Chelsea’s MA Curating & Collections Showcase: Lingering On The Threshold
- Written byCharmaine Wah
- Published date 29 July 2024
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Our Post-Grad Ambassador Charmaine Wah (2024 MA Curating and Collections, Chelsea College of Arts) explores the liminal themes around her cohort's curatorial practises at Chelsea College of Arts' 2024 Postgraduate Show.
On a gloomy July evening, Chelsea College of Arts opened its gates for the 2024 Postgraduate Show which included my course, MA Curating and Collections (MACC), and MA Fine Art. Apparently, it has been a few years since MACC participated in the degree show. Having led this year’s comeback as the head producer, I would like to humbly share our concept, process and experiences in curating the liminal.
Our exhibition, Lingering On The Threshold, features moving image work from the Artangel Collection (London, UK) and the collection of the October Salon (Belgrade, Serbia). Housed within a maze of 4 attached rooms, our show brought in works by Francis Alÿs, Sanja Anđelković, Igor Bošnjak, Rachel Pimm & Graham Cunnington, Ben Rivers, Gregor Schneider.
Lingering On The Threshold leaned into the liminality and surrealism of the curated selection that raised various cultural, economic and environmental concerns. We wanted to create a safe in-between space for visitors to sit with the challenging ambiguities of contemporary issues and explore liminality’s potential in promoting dialogue and change.
Lilian Zancajo-Lugo, the writer of our press release, shared with me:
Stepping through the exhibition doors, you are greeted by a duet between a low droning hum and a distant chanting choir. As your eyes adjust to the dark room, do you take a left towards the soft glow from Igor Bošnjak’s eerie work, Hotel Balkan (2013)? Or do you venture straight ahead, where images of plants, minerals and text from Rachel Pimm and Graham Cunnington’s an earshare / to cassay the earthcrust (2021) flash in the corner of your eye?
Let’s say you take a left. Bošnjak’s work transports you to Bosnia and Herzegovina, taking you through an abandoned nuclear bunker that belonged to Tito, the former president of Yugoslavia. Previously a privileged shelter for the powerful and now a retreat where artists and creatives meet, Bošnjak’s film illustrates how the bunker simultaneously holds multiple pasts of imagined futures that never happened and a present future that did.
Across from Hotel Balkan, a red fox is on its own journey around the National Portrait Gallery after hours, defiantly ignoring every expensive historical painting and sculpture. Francis Alÿs’ The Nightwatch (2004) was the first work our team decided to include in the show. When we first watched the silent film together, it sparked a lively discussion. Where did the fox come from? Aw, it’s so cute. Will it escape? Should we give it a name? Oh, I feel sad now.
In the next room, visitors are introduced to human figures for the first time through Ben Rivers’ works, Mrabet and Taxi (2015), two films from a five-part series titled The Two Eyes Are Not Brothers. From a box TV, a man in the front seat of a taxi peers over his shoulder and watches you walk in. Mrabet (2015) is back-projected onto a wooden frame and shows two men sitting at the mouth of a cave and later, sitting outside of a cafe. In each place, the man in a robe, Mohammed Mrabet, captivates the camera and its audience with his stories that tow between the lines of fable, fact and fantasy. Having invigilated from the back of this room for many hours, there was never a moment where his stories didn’t intrigue, horrify and amuse me.
Entering the adjacent room, Francis Alÿs arrhythmically runs a drumstick along the metal railings of Fitzroy Square. Railings (Fitzroy Square) (2004) shows a simple, clandestine act that calms my mind with each hypnotising, ringing clink. In the fourth and final room, a pair of wicker chairs are placed closely in front of two screens, each a parallel universe to the other. An old wooden cabinet sits at the back of the room, adding to the domestic atmosphere. In Die Familie Schneider (2004), the work shows point-of-view footage of apartments 14 and 16 on Walden Street, London, where the work was originally installed for people to visit. In the form of moving image work, it is still difficult to escape the uncanniness and uneasiness displayed by both films. Sets of identical twins perform the same repetitive tedious acts in identical homes, barely responding to the camera’s sudden presence and gaze. For me, this work is much easier to watch when there is someone else with you in the room.
Finally, you have seen everything. You emerge into the bright fluorescent college hallways once again. Some visitors would go on to see the rest of the postgraduate degree show, while others make their way around again, revisit a work or two or leave a comment in our guest book. Some visitors are curious about how the exhibition came about and want to hear from me about how we managed to get to work with two established collections. However, I never got to share about all the unseen labour and teamwork our group went through to make our exhibition look as clean, professional and thoughtful as possible to honour the high calibre of work we curated.
Without our technical team, we would not have a show. One of our tech reps, Nis Murat, shared a piece of advice for putting together an AV-heavy show: “My biggest advice would be to always be organised and be punctual to install days because you never know what’s going to go wrong and if you need extra time with AV. I would also say, have a good working relationship with other AV technicians because you never know when you’ll need that help. Always come prepared to learn something new.” Our tech team, budget management team and I worked very closely together despite our varying roles to ensure we had the right equipment, materials and support to produce our exhibition.
In terms of the visual identity and the communication of our exhibition, the other teams took charge. This included the press release team, catalogue design, marketing and communications, signage design and our dedicated exhibition sketch-up team. In the initial conception of the overall visual aesthetics of the show, Riccardo Greco, who led the marketing team explained the design behind our poster, “The (initial) idea was to give a sort of first tiny taste of the exhibition, considering (its) atmosphere…and the sense of portals.” Regarding selecting an image from Sanja Anđelković’s work, Look up! I am No Canopy - I am a Messenger (2022) as the background of our poster, Riccardo continued to share, “I (thought) that it summarises perfectly the vibe that we wanted to give…the image of the forest that is a sort of a natural maze is quite strong, it was the atmosphere that we wanted to recreate. It’s the perfect metaphor.”
When I asked Yaqi Liang about co-leading signage design, she illustrated how her role was unexpectedly diverse in its tasks. She shared, “I (needed) to manage the communication between different teams, calculate the budget, contact the printing service, and also staff from ArtAngel whilst I was working on the design of the intro panel and testing (signage) materials.”
Documenting Lingering on the Threshold allows me to let our exhibition live on after the show. By also documenting our thoughts and experiences, I hope to create a record of the collective blood, sweat and tears we poured into this once-in-a-lifetime project. Reflecting on this experience, I am grateful to the team I worked with and for the memories we shared. Thank you to everyone who made our project possible and thank you for visiting Lingering on the Threshold.
References
Hadromi-Allouche, Z. and Mackay, M. H. (2023) Betwixt and between liminality and marginality: Mind the gap. Lanham: Lexington Books.
Thomassen, B. (2018) Liminality and the modern: Living through the in-between. London: Routledge.
Curatorial Team:
Head Producer: Charmaine Wah
Technical Team: Nis Azmee Murat, Stephanie Colclough
Budget Management: Maria Herrero Tejada, Aayushi Rajput
Press Release: Lilian Zancajo-Lugo, Aayushi Rajput, Mahalia Sobers
Catalogue Design: Wenyan Ma, Yining Bai, Wanjing Lin
Marketing and Communications: Riccardo Greco, Mengze Geng, Qinxue Shen
Signage Design: Yaqi Liang, Xingcheng Xu
Exhibition Sketch-up: Heyue Lu, Wenyan Ma
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