Decolonising Collections

Our 2021 curatorial researchers in residence Harvey Dimond and Marenka Thompson-Odlum share their research interventions into 3 public collections: Arts Council Collection, British Council Collection and Manchester Art Gallery.

Decolonising Collections is an emerging curatorial research network led by UAL’s Decolonising Arts Institute, generously supported by the Art Fund Professional Network Grant scheme.

Harvey Dimond

Charting a Cartography of Black, Feminist and Working Class Histories in the North West of England

Harvey is a British-Barbadian writer, artist and researcher based between Glasgow, Scotland and Athens, Greece. They work with queer(ed) histories in the pre and post-colonial Caribbean and Africa.

Working across the 3 collections, Harvey’s research examines recorded histories of Black communities in the North-West of England, exploring the correspondence between the geography of the United Kingdom and its working class, feminist and Black histories.

Marenka Thompson-Odlum

”Zero points to the UK”: The ‘Absence’ of the Self in the Classification Systems of the Manchester Art Gallery, the Arts Council Collection, and the British Council Collection

Marenka is a Research Associate at the Pitt Rivers Museum and a doctoral candidate at the University of Glasgow.

Working across the 3 collections, her project examines the taxonomy of coloniality within the language of these collections, to identify stereotypes and unpick the ways coloniality is reiterated in their narratives. From there, she considers how we can rethink how we speak about, classify and learn from collections.