European Commission - 7th Framework Programme European Museums and Libraries in/of the age of migrations last updated: February 2015


Victoria Walsh

RF04 Leader

Dr. Victoria Walsh
The Royal College of Art - CCA
Head of the Curating Contemporary Art Programme

 

She is Head of the Curating Contemporary Art Programme at the RCA. Focused on interdisciplinary, practice-based, and research-led teaching she is the co-author of Post Critical Museology: Theory and Practice in the Art Museum (Routledge, 2012).

Prior to joining the RCA in 2012, she was Head of Public Programmes at Tate Britain during which time she was Co-investigator of the major three year research project, ‘Tate Encounters: Britishness and Visual Culture’, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council under their strategic programme ‘Diasporas, Migration and Identities’. A collaboration between Tate Britain, Chelsea College of Art and Design and London South Bank University, the project addressed the relationship between curatorial practices in the art museum, audience development and engagement, and the impact of cultural diversity policy. The research findings centre around the limits of the politics of representation and identity and aesthetic modernism as a curatorial trope within an analysis of the contemporary cultural condition of hypermodernity, globalisation and digital distribution.

She is currently also Co-investigator of the major four year Tate Research project ‘Art School Educated: Institutional Change and Curriculum Development in the UK since 1960’, and curatorial consultant to the forthcoming Richard Hamilton retrospective, (Tate Modern / Museo Reina Sofia Madrid). Since the mid- 1990s she has also worked as a freelance curator, project manager and research consultant in the fields of visual arts and architecture including the project-management of the competition to select an architect for Tate Modern, the relaunch of the Fourth Plinth Project in Trafalgar Square, London, for the Mayor's Cultural Office, ‘London in the 21st Century’ public debates for The Architecture Foundation and as Curatorial Consultant to the exhibition 'Open Systems: Rethinking art since 1970' (Tate Modern, 2005). She has published widely across post-war British art including the seminal work Nigel Henderson (Thames & Hudson, 2001) which continues to inform studies of the ‘Independent Group’ which was active at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London in the 1950s.