Kinderkunstlabor – Presentation Script
Presentation summary
Leanne Turvey and Alice Walton, Senior Learning Curators leading the Tate London Schools and Teachers team, share six anecdotes about significant moments that have shaped their thinking and programme. They consider how challenges, difficulty or points of failure, have afforded rich opportunities for their learning, which support possibilities for change within the institution. Sharing images, quotes and activities, they endeavour to share their practice in practice; evoking the ideas, experiences and voices of the artists, teachers, Tate staff and young people they work with to extend an immersive and invitational space to the audience.
Slide Script
1. SILVER PICTURE Hello
2. INTRODUCTIONS (FOOTBALL/HANDS)
Leanne Turvey: I have been a Learning Curator at Tate for a long time (before Tate, in mid-scale and small galleries in London), I am also a writer, and educator Alice Walton: I’m an artist and have worked in that capacity as well as a curator across the gallery sector. We also both have a lot of experience working across educational settings (schools, Alternative Provision, universities etc.)
3. CATS CRADLE (COLLABORATION)
We have been in a job share as Senior Learning Curators leading the Schools and Teachers programme at Tate since 2010 We wanted to acknowledge in planning this talk that doing it together – rather than either one of us individually – brought a certain amount of complexity
Beyond logistical or practical complexity there is the interesting process of coming together through shared thinking and collaboration (always the case). We needed to ‘make’ something between us. And this is a good analogy for how we work together day to day and with the team.
• When we first started to collaborate, we tried not to identify any of the differences, or even what might be the individual strengths we brought to the collaboration –partly because we were building something – building a new cross site team and programme More recently, and more productively, we have been able to acknowledge and use these differences.
• We need to have a shared (institutional) position, but this holds the movement or correspondence between our individual interests, ideas, questions and in a way, this embodies something of what we are trying to afford others through our
programming. This is its own learning state – our collaboration is a constant process of learning.
4. THE PROPOSITION ([Turbine Hall Installation]
Today we will share with you how we learn as a team through a collection of 6 programme moments that each taught us something, or asked us to underscore, revise or work differently. We often hold anecdotes in the team (stories), points of difficulty/challenge/failure, and use them as productive points or pivots for new programme and thinking.
• [Turbine Hall Slide] We hope to share something of our practice in practice and will draw on ‘material’ in a number of ways to evoke how we work into this room –literally and figuratively.
• We often talk with teachers - about drawing attention to learning in the moment of learning (this to better support them to support others to learn) and we hope to do a bit of that here, in this moment. It is intended as a bit of an experiment.
• Rather than us simply telling you something, we’re keen to implicate you a little bit, to acknowledge everyone here in the room, acknowledge our coming together, thinking together.
• This to attempt to conjure some of the qualities of learning as we see them - a liveness, exchange, being with others, ideas of reciprocity and movement.
5. AIM [ALICE]
We’re going to share the briefest context, starting with our key aims which are: To support young people to learn about themselves and others through being with art
For all young people to see themselves reflected in all that they encounter: This meaning that they feel able to bring all of themselves, their stories, lived experience, their culture and community, into conversation with the multiple stories of art on offer in the gallery
6. OROZCO [LEANNE – CONTEXT]
Underpinning these aims is this quote:
What is important is not so much what people see in the gallery but what people see after looking at these things, how they confront reality again
Gabriel Orozco
There is, post the recent election, some optimism for both the education and cultural sectors in the UK. However, this follows 14 years of under resourcing, and an undermining of the role and value of taught art in schools. Today, in primary schools, ‘core subjects’ are often the main focus, there are few specialist arts teachers and teachers struggle to access professional development in the arts. (The All-Party Parliamentary Group for Art, 2023). What is new is that we are at a point politically, and culturally, where there is the invitation to restate the case for arts and culture and what it affords young people at school.
7. TRIANGLE [ALICE – WORKSHOP IMAGE]
How we work is with artists, drawing pedagogical strategies through their practice to support learning contexts. Commonly this approach shares three constituent parts, the art (of the gallery/building), the artist (sometimes of the collection, more often not) and the audience. We often refer to this as the TRIANGLE and believe that something very particular is made possible by bringing these elements together into conversation
8. Sara AHMED [LEANNE]
This quote has accompanied us over several years, several projects and the idea of ‘fitting’ or not – being welcome or not - is present or informs all of the things we are going to share with you today We are putting it into the room here to frame our conversation.
Maybe an institution is like an old garment: if it has acquired the shape of those who tend to wear it, then it becomes easier to wear if you have that shape. The ease of movement, the lack of a stress might describe not only the habits of a body that has incorporated things, but also how an institution takes shape around a body. If a body is oriented toward things, an institution might be orientated around that body. We might be thinking of this bodily inhabitance as ‘fit’ by Sara Ahmed
Sara Ahmed, ‘Institutional Habits,’ feminist killjoys (blog). 2 Feb 2015. https://feministkilljoys.com/2015/02/02/institutional-habits/
[TITLE SLIDE] TITLE: From excluded young person to excluding museum [ALICE]
In 2018 we invited a school local to Tate to take up residency at Tate Modern for a week.
The school - Southwark Inclusive Learning Service (SILS) – is called, in Britian, a PRU (pupil referral unit). In planning this talk I looked up the definition of a PRU and got this:
For young people who are unable to attend mainstream school, there to help children who have been excluded from school, are at risk of exclusion or have a short or Longterm illness.
By this time in 2018 we had been working with the school for a number of years following an incident which can be seen as an illustration of Ahmed’s notion of ‘fitting’ or not fitting institutional behaviours and expectations.
In 2013 a group of young people - majority boys and people of colour – had been working with an artist in the galleries when their activity was shut down by a member of Tate staff responding to a complaint from a member of the public.
(EXTRACT
FROM CAN IT BE ABOUT US? PUBLICATION)
The group’s behaviour was labelled as ‘wrong’ by gallery staff despite the activity being devised and led by a Tate Schools Workshop artist and supported by Tate staff. Following this incident the group articulated a lack of surprise at what had happened. It seemed to indicate that the incident had confirmed their expectations of not being welcomed by the gallery and gallery visitors.
Aware of how damaging this intervention could have been for the group – for many it was their first time in a gallery – we contacted the school to see if they would be interested in working with us - with a view to us learning about how to better welcome them to Tate in the future.
Roll on to 2018 and one of their two school sites shuts and moves – staff, pupils, pastural care, admin - to Tate for the week.
Bearing in mind that we have now been working for 5 years with the whole school community AND with this purpose of learning from the initial negative encounter we were very conscious that this week held both huge potential and huge risk
SLIDE (WORKSHOP) Our shared question for the week was what does being with art and artists within the public space of the museum afford young people.
The residency was titled IDENTITY by the young people themselves who were acutely aware of the ways in which their identity was proscribed by society – they described being labelled as ’troublemakers’, ‘difficult’, ‘bad’ etc. And they shared their desire to wrestle back control of the narrative and language, to be able to have agency in how their identity was formed and understood.
Having experienced how the institution could perpetuate the problem, literally from the moment they crossed the threshold we undertook a lot of preparation ahead of the residency.
We set about developing training with our Front of House teams aimed at supporting young people excluded from mainstream education to be welcomed to Tate, from entering the building, having their bags checked along with everyone else, moving around the building and engaging in loads of different activities. We wanted to tackle assumptions staff might hold about these young people.
Our use of the ‘term’ excluded was challenged by a member of Security staff, who had himself experienced being in a Pupil Referral Unit. He voiced the damaging impressions that this word conferred. How it labeled the young people and placed the emphasis on them as the ‘problem’ rather than holding space for the idea that school (or society) might have failed them. He said that we shouldn't use the word. On comms, on signage. Anywhere.
SLIDE [IBRAHIM EL-SALAHI REBORN SOUNDS OF CHILDHOOD DREAMS] This prompted a (very simple) linguistic flip from referring to the young people as ‘excluded’ to naming the museum as ‘excluding’. While slight, conceptually it was a key moment of learning for us and the team.
It helped to hold us accountable to our aim and was a constant reminder of what it meant to be doing this work within the context of a space such as Tate. It was a pivot point, away from staff feeling it was perhaps their job to ‘police’ the galleries on behalf of the general public, to a shared imperative to welcome each and every young person as a valued member of that public.
[TITLE SLIDE] TITLE: Yes, but ... [LEANNE]
After IDENTITY, we began developing a new project with the school.
We were supported by Dr David Maguire. As lead researcher for I IDENTITY, he set up a process with us where the young people themselves were researchers in the project. David has lived experience of these kinds of schools – describing in his own words ‘shared insights’, with the SILS young people, on ‘what it is to navigate sites of extreme exclusion.’
SLIDE [CAMERA]
The research approach tried to move away from the convention of the distanced ‘expert’. The ambition being that the methods for evaluating would (as Alice has referred to) and
quoting David ‘centre on enabling the young people themselves to take control of the narrative and language used to describe their experience.’
SLIDE [MEETING WITH SECURITY]
Looking with rather than at the SILS young people, the young participant researchers developed a number of research tools including ‘switch interviews’ – where the young people asked staff and artists challenging questions like – do you treat us differently to mainstream school students?
These ‘switch interviews’ demanded an honesty that challenged us I wanted to be honest I personally felt that I did treat them differently ... as we had thought very carefully about how to support them to be in the building
[ALICE]– I'd suggest that what was different was more – or as much – about the institutional context. We had to ‘prepare’ for their arrival in a way that just doesn’t happen with the hundreds of mainstream kids who arrive every day as part of school groups!
We wanted the museum to treat them as audience – but in order to make that happen we needed to affect a paradigm shift within the organisation!
After the project finished we began to pull together a report. The subsequent book Can It Be About Us? Is the manifestation of the data collected by the young people and the reflections by the staff, team and artists involved in the project. It also records all the contradictions, missteps and problems that punctuated the progress of the five days at Tate. Including the moment after the first day when some young people were excluded from the project for being disruptive.
David acknowledges that we had prepared the project to ‘ensure [...] full inclusivity.’ but that we had not ‘anticipated’ how the sanction of withdrawal or exclusion would be used by the school within the project. At the end of the book, the epilogue is a quote from a young person reflecting the impact of this moment:
(EXTRACT FROM CAN IT BE ABOUT US? PUBLICATION) Including everyone is the whole point. What's the point of excluding someone who has already been excluded?
This is a question into our future.
In 2019 we set up a Ste ering Group – made up of teachers and Schools &Teachers teamstaff - to develop a new project. It met every two weeks, at the end of the day at school.
It felt like being there, in the school, in the moment, made something be able to happen –to move. If we had an idea, or the teachers had a question, we could explore it together.
And David, who also joined the Steering Group, kept laying down a ‘gauntlet.’ Every time we thought we had made good progress, he said ‘yes but – it would be good to try so-andso.’
One of his gauntlets was to suggest that we invite young people to be ambassadors for the project. With support from one of the Teaching Assistants we were able to get two of the young people who had been actively involved in the project to take up the invitation. In a sit down with one of them, when we asked how we should introduce the new project in an assembly, she said that we ‘had got it wrong last time’.
She said that we needed to ask the young people themselves what they were interested in doing.
This can happen in the space of completely open dialogue about what could/or might happen – rather than the closed space of, this is what is happening. New and different approaches are developed.
The ‘yes but’ of the title of this section refers to how David’s role, and to some extent his positionality, operated on the the development of a new project with SILS.
A question we were being asked to ask ourselves was about how our own positionality, and that of our team, majority white, female, middle class, impacts on how things are put together – David challenged us on the risk of unconsciously operating as white middle class saviors; Going so far but not quite seeing everything, not being alive to all the cues in the room.
To a certain extent this final gauntlet informed how the book was produced and how it is fundamentally – in terms of its multi-voiced complex narrative and counter narrative content – not about arriving – but about never arriving.
SLIDE [FOOTBALL] ALICE: This image captures a moment in the project that encapsulates this type of complexity and in a way remains a question.
We managed to arrange for the young peoples’ ‘break’ to take place in the Turbine Hall An important aspect of the school day for many of them being football. But we recognised a tension between our hope that this was empowering – them taking over the space and doing something transgressive with our full permission - and the risk that their presence became performative – a spectacle even – in a way that was beyond their experience or understanding.
Had we in effect turned a project challenging how identity is proscribed into an ‘object’ to be looked at?
TITLE: A good workshop for young people with additional needs is a good workshop (ALICE)
In 2017 we worked on a summer school for teachers, which was developed with us by artist Bill Leslie – the intended ‘focus’ being an exploration of inclusive practice in the classroom. We started with a provocation from Bill, that A good workshop for young people with additional needs is a good workshop
On one morning the group came into the room to find four tables, each with a large lump of clay and the instruction to start making in silence.
People started manipulating the clay, wondering how long this might last, what they should do, what the expectation was, they looked around, shuffled.
Then settled into the making.
After a while they were invited to change tables and to continue to make, this time responding to what they found on the next table. Then again. And again.
As I worked and watched I saw the group pass through various states, from selfconsciousness, to absorption, then to rebellion and restlessness.
In retrospect I realise that, in my role of curator/host, while I was witnessing this happening, I wasn’t really experiencing it. I was observing shifts in the group – possibly transitional moments in their learning - that felt significant, but I was too distracted by my role to really be experiencing them myself.
I felt that the activity had surfaced loads, and I was keen to discuss it. I got to the point where I felt that it was time to move on, to reflect, to bring the voices back, to name what had clearly occurred.
I whispered this to the artist. They said ‘wait’. We continued to make. For a lot longer than felt comfortable, until we’d passed through all of the above phases, and come full circle.
It was in places uncomfortable. Certainly, for me, possibly for others, individuals seemed to surface, perhaps almost ‘see’ what I was seeing, but then they would return into their making.
What became clear was that this ‘activity’ (process) created the possibility for a more fundamental learning proposition. It was not ‘about’ working within Special Educational Needs and Disability settings, not about creating activities or thinking about the experiences of young people with additional needs, but about ourselves, about our relationships with others and the multiple different ways of communicating or ‘communing’ with one another!
This is another - slightly different - kind of ‘flip’ - the attempt – and we don’t always succeed – to try and create programme that is inclusive by nature.
Not making programme ‘accessible’ or even ‘inclusive’ (which we hope it is!) but starting from a place of audience (sometimes a particular audience) to better support all audiences.
We often work with an artist’s provocation following where it takes us – these are just some of the brilliant thinkers and artists that have informed the programme: [SLIDE]
And this contention - that a good workshop for young people with additional needs is a good workshop - has continued to inform how we work, supporting us to hold on to the affordances of quiet making, of bodily interaction, silence even, over the primacy and dominance of language.
TITLE: NOISE (LEANNE)
There is something about NOISE in the gallery – it keeps returning us to a space of conflict for the audience.
The other day I was spending time at the Schools Desk at Tate Modern with colleagues signing schools in. A teacher came in and said, as part of a general conversation, ‘I liked your resource online, inviting students to make noise in the gallery’.
That morning at the Front of House briefings 5 mins before the galleries open, our colleagues had groaned when told the number of school groups that will be visiting that day. 800 children.
The teacher, who liked the sound of our resource, said that they had been approached by a member of staff while in the gallery the week before, and was told to keep the noise down. They said they had been laughing.
This is 5 years on from IDENTITY
10 years on from the incident Alice opened with.
‘Do they know about that resource?’ She asked.
The artist who wrote the noisy resource – that the teacher liked - Jakob V Joyce, invites students to:
Find the most BORING artwork in the gallery. Stand around the work together and poke fun at it by pretending to find it interesting. Start saying ‘wow’ to each other. At first let the wows be small little sarcastic wows under your breath. Slowly let the wows become
louder. Play with the pitch by wowing in a deep low voice and then in a high squeaky voice. How about some snooty wows, some yawning wows? Try to wow in a few different voices. Make your eyes really wide, put your hands on your cheeks and do a long extended ‘Wow’, really stretching out the ‘oooooo’ sound. WoOOOooOOOow! Keep wowing together, with each ‘wow’ becoming louder than the last. Keep the air around you filled with sound and hear the way your voices join together. Pretend the artwork is the most exciting thing you have ever seen and release one last epic ‘WOOoooOOooW’. Wow as if you’re becoming a pack of howling wolves. WooowWoooWoooooooooooooooooooooow!!!!!!
This invitation suggests that there are different possibilities for looking at art
But how does institution wide support – for something like IDENTITY - shift, dilute or disappear.
We might have a sense then, that work we do, collectively and across roles and teams, to adjust the threshold, or welcome, doesn’t fundamentally change the institutional systems and structures that created those inhospitable thresholds in the first place. Those systems and structures seem bigger, maybe more entrenched.
Museum and gallery learning projects often contain multiple contradictions because they operate inside institutions that have competing priorities. Dr. Janna Graham, Senior Lecturer in Visual Cultures and Programme, University of the Arts, writes - ‘institutions often fail to examine the contradictions between the question provoked by politically themed events and exhibitions and the organising structures of the contemporary art world that they inhabit.’
We have multiple strategies for informing, developing and holding a positive and responsive welcome for young people – clear internal communication via staff channels, training (like for IDENTITY), schools visits champions in the Front of House teams, institutional messaging prioritising young audiences – but the experience for our audience is that the gallery/institution can ‘snap back.’
It is crucial to acknowledge the tenacity of such feelings as ideas. And to some extent be aware that the general gallery going audience, the one that finds itself at home in an institution like Tate, might serve to perpetuate prevailing attitudes about who the art museum is for – creating a powerful tendency – as Ahmed’s quote suggests, towards them.
Mark Miller, Director of Learning at Tate, writes that - ‘Difference’ whether through economic, social class, race, gender or sexuality, continues to prevail as major barriers to bridging gaps in privilege and access to resources within the cultural sector’.
ALICE: again, linking back to the football example, this section raises questions about the trickiness of a programme that invites transgression within a space that might not always be inviting, and in a way that might draw negative attention to the young person/participant.
What does howling in the gallery afford? How do we support the possibility of various and different ways of taking up space – and as a way of disrupting the singular ‘fit’ of the institution - without putting our audiences at risk?
TITLE: Working with not for (ALICE)
Working ‘with’ as opposed to working ‘for’ audiences, is not a new idea (and it is threaded through all that we are sharing today)
It’s premised on a recognition of the agency of others and the need to learn from the people we work with. A genuine belief that not just the schools team, or us, but the institution at large needs to be attentive to all that our audiences bring – and all audiences. To really hear them. It is only then that change becomes possible
It can be seen as part of a broader shift in museum practice, away from a model premised on ‘telling’ to an approach that is more reciprocal.
Perhaps epitomized by the OF, BY, FOR ALL movement that Nina Simon initiated in 2011, beginning at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History.
We are wanting to share just one small example of how we have worked ‘with’ our audience (in a way that supported our learning).
In 2019 we worked with arts organisation Heart n Soul:
In their words - a ‘creative community and arts charity’ that ‘believes in the power and talents of people with learning disabilities and autistic people’ who ‘work together to make great art with imagination, love and trust’.
In particular we joined with Do Your Own Thing, Heart and Soul’s young people taking part group, to create a project called Testing, Testing, Testing – as the title suggests this was about:
- working out how to work together
- Testing and iterating
- A commitment to shared learning
For us this is one of many instances (Leanne is about to mention another) where we – as Tate, a huge institution – have worked with a much smaller, expert organisation – which itself is a complex proposition - requiring us to really guard against our being extractive or just overshadowing the small organisaiton.
Importantly, Testing, Testing, Testing was not an event ‘for’ the young people (with additional needs) but an event developed collaboratively with them for the general public. After an extended process of planning we arrived at something that felt a bit like a party on the main gallery concourse. A key feature being music and dancing.
In planning this talk and reflecting back on the event, we found it difficult to articulate how we learnt exactly but we acknowledged that it felt different.
I think we arrived at the idea that it very successfully took us away from our role as we knew it and required us to BE differently.
We had to ‘see’ the ways in which we operate (which are usually invisible to us and which are often ableist) and shake them off in favour of a much slower and more relational way of being. We also had to get comfortable with dancing at work!
This really was an instance of working ‘with’ not ‘for’. Resulting in a learning through and learning in the body.
LEANNE: and perhaps an example of how learning with audience or following the life of an idea with an artist can usefully rupture or rewrite the ‘stasis’ of the institution.
[At this point the following activity was invited. This used a long reel or ribbon of reflective material]
Now we’re going to attempt to evoke some of what we have been talking about with you in this moment (in a tiny way). We’re going to pull out the material in this image (that was part of this very joyous moment) to share between u s in this space
SILVER RIBBON (FILM) (INSTRUCTIONS)
For this we invite you to stay silent. I will read a short set of instructions before we start and repeat them as we start
Pass the ribbon from hand to hand, person to person
Keep a hold of it as it moves to you/from you
Be silent. Listen
Pay attention to your body, to your mind
TITLE: How do you need the space to be? (LEANNE)
As we have seen, some young people can find these spaces/cultural spaces, uninhabitable.
We directly explored this through a collaboration with Touretteshero, a disability arts activist organisation, in 2013.
Tourettes is a neurological condition. ‘Tics’ are a key feature of Tourettes - these are the involuntary and uncontrollable sounds and movements people with Tourettes make. The sounds are called vocal tics and the movements are called motor tics. It’s estimated to affect more than 300,000 children and adults in the UK.
Touretteshero’s emphasis is on disability as potential for the creative transformation of society. One of their objectives is to run innovative events for children and young people with Tourettes that focus on the value of play, interaction and social inclusion.
SLIDE (TOURETTESHERO) What distinguishes Touretteshero’s campaigning methodology over other activist group practices is that the possibility for these young people and their families to exert change in society is given traction through the belief in a superpower. Tourettehero, artist Jess Thom, who herself has Tourettes, is a superhero and her power is her Tourettes.
Jess has said:
‘The main thing I’ve learnt [...] is that if something isn’t working I have the capacity to change it. And this isn’t because I have any special qualities, it’s because we all have the power to create change. Realising this and acting on it is a significant form of resistance whatever you as an individual may be facing.’
The notion of a superpower is connected to creativity which is recognised as a power that can transform or change the environment around you.
With Touretteshero we explored how this approach could create change in an institution like Tate. The resulting day, called We Forgot the Lot!, involved a number of artist led interventions in the space of Tate Britain supporting a daylong event for young people with Tourettes and their families from across the UK.
The significance of this event for a group of people who avoid large public spaces, in part because of their concern about making uncontrollable noise and the response they might elicit from the public, was huge. The families repeatedly shared their surprise that this sort
of activity was allowed in a venue they perceived as having its own particular etiquette and experienced as intimidating.
Tourettehero shares an approach used by many activist groups and organisations, inside and outside the artworld - activism as creative play
Pediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott argued that play doesn't take place just in our imagination or just in the external world – it happens in the interface between these two. Winnicott was interested in the ‘capacity for being’ which he saw as essential to the ‘maintenance of a true self,’ that he felt was fostered by the ‘practice of play’ in childhood and extended into adulthood – through music, and art.
Jess’s practice connects to the idea of holding play and creativity as a space for fully being, developing this into a method for transforming a place, in order to be - fully. The social model of disability overlays this method. Looking at what barriers have been put in the way of your full access to something or somewhere – or yourself. Whenever we met with Jess and her team at Tate, she would ask us to have cushions placed on the floor and straws ready for her to drink from. Sometimes her tics are a seizure, and she needs to know the space that she is in, is ready.
These large cultural spaces aren’t how they need to be for many bodies – for the young people in IDENTITY this was the threshold, for Testing, Testing, Testing this was needing to generate the activity, for Touretteshero this was about asking us – as indicated in the title of the project – what have we forgotten to think about in this space?
Like David’s ‘yes but ...’ Touretteshero’s ambition for how the space could open up for the young people invited for the day didn’t begin with any limitation. It was simply – this is what we need – can you do it? Near to the day itself they asked can we put the book – Back Stage at Biscuitland – written by Jess for young people – in the Tate bookshop? We felt like this request would just be too slow to achieve/sort out
We have realised that we are, to some extent, institutionalised to feel, or see, the limitations for what can be done at Tate I.e. we can be part of the problem.
They managed to get it in the bookshop.
[We finished by extending a final invitation, which involved rice]
A final invitation to you/us all. This is a material moment that has travelled from an artwork Lee Mingway– a work in the Turbine Hall – via some workshops and thoughts but is – in this form – untested. So we will leave, doing something with you as a collective moment of potential learning.
Our invitation is for you is to:
Be present
Be quiet
Be slow
Act with care
Pass a handful of rice along the line/around the circle.
[PAUSE]
[SLIDE] gathered set of ‘challenges’ being left in the room, hopefully as a provocation that continues, like the book, to be resourceful (for us and for you).