Sarah ALLEN

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Sarah ALLEN

Participating Project	Curator Residency Program
Activity Based	London
City / Place stayed	Tokyo
Period	2024.5 - 2024.6

Purpose of the residency

This residency research will be undertaken into themes of spirituality and ecology towards future programming at the South London Gallery. Key research questions include – is the climate crisis a spiritual crisis?

Plan during the residency

• Visit Kyotographie Photography Fair
• Visit Tokyo’s art museums 
• National Museum of Nature and Science
• Mentoring session arranged by TOKAS
• Presentation at TOKAS
• Studio visits

Activities during the residency

During the residency I was researching a future group exhibition to take place at the South London Gallery on the theme of Spiritual Ecologies. This will be an international group exhibition bringing together artists working at the intersection of themes of Spiritualism and issues of climate crisis, environment and ecology. It will recentre artists from the Global South as this is the area most affected by climate change.
Below is further list of my activities.

During my residency, I :

• Visited Tokyo’s premier art museums among them: Mori Art Museum, Tokyo National Museum, TeamLab Borderless, Odawara Foundation, Kusama Museum, Sumida Hokusai Museum and National Art Centre, Tokyo
• Developed the artists list for the exhibition
• Spent time reading and researching around key curatorial questions such as: What is the link between climate crisis and spiritual crisis?
• Researched exhibition making methodologies which might reduce the carbon footprint of the exhibition
• Researched partner organizations
• Identified a funding stream from the British Council that provides funding to partner with organizations in the Global South

Outcome of the residency

I feel the achievements are the same to the activities listed above. In terms of future outlook – having now completed the residency, I feel I am convinced of the importance of curators to take this dedicated research time to develop group shows. My role of Head of Programme is quite broad at the SLG. A good portion of my time is spent managing the department, working on long-term strategy, developing processes and procedures for the effective running of a department. In essence, it is extremely rare to have dedicated, protected research time. This made this residency experience completely unique in terms of my own career and extremely generative – it wouldn’t be a stretch to say that it reminded me of the reasons I wanted to become a curator – to be able to spend time researching artists, and thinking deeply about concepts and themes underpinning artistic practices.
In terms of what I may have done differently - I probably would have liked to travel South to further my research in Shamanism in the Okinawa region if time allowed.
The most impressive experience during the residency was that I learned about Shintoism and visited the many Shinto shrines located in the country, and experienced fist hand how people of Japan engage with this indigenous belief system. Equally important was exposure Buddhist temples and how these two spiritual belief systems interact.

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