Curating Contemporary Art (MA)
Titus Nouwens
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, Naïmé Perrette with Sara Giannini and Sam Keogh. 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.
Nothing gentle will remain now reimagines this proposition and takes the form of a publication that combines research material and artist commissions. The ongoing Covid-19 pandemic and worldwide protests against police brutality and systemic racism, have called into question our notion of collective gathering, turning it from a naively utopian intention, to something seemingly impossible, to a necessity in order to demand real and significant change. Our intention to imagine collective futures and take up space has become a reality, something that thousands of people are doing right now, despite the many threats and dangers of claiming public space at this time. As the project progresses to its next phase, we will continue to speculate on what collective gathering means in 2020 and beyond.
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. The publication is designed by Lotte Lara Schröder and developed online by An Endless Supply. The title is borrowed from CAConrad’s poem of the same name, published in ECODEVIANCE: (Soma)tics for the Future Wilderness (2014).
Read the publication here: https://nothinggentlewillremain.rca.ac.uk
My current research explores performance and performativity in relation to the social and physical space of the art institution. In my dissertation Exhibition as Performance, I explored this further by approaching the exhibition as a constellation of ‘performing agents’ and by examining the role of curating within this. Similarly, in my curatorial projects, I aim to offer possibilities for viewers to move between affective and discursive registers, to be seduced by, as well as critically analyse the works on view. Often forming a complex dramaturgy of both object-based and time-based works these projects have at their core the bodily presence and spectatorship of the viewer. Ultimately my aim, through my research and practice, is to complicate the distinction between performance and exhibition, criticality and emotion, the real and the staged, art and life.
Titus Nouwens is a curator based in London and Amsterdam. He holds a BA in Art History from University of Amsterdam and an MA in Curating Contemporary Art from Royal College of Art. His graduate project Nothing gentle will remain is a public programme turned publication, inviting artists and audiences to speculate on how we gather together, now and in the future. Other recent projects he has (co-)curated include Open Avond(S) at De Appel; Forum of Live Art Amsterdam at Arti et Amicitiae and Frascati Theatre; funny how forever, feels now at Juliette Jongma Gallery, Amsterdam; and It’s a lot like life at Royal College of Art, London. He was selected for NEON Curatorial Exchange 2020 (organised by NEON, Athens and Whitechapel Gallery, London). Titus has also developed a collaborative practice with Panos Fourtoulakis.
