Curating Contemporary Art (MA)
Nora Kovacs
Nothing gentle will remain is a publication inviting artists and audiences to speculate on how we gather together, now and in the future. The publication condenses a year-long exchange with Open School East and contributing artists Josefin Arnell, Pauline Curnier Jardin, Paul Maheke, Dipesh Pandya and Naïmé Perrette.
The project was initially conceived as a series of artist commissions to be presented across Margate in May 2020. These performances, workshops and screenings were to engage with the different timescales, paces and rhythms of the seaside town. With a crowded beach and abandoned arcades, a turbulent sea and a century-old amusement park, Margate is a town that fluctuates between carnivalesque abundance and eerie absence. The region’s geological history as an island severed from the mainland, its ancient myths and daily tides form an environment where past, present and future overlap. Departing from these peculiar sensations of space and time, Nothing gentle will remain intended to invite local and international artists and audiences to come together and take up space; to explore what might happen if we spill over and ooze out.
In this radically shifting moment, when collective gathering has been called into question and all we have are our speculations on the future, Nothing gentle will remain reimagines this proposition. The project is now presented in the form of a publication, ranging from drawing and collage to poems, essays and a script of a performance that never happened. The local stories and myths of Margate, as well as the various forms of narration, mediation and exchange that they opened up, remain central to the publication, which serves as both an alternative space to stage the artists’ contributions and as a manual for gathering collectively under these strange and uncertain circumstances.
The title of the publication is borrowed from CAConrad’s poem of the same name, published in ECODEVIANCE: (Soma)tics for the Future Wilderness (2014), with kind permission from CAConrad.
Nothing gentle will remain is a collaboration between Lydia Antoniou, Caterina Guadagno, Nora Kovacs, Titus Nouwens and William Rees in partnership with Open School East, as part of the MA Curating Contemporary Art Programme Graduate Projects 2020, Royal College of Art, London.
Nora Kovacs is a Hungarian-American writer, curator and arts administrator. She is particularly interested in performative and socially-engaged artistic practices, radical pedagogies and the notion of ritual as it relates to how we move through institutional and curatorial spaces. Her dissertation, Life in Plastic: The Paradox of Performativity in Art and its Institutions, traces the resurgence of performance and performative practices across institutions and the curatorial field in order to consider the function of liveness in redefining the spaces in which we encounter art. For her graduate project, Nora co-curated Nothing gentle will remain, a publication inviting artists and audiences to speculate on how we gather together, now and in the future. The publication condenses a year-long exchange with Open School East and contributing artists Josefin Arnell, Pauline Curnier Jardin, Paul Maheke, Dipesh Pandya and Naïmé Perrette.
Nora has previously held positions at Dance Umbrella (London, UK), PARSE (New Orleans, USA), the Contemporary Arts Center (New Orleans, USA), Warren Editions (Cape Town, SA), SITE Santa Fe (Santa Fe, USA), A.I.R. Gallery (New York, USA) and Berlin Art Link (Berlin, DE), to name a few. She has also co-curated a number of international projects, including How Much is Too Much? at A Plus A Gallery (Venice, IT) and Cooperative Lunch #3: A Public Assembly at Cubitt (London, UK). Her writing has been published by This Is Tomorrow, Berlin Art Link, AQNB, Exhibition Reviews Annual / the International Awards for Art Criticism, Pelican Bomb, OlyArts, New York University and A.I.R. Gallery. Nora holds a BA in Global Liberal Studies from New York University and an MA in Curating Contemporary Art from Royal College of Art. She is currently based in the USA.
