Curating Contemporary Art Graduate Wins NEON Curatorial Award
RCA Curating Contemporary Art graduate, Joseph Constable, has been awarded the 2015 NEON Curatorial Award. Established in 2012, the award champions curatorial excellence and fosters links between emerging curators in London and across Greece in order to encourage the exchange of ideas and innovations in the presentation of contemporary art.Â
This is the first year in which two winning curators have been selected for the prize: Constable shares the award with fellow curator Rebecca Edwards.
The prize is part of an on-going partnership between NEON, an Athens-based non-profit organisation, and the Whitechapel Gallery, where the award was announced on 10 December. This years’ judging panel was moderated by Nayia Yiakoumaki and consisted of three high-profile curators: Nicolas de Oliveira (London Metropolitan University), Ingrid Swenson (PEER, London) and Grant Wilson (Royal Academy of Arts).
For the competition, curators are invited to propose an exhibition drawing from the D. Daskalopoulos Collection, which includes over 500 art works by 170 international and Greek artists. This year saw a record number of proposals, submitted by aspiring curators from Greece, as well as a number of notable British Master's programmes in curating:Â Royal College of Art, Goldsmiths College, Courtauld Institute of Art, and London Metropolitan University.
Constable – who graduated from the RCA in 2014 and currently works as Programme Curator at l’étrangère Gallery, London, and Projects Assistant to producer and curator, Jacqui Davies – was selected for his proposal entitled The Labours. A photograph by British artist Helen Chadwick, from her Ego Geometria Sum series (1983–6), forms the titular reference for the exhibition: the picture shows the artist in the nude as she lifts a large rectangular column onto which has been printed a life-sized version of her image – with her feet planted wide, she strains to lift the volume, leaning back to brace it against her naked body, face turned away from the camera.
Constable conceived the proposal as an exploration of how artists and artworks can create the conditions of rupture necessary for new modes of subjectivity, particularly in response to the contemporary context of Athens and its drive for creative self-organisation. The group show is to include works by Joseph Beuys, José Damasceno and Pierre Huyghe, amongst others.
In keeping with the notion of interrogating forces of destabilisation, Constable has proposed to stage the exhibition in the empty spaces of the National Museum of Contemporary Art (EMST) in Athens – a symbolically appropriate venue currently in a state of flux, ‘where internal labour becomes an abstracted, performed bureaucracy’. He describes his initial visit to the space as central to the conception of his exhibition: ‘Visiting the vacant National Museum of Contemporary Art in Athens was encounter with the void; an in-between space. During an eye-opening tour given by the museum’s two curators, these empty white cube spaces that were closed to the public highlighted an important equation between the current political situation occurring throughout Greece with a wider issue concerning the position of a contemporary art museum within such a context.’
The judging panel praised the young curator’s considered and incisive proposal: ‘Joseph’s proposal presents a poignant commentary on the Greek crisis but is also concerned with the broader issue of art’s relation to capital more broadly. He has considered an evocative venue, the closed, or rather, unopened Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens, and he refers to theorists’ ideas that are very relevant to Greece at the moment, promising a very ambitious public programme to further unfold the concepts of the exhibition.’
Constable’s co-winner, Rebecca Edwards, was selected for her proposal The Ear and the Eye, a two-part exhibition brings together a multi-channel sound installation representation of Alex Tyrell’s album, Memories We Made in the Computer Age with an installation, Stop Counting, by Scottish artist and Turner Prize nominee (2011) Karla Black. Embracing NEON’s ethos of cross-cultural exchange, the two installations will be shown simultaneously with the former in London (ANDOR Gallery) and the latter in Athens (State Concept Gallery). Through the use of live recordings and projection in real time, the two art works will correspond to create a dialogue in which the physical and the non-physical will ‘be in a state of synchronicity’ through technology.
Professor Victoria Walsh, Head of Programme for Curating Contemporary Art, highlights the importance of NEON as a platform for young practitioners: ‘The opportunities presented by the Neon Curatorial Award scheme are unique in encouraging creative proposals based on a critical engagement with the D. Daskalopoulos Collection and contemporary art culture in Greece today. Joseph Constable, who graduated from the RCA Curating Contemporary Art programme in 2014, is at an early stage of his curatorial career; winning this award, jointly shared, is a significant achievement. The Curating Contemporary Art programme continues to appreciate and value this scheme, established by the Whitechapel Gallery in partnership with Neon, and particularly grateful to Iwona Blazwick and Dimitris Daskalopoulos for inviting CCA to participate.’
Elina Kountouri, Director of NEON, said: ‘We look forward to continuing this important cultural dialogue between Greece and the UK through our renewed partnership with the Whitechapel on the Curatorial Exchange Award.’Â