Tate Exchange - What Is Your Stance?
6-12 May 2019
Tate Liverpool, Liverpool (UK)
What Is Your Stance? was a programme of events and activities at Tate Liverpool, which asked how art can inspire change in our everyday lives and help us understand who we are. Selected as one of the Tate Exchange programmes, What Is Your Stance? was developed by BA (Hons) Art History and Curating students at Manchester School of Art, Dr Rosemary Shirley (Associate Professor of Museum Studies at the School of Museum Studies, University of Leicester), Georgia Burns (Senior Graphic Design Lecturer at Sheffield Hallam University) and myself.
Responding to the key theme ‘movement’, the project aimed at creating an open social space with workshops and drop-in activities, providing participants with an alternative way of looking at art. It was curated by students Laura Kubiliene, Chia-Wei Lee and Fiona-Rose Stephens, and designed by Georgia Burns. In the space, there were three different, yet connected elements for participants to engage with. Inspired by the concept of social choreography, Find Your Stance enabled visitors to express their physical and personal positions through movement. Share Your Stance was a community board, a space for written and drawn responses to visitors’ experiences of the project. In addition, a gallery map linked some of the artworks on display to aspects of our everyday lives, offering new ways to think about how art connects to and invites us to consider our own personal stances. A series of workshops and talks accompanied the main project. Taking an artwork on display as inspiration, speakers and hosts were invited to lead an open conversation, including the one I hosted on digital technology with Gabriella Warren-Smith, freelance writer and curator.