Curating Home

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Time: 12.00pm - 1.30pm
Price: free

Online

In this first of a three-part event series taking place over May–June on the theme of HOME, members of Kingston University's Visual and Material Culture Research Centre will be in conversation with guest speakers on the theme of curating the home. The conversations will be followed by a panel discussion and opportunity for audience questions.

‘Stay Home' rapid response collecting project, Museum of the Home

The Stay Home Collection is a digital collecting project at the Museum of the Home that explores people's experiences of home during the COVID-19 pandemic. Since April 2020, the project has received over 400 submissions including questionnaires, photographs, oral recordings and diaries, all of which document how the pandemic has impacted on home life – from the challenges of isolation, home-work and home-schooling to building new relationships and community support. In this conversation between Véronique Belinga (Collections Assistant, Museum of the Home) and Annabelle Wilkins (post-doctoral researcher, Kingston University and Queen Mary), we will explore how the project has enabled the museum to engage with the changing meanings of home in its exhibitions and collections, as well as reflecting on collaborative practice with participants, creative practitioners and researchers.

Curating Home: a conversation with emerging artists

This conversation between artists Omalola Mau, Husna Memon and Helen Potkin (Associate Professor, Kingston University) will focus on a recent exhibition on the theme of home that took place at One Paved Court Gallery in Richmond in January 2022. We will explore how the curators and artists individually and collectively addressed the themes of home, identity and cultural heritage, the curatorial decision-making process and audience responses.

‘For some, home remains the place where they were born, while for others, it is an adopted place where they have developed a bond with the environment and its cultural identity. Some people think of home as a more solid "truth" that connects to their race, identity, or cultural heritage. Despite Britain being diverse, the concept of home for People of Colour is tainted by the experiences of exclusion and racism. The experiences and stories of communities of colour are largely unheard and un-documented. As individuals who are from these communities, the nine artists offer a unique lens on the concept of home in all its complexities and meanings. In light of this, the artists have come together to present a varied collection of work that shares these wider themes of home through film, digital art and digital collage, painting and printmaking.' (https://onepavedcourt.co.uk/portfolio-item/home-group-show-jan-2022).

Speaker biographies

Véronique Belinga is Collections Assistant at the Museum of the Home, where she has worked on the ‘Stay Home' Digital Collection, a generative project that engages people's experiences of home life and homemaking. Her role involves helping to collect, organise and preserve people's stories of home during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Omalola Mau (b. 1998) is a Canadian artist living and working in London. She completed her BA in Fine Art at Kingston School of Art in 2021 after completing a foundation degree at City and Guilds of London Art School. She has a multidisciplinary practice with an emphasis on painting. In her work, she explores themes of gathering, heritage, and preserving moments. The gap between feeling and being something is integral to her work and in particular she is fascinated with the concept of closeness and connection in a time where everything has become so atomized, and in relation to that, the fracturing that takes place through immigration over time. Through painting Mau records her own history and experiences, focusing on still-lifes of food and household objects, and drawing on family archives to explore the idea of gathering and togetherness. Mau has always been drawn to painting as a way to record experiences; this comes from a long-term interest in archives, particularly non-traditional archives.

Husna Memon is a British South Asian artist and curator, who studied BA Fine Art & Art History at Kingston University. She is a mixed-media artist, who primarily focuses on analogue photography, and more recently printmaking. Her practice is research-heavy and covers topics such as identity, culture, Colonialism, Post-colonialism, and Orientalism. Once her Granddad died, her connection and link to pre-partition and colonial South Asia was severed. He was the only surviving family member who remembered and had first-hand experience of the 1947 partition. Husna overlays imagery of her Granddad's deterioration over the pages of India on the Brink (1931), a book that had been published around the time he was born. In doing so, she aimed to bookend his life. Also, by covering and exposing certain passages of the book, she is reclaiming the telling of history that has always been told by white men. She edits and changes the very nature of the book, so much so she has become the author.

Helen Potkin is Associate Professor of Art History at Kingston University and Course Leader for the BA Fine Art and Art History. Her research interests include the role of participation and collaboration in contemporary art and pedagogy (https://www.kingston.ac.uk/staff/profile/ms-helen-potkin-579).

Annabelle Wilkins is a social and cultural geographer with interests in migration, home and belonging. She is a post-doctoral researcher at Kingston University London, where she works on the Nordforsk-funded project ‘Making it Home' (MaHoMe), and at Queen Mary University of London, where she is working on the UKRI-funded project ‘Stay Home: rethinking the domestic in the COVID-19 pandemic' (Stay Home Stories).

For further information about this event:

Contact: Helena Bonett
Email: h.r.bonett@kingston.ac.uk