Paper Curating

In collaboration with MA's on ISD and CPCW we created a proposal for an exhibition entitled "The Banality of Everyday".

"‘Small gestures in specific places’ – this could be the coda for the time when the place for art is on the move. Today the form of art bends to the circumstance, and the boundary with the everyday blurs. The placement of small gestures in specific places can at first glance be continuous with our daily stride, sight, breath, touch and reach.”
- Nikos Papastergiadis, Spatial Aesthetics (2006) p.138

The Banality of Everyday examines not only the invasion of the private territory, where the basic and monotonous gestures of “way of operating” are practiced and repeated everyday, but also potentiality of generating personal history and narrative under the certain rules and systems of the space. As the platform of this in-progress project, the flat room will be inhabited by solitary participants for a certain duration based on provided objects which have particular functions. Everyday life seems banal, quotidian and ordinary within generic socio-cultural codes. However, it is continuity of the uncanniness as being familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. Every time confronting a basic demand for safety, security and comfort, we are constructing everyday activities through various tactics. The project intends to bring an artist, Alison Balance, as the last visitor of the room. To terminate the project, having the creative freedom to the space, Balance will explore performative reactions in response to the space that have been constructed by audiences.

Within the multiple trajectories and the distinction between the foreign and the common, this site-specific practice will be a globally ongoing project which investigates the space’s potential with the diverse cultural production in everyday surroundings.

Working with my fellow GDC student Jane we brainstormed ideas of promoting and discussed the practicalities of the project. We needed to have a website for prospective participants to get information and book their time in the room. The website would act as an archive where documentation of the exhibition would be available. It would also allow us to stream the closing performance by artist Alison Balance. High-lighting the ordinary became the aspect of the project we would use in our work. The initial idea was to create a viewing apparatus in the from of a postcard with the image of two hands creating a viewfinder. The holder is free to create compositions and look at things carefully in a manner which maybe they wouldn't normally. Taking this apparatus we made a viral video following the use of the postcard. As we envisaged the exhibition as one which would travel to several cities, the viral would be one of a series made in each city. We also created posters which feature the postcard.

View the website here