Spaces of Practice

This Module, in partnership with The Whitechapel Gallery, Gasworks and Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art and gives you the opportunity to engage in a study of contemporary art practices to develop pedagogical and artistic knowledge and understanding. It is aimed at initiating and extending practical, critical, and contextual understanding of contemporary art practices and how these can be used to explore social and cultural issues. You will engage with contemporary theory in critical and cultural studies such as semiotics, hermeneutics, post-structuralism, and psychoanalysis.

Essay.

This is the facade of the Whitechapel Gallery today in 2022. It shows the 2012 addition of Rachel Whiteread’s ‘The Tree of Life’ – an Arts and Crafts motif symbolising social renewal through the arts (Whitechapel, 2022). 

Sarah Chalkie Cloonan. Spaces of Practice Essay 2022. 

Can a gallery be both a space of art production and a space of display? 

In my essay, I shall focus on the Whitechapel Gallery as the place of display, asking if it might be a place of production too. I shall experiment with ethnographic and phenomenological research methods at the gallery and make a collage to prove my findings. 

I am interested to see if the visitor might be Jacques Rancière’s (1992) ‘unpredictable subject’ and if the making space created in parallel to the gallery’s current exhibition, A Century of the Artist’s Studio: 1920 – 2020 (Whitechapel Gallery, 2022) is merely an inspirational escape. If the audience engages with The Living Studio, the making space will change their experience, creating subjectivity, conscious critical thought and, in turn, knowledge. The real question for me will be: without an instructor, guidance, or rules, can this gallery-making space engage with the visiting audience from the A Century of the Artist’s Studio exhibition? 

Link to Essay