Exhibition Histories and Interviews Reading Group
Reading Group – Hajra Williams, Claudia Di Tosto
- 30 January 2025
- 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
In this session we will concentrate on a recent publication (2023), which focused on an aspect of exhibitions which usually goes unnoticed and undocumented: exhibition design history. As argued in the introduction, one of the suggested readings, “exhibitions are challenging objects to reconstruct and research; they are multi-authored, complex tools of expression, iterative and experimental, and ephemeral in their nature”. To build a framework to study and analyse exhibition design, a creative act in its own right, it is thus also essential to shift the focus “from the final, finished exhibition” to the processes that enable an exhibition to happen in the first place. The invited speaker is not only one of the editors of Histories of Exhibition Design in the Museum: Makers, Process, and Practice, but also the author of an essay in the book, also a suggested reading, which focuses on the interview as a core methodology to explore exhibition design, highlighting the exhibition-making practice of the British South Asian curator Nima Poovaya-Smith at Cartwright Hall in Bradford during the 1980s and 1990s.
Readings**:
Guy, Kate, Hajra Williams, and Claire Wintle, “Introduction: Museum Exhibition Design Histories”, in Histories of Exhibition Design in the Museum, ed. by Kate Guy, Hajra Williams and Claire Wintle (Routledge, 2023), pp. 1–17*
Williams, Hajra, “Collaboration and Exhibition Making at Cartwright Hall: Strategies of Permanence”, in Histories of Exhibition Design in the Museum, ed. by Kate Guy, Hajra Williams and Claire Wintle (Routledge, 2023), pp. 119–36*
**Histories of Exhibition Design in the Museum ed. by Kate Guy, Hajra Williams and Claire Wintle (Routledge, 2023) is available to physically access at the Paul Mellon Centre library.
Image credit: Gurminder Sikand, Landscape with Woman and Trees, 1994, watercolour & gouache on paper, 28 x 40.3 cm. Collection Cartwright Hall Gallery (1996-002). Image © the artist’s estate / Bradford Museums and Galleries
About the speakers
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Hajra Williams is a researcher and museum consultant. Her PhD research, supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), focused on British South Asian communities and collaborative exhibition design in the UK. By analysing three exhibitions held in different institutions across the UK from 1971 to 2008, her research aimed to highlight the experiences of British South Asians. Previously, Hajra worked at the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A), serving as the South Asian Education Officer from 1997 to 2001. She also worked on capital projects, acting as the interpretation lead for four permanent galleries at the V&A from 2006 to 2014. She holds a BA in Design from the Glasgow School of Art, an MA in Fine Art from the Royal College of Art, an MA in Museum Studies from the University of Leicester and a PhD from the University of Brighton.
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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.
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