Curating Spaces for Not-Knowing

In recent years, the public art gallery has evolved into an increasingly interactive, participatory, and often performative context for the exchange and interaction of views and ideas.1 Museum theorist Nina Simon describes the institution in these circumstances as,

Throughout this shift in the museum’s purpose, programmes like Tate Exchange have become more prevalent. Based at Tate Liverpool and at Tate Modern in London, Tate Exchange is a physical and online space for artists, practitioners and community partners to run programmes, share ideas and hold events, workshops and discussions. While the key players in such initiatives – the institution, the artwork and the audience – have remained the same, their status, visibility and indeed function have become more mutable, setting up interactions that create new opportunities for practice, and opening up the spaces for possibility that Simon describes. Of particular interest to me in my research has been the understanding and value of the knowledge generated, developed and exchanged around artworks in these spaces.

In this paper I will discuss research undertaken at Tate Liverpool in 2013–16, which explored institutional epistemology and the co-creation of knowledge against the backdrop of this emerging practice. I will reflect on the contexts created through Tate Exchange and the need to expand its principles across all curatorial practice. The application of some of my study’s findings to new curatorial approaches at Tate Liverpool through a co-curated collection display, Ideas Depot, is discussed at the end of the paper.

Investigating co-creation

Socially engaged artistic and curatorial projects often include the development of participatory experiences. There have been moves in the past few years to apply these approaches to collection displays, curated with audiences, inviting them to contribute their knowledge and experience.3 Some of these ‘co-’ projects (co-designed, co-produced, co-created) generate new knowledge for other visitors, who may encounter this alternative content or use it as a lens through which to experience a specific exhibition. However, the co-created material is often positioned alongside exhibition content.4 This parallel body of knowledge, although informing visitor experiences, rarely contributes to the curator’s knowledge or to their creation of an exhibition, and is most often developed once the exhibition research has been formulated and undertaken. Knowledge is assembled for the audience to consider, but is often sited in less visible and arguably less high profile physical and virtual spaces. There is a danger that Tate Exchange could become such a parallel space, rather than maximising its potential to instigate more fundamental institutional change across the museum as a whole.

In encouraging museums to become more participatory, Simon outlines a participation framework that can be used to explore how power can be handed over to the public. Tate Exchange could be seen to align to the ‘hosted’ model in Simon’s framework, in which spaces and resources are given to public groups to enable them to programme within the institution.5 Yet there is a danger of minimising the visitor’s experience or the impact on institutional practice if these participatory agendas are perceived as belonging exclusively to certain physical spaces and programmes. Although there has been much recent research into participatory practice in terms of inclusion and co-production,6 the impact of such approaches usually focuses on the visitor. In my research I have been keen to examine the impact of these ways of working on staff and their practice, exploring the potential of a model for generating new knowledge that involves all constituents – audience and staff – from the start. This offers the potential for a curatorial practice that is firmly situated within Simon’s stage of ‘Co-creation’, one that repositions gallery and audience to enable an equitable and collaborative inquiry for both – what I term a ‘learning-with’ between staff and audience.

Within the context of gallery learning, art education practitioner and researcher Carmen Mörsch identifies four discourses through which the practice is represented: affirmative, reproductive, deconstructive and transformative.7 The affirmative discourse represents gallery education as communicating the dominant voice of the expert institution via what Mörsch refers to as ‘authorized speakers’. This is usually in the form of lectures, tours, catalogues and also, I would argue, interpretation. Through the reproductive discourse, gallery education’s function is to educate those new to a particular field of knowledge, and to support audience development. Practices associated with the reproductive discourse include open access drop-ins for families and communities that are ‘light touch’, entry-level events that generate large audiences; they also include artist-led workshops for school groups and live interpretation from gallery assistants. Mörsch’s deconstructive discourse is associated with critical museology, and is aligned with practices of institutional critique. This may include artist interventions or socially engaged practice that makes visible the ways in which truth is constructed within the institution. It may also involve the more emancipatory or political involvement of excluded groups. Mörsch sees the fourth discourse, the transformative, as the most uncommon. Here, the purpose of gallery education is to support the subversion of the museum as holder and explicator of expert knowledge, and to undermine traditional views of knowledge as fixed and hierarchical. Tate Exchange provides a context that often sits within the deconstructive discourse but has the potential to be located firmly within the transformative discourse.

I have worked in gallery education for twenty-five years with a range of audiences and galleries, delivering a variety of programmes. This has often involved me facilitating discussions about artworks with audiences in the gallery. During this time I have witnessed the growing confidence of visitor groups in developing, articulating and connecting ideas and making their own meanings about art. However, within the context of the gallery, visitors more often than not return to one simple question at the end of the session: ‘So what does it really mean?’ Over the years, I have found this ambivalence towards collectively generated knowledge both frustrating and intriguing. Exploring this phenomenon became part of the impetus to undertake this research and to look at ways in which we can expand the principles of equity, research-based practice and creative learning – so visible in places like Tate Exchange – to other areas of curatorial and learning practice at Tate Liverpool.

My research examined perceptions of knowledge about art in the museum and explored the potential of co-creation as a model with which to genuinely learn with audiences. An inter-paradigmatic methodology was required that would generate qualitative data. As mentioned, data were generated at Tate Liverpool, where I had already worked in the Learning department for a number of years. Participants were recruited from groups that were implicated in knowledge co-creation in some way: educators, curators, visitor experience assistants and audience members. They took part in a group workshop at the gallery that was facilitated by an artist-educator and was designed to provide opportunities to develop new knowledge together. The workshop included collaborative drawing, discussion and making new connections between artworks on display (fig.1). Following the workshop, participants were interviewed, and their experiences analysed. Other data generated through the workshop, as well as analysis of organisational documentation and reflection on my own practice as a gallery educator, were drawn together through a bricolage approach. Methods used included drawing, semi-structured interviews and personal meaning maps. Through interpretive analysis of the data, I constructed a situated taxonomy of knowledge types in the gallery and a conceptual model of co-creation, both of which I discuss further below.8 Key paradigms of knowledge were identified, and the issues associated with the authoritative nature of institutional knowledge were presented as a significant barrier to co-creation.

Co-creation is a term used across a variety of fields to denote a coming together of ideas, knowledge, practices and perspectives in order to jointly develop something new. The term itself is defined and used slightly differently within the literature; for example, it is collectively defined as ‘creating an output together’ by museum theorists and practitioners Katy Bunning, Jen Kavanagh, Kayte McSweeney and Richard Sandell.9 Cultural learning specialist Louise Govier draws out the differences between collaboration and contribution, highlighting that participation in the process of creation is more integral to collaboration, and less limited than contribution. For Govier, co-creation can be viewed as a democratic concept indicative of inclusive practice, but it can also be seen as persuasive and a strategy to cultivate an audience for ‘co-’ practices on institutional terms.10 There has been a prevalence of these ‘co-’ practices (co-design, co-production, and so on) in gallery contexts in the past few years. I have used the term ‘creation’ rather than ‘production’ or ‘generation’ (which is more often used in connection with knowledge) to explore models that imply something new for all involved that creates opportunities for genuine learning-with.

While the pedagogies that underpin gallery learning programmes embrace participation and collaboration, and prioritise critical and reflective engagement, the exhibition environment still largely upholds the authority of the institution and associated hierarchies of knowledge.11 In recent years, the educational and discursive turns in curatorial theory have accommodated pedagogical and participatory art practice, and created opportunities for a range of learning experiences to become more embedded into institutional policy and practice.12 Calls for a repositioning of the museum in relation to its audience have gathered momentum13 and yet there is limited evidence that this happens through curatorial practice with collections.14

Paradigms of knowledge and perceptions of co-creation

As part of my study I constructed a situated taxonomy of four knowledge types – art historical, experiential, personal and collective – and examined how each was regarded by participants in the study. The results showed that a clear hierarchy was evident, with art historical knowledge at the top.

Researcher and educator Esther Sayers contrasts the scholarly knowledge at the top of the hierarchy with the types of knowledge associated with gallery education. In this context, she describes knowledge about artworks in the gallery as co-constructed through learning activity: ‘It is through this dialogic process of exchanging and questioning that knowledge is made, shared and remade by artist-educators and participants.’15 Consideration of responses and ideas validates knowledge contributed during the conversation that is often initially ‘speculative’ and later ‘negotiated’ within the group. Sayers concludes that scholarly knowledge remains the most dominant within most museums and galleries, and despite organisational commitment to gallery education and the knowledge it produces, continues to be the dominant form of visible knowledge within displays. Curatorial approaches and exhibition design, she argues, clearly position the curator as ‘with knowledge’ and the visitor ‘without’ it: ‘Exhibition displays are authored, and the learner is required to break out of their historical or cultural situation to appreciate the display as the author intended. In this exchange objective “truth” is asserted.’16

If a visitor is dislocated from the site of the production of knowledge and guided by the curatorial argument, it is difficult for them to generate or contribute new lines of enquiry. The exhibition format remains in most cases an end product, and therefore a potential cul-de-sac as far as the co-creation of knowledge is concerned. For co-creation to be supported, transparency is required to expose the constructs – the narrative or theoretical positions – that are in place in order for audiences to challenge them. It is important to reveal to audiences the research and design processes involved in developing an exhibition or display, and to show how certain choices have been made about the objects and artworks included.

A person’s judgements about what knowledge is valued – or is even recognised as knowledge in the first place – are bound up within a set of other considerations, beliefs and attitudes within a particular paradigm. Education theorist Egon Guba provides a popular and often default definition of a paradigm within the social sciences as: ‘A basic set of beliefs that guides action, whether of the everyday garden variety or action taken in connection with a disciplined inquiry’.17 The paradigms that emerged through my research are as follows:

• The institutional paradigm, which reflects the power and knowledge constructs within institutional settings where one dominant view of knowledge prevails, excluding or subjugating others.
• The emancipatory paradigm, which reflects attempts through critical approaches in pedagogy or research to expose and challenge the above authority for those identified as subjugated or excluded.
• The artistic paradigm, which reflects the uncertainties of creative practice and the mutability of meaning inherent in the art object.

The conventional exhibition format is key to the construction of truth in the gallery and is firmly situated at the heart of the dominant institutional paradigm. Exhibitions are often presented as texts or essays, where research is collated and authored for presentation. Social anthropologist and museum theorist Sharon Macdonald points out that the viewer only sees the finished exhibition and not earlier ‘drafts’. She argues that it is through the development of the exhibition as a text that the museum constructs not only a particular narrative or theme, but a conceptualisation of that particular field of knowledge for the public. Speaking from her own experience in science museums, she suggests that, ‘One effect of science museums is to pronounce certain practices and artefacts as belonging to the proper realm of “science”’.18 This is particularly relevant in the context of museums of modern and contemporary art, where there is often scepticism about how objects on display are constituted as artworks. A more expanded notion of artistic practice is accepted within Tate Exchange due to its explicit partnership and community agendas, but the situation is different in other, more conventional gallery contexts. Here, audiences expect modes of display that present knowledge in order to provide cultural security: the reassurance that they can trust the knowledge and perspectives they encounter and that these experiences can contribute to their own cultural capital. Although within the artistic paradigm the art object is seen as a manifestation of artistic knowledge, and objectified as a trace of the creative process, within the prevailing institutional paradigm it is the curator’s knowledge that is arguably most prevalent: this appears explicitly through labels and texts and implicitly through the curatorial approach.19

Guba highlights the ‘incommensurability’ between aspects of different paradigms, and the competing nature that emerged between the paradigms I identified above proved to be at the heart of some of the issues connected to collaborative knowledge generation in the gallery. The ambivalence of audiences towards their own knowledge and the impulse towards the discovery of ‘real’ meaning, as described in my introduction, reveals a lack of justification for that knowledge and a desire for an alternative that they feel is ‘true’. Historian Helen Verran uses the phrase ‘epistemic disconcertment’, which she defines as when ‘our taken-for-granted account of what knowledge is has somehow been upset or impinged upon so that we begin to doubt and become less certain.’20 She outlines an ‘epistemic rightness’, which she describes as ‘corporeally agreeable’. According to Verran: ‘We experience this sense of comfort with, say, a satisfying explanation.’21 For Verran, it is important to reveal this unconscious acceptance of knowledge and to explore different voices, perspectives and truths. She warns of the danger of ‘translating sameness’ and calls for the development of methods that enable us to ‘do difference together’.22

In my research, these issues of difference and epistemic disconcertedness were evident between the three paradigms I described above – the institutional, the emancipatory and the artistic. Within Tate Exchange it could be argued that this epistemic disconcertment is not an issue. The paradigm operating there is one that encourages and acknowledges other knowledge types, valuing their contributions to debate and discussion. However, a visitor moving from this space in Tate Liverpool through to another part of the gallery may experience a sharply felt difference in how their contribution to knowledge is valued.

Key to my research was to explore how interactions across these three different paradigms were perceived and experienced. Four perceptions of co-creation of knowledge emerged from this:

• The jigsaw: different knowledge types are acknowledged and pieced together, providing a comprehensive knowledge base. Coherence and consensus are often sought.
• The reflective pool: different knowledge types are considered individually, at the time of encounter, through processes of understanding.
• The clash: different knowledge types test and challenge each other, retaining difference and tension rather than seeking consensus.
• The creative catalyst: different knowledge types interrupt and rupture existing knowledge, opening up practice and epistemological positions to new directions.

Through the exploration of the co-creation of knowledge, and in particular the creative catalyst category, a fourth paradigm emerged for my research: the paradigm of ‘not-knowing’.

The not-knowing paradigm

At the heart of the not-knowing paradigm is a need for rupture and the embracing of epistemic disconcertedness as the approaches most suited to co-creation as a model for learning-with. In developing an epistemological position suited to this paradigm I have looked to approaches within the social sciences that challenge conventional criteria for justification. Educator and researcher Patti Lather proposes a feminist methodology that seeks to ‘rupture validity as a regime of truth’.23 For Lather, anti-foundationalism exposes the construction of realities where truth through discourse, and resisting correspondence, become criteria for justification. She proposes alternatives that reframe validity and justify knowledge resulting from an opening up of practice – a process in which practice is considered and reviewed in order to shift and adapt it. Lather suggests a ‘rhizomatic validity’ that resists structures and hierarchies and opens up opportunities for alternative connections that can create new and not-yet-known knowledge. Horizontal networks provide a framework of connections, rather than hierarchised forms of knowledge. Within these perspectives, knowledge is constantly coming into being. It is temporal and contingent and resists a fixed permanence. Validity or justification are situated and contextual, and are able to open up both knowledge and practice; Lather describes it as a ‘nomadic and dispersed’ validity.24 Rather than resolving difference and adhering to belief systems sustained by consensus and authority, rhizomatic validity allows other knowledge and perspectives to remain in dialogue with each other. In this respect, ‘rhizomes work against the constraints of authority, regularity, and common sense and open up thought to creative constructions.’25

A key motif of more recent discourse in gallery education is the idea of the learning event; an intervention that interrupts, and sometimes disrupts, the gallery experience and can be seen as both political and creative. Museum education theorist Emily Pringle and researcher Jennifer DeWitt describe how for some educators, ‘disruptions are springboards for new ways of looking at the world’.26 Unpredictability and disruption are seen as catalysts, and yet, as Pringle and DeWitt acknowledge, the power lies firmly with the institution and educator as an institutionally sanctioned critical practice. However, in terms of opening up practice, as described above in the creative catalyst concept of knowledge co-creation, these disruptions are helpful. As practice-based research is increasingly valued and visible in spaces like Tate Exchange, reflective and disruptive approaches can help to expand and guide curatorial as well as learning practice and implicate all members of the organisation within a collaborative structure.27

The idea of not-knowing is perceived as negative in Western epistemology. This view is perpetuated through cultural and educational concepts of knowledge, where learning involves gaining knowledge of the ‘not-known’ – apprehending it and ceasing ‘spinning’, as one participant in my study described it. The not-known is perceived as a gap, a hole in knowledge, whether that be individual or collective, which precipitates resignation or motivation. What emerged from the analysis of my data was that art historical knowledge was the most highly valued. ‘Knowing’ was predominantly associated with this knowledge type, whereas ‘not-knowing’ was associated with experiential and personal knowledge, which were not valued as much. Participants spoke of this particular not-knowing in negative terms: they described feeling ‘bad’ or ‘embarrassed’ about a perceived lack of important knowledge. However, ‘not-knowing’ has the potential to be a more active experience that opens up more equitable possibilities. In ‘Chaos Station’, a project run by young people in Tate Exchange in February 2019, the impact of repositioning an audience group as experts in the space was significant. The educator facilitating the group said of the young people who ran the project:

It is useful to turn to discourse within the artistic paradigm here. Writer and artist Emma Cocker acknowledges the challenge of adopting a more positive view of not-knowing and resisting the conventional move towards knowing. Knowledge within the artistic paradigm is much more fluid and temporal, and for some it is difficult to accommodate within more academic paradigms.29 Curator and researcher Elizabeth Fisher and artist, writer and academic Rebecca Fortnum describe a space of ‘thinking outside of language’,30 where speculative and creative thinking are protected from the compulsion to resolve and fix knowledge. However, art historical knowledge, most visible in textual form in the gallery context, was shown in my study to be important in providing an ‘authentic meaning’ and hence epistemic ‘concertedness’ and cultural security. An expectation from visitors to have access to this knowledge can be inferred from the interviews with in-gallery staff in the study, who demonstrated a sense of duty to provide it as part of their role in creating a positive visitor experience.

In conventional gallery terms, to ‘know’ an artwork is to make sense of or take meaning from it, and to acquire it as knowledge. Understanding a work means that the unknown is no longer unknown. Philosopher Rachel Jones encourages us to be ‘Open to the strange ... [and] prepared to lose ourselves in the encounter’; to remain in a speculative space and resist the urge to construct meaning.31 The data from my study demonstrated such an urge; the task for the gallery, if it wishes to develop co-creation as a model for learning-with, is to retain, and indeed embrace, epistemic disconcertment rather than trying to overcome it. Cocker has argued that within artistic practice there is a desire to retain a perpetual not-knowing as a gateway to possibility. This demands a radically different epistemological position to that of the current dominant institutional paradigm. For Cocker, an artwork ‘exceeds existing knowledge, not only by extending its limits but by failing to be fully comprehended within its terms.’32

Although these ideas can be easily accommodated within the artistic paradigm, it is difficult to bring them into the institutional and emancipatory paradigms. Producing contexts and conditions of uncertainty is represented as part of artistic practice, but the challenge is to transfer this from the studio into the gallery, curatorial practice and the experience of visitors. This problem was epitomised by the prevalence of the institutional paradigm in the experiences described by participants in my study, suggesting that an encounter with a practice that is opened up is required. This could involve knowledge being disturbed and interrupted as Lather describes, allowing that knowledge to make multiple connections in the moment of encounter. To support this shift in epistemology, resilience needs to be built against the impulse to know. Strategies are required to support the visibility and acceptance of the uncertainty of the encounter. For Fortnum, the studio is a better site for the unknown than the gallery because there, ‘thinking without language’ prevails; it is only once repositioned in the gallery that speaking through discourse takes over. Art education theorist Dennis Atkinson has proposed fostering the unknown within art education and it is useful to apply this thinking to gallery education and a potential model for learning-with.33

In applying aspects of not-knowing to pedagogy, Atkinson proposes that uncertainty can be created but that the teacher must be comfortable with an open-ended outcome. He draws on philosopher Alain Badiou’s concept of truth and his theory of ontology as ‘event’ to formulate a pedagogy that finds truth not in knowledge produced, but in encountering the unfamiliar, as described above.34 These encounters with uncertainty challenge not only truth and justification, but the fundamental nature of the ‘event’ itself and how we are constituted as subjects within it. This more existential experience of epistemology perhaps creates enough space for knowledge to circulate equitably to provide a context for learning-with. Atkinson conceives of this as a pedagogy that can open up to horizontal discourse and accommodate ‘othered’ and subjugated knowledge: ‘this movement involves “that which is not yet”. Accepting such new positions involves accepting new states of existence as learners. This would indicate a space of infinite potential.’35 Interactions within these open spaces of possibility and unknowing can lead to the emergence of new knowledge. Verran encourages us to collectively venture into the unknown and embrace the epistemic disconcertment we encounter there: ‘Together we should cultivate the collective disposition to interrogate the familiar.’36

Creating a space for not-knowing

To create a space for not-knowing, we first need to abandon our preconceptions of knowing. This involves challenging processes of justification that prioritise dominant knowledge; the construction of pedagogised subject positions in the gallery; and the need for epistemic ‘concertment’ and cultural security. We should not assume, however, that the creation of a successful space for not-knowing merely amounts to reversing these established conventions. It is not an ‘unlearning’. The condition of not-knowing can be developed as a positive and active position. Rather than engendering resignation in response to a lack of knowledge, or motivation to acquire knowledge to address that lack, what is required is a stance that embraces openness and uncertainty without pinning down meaning; a space that is satisfied with speculative knowledge rather than perceiving it as a means to an end.

Many arts-based methodologies can accommodate uncertainty and are useful to mention here. A/r/tography, for example, is a methodology that embraces image, text, experience and context simultaneously. It allows for meanings and knowledge to emerge in a fluid, responsive and relational way, where identities and conventional positions are disrupted. According to researchers Stephanie Springgay, Rita L. Irwin, Carl Leggo and Peter Gouzouasis, it is ‘situated in the in-between, where theory-as-practice-as-process-as-complication intentionally unsettles perception and knowing through living inquiry’.37 During From Mittens to Barbies: International Arts-Based Education Research, a project held at Tate Exchange in Liverpool in March 2018, researchers from the University of Chester employed an a/r/tographic approach.38 One of the researchers, Jeff Adams, describes the rupture experienced in the space during this project as a ‘reciprocal circuit of knowledge generation … emphasising rather than diminishing the vagaries and unpredictability of what might originally have been sought.’39 For another group of researchers, Tate Exchange provided a space where, ‘Being pre-sent lingers at the realm of the not-yet’.40 The fluidity of positions within this context was articulated by a further set of researchers involved in the project, as follows:

The question therefore arises as to how we can create the right conditions for this space to emerge beyond contexts like Tate Exchange. Curator and educator Megan Arney Johnston refers to her own ‘slow curating’ as ‘rhizomatic, organic and non-linear’, challenging expert knowledge and exploring knowing and not-knowing.42 She addresses the pedagogised nature of the gallery and the ways in which it constitutes the artwork, knowledge and subject positions, asking ‘Can we embrace the idea of “not-knowing” or reject the notion that art is about educating?’43 I would argue that unless we can do this, we will not be able to break down the positions of curator as expert and the associated hierarchies of knowledge that dominate the museum via the institutional paradigm.

Curator Anthony Huberman proposes reconsidering the exhibition as ‘the beginning of a curatorial idea, not its end’.44 He calls for curators to shift their behaviour and embrace philosopher Jacques Rancière’s concept of an equality of intelligences:

In pursuing models for not-knowing we need, as practitioners, to be mindful of the audience. These spaces of uncertainty and possibility may be more equitable theoretically, in a Rancièrian sense, but they do subject the audience to epistemic disconcertment. If this is not addressed in our steps forward in developing the creative catalyst, we are perhaps in danger of creating spaces where only the gallery staff know how ‘not to know’. Evaluation of the second year of activity at Tate Exchange (2017–18) found that ‘the relational aspect of Tate Exchange is central to its success in making a difference to people’s lives’.46 The evaluation recognised that part of this is the importance of people feeling that their views are acknowledged and valued, but it was acknowledged that this often requires facilitation. Encouraging and developing this kind of dialogue relies upon creating a communal rather than a solitary experience.

Discussing Tate Exchange, museum education theorist Anna Cutler highlights the importance of a context underpinned by the core values of ‘trust, generosity, risk, respect and openness’. For Cutler, this would be developed through creative learning, which she proposes can ‘generate the potential for a dynamic interaction between selves and others as an ongoing exchange of questions, ideas, knowledge, attitudes and behaviours from wherever one is situated without an imagined origin or endpoint.’47 The emphasis on an ongoing project of enquiry seems crucial in reassuring visitors to also let go of their preconceptions and embrace uncertainty as a creative approach. Referencing Rancière’s much-cited 1991 text The Ignorant Schoolmaster,48 art and literature theorist Emilie Sitzia imagines an ‘ignorant art museum’ that could develop the gaming concept of the ‘emergent narrative’: ‘In a museum, “emergent narrative” would mean that the exhibition space would be merely a framework allowing for individual narratives to be constructed by visitors using objects as a support for their own individualised knowledge production.’49 My exploration of such an approach through my research informed Ideas Depot, a subsequent initiative that emphasises the co-creation of knowledge.

Ideas Depot

My work to devise new approaches for developing and exchanging knowledge with audiences at Tate Liverpool led to the creation of Ideas Depot (November 2018 – September 2022) with curator Darren Pih, a co-curated collection display that is situated in between Tate Liverpool’s Tate Exchange space and Clore Learning Centre. Ideas Depot therefore inhabits a physical and conceptual space between Tate Exchange, where content and ideas are curated and shared from the perspective of our partners and associates, and our drop-in family space and studio where audiences are invited to play, create and imagine. As such, it offers a unique space in which to suspend fixed and authoritative knowledge, and instead embraces provisionality and uncertainty. Ideas Depot has been curated in parallel with a schools-in-residence research programme, offering children and teachers the opportunity to work with us on curating and refreshing the display, allowing us to generate new knowledge about the artworks in our collection together.50

These invitations to co-create with collections have become more common in recent times. The curators of Hello World: Revising a Collection at Staatliche Museen zu Berlin sought voices that were representative of their audience and communities to open up their practice and collection in order to generate ‘an expanded knowledge’.51 Representing and integrating diverse perspectives through meaning making about artworks in the collection acknowledged those voices that had formerly been absent. The exhibition catalogue documents how this felt destabilising for staff who perceived the project as a handing over of authorship. Despite this, the display embraced the opportunity to let go of knowing in a more traditional sense:

In order to develop strategies that could build on this kind of practice at Tate Liverpool, certain approaches were considered for Ideas Depot. The exhibition format has been shown to restrict co-creation due to the conventional schedule of research, presentation and reception, and the associated hierarchies of knowledge at each stage. To enable co-creation of knowledge, engagement with artworks on display in the gallery needed to be framed as research-in-process. For Nina Simon, co-creation should include the audience from the start, shaping and defining the aims of a particular project.53 Projects should have relevance,54 consideration of who is benefiting55 and an acknowledgement that each collaboration is different and requires agility and responsiveness.56

For Ideas Depot (fig.2) we invited local primary school teachers to join us from the start in developing ideas about which works to include and how they should be presented in the gallery. We approached several designers to create an appropriate context for the space. Their brief was to design a space that would look and feel like an art store or archive, and that presented works in a provisional way, emphasising that their current position and narrative role in the display was temporary. The idea was that any of those works could be used as a resource or starting point for individual and collective research as an ongoing project of enquiry and knowledge production. The project also incorporated ideas from the teachers around colour, segmenting the space and providing new physical ways of encountering the artworks. The successful design came from Sam Jacob Studio and presents artworks on industrial storage units.57 The units not only create the feel of an art store but also allow the visitor to see the backs of the artwork and the labelling that reveals their journey as an object through time and various displays. Lower-level plinths also encourage all visitors to look in different ways. Interpretation labels have been presented on clipboards; the text is aimed at a lower reading age than is usual for gallery interpretation – one geared towards the age group of the participating children – and poses questions to the viewer.

The importance of developing curatorial transparency has been a key factor in the design of the display and also in a specially commissioned resource that runs alongside it. The resource, titled Connecting Ideas (fig.3) and designed with Interference Art, offers primary school aged children the opportunity to develop an understanding of the curatorial process in the gallery, encouraging them to make their own relevant connections and consider how they would display their choices.

The Ideas Depot display is refreshed once per school term, and we invite schools participating in our residency programme to co-curate these refreshed displays with us. Discussions between the children, teachers, exhibitions curator Darren Pih and I have ranged from what certain artworks reminded us of, how they might link to what the children were learning, and even what kind of voice particular artworks would have if they could speak. Participating children select around five works which are installed before then taking up residency with us and being used as resources for teaching and learning that week, along with other works in the gallery. Some of the material that is generated through the participants’ discussions in the gallery forms part of new interpretation in the display, in order to share the new knowledge generated with other visitors. We have taken the decision not to differentiate between these new labels and those written by the exhibitions team.58 The display is dynamic and responsive and supports a continuous exchange of ideas and knowledge between curator and children, institution and audience.

Tate Exchange has developed as a physical and conceptual space where knowing and not-knowing can be fluid, and where positions are interchangeable and non-hierarchical. In this environment, knowledge co-creation has been shown to thrive. However, this paper has demonstrated the challenges in transferring this epistemological position to other spaces in the gallery. Ideas Depot provides an example of how exhibition conventions can be disrupted to successfully encourage a not-knowing paradigm. If spaces like these can regularly interrupt our practice, then perhaps there will be fewer occasions when a visitor asks, ‘So what does it really mean?’

Deborah Riding is an independent researcher and consultant in gallery education, and is a visiting research fellow at the Centre for Research into Education, Creativity and Arts, University of Chester. She is Principal Editor of the International Journal for Art and Design Education.