Upcoming Events

Exhibition Histories and Practice-led Research Reading Group

Reading Group – Sunil Shah, Claudia Di Tosto

  • 26 September 2024
  • 3:00 – 4:00 pm
  • This Reading Group aims to provide a space for discussion and reflection about the role of exhibitions within the production of British art.
  • Online

The aim of the first event in the Reading Group series is to explore how practice-led research can contribute to disrupting established narratives around seminal exhibitions. This is the methodology adopted by Sunil Shah, curator and PhD candidate at the UAL, for his doctoral research on Documenta XI, held in 2002 and curated by Okwui Enwezor. Drawing from his own practice, Sunil focuses on peripheral archives of the exhibition instead of the official one in Kassel.

Readings:

Shah, Sunil. “The Rise (and Fall?) of the Postcolonial Documenta”, Afterall: A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry, 2022.*

*The article is under paywall here.

Image credit: Peter H. Feist, Museum Fridericianum, Kassel, Documenta III, 1964. Digital image courtesy of Media Library of Art and Visual History of Humboldt, University of Berlin (CC BY-SA 4.0)

The Reading Group will be hosted by the Paul Mellon Centre and convened by Claudia Di Tosto (PhD candidate in history of art, University of Warwick). The four sessions will take place online, allowing people to attend regardless of time zone and geographical location. A final hybrid event will also be held at the Paul Mellon Centre in the summer term. The Reading Group will meet once every two months, beginning in September 2024. It is open to everyone.

More information on future events and access to readings will become available. If you have any questions, please write to the convenor, Claudia Di Tosto: [email protected]

About the speakers

  • Sunil Shah is an artist and writer. He is a PhD candidate at Central St. Martins, University of the Arts London (UAL) researching art and exhibition histories with a particular focus on Okwui Enwezor’s Documenta11 (2002). His work centres on the visual document, photography and archives with an interest in analysing their role in relation to post-colonial theory, political science and Black Studies. He is affiliated with Afterall Research and since 2015 he has been associate editor of American Suburb X online photography and visual culture platform and has made contributions to Foam Magazine (NL), Source Magazine (UK), The Eyes Magazine (FR) and FOMU Extra (NL).

 

  • Claudia Di Tosto is a PhD candidate in history of art at the University of Warwick in collaboration with the Paul Mellon Centre. She is researching the history of the British Pavilion at the Venice Art Biennale through the lenses of global and national art histories, exhibition history and postcolonial theory to explore the Pavilion as a site of national self-definition and redefinition. Prior to starting the PhD, she worked for various institutions such as: IMMA – Irish Museum of Modern Art (Dublin, Ireland); V&A (London, UK); Vatican Museums – Modern and Contemporary Art Department; and MAXXI – National Museum of 21st-Century Arts (Rome, Italy). Most recently, she was the co-convenor of the Doctoral Researchers Network at the Paul Mellon Centre for the academic year 2022/23 and held a position as associate lecturer at the Courtauld Institute of Art.