Laura Castagnini
Curator and writer (AUS)
Laura Castagnini is a curator and writer interested in the histories of feminism and their current articulations, especially as they intersect with the politics of sexuality and race, and their expression in modern and contemporary art. She has published widely and taught curating at various institutions, including a course on Queer and Feminist Curating at Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK).She is currently Curator at ACMI in Melbourne, where she is currently working on Angela Tiatia's Ian Potter Moving Image Commission after leading on the recent major exhibition Light: Works from Tate's collection. Prior to ACMI, Laura worked in as Assistant Curator, Modern and Contemporary British Art at Tate in London, where she curated monographic displays of Lubaina Himid and Liliane Lijn as well as assisted on major exhibitions including Frank Bowling's first retrospective and All too Human: Bacon, Freud and a Century of Painting Life. In this role she also played an active role in diversifying the collection, leading on major acquisitions such as Maud Sulter and Claudette Johnson, as well as conducting collection research into the representation of LGBT+ artists. She had previously worked as Programme Coordinator at Iniva (Institute of International Visual Arts), where she worked on a range of projects exploring the politics of race in the visual arts including a series of collaborations with the Black Artists and Modernism research group. She holds a Master of Arts (Art History) from the University of Melbourne and has received numerous grants and awards for her research on feminist and queer art, including most recently a Research Continuity Fellowship from the Paul Mellon Centre to trace an exhibition history of the touring exhibition Stolen Glances: Lesbians Take Photographs (1991-2).
Why did you become a curator? Were you interested in a specific topic and why?
I wanted to become a curator as soon as I learnt what that word meant, which was in the later years of my high school. Art history was my favourite subject but I had never met anyone working in the arts until I went to university and it completely blew my mind that this could be a career option (Perhaps my naivety was a blessing, as I also didn't realise how tough his path would be!). I went to university in my late teens / early 20s, and still remember the shock of realising all the possible ways of thinking and living that could exist outside my (white, heteronormative) suburban upbringing.
At university I was introduced to feminism and it became an important tool to understand myself and my place in the world. Feminist art and ideas led me towards queer theory, which helped me to articulate my own sexual identity. It also brought me to postcolonial thinking, which helped me to understand my subject position as a white settler currently living in the context of so-called "Australia". This learning expanded to global politics of race once I moved to the UK (where I lived for 8 years, until recently) and worked for a radical small organisation called Iniva who works predominantly with British visual artists of African and Asian descent. I'd say that identity politics is the core concern of my writing and curatorial practice. I have continued this path of learning over the last 15 years and it never ceases to fascinate me.
Have you ever experienced tokenisation of identities/certain groups as a problem in your practice? Have you questioned that?
Tokenism is rife in the art world. There was a moment about 10 years ago where everyone was doing "senior women shows" (that is, white women; it took a few more years for Black women to hit the spotlight). Obviously it is super important that these artists are finally getting their due credit, but I can't help but wonder if the retroactive and recuperative focus on artist's early work of the 1970s/80s serves to relegate sexism as thing of the past - rather than an ongoing issue.
In 2017 I was asked to curate a collection display of sculpture by the artist Liliane Lijn at Tate Britain, a leading figure in the male-dominated field of kinetic sculpture in Britain. She is well-known for her work during in the 1960s and Tate's collection (at the time) reflected this. However, after meeting Lijn and researching her long and extensive practice, I felt it was important to show our audiences more recent work. In addition to the exhibition, we celebrated her long career through a "takeover" of the entire gallery with interactive digital artworks, performances, workshops, music and video projections. A major highlight was the premiere of Lijn's participatory performance The Oracle, which she first developed in 1974 but had never before had the opportunity to perform in public.
I think it was important to really focus on the artist's practice, in the past and in the present, beyond their biography. Another example is working on Frank Bowling's first retrospective with my colleague Dr Elena Crippa. Although he was a leading figure in debates around Black art, especially in the 1970s, his primary motivation was always painting, famously stating: 'My art isn't about politics, it's about paint'. Thus, the exhibition brought in elements of Bowling's biography only where explicitly depicted in the work or stated by the artist.
This is not to say these decisions are always straightforward. I am often torn between my responsibility to the artists I work with and my responsibility to my audiences. For many audiences from marginalised communities, they do not feel automatically at home in major galleries. Speaking for my own community, I feel a responsibility towards my younger LGBT+ audiences to point them towards queer content so they can see themselves reflected and visible part of society. As Anna Conlan (somewhat dramatically) argues: "omission from the museum does not simply mean marginalisation; it formally classifies certain lives, histories and practices as insignificant, renders them invisible, marks them as unintelligible, and thereby casts them into the realm of the unreal." From my own research into national major collections, I know there is a very low representation of LGBT+ artists, particularly lesbian and transgender artists, which limits potential for what can be displayed on the walls. And yet, I've found some LGBT+ artists, particularly senior artists with other intersecting marginalised identities, do not want their work to be discussed in these terms.
This conundrum poses a real challenge for my desire to articulate a lesbian art history, which feels missing in our culture. I want to seek the wisdom of older lesbian artists and curators, to engage in a public inter-generational dialogue. But I'm finding the double barrel of misogyny and homophobia poses a big challenge to my attempts.
Did you develop any organisational or curatorial tactics to overcome this problem and really support the communities that were important to you and your programmes?
One strategy is that I've decided to focus on exhibition histories, rather than individual artists. In particular I've been researching Stolen Glances: Lesbians Take Photographs, a touring show curated by Tessa Boffin and Jean Fraser in 1991. Its wild to me that the first exhibition and book to explore representation of lesbianism in art and history in Britain was only 30 years ago! Stolen Glances articulated new definitions of lesbian photography by bringing together ten photographers from Britain and North America - including Ingrid Pollard, Tessa Boffin, Mumtaz Karimjee, Della Grace (now Del Grace Volcano) and Deborah Bright - whose work addressed lesbian issues and explored the history and materiality of photography. It was a bold and controversial exhibition that directly responded to the UK's increasing culture of censorship and attack on LGBT+ communities. This context is of particular interest to me today when programming in our institutions is once again the subject of media speculation and government intervention during the present so-called 'culture war'. I also co-organised a seminar with Tate's Queer British Art Network to bring together other researchers exploring LGBT+ exhibition histories. A significant research output was the online publication of our collectively created Wikipedia entry British LGBT+ Art Exhibitions, the first published chronology of its kind. Its really important for LGBT+ communities to know our history!
Another tactic is community. I have learnt that even when we try to judge artistic merit "objectively", the people making decisions really do reflect their own lived experience. It is one thing to know this on an intellectual level, and another to witness it in practice. A good example is acquisitions committees. When I was working at Tate Britain, I was very often the only queer curator in the room, but not always. There was a wonderful instance in which the curatorial team were discussing a selection of works by Derek Jarman, collectively deciding which to put forward for proposed acquisition. There were a number of excellent works but we only had budget for a limited selection. I noticed a very clear split in the room; the LGBT+ identified staff were much more interested to pursue works which spoke specifically to the socio-political oppression of the time in the form of Clause 28, while the non-LGBT+ staff were championing a different work for its aesthetic qualities. Collection building is not a science and neither of these decisions is objectively the "right" one, but I know that the presence of LGBT+ staff that day did make a difference to the outcome (see 'The Clause'FFFf, Derek Jarman, 1988 | Tate). I also know that without the supportive presence of my fellow queer colleagues, I would not have felt as comfortable expressing an opinion so informed by my marginalised lived experience.
There is a unique pressure and challenge that comes with being "the only one in the room" that I think institutions really need to recognise. For many of us, we don't even realise the difference until we work somewhere with a diverse staff pool. ACMI is the first job where I've worked alongside other queer female curators and it feels like a sigh of relief to stop overthinking what I say and how I dress in order to fit in and be taken seriously. I think this goes for all members of marginalised communities: as my fellow ACMI colleague and Luritja woman Jenna Rain casually said to me the other day "I don't ever want to work anywhere again where I'm the only blackfella". I do believe that the recent push to employ people from marginalised communities through identified roles is essential, but I'd like to see more institutional focus on how to support people to remain in these roles and flourish.
I know I've strayed a bit from the question, but I guess what I'm trying to say is the 1990s disability rights slogan "nothing about us, without us" is a pretty good rule of thumb for all marginalised communities.
Another way to define tokenism is when the inclusion of artists from marginalised communities feels like an afterthought. My colleague and Taungurung curator Kate Ten Buuren explains this when she says that First Nations Curators are "often asked to respond to whiteness" - a situation that centres whiteness and relegates Blak voices to the fringe1. Kate has just curated a really excellent show at ACMI called How I See It: Blak Art and Film, which considers how First Peoples have been historically represented on our screens as they also imagine alternate realities and futures. It's a great example of what can happen when we give power and space to young curators to represent their own communities, on their own terms. I'm proud to work at an institution that positions First Nations culture at the centre of Australian screen culture.
What does feminist and queer curating means to you?
Feminist and queer curating means challenging the absence of marginalised voices and questioning the museological systems that maintain exclusion.
I think we can all agree that we need to collect and exhibit more artists of "under-represented identities" (women, BAME, LGBT+, disabled artists etc.). The challenge lies in addressing the dominance of heterosexual white male artists without resorting to an oversimplified and tokenistic version of identity politics. How can we beyond a recuperative effort and to present a history of art with nuanced understandings of identity as unfixed, fluid and highly subjective?
I believe museums are inherently flawed sites of colonial and hetero-patriarchal conquest. I want to find new curatorial approaches beyond simply inserting marginalised voices into the existing museum narrative. I follow the lead of Helen Moleworth, in her brilliant essay "How to Install Art As a Feminist?", and ask: "is there a way to install works of art so that the artist and the art historian do not experience the space of the museum as the site of one triumph over another?"2.
I try to apply feminist and queer methodologies to my everyday working practices. For me, this means questioning the way that principles of diversity and inclusion often operate in a museum context (read: "box ticking"). It also means critically reflecting on my curatorial practice, my decision-making and my blind spots. We all need to examine our own biases within invisible structures of museological privilege and power. Nikki Sullivan and Craig Middleton name this as "ethics as critical practice". I'll end with a quote from their excellent book Queering the Museum:
"We rise to the ethical challenge of thinking beyond what we (think we) know, to being open to ways of knowing, being, doing, that may not be immediately intelligible to us. In other words, rather than simply arguing for the inclusion of LGBTIQ+ his/stories, practices, modes of being, in order to redress past imbalances, or suggesting that we replace an oppressive model of museological practice with a liberatory one, we advocate a troubling of the categorical logic that underpins these kinds of claims."3.
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1 The term Blak was coined by Aboriginal artist Destiny Deacon in 1994. See Why 'Blak' not Black?: Artist Destiny Deacon and the origins of this word | SBS NITV
2 Helen Molesworth, "How To Install Art Like a Feminist." Modern Women: Women Artists at the Museum of Modern Art, edited by Cornelia Butler and Alexandra Schwartz (New York: MoMA, 2010), 509.
3 Nikki Sullivan and Craig Middleton, Queering the Museum, Routledge, 2020, p. 276