Royal College of Art announces MA Curating Contemporary Art Shows 2023

The Royal College of Art announces four Curating Contemporary Art (CCA) graduate shows taking place in April and May in collaboration with leading UK art organisations Flat Time House, Gasworks, LUX and Southwark Park Galleries.

This highly influential MA programme at the world’s number one art and design university is recognised as an international leader in curatorial education and places importance on collaborative group project-based work as a way of sharing knowledge and cultures.

Graduating students from the Curating Contemporary Art programme will present their final projects which act as important testing grounds for new curatorial forms of working with artists and the public in a ‘live’ setting.

To Be Here With You (22 April – 5 May) embraces practices of ritual to create a space of shared knowledge, gentle hospitality and open collectivity. Situated at Southwark Park Galleries and engaging with the surrounding park, the project consists of five free workshops. Artists have been invited to each develop a workshop that begins with an exploratory walk in the park, followed by guided activities in Lake Gallery’s Salter Space. Each session opens a pathway for audiences to appreciate the spaces we inhabit, to rediscover the spiritual aspects of nature, and to value our intimate rituals as something sacred.

Artists: Gail Dickerson, Hannah Lees and May Hands, Alice May, Rie Nakajima, YEWANDE 103 with Rudzani Moleya

MA curators: Caspar Danuser, Ana Paola Escoto Esteva, Seven Feng, Julia Jiang, Esther Liu, Sophie Nowakowska, Youjia Qian, Marjian Tsatsaros Tyagi, Nathan Yeomans

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Responding to the late British artist and theorist Ian White’s performances in nightclubs, One Time Only (O.T.O) (11 May), in partnership with LUX, is an event using the space of the nightclub to activate the intersections between music and the moving image. New commissions by artists Tarzan KingOfTheJungle, Anna Clegg and Adam Farah-Saad, alongside existing work by Ahaad Alamoudi and David Hall, will use media including film, video-jockeying and lighting to unravel how music videos shape, and are shaped by, our digital, geographical and personal identities. On Thursday 11 May (7pm – 1am), these live works will be presented as a club night at FOLD, supported by Futur.Shock. with DJ sets by HabibTati and Hellikisto, created in conversation with the artists. The project themes are also explored in works commissioned for social media by Hugo Hutchins and Maria Mahfooz and in a free online, interactive publication featuring critical essays, speculative writing and interviews.

Contributors: Ahaad Alamoudi, Anna Clegg, Adam Farah-Saad, Hugo Hutchins, Maria Mahfooz, Tarzan KingOfTheJungle and DJ sets by HabibTati and Hellikisto

MA curators: Malak Alhajri, Lewis G. Burton, Guanchun Chen, David Hall, Elizabeth Langton, Sukii Lu, Siavash Minoukadeh, Ambre Panhard, Nikki Ramirez and Anqi Zhang.

Further information

Breath Variations (12 – 14 May) is a new body of work created by Irish artist Christopher Steenson for Flat Time House, the former studio-home of late British conceptual artist John Latham. Using sound, video, and transmission-based methodologies, Breath Variations will explore the materiality of time – its permanence and evanescence – and the power that attention has over its transmission and state of matter.

By manipulating and extending the sonic dimensions of Flat Time House, Steenson investigates the capacity of breath as a ‘least event’ – Latham’s term for the shortest departure from a state of nothingness – to punctuate linearities of time and space.

Artist: Christopher Steenson

MA curators: Thomas Cury, Cindy He, Salomé Jacques, Romy Lagesse, Napas Mangklatanakul, Ariana Martin, Liyin Wang, Hyora Yang

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Blue Space: The Changing Currents of Resilient Waterways (24 – 28 May) in partnership with Gasworks, is a collaboration between artists Priysha Rajvanshi and Elise Guillaume, that responds to our evolving relationship with nature, through the creation of a provisional shelter that gives voice to the environment. Large cyanotype sheets made in the River Thames by Rajvanshi have been adapted to form the tent’s canopy with a related projection across the interior walls. An original soundscape produced by Guillaume incorporates the vibration-based audio of natural elements with spoken word, to allow a speculative conversation between humans and our surroundings to occur. Through this, the artists invite visitors to slow down and listen to the earth, so as to hear its perspective as we look to adapt 

to our changing world. 

Artists: Elise Guillaume, Priysha Rajvanshi

MA curators: Aleda Wood Roberts, Blythe Thea Williams, Genevieve Fisher, John Dougan Nealon, Kangin Park, Nathalia Oliveira, Wanlan Chen, Zihan Wen

Further information