Last week I finished my curatorial and public programmes internship at the Liverpool Biennial. The last two months have completely flown by, and I've had an amazing time whilst working at the Biennial.
My role has varied, helping with a variety of tasks for our head curator and our head of public programmes. The last two months has seen me help work on the programme for the up and coming event at the Liverpool Biennial: Future City, which is a two day event including a Forum conference and a series of artist led expeditions. This event has been organised in conjunction with Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art as part of Qatar UK 2013 Year of Culture.
Its a really interesting event, and has been great to see the inside processes of making such an event happen. Future City will investigate the connections and asymmetries between cities, and considers the optimistic agendas for urban transformation surrounding the partner institutions. It is also an exploration of the ability of contemporary art and cultural knowledge production to imagine urban and social development in a global context. The Forum includes contributions from distinguished thinkers and practitioners in the fields of art, architecture, urbanism, visual culture and sociology. During my time at the Biennial I spent quite a lot of it
researching the speakers, and boy are there some very important people coming to speak!
As I mentioned before there will also be a series of expeditions exploring the city of Liverpool. This is a fantastic idea, as it allows people to really encounter and interact with the city from an artist point of view.
Listening to the different ideas that many of the artists put forth for these expeditions was incredibly interesting.
As well as working on the Future City event, I also helped organise two of the Tuesday Sessions that the Biennial run on the last Tuesday of each month. These events are talks with academics, writers, artists etc who specialise in a particular field; providing a talk for the public to come and engage with. Whilst working at the Biennial these events have proved thought-provoking and have definitely made me think about some things from a different angle. One of the events was centered around the title of 'Post-print Publishing', and looked at the digital publishing world and how we have moved on from the concrete material manifestation of publications.
It was a topic that I've actually had little thought towards, but it proved insightful. One of the speakers talked a lot about the process of turning a book into pdfs and into audio books. What struck me in this particular talk was the ideas that when converting a written text into an online or e-book, that there can be several people in the process of this conversion - yet, how do we really know what is the 'real' and 'truthful' copy of the text. Anyone, I suppose who is in the process of this conversion, can add words and change the slightest of things in the books. This notion was further highlighted by James Bridle who discussed one of his works where he has created a number of volumes of Dickens' 'Hard Times', wherein each copy he has altered something. This may be the colour of clothing of a particular character; a name of a street; or on the extreme end of the scale, the city itself - he changed the story line to be based in India! Even though the last example is slightly far-fetched, the notion of just changing an item of clothing of a character in the novel is intriguing, because how would we really know whether we were reading the 'correct' version, or an edited one like James'. If you would like to find out more, the Liverpool Biennial have filmed all their talks and are uploaded to the website.
One of the other tasks that I undertook during my first few weeks as intern, was a lot of artist research. The Liverpool Biennial is currently in the process of researching potential artists for the 2014 Biennial next summer, and it was my job contacting galleries, art dealers and artists themselves in order to obtain relevant and desired information. This was an extremely interesting task, as it introduced me to a wide variety of artists that I've never hear of, yet their work has such potency.
Alas, I cannot write down all the jobs that I undertook whilst here at the Biennial - that would 1. Take too long and 2. May make you super jealous!
I've had a fantastic time working as curatorial and public programmes intern at the Liverpool Biennial. I've not only met some of the kindest and loveliest people, but I've been given a rare and invaluable opportunity to see the process and practices behind such a company. It seems naïve and stupid, but before I came to the Biennial I never knew so much hard-work and enthusiasm went behind the scenes of such an organisation, and I cannot wait to see who the choose for the 2014 Biennial and the various events that will be taking place. Hopefully, I will get the chance to come back and work at the Biennial once again.
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