Unlocking the Collections

A research residency for an early-career, London based artist to engage with The Collections Library at the Museum of the Home.

Residencies took part in 2021 and 2022 with advice from Artquest on improving application and selection procedures. This work with Museum of the Home informed our Tender research work on more equitable processes in the arts.

Museum of the Home funded the award, which was based on previous Artquest research residencies at the Foundling Museum, Horniman Museum and Conway Hall Archives. Reflections on these past research residencies led to a seminar, The Artist Researcher, aimed at museums and collections looking to work with contemporary visual artists. More recently, these residencies have informed our interest in how artist practice can help with the structural work of decolonising museums, Artists Decolonise Museums.

Interview with Elora Kadir

In this interview Artquest talks to residency recipient Elora Kadir about her experiences on the Unlocking the Collections residency.

Unlocking the Collections 2022/23 Closing event

Comfort Furniture screening + discussion with Elora Kadir

Date: Wednesday 24 May 2023, 6.30 – 8pm at Museum of the Home

Artist-in-residence Elora Kadir was in conversation with artist-curator Jamila Prowse following a screening of Kadir’s film, Comfort Furniture. This was be a closing event for the Artquest Unlocking the Collection residency at Museum of the Home. The short film ponders the relationship we have to the objects in our home and the ways in which they bring us comfort.

Awardees

The artist selected for the 2022 residency was Elora Kadir.

Kadir is an artist from London working across a variety of media. She uses drawing, photography, video and found objects. Her work mostly focuses on her lived experience with disability and how this interacts with the outside world – whether that’s through access of buildings, bureaucratic structures or any other tension or mismatch with the able-bodied world. Her more recent work has focused on how the domestic space can provide both respite and isolation, resulting in a series of photographic prints.

During the residency Kadir found household objects in the collection that bridged a gap between convenience and necessity. She also learned more about the furnishings and electricals in the collection, all objects she has previously used in her work. Underlying her work was questions around the ability to access and use these objects.

In 2021 the residency was awarded to artist Calum Perrin.

Perrin works across visual art, performance and radio, exploring themes of disability, class, sensory experience and domesticity. Their interests also include the relationship between archival processes and artistic practice, using an autistic perspective to question traditional hierarchies of senses, in particular the way that factual information can be processed and restructured through embodied processes of sound and touch.

During the residency Perrin explored fabrics and soft furnishings in the collection, looking at how they combine to form textural compositions which shape our sensory experience of the home. Perrin investigated how this material can be used in conjunction with the records of everyday domestic experience in the Documenting Homes archive to make work that asks questions about the body’s relationship to domestic space.

You can listen to Callum’s experiences of the residency and see examples of his work below.

The Award

The selected artists received:

• An award of £3,000 to develop their practice in response to the Museum of the Home’s collections.
• A further £850 to deliver a public-facing event that showcases their thinking and research undertaken over the residency period
• Special access to Museum collections and curatorial staff

The artists:

• Visited the Museum and engage with the collections at least one day a week over a 3-month research period
• Participated in interviews about their work, published below
• Organised a closing event to showcase their thinking, research and work during the residency

Selection was done by an independent panel made up of artists Alaa Alsaraji, Kadir Karababa, Rahemur Rahman, and Museum of the Home Collections Assistant Véronique Belinga.

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