Edward Ball
MA work
MA work
Notebook
Notebook is a printed publication that brings together the four Graduate Exhibitions of the Curating Contemporary Art MA Programme. Rather than risk flattening difference, Notebook celebrates the heterogeneity of the four exhibitions in its refusal to operate under one fixed narrative. But this raises the question: how to accept heterogeneity while still maintaining a coherent editorial approach?
As well as reflecting on how to bring the four exhibitions into dialogue, Notebook also creates a space to discuss the aims and intentions of each project, through curatorial essays authored by each group; a newly commissioned response to each project by international artists, critics and writers; and a space for documentation as a visual essay for each project.
Notebook draws influence from Doris Lessing’s 1962 novel The Golden Notebook,
a book in which individual identities are split into categories through an inability to conceive of the self as a whole in the present. The protagonist Anna Wulf records her experiences in four
coloured notebooks: black for her writing life, red for political views, yellow
for emotions and blue for everyday events. Wulf also keeps a fifth, golden notebook, in which she attempts to draw these distinct strands of her life together.
Notebook also divides itself into four discrete
sections, where each exhibition operates individually rather than
relationally. Following this, there is a fifth discrete space, a
space of synthesis. As a final note, this section reflects on the four
exhibitions, and suggests possible crossovers and shared concerns across
the four distinct exhibitions. The interpretive act of synthesis, explored in collaborative writing, is an experiment in which the editors used the shared encounter with each exhibition project as a point of departure. The act of writing seeks to bring the exhibitions into a dialogue with one another while posing questions around collective spectatorship as a dialogic action itself.
Info
Info
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MA Degree
School
School of Humanities
Programme
MA Curating Contemporary Art, 2015
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Contact
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+44 (0)7794 4984643
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I am a curator and writer interested in the relationship between experimental writing and curating. Central to this is how techniques and styles of writing such as poetic form and metaphor can inform curatorial practice. This interest has developed through independent projects and my MA dissertation, in which I looked at the practices of two curators, Anthony Huberman and Raimundas Malašauskas, who both performatively play with language and writing in an exhibition to open out the field of meaning.
With the belief that an exhibition does not need to provide answers or a conclusive statement on a topic, I am interested in how the articulation of doubt, refutation and ambiguity within an exhibition might operate as a critical tool. In my future practice, I am looking to continue to explore the ways in which experiments in writing can alter an exhibition’s form and its reception by an audience.
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Degrees
- BA (Hons) Modern & Medieval Languages, University of Cambridge, 2013
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Experience
- Curatorial internship, Liverpool Biennial, Liverpool, 2014; Exhibitions and projects assistant, Caroline Wiseman Modern and Contemporary, 2012
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Exhibitions
- Correspondances, Nunnery Gallery, London, 2015; Performing Histories, Asylum Chapel, London, 2014; Inside | Out, Hackney Picturehouse, London, 2014
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Publications
- 'Notebook', 2015, 92