The Courtauld Institute of Art’s MA Curating the Art Museum students announce their annual exhibition, offered online for the first time. Organised by nine emerging curators, Unquiet Moments: Capturing the Everyday represents both an extraordinary group of artworks and an effort to ensure that art can continue to be accessible in unprecedented circumstances.
Originally conceived as a public exhibition in Somerset House’s galleries, the project has moved online: potentially reaching a far wider audience at a moment of immense collective digital engagement.
Somerset House is home to The Courtauld, which is currently undergoing a major transformation project to make its world-class artworks, research and teaching accessible to more people. The Courtauld Gallery will reopen to the public in 2021.
Unquiet Moments: Capturing the Everyday was inspired by the chapter of Somerset House's history as the home of the Register of Births, Deaths and Marriages. Such an archive records the banner headlines, the life-beginning, life-changing and life-ending moments that mark human experience. But what would an archive look like that instead recorded the fine print: the quiet, everyday moments of transformation and connection that shape human lives?
Artists have responded to and embraced modes of archiving throughout time, creating material records apart from and sometimes unknown to official histories. Unquiet Moments: Capturing the Everyday explores the enduring impulse to record, reflect and connect through everyday life: its small wonders and disappointments, its intimate joys and tragedies.
With major works from the Arts Council Collection and The Courtauld Gallery collection, this digital exhibition spans four hundred years of artistic practice, from the 17th century to the present day. Unquiet Moments: Capturing the Everyday represents the work of 24 artists. These works of art can be visual diaries of personal experience, portraits of families and communities, or traces of loss. They call on us to reflect upon the many ways in which we construct archives of our lives and memories.