Anna Lucas, L’homme mort, Archival Digital Print, 120*80 cm, 2020
The hands-on experience of curating an exhibition is essential to AMAGS (Art Museum and Gallery Studies)’ students every year. However, last year the intended exhibition, was sadly postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Luckily, this year, the AMAGS students got chance to make the exhibition happen! Taking over parts of the work done by last year’s cohort with the generous help of teaching staff in the school, we students co-operated as curators with artist and film-maker Anna Lucas, and the ACC (Arts Council Collection). We are all looking forward to the exhibition opening this summer in the School of Museum Studies Building.
The exhibition will be showing artworks from Anna Lucas and a selected collection from ACC. ‘Alongsiding,’ a term created by the artist, is the theme of the exhibition. It is a new term all about shared looking and what happens when we look through a lens with orders. ACC’s collection of artworks certainly resonates with the theme - 'alongside' Anna’s work. After the opening of the exhibition, there will be an online screening event in cooperation with Phoenix Square Cinema Leicester to show Anna and other artists' films with further conversations between the artists.
The cohort have worked in different roles (Management, Curatorial, Archive, Marketing and Audience Development, Interpretation, Screening and Events) but at the same time, we have all been exhibition curators. As a member of the management team, I have to say this has been an amazing learning opportunity to really put together an exhibition, especially with the limitations of the pandemic. We worked 100% online instead of physically working together, and there were uncertainties and plans to change very often. But overall, we learned how to adjust to the situation and work effectively and professionally which was great practice for our future career in the field.
As well as working with the artworks themselves, this unexpectedly two-year time-span exhibition is probably also a reflection of how it works in museum and gallery sectors under the special pandemic period. We are planning to have a celebration opening in late June and hope to see each other face to face. Of course, this depends on the social distance restriction at that time. Let's stay tuned!
Written by Iris Y. Chow
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