Beverley Harrison

About

My curatorial practice stems from a strong academic background in International Contemporary Art, Curation and Theory. Interests include how performance bisects intermedia installation and other media. This research encompasses embodied art practices that are temporal, spatial, site and context sensitive. I delve into performance and participatory nuances – art’s sensorium – to stage and open art’s interpretive perceptual reception, visitor awareness and public engagement. I explore expanded curatorial strategies that enliven experiential encounters, spawning multilayered expansive meanings. Installation and performance foster artist and curator interdisciplinary collaborative curatorial relations, which I cultivate.

Curatorial Approach

Aesthetic situations become confluences of knowledge, constellations of contexts, diverse publics and interdisciplinary exchanges. These are presented in exhibitions, encounters, performances, events, symposium, assemblies and reading spaces. Art and artistic intent’s manifestations are mirrored in the curatorial format, transparent propositions, processes and public address. The public address reflects known and potential publics, in the exhibition’s format, mediation and participatory curatorial outreach. Outreach includes ongoing dialogues with local art ecologies and community representatives, to coordinate programs and examine contemporary narratives. Art experiences are inclusive, welcoming all, hosting the public as actors or actants.

Performative participatory practices decentre institutions, availing new perspectives, recasting histories, discursively presenting new realities. Therefore, as a transnational curator, I aim to exhibit, stage and restage, from one site to another, engaging in reciprocal exchanges. Exhibition encounters reflect the site’s cultural socio-political artistic ethos, through inclusive collaborative dialogues with local artists, curators, and communities. The local is posited within the global, in artistic cultural intermingling, to eschew global homogeneity. Local artists are included in travelling exhibitions. Thus, transcultural interactions spawn manifold narratives, woven into the conceptual format, reconfigurations, performances and discursive events. Public outreach is enacted, in a coming-together, hosting artistic experiences inside and outside art venues.

Prior degrees and curating courses include:

University of Manchester, Sotheby’s Institute of Art, London, MA: Contemporary Art, Distinction 2017-2018, included global contemporary art and curation courses.
My dissertation Chiharu Shiota: Imaginative Journeys, examines the relationship between performance, performance-videos/films and installations – embodied absent presence as liminal and diasporic.

Curating the Contemporary 2019: Goldsmith University’s Summer School at the British School in Rome 2019.

University of Western Ontario MA: Library and Information Science, 1984.

Carleton University MA: Canadian Studies, Art History, 1982.
Thesis: Ronald Bloore’s Art:Interpretive basis (1950-80s Abstraction)

Carleton University BA Honours: Art History, 1979.