Tate Research Centre: Learning

Considering how institutional experimentation can attend to the pressing issues of today

What does research look like, how do we see it, what happens if we poke it?

Engaging with the emerging and growing trend of new or neo-materialism in research, art and curatorial practice

Addressing the ethical practices and challenges when working with issues of race and difference, neurodiversity, disability and young people

Considering how ethnographic approaches have been applied within art museums, and how these concepts may impact curatorial, learning and participatory art practices

2014

A seminar bringing together practitioners and academics from Denmark and the UK to discuss learning and practice based research

Exploring how the format of the seminar as used in contemporary art education is developing, and the social, economic and political reasons for these changes

Memory loss, struggles in communicating our work, changes in mood, apathy, confusion, difficulty in building our own storyline, a failing sense of direction, being repetitive, struggling to adapt to change... is gallery education suffering from a failing memory? Probably, but this is not the end of the world. Early diagnosis can help us find treatments to reduce the symptoms. Archiving learning experiences is one of these treatments but archives respond to each institution's specificities. Factors such as size, amount of activity, urgency, priorities and space, play an important role in the organisation and decision-making process. The purpose of this paper is to address how these variables produce an archive that matches the learning teams' and audiences' values and agendas. At the same time, this text is intended as a means for making these symptoms less damaging in the specific case of Tate Learning.

This research paper highlights some of the core issues related to funding structures available for socially engaged practices in India, with an emphasis on their limitations and pitfalls. Questioning the roles that artists’ play while working with ideas of activism, politics and art; as well as addressing the key motivation and driving force behind art projects that engage communities at grassroots level. It is an exercise in self-reflectivity for the author/ artist’s practice at the end of a decade of working with such projects in India.

At Tate our vision is to inspire new ways of learning with art and specifically with Tate’s Collection in a way that reaches a wider audience and that promotes positive change, dialogue and engagement in contemporary cultural and artistic life. We hold this vision because we believe in a democratic and inclusive approach to learning with art that seeks to innovate in order to meet the challenge of the changing face of arts practice and production in the broader context of our rapidly changing world.

From July to October 2012, the newly opened Tanks at Tate Modern hosted a season of cross-disciplinary and live interventions. Converted from their former function as huge oil containers for the power station, the Tanks are the only designated museum space for ‘live’ art in the world. The opening programme, Art in Action, which involved major international and emerging artists and included film, installation, participation and performance, pioneered a newly integrated approach with the gallery. In tune with developments in contemporary art and participatory practice this programme sought to present fresh ways of linking the most recent tendencies in art-making with a particular strand of art history, whilst facilitating new kinds of engagement, interpretation and learning. In its opening fifteen week season, the Art in Action programme attracted 565,000 visitors, suggesting a curiosity about and appetite for this form of art practice and exhibition.  

This paper will present an emerging artistic practice that employs the unexpected and unfamiliar as minor provocations to stimulate enquiry-based learning in museums and galleries. The specifics of this way of working will find focus around two themes. Firstly, the roles that hedsor play in learning settings and secondly the ways that the social and participatory processes, integral for the use of Object Dialogue Boxes, find form in the learning of young people.