Dates:
20 Apr 2024
People:
Location:
Ikon Gallery
Project:
What is the role of a curator? How can insight into a curator’s practice help us engage more deeply with an exhibition? And why does the curatorial perspective offer a unique vantage point into the forces and factors underlying the creative work that audiences see in museums and galleries?
Saturday 20 April 2024, 6-7pm
Ikon Gallery, Birmingham
Join curators Orphée Kashala and Candice Nembhard for an open and critical conversation about curating exhibitions and other creative projects. This exchange offers insight into Kashala and Nembhard’s individual approaches to curatorship, with reflections on recent projects in Birmingham and elsewhere. Through this conversation, Kashala and Nembhard will seek to expand understanding around and demystify the role of the curator.
They will reflect on the many possible relationships between curatorial and artistic practice. They will shed light on the realities of working as freelance curators and their experiences of working with institutions, as well as the significance of collaborating with artists and other creative practitioners. This conversation will also provide an opportunity for Kashala and Nembhard to reflect on the factors that can help or hinder free, creative curatorial expression, such as the value of being part of a network of peers, the effectiveness of curatorial fellowships, and the precarity of working independently.
The event is presented as part of the public programme for Epiphany (Temporaire), an exhibition by Exodus Crooks and curated by Orphée Kashala, at Ikon Gallery (9 March – 21 April 2024).
Epiphany (Temporaire) was commissioned by Ort Gallery and ICF, originally presented at Block 336 as part of ICF’s residency in Brixton (26 August – 17 September 2023).
This conversation is organised by Ikon Gallery in partnership with ICF.
About the speakers
Orphée Kashala is a UK-based Pan-African and Diasporic art curator and cultural producer. Kashala was selected in 2021 for the Emergence(y) project in Birmingham, an Ort Gallery and ICF residency provision for emerging curators to develop their practices. His curatorial practice is a recourse to art and artists as mediums to lead the collective interrogation, interpretation and reckoning with human complexity. Kashala leans into contradiction and complication to untangle an intrinsically resistant, liberated, and decolonised counter-visuality.
Candice Nembhard (okcandice) is a writer, artist-curator, archivist and musician based between Birmingham and Berlin. They are the Digital Curator for Birmingham Museum & Gallery and 2023/24 Woven Foundation Curatorial Fellow; previously a Jerwood Arts Curatorial Fellow, Obsidian Foundation Poetry Fellow and artist-curator at Eastside Projects. Elsewhere, Nembhard is the founder-director of all fruits ripe; an independent platform for queer filmmakers of colour and Bedtime Stories; a live radio club championing experiments in ambient, electronic(a) and downtempo music.
People:
Project:
What is the role of a curator? How can insight into a curator’s practice help us engage more deeply with an exhibition? And why does the curatorial perspective offer a unique vantage point into the forces and factors underlying the creative work that audiences see in museums and galleries?
Saturday 20 April 2024, 6-7pm
Ikon Gallery, Birmingham
Join curators Orphée Kashala and Candice Nembhard for an open and critical conversation about curating exhibitions and other creative projects. This exchange offers insight into Kashala and Nembhard’s individual approaches to curatorship, with reflections on recent projects in Birmingham and elsewhere. Through this conversation, Kashala and Nembhard will seek to expand understanding around and demystify the role of the curator.
They will reflect on the many possible relationships between curatorial and artistic practice. They will shed light on the realities of working as freelance curators and their experiences of working with institutions, as well as the significance of collaborating with artists and other creative practitioners. This conversation will also provide an opportunity for Kashala and Nembhard to reflect on the factors that can help or hinder free, creative curatorial expression, such as the value of being part of a network of peers, the effectiveness of curatorial fellowships, and the precarity of working independently.
The event is presented as part of the public programme for Epiphany (Temporaire), an exhibition by Exodus Crooks and curated by Orphée Kashala, at Ikon Gallery (9 March – 21 April 2024).
Epiphany (Temporaire) was commissioned by Ort Gallery and ICF, originally presented at Block 336 as part of ICF’s residency in Brixton (26 August – 17 September 2023).
This conversation is organised by Ikon Gallery in partnership with ICF.
About the speakers
Orphée Kashala is a UK-based Pan-African and Diasporic art curator and cultural producer. Kashala was selected in 2021 for the Emergence(y) project in Birmingham, an Ort Gallery and ICF residency provision for emerging curators to develop their practices. His curatorial practice is a recourse to art and artists as mediums to lead the collective interrogation, interpretation and reckoning with human complexity. Kashala leans into contradiction and complication to untangle an intrinsically resistant, liberated, and decolonised counter-visuality.
Candice Nembhard (okcandice) is a writer, artist-curator, archivist and musician based between Birmingham and Berlin. They are the Digital Curator for Birmingham Museum & Gallery and 2023/24 Woven Foundation Curatorial Fellow; previously a Jerwood Arts Curatorial Fellow, Obsidian Foundation Poetry Fellow and artist-curator at Eastside Projects. Elsewhere, Nembhard is the founder-director of all fruits ripe; an independent platform for queer filmmakers of colour and Bedtime Stories; a live radio club championing experiments in ambient, electronic(a) and downtempo music.
Dates:
20 Apr 2024
Location:
Ikon Gallery
