Curating Magic, British Art Network

Posted by Emily Selove

https://britishartnetwork.org.uk/event/curating-magic-october-2022/

The organisers for this event are currently inviting calls for papers.

Seminar exploring magic as content, theory and/or practice in exhibition making Saturday, 29th October 2022 | day-time BST (online)

Magic ‘… the means of approaching the unknown by other ways than those of science or religion.’ (Max Ernst, 1946)

“Inspired by exhibitions such as The Dark Monarch: Magic and Modernity in British Art (Tate St Ives, 2009/2010), Enchanted Modernities: Mysticism, Landscape, and the American West (Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art, 2014), Spellbound: Magic, Ritual & Witchcraft (Ashmolean, 2018/2019) and most recently Surrealism and Magic: Enchanted Modernity (Peggy Guggenheim Collection and Museum Barberini, 2022), as well as recent publications including Magic, the latest of the Whitechapel’s Documents of Contemporary Art (2021, edited by Jamie Sutcliffe), this call for papers encourages research on the ways in which magical thought and practice are central to art and culture. It considers how magic’s continued importance as counter-cultural force and epistemological strategy might be reflected in art, art history and curation, and hopes to reappraise how occultism and magic might be reflected not only in the content of an exhibition but how they might, in turn, inform curatorial practice itself.

This seminar is organised by Helen Bremm (Doctoral researcher, University of Cambridge), Tor Scott (Collection & Research Assistant, National Galleries of Scotland) and Emma Sharples (AHRC-funded collaborative doctoral researcher with Tate and the University of Cambridge)”