SPEAKING SURFACES

Designing spatial structures for exhibition practice

Brief: (Key focusses): ” The exhibition aims to create a dynamic, welcoming and functional space as a platform for encounters: exhibitions, conversations, performances, gatherings, screenings and teaching. Speaking surfaces asks, how can the gallery as a place and space, “articulate through arrangement, narrative and spatialisation,” how publics are made, subjectivities instituted and politics of display manifest? “

As the spatial designers for this project we are working with and alongside curators, artists and other practitioners rather than creating artworks or exhibits ourselves. Our job is to design the space for others. We are creating a world for the work and voices of others.

” How do interior surfaces speak? What narratives subsist with or are sustained by the patterns and repetitions of interior ensembles? How are cultural stories and forces inscribed in the surfaces that surround us? How has this interplay manifested historically? What novelties and continuities are there in contemporary articulation of surface and orality? In the Pacific, interiors are portals that augment and entangle people and objects within time (tā) and space (vā) as a form of ‘dwelling-in-time’ in an “ever-moving-present” (Wendt 1996). In other traditions, interior surfaces are portals for accessing nature, the ideal, and richer outside worlds.”

” The history of galleries and museums as we know them is part of a lineage of colonial structures where social and cultural politics are operating even when not explicit. How do we counter repeating established and institutionalized power relationships? Who, and what, is missing? How do we deploy existing institutions and their spaces, or create new ones in better, more effective ways – ways that do not rehash and reinforce dominant power structures and narratives? What do non-colonial and non-patriarchal spaces feel like? ”

” By presenting a contemporary, multipurpose and flexible space within St Paul St Galleries, Speaking Surfaces responds to these histories of social control, which were exercised through the construction and display of culture in museums and galleries “

Overview: Reading the brief and being introduced to it was very exciting. I would say there are a lot of ideas that I was excited to share and execute. This may have to do with the confirmation of knowing who I am as a designer. I have developed strong connections towards who I am as a person and the realisations of how there are many different or unique aspects of my life that are able to be contextualised and introduced in spatial forms.