The Circulating Department ()
Photographs, wooden stands, simanay, thread.
V&A Museum
London
Gayle Chong Kwan was Artist in Residence in Photography at the V&A between - , during which she explored the museum as process, movement, and as a force of deterritorialization in relation to objects, people, and collections, and developed a series of photographic, wearable, and sculptural work, which was installed at the V&A.
I became fascinated by the V&A’s historical Circulation Department, which lasted between and , after which objects in its collection were dispersed throughout the wider collection. Its archives are kept at Blythe House, where objects not on display at any of the V&A museums are stored. Unlike the rest of the V&A which had a ’year rule’, whereby only work that was over 50 years old could be collected, the Circulation Department collected contemporary work. The Circulation Department was the first ‘travelling gallery’ in the UK, and loaned original works and copies to provincial and national museums, libraries, galleries, art colleges, and schools. The department had a higher than usual intake of women, many of its staff were educate
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What is a castle?
Worldwide, castles have had many purposes and meanings. They may be coveted possessions of strategic and political importance, symbolising power, sovereignty and conquest. They are sites of attack, defence, vigilance; places of imprisonment, but conversely also of protection, sanctuary and refuge. They may conceal mysteries, secrets, even atrocities within their walls, or become museums committed to revealing hidden stories of the past.
This Curation responds to a loan from the National Gallery, London of The Fortress of Königstein from the North by Bernardo Bellotto () to Norwich Castle Museum in summer It explores some of the themes above, using a wide range of artworks from medieval to contemporary.
Artists featured in this Curation:Bernardo Bellotto (–), William Henry Crome (–), Aelbert Cuyp (–), John Sell Cotman (–), Marwan Rechmaoui (b), Gerard David (c–), John Berney Crome (–), Gustave Moreau (–), Briton Riviere
Dr. Gayle Chong Kwan is a British artist who explores perspectives and possibilities to observe, model, and contest aspects of historical, political, and ecological life that traverse the material and spiritual, modes of interiority and exteriority, and the individual and collective. Her photographic works, installations, moving image work, performances, and ritual sensory events act within and against histories of oppression to position the viewer as one element in a cosmology of the political, personal, social, and ecological. Dr. Gayle Chong Kwan's research is based around in individual methodology of fine art practice, but is one that manifests with and through social practices that engender change in the way the organisations and institutions can work with collecting, commissioning, remembering, redistributing, returning, and making meaning with audiences and artists. PhD Doctoral Thesis, Royal College of Art, London (), 'Imaginal Travel: political and ecological positioning as fine art practice'.
Representation
Martina Gracis martina@
Galerie Alberta Pane, Paris and Venice.Press
Binita Walia binita@
The Space inBetween, London.Supported by
The Artists Agenc
Gayle Chong Kwan – interview: ‘I’ve made a connection between displays of constructed power and childlike play’
The artist talks about using sand and sugar to make historic and contemporary connections between Mauritius and the Isle of Wight and between colonial power, indentured labour, leisure and childhood
Gayle Chong Kwan interrogates legacies of extraction and exploitation and histories of oppression in her expanded and embodied art practice, using sensory experience, material objects and collective ritual to reflect on the past and envisage alternative futures. In A Pocket Full of Sand, now at John Hansard Gallery in Southampton, themes of colonial power, indentured labour, leisure and childhood meander and crisscross through the mediums of film, sculpture and collage.
Unexpected, fruitful connections are drawn out between two islands at opposite ends of the British empire: the Isle of Wight and Mauritius, the birthplace of Chong Kwan’s father. The London-based artist homes in on the materiality of sand and sugar, the mainstay of Mauritius’s colonial economy, harvested initially by enslaved people, and subsequently by indentured workers. “By thinking about colonial time
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