographic rigidity that the notion of ‘home’ can evoke is challenged, and its ephemerality and temporality are highlighted. We seek to understand how a home is constructed through transient relationships and experiences. 

Our presentation displays the commissioned sets of cards, inviting the audience to explore and respond to the archive produced through playing the game. In an accompanying live event, an improvised sound performance by Hannan Jones and Shamica Ruddock, that uses the archive as score, delves deeper into non-logocentric modes of (re)collection.

Icon image

My practice and research is rooted in challenging the logocentric modes of curatorial communication and exploring beyond the boundaries of canonical curation through a non-hierarchical process of care that is equal within artwork, artist and audience. Coming from an architectural background, I always start my curatorial mediation from audience experiences, narratives and spaces, intending to build an environment that is inclusive, legible and welcoming.  

In my most recent research proposal, I focus on the absence of an aesthetic public sphere in contemporary art where audiences can equip the agency of interpretation and criticism. Through creating “Audience-run Initiatives”, the democratic framework aims to examine the passivity of institutional public engagement and further renegotiate the structural hierarchy to challenge institutions’ and capital’s authority in the art world. 

Prior to my master's program at the Royal College of Art, I finished my BA in Comprehensive Architecture Studies at the University of Toronto.

Currently, I work as a cultural practitioner based in London, UK and Toronto, Canada.