JOIN THE CONVERSATION - ongoing series alongside changing exhibitions

Participants: The public

Purpose: A facilitated conversation to gain an insight into visitor responses to forthcoming exhibitions. The conversations are often filmed and the films may then form part of the interpretive experience

This is an ongoing series of conversations with the public, held whilst an exhibition is under development. The ideas and responses in the session can then inform decisions made about how the interpretation strategy is organised. Our premise is that all starting points are valid.

Jeremy Deller English Magic

Carl Andre, Rosa Barber, WJM Turner  This film forms part of the interpretive experience at the Gallery for an exhibition combining the work of three artists, Carl Andre, Rosa Barba and WJM Turner. It's aim is to invite discussion in connection with contemporary art and the work of Carl Andre, Rosa Barber in particular.

The film features extracts from a visitors' discussion together with comments from the artists responding to these extracts.

Copper, Aluminium, Red and Green Artists and scientists met to discuss Carl Andre's declaration: 'The periodic table of elements is for me what the colour spectrum is for a painter. . . Copper is more profoundly different from aluminium than green is from red'. Andrew Park from Cognitive, then animated the ideas that arose in the dialogue for this film.

Self: Image and identity self-portraiture from Van Dyck to Louise Bourgeois

A National Portrait Gallery Van Dyck self-portrait, recently bought for the nation did a 3 year tour around the UK. First stop was Margate.

Margate’s Turner Contemporary gallery curated an exhibition intended to engage with the self of each and every individual who walked through the doors. The portrait toured to a number of galleries around the UK.  The Scottish National Portrait gallery in Edinburgh curated an exhibition around the male gaze ‘Looking good: the male gaze from Van Dyck to Lucien Freud’.  As part of this the gallery also commissioned Edinburgh band the Young fathers to respond to the Van Dyck self-portrait in it’s ornate gold frame, in the context of the gallery collection..

Some of the response to this setting of the Van Dyck within the context of the Edinburgh National Gallery was very different to what we saw in Margate so I have included some information about that section of the tour below.

Here’s the context….Shockingly, the short and powerful film that was produced attracted 1000’s of hate messages (possibly from bots) so the comments have been frozen, but you can still watch the film on youtube.