Re/Locating Cultures of Equality

The closing GlobalGRACE exhibition was due to launch in June 2021 in Cape Town, before touring project partner sites. We had looked forward to co-presenting our work, produced over the four preceding years, and to exploring possible new framings as it travelled from place to place. The global coronavirus pandemic interrupted our plans, and much more besides, from early 2020.

Deciding to mount a virtual exhibition invited new considerations. We did not want to lose sight of partners’ distinct artistic, aesthetic and political orientations, but knew that digital renderings of objects and events cannot capture nuances of tactility or place. At the same time, we recognised that the pandemic had enforced necessarily distanced, frequently virtual, modes of living and working. New reflections intertwined with original curatorial goals, to demonstrate processes of (re)creating cultures of equality, identify parallels and affinities between disparate locales, and explore the challenges and rewards of transnational collaboration – from wires crossed to joyful synchronicities.

This resulting exhibition, Re/Locating Cultures of Equality is divided into three areas: Installations are created specifically for online interaction but remain grounded in site-specific methods and modes. All are juxta- and superim-posable onto snapshots of places a physical exhibition might otherwise have been, gesturing to the (im)possibilities of relocation/reframing on- and offline. Six Films explore varied themes and multiple artforms through a single, unifying medium. Thirty Postcards reveal connecting threads between collaborators and trace transformations of material culture (and interpersonal communication) through digitisation and display.

Lead curator was Dr Siobhan McGuirk