Reflections

In curating an exhibition you never know how it will look and feel until it is up. Reflecting on the exhibition two things immediately come to mind. The first is that we had so few points of disagreement. You would think that a set of curators from different disciplines working together with a set of artists with very different backgrounds would produce endless disagreements as to the order of works in the exhibition, which works to juxtapose and the basis of the juxtapositions. We had few of those differences despite the fact that many decisions were made at the last minute and the final order only arose during the hanging of the works. The second is the realisation that the main basis of my 'hanging' decisions were those mysterious aesthetic judgements as to which worked well together. The intellectual theme of interrogating the concept of abstraction - the process of abstraction, the different meanings of abstraction - that determined the selection of the artists and their works, did not obviously play a central role in determining the order. Does this mean that in the context of exhibition other things become subordinate to aesthetics? Perhaps in the process of preselection we had created many synergies, and therefore, many possible ways of ordering the works which would have been equally effective in their different ways. And when we visited the exhibition with the curators and artists together it seemed that both were true. The exhibition became a context for a dialogue over abstraction but also for feeling the different resonances as we moved between the works.

Howard curated Djambawa Marawili and Wanyubi Marika's works