PRAXIS
My research explores how cultural memory is transmitted, circulated, and reimagined within artistic and curatorial practices. Through exhibitions, publications, collection-based interventions, and dialogical formats, I bring together artists, researchers, and communities to examine how cultural memory is shaped and reimagined across temporal, geographic, cultural, and social contexts.
I develop iterative projects that evolve across multiple formats in response to context and collaboration. These projects frequently involve partnerships with museums, art schools, artist-run spaces, contemporary art centres, charities, and community organisations, enabling research to unfold through both scholarly enquiry and public engagement.
My practice develops over three interconnected research enquiries:
Artwork Reproductions & Imaginary Museums
Developing through curatorial and archival research, this research topic enables interventions in collections through formats such as publications, exhibitions, conversations and interviews with artists, and workshops with art school students.
Examples include the monograph Flâneurs, the exhibition Tomorrow Never Dies. Laocoön’s Hyperrealities, and the workshops The Original Copy. I am also conducting research related to this topic as part of my doctoral research.
This research topic unfolds across a transhistorical enquiry that develops over interrelated threads:
Historic copies – painted copies and plaster casts – as instruments for disseminating Western artistic canons and ideologies. Museum of copies as early forms of ‘imaginary museums’.
Artwork reproductions as tools for art-historical research, drawing on and reactivating the methodologies of André Malraux and Aby Warburg. The creative potential of ‘imaginary museums’ in redefining art history.
Questions of authenticity and originality, including the composite biographies of plaster casts, the migration of aura from original to facsimile, concepts of authenticity in Eastern philosophies, and appropriation art.
Digital reproductions of cultural objects and related ethical questions that may arise regarding copyright and ownership of data, known as digital colonialism.
Contemporary forms of appropriations as ‘invocations’ (Verwoert 2007), or how reproductions and recreations of cultural objects by contemporary artists deal with unresolved questions of identity, belonging, hybridity, and situatedness.
Imagining alternative museum formats through the circulation of copied objects, using reproduction as a tool for reflecting on institutional and social transformation.
Contemporary artists often reactivate cultural heritage through acts of remediation, using reproduction as a means to address questions of identity, belonging, and social change.
Alternative Hi/Stories & Heritage Reimagination
Developing through archival and participatory research, this research topic has manifested in various formats, including publications, exhibitions, online platforms, interviews with artists, talks, screenings, and participatory and thinking-through-making workshops. Examples include: Monuments for the Present, Monuments for Equality, East End Transmissions, and the conversation with artist Matt Baker about the regeneration of Crown Street in the Gorbals, Glasgow, in the 2000s.
This research thread is developed in collaboration with artists, researchers, and communities, in response to public space and through oral history and thinking-through-making sessions.
Preserving and transmitting community hi/stories during periods of urban regeneration and displacement.
Reconsidering the role of monuments in the aftermath of Black Lives Matter, creating space for underrepresented communities to shape what is remembered and passed on.
Contemporary art practices that provide alternative spaces of remembrance and transmission, challenge the fixity of monuments and instead celebrate more ephemeral and communal moments.
Intangible mo(nu)ments that celebrate traditions, encounters, care, and exchange.
Curatorial Pedagogies and Participatory Knowledge-Making
This strand of my research explores the potentialities of collaboration and in the production of alternative knowledge. Participation is embedded across my projects and often takes the form of co-creation with community groups.
In parallel, I programme public engagement events for wider audiences, facilitate peer sessions for artists and curators, and curate training events for PhD students.
My exhibitions often emerge from extended conversations and shared research with artists. The resulting commissions often carry elements of these mutual inspirations and exchange.
Some of my projects have been accompanied by publications that capture the conversations, histories, reflections, and moments of sharing that happened during the process of developing the project.
Examples of this research thread include Monuments for the Present, SIX YEARS: What do curators care for?, L’intrigue se cherche…, past forward, East End Transmissions' engagement programme, The Curator’s Workshop, and the SGSAH Catalyst Event The Poetics of the Proxy: Rethinking Ownership, Authenticity, and Institutional Authority Through Replicas.