Actualité de la recherche: a lecture by Prof. Natasha Adamou

Wednesday 15 November 2017

12h15 - 13h45
HEAD, Boulevard Helvétique 9
Salle 25
Free entry

Actualité de la Recherche, Spring semester 2017-2018
In collaboration with the University of Geneva, the Art History Department

"Exhibitions, Audiences, Institutions:  Re-staging Richard Hamilton's Growth and Form, ICA 1951"
A lecture by Prof. Natasha Adamou, Kingston University Londres

In 2014, the full-scale reconstruction of Richard Hamilton’s exhibition Growth and Form (1951) opened the artist’s retrospective exhibition at Tate Modern in London. Hamilton’s one-room installation, originally staged at the ICA in the context of the British Festival in postwar London, dealt with the relationship between science, nature and the creative act. In its proper historical context the exhibition aspired, among other things, to play an educational role by familiarising British audiences with scientific imagery in an immersive and playful way. It put into question issues of modernity and scientific positivism in relation to the reconsideration of British identity and Britain’s place in postwar Europe. 
Victoria Walsh, the curator who led the re-staging of Growth and Form, has argued for the value of reconstructing exhibitions as a way to ‘introduce the forgotten of art history — the embodied spectator rooted in the specific, temporal encounter.’ In view of a recent surge in exhibition reconstructions often critiqued as historical fetishes, this seminar discusses the curatorial motivations behind Hamilton’s 2014 reconstruction in the context of the Contemporary art museum.

 

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Richard Hamilton, Growth and Form (1951/2014), vue de l’exposition reconstituée en 2014 à la Tate Modern
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