Besides Looking: Patrimony, Perfomativity and Visual Cultures

David Dibosa’s paper, 'Besides Looking: Patrimony, Performativity and Visual Cultures in National Art Museums', is an exploration and a further elaboration of the relations between the development of visual media practices within the research – what we have previously indicated as stemming from practice-based research approaches – and transmigrational visual cultures. David asks how perspectives derived from the study and articulation of Visual Cultures, (Hall, Mirzoeff, Evans, Rogoff) might usefully frame our understanding of transmigrational ‘viewing strategies’ and more specifically the practices of Tate Encounters’ participants. He introduces an important counter to the idea that either the art museum or the research framing can address the transmigrational viewer other than in an engagement at the point of viewing. This stresses the dynamic, rather than settled, historical sense of migrant experience that has become contained in notions of ‘heritage’, and ethnic categorisations. He looks to performativity to offer a way out of the impasse of categorisation and his focus upon transmigrational experience as fluid leads him to the idea that a corresponding art museum viewing strategy might be that “which has not yet been seen” or “a kind of seeing on the move”.

Tate Encounters is a three-year research project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council through the Diasporas, Migration and Identities Programme. The project started in April 2007 and involves three collaborative institutions: Tate Britain, London South Bank University and the University of the Arts London, through Wimbledon College of the Arts.

The project aims to provide an in-depth account and analysis of the reciprocal meanings of a sustained encounter between London South Bank University (LSBU) students who have a migrant family background and an important national cultural site. The project will develop knowledge and understandings of how narratives of Britishness are contained, constructed, and reproduced within the curatorial practices and collection of Tate, and of how such notions are received and valued by different migrant and diasporic family members within the context of the active material/visual cultural practices of everyday life. From this encounter the project will develop new curatorial and educational perspectives relevant to wider and more culturally diverse audiences and will contribute towards cultural change within the Museum and Galleries sector.

• Organisation
• http://www.tate.org.uk/research/taterese...