Conversations with Curators: Nici Cumpston on relationships and conversations

08/07/19 • 32 min

“Each curator is unique like every artist is unique, I believe,” says Nici Cumpston, who holds the dual positions of Curator of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art at the Art Gallery of South Australia and artistic director of TARNATHI. Not to mention that Cumpston, a Barkindji woman of Afghan and European descent, is also an artist, educator and writer. In this podcast, the second of four episodes which focus on contemporary curating, Cumpston discusses how for her curating is a mixture of aesthetic, cultural, political and educative roles, at the centre of which lie community, relationships and conversation. “For me I need to have a good understanding of the artists work,” she says. “I need to build a relationship with the artist that I’m working with and I like togive them the opportunity to excel themselves.” Cumpston further talks through her pre-art life, how she eventually found herself at AGSA, the larger aspirations behind curating, and the changes she’s noticed in the arts as an Indigenous curator during the last decade. See more at Art Guide Australia online: www.artguide.com.au Podcast produced by Tiarney Miekus. Engineered by Mino Peric. Music by Jesse Warren.

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Conversations with Curators: Anna Davis on collaboration and experimentation

When Anna Davis discusses being a curator, she talks about collaboration, conversation and experimentation: “It’s about working with artists and working with ideas.” It’s also about the relationships: “The exhibition really starts to take shape in a real sense once the artists are really talking. I think when you get the chance to work with someone like Jenny Watson or Louise Hearman and it’s over a number of years, which is fantastic, you get to develop this relationship with them and hopefully a level of trust comes through that.” Having held the position of Curator at Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (MCA) for the past decade, Davis has curated a vast array of contemporary exhibitions, which she discusses in the first episode of Art Guide’s four-part series ‘Conversations with Curators’. Anna discusses how she came to curating, what her past life as a “lapsed artist” offers her curatorial practice, the experience of curating major solo shows and the ethical implications of her work. See more at Art Guide Australia online: www.artguide.com.au Podcast produced by Tiarney Miekus. Engineered by Mino Peric. Music by Jesse Warren.

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Conversations with Curators: Andy Butler on life as an independent curator

“Not only is it exhibition making,” says independent curator Andy Butler when talking of his curatorial practice, “I think it’s advocacy in a lot of ways for particular artists’ practices, for the arts more broadly, for particular ideas that you want to see circulate within the contemporary art world and contemporary art discourse.”

Along with being an independent curator, Butler is a Filipino-Australian writer and artist who continuously looks at the dynamics of power, systemic racism and racial hierarchies within a contemporary art context. As Butler explains in the third episode of our Conversations with Curators series, independent curating provides a malleable space for exploring power and racism, allowing him to work closely with artists and to take greater curatorial risks.

Although Butler is still in the earlier stages of his curatorial career, he’s recently curated a number of exhibitions that have garnered considerable attention including Those Monuments Don’t Know us at Bundoora Homestead and Always there and all a part at Melbourne artist-run gallery BLINDSIDE.

In the podcast conversation Butler talks about these shows, explaining his impetus to illustrate the complexity of artists and their work, and to focus on having meaningful engagements and discussions on racism and colonialism in both art and life. “At least in the exhibitions I’ve curated, I’ve tried to move away from this sense that exhibitions like this are just celebrating diversity — they’re actually more about whiteness,” explains Butler. “They’re more about structures of power that people from all of these [different] backgrounds are all navigating in these different ways.”

See more at Art Guide Australia online: www.artguide.com.au

Podcast produced by Tiarney Miekus. Engineered by Mino Peric. Music by Jesse Warren.