Curating Contemporary Art (MA)
William Rees
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 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. 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 in line with ongoing seismic events that 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. The project now takes the form of a publication designed by Lotte Lara Schröder, with contributions ranging from drawing and collage to poems, an incantation and a script of a performance that never happened. It serves as both an alternative space to stage the artists’ work and as a manual for collective gathering 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. Josefin Arnell's commission is supported by the Mondriaan Fund. The project's title is borrowed from CAConrad’s poem of the same name, published in ECODEVIANCE: (Soma)tics for the Future Wilderness (2014), with their kind permission.
For the graduate project, I worked with Open School East to create a programme of commissions engaging with Margate; its landscape, histories, myths and atmospheres. The project has developed alongside seismic global events that have called in to question notions of collectivity, speculation and performance. As the project progresses to its next phase - with a print version of the online publication launching later this year - it will continue to grapple with these questions and speculate on what collective gathering means in 2020 and beyond.
Whilst at the RCA, I’ve researched queer approaches to curating and exhibition making; exploring how other practices, such as cruising and fermentation, might be used as models for these approaches. In Desire Lines: Cruising the Curatorial, I explore projects that move beyond representations of queerness to employ cruising as a curatorial methodology. As part of a fellowship with the RCA and the British Council in 2019, I spent time in Venice working at the biennial whilst researching and writing about queer ecologies, Mann’s Death in Venice, and fermentation. The outcoming work has been presented at research symposiums and will be shown in an exhibition organised by the British Council in 2020/2021.
I've also explored my interest in education and pedagogical practices: co-curating Cooperative Lunch #3: A Public Assembly, an event on self-organisation with other CCA students at Cubitt Gallery; working with ADS4 Architecture students on an exhibition of video works at Sluice Projects; and organising writing workshops as part of Across RCA and Fuel RCA. With Akis Kokkinos, I organised Extra Credit, a summer module on the CCA programme in which students decided on the programme's topics and speakers; these included talks from Lucia Pietroiusti, Asia Art Activism, Kiki Mazzuchelli and a field trip to Margate.
Prior to the RCA, I worked in Oscar Murillo’s studio, as part of Frequencies Project Foundation, and at Carlos/Ishikawa; worked on projects with Mandy el-Sayegh, Cecile B Evans, Hamish Pearch and Alex F Webb; founded roaming projects, an itinerant curatorial initiative based in London; organised exhibitions and events with J Hammond Projects, Sluice Projects, Close-Up Film Centre, Rich Mix and the Yard Theatre, London, and Triumph Gallery, Moscow; edited Contra, a journal on visual culture and conflict; and have written for various artists and arts press. I previously studied History of Art BA at UCL.
