Art Gallery and Museum Studies alumna heads for London’s Tate

MA Art Gallery and Museum Studies alumna, Acatia Finbow, has been awarded a research studentship at Tate focusing on a history of performance and performative art.

From September 2014, Acatia will be a part of a team at Tate in London working on a new project, Collecting, Archiving and Sharing Performance and the Performative. Within this, she will be undertaking her own three year PhD research project, thanks to an AHRC-funded Collaborative Partnership Award between the University of Exeter and Tate.

Acatia says of this upcoming opportunity:

‘As part of a larger research project, I will be helping to map a history of the relationship between Tate and performance and performative art, which the organisation has engaged with since the 1960s. This will involve research into individual performance pieces, preparing case studies which will then create an online archive of around 100 works of art. The research project will also generate a book, visitor engagement workshops and an international conference, in aid of better understanding how we collect and present performance and performative artworks.

‘My own PhD project will then be using a number of the case studies generated to explore changing value perceptions that different stakeholders in the gallery have towards documentation of performance art works, with a particular emphasis on re-performance documentation.’

Acatia’s research will see her striving to understand how attitudes towards documentation have already affected the presentation of works, and how they may impact on the long term archive of performance and performative works at Tate. She will be looking at a range of case studies from the 1960s to the present day, to understand what value changes there have been, why these may have occurred and what their impact has been on the generation and collection of performance art documentation.

Acatia’s interest in this field began whilst studying for her MA in Art Gallery and Museum Studies at the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies, University of Leeds.

‘My MA dissertation was focused on the much broader picture of the impact of performing and exhibiting performance art in a gallery or a museum. The exploration I made through my dissertation gave me a real insight into the nature of the contemporary art gallery, how it has its own motivations when dealing with works of art, as well as understanding the conscious and unconscious decisions made around the practice of exhibiting. I have no doubt that the basis my MA dissertation research provided will feed directly into my research project, and I will be reflecting on a lot of the theories and observations which I used within my research.

‘I am really looking forward to being able to extend the research I began in my MA study, to be able to look in depth at a greater range of performance art works and to be able to contribute in some way to the work currently going on at Tate concerning performance and performative art.’