Displace: Members Show 2021

About

This year, we have invited guest curator Uthra Rajgopal to look at the submissions and make the final selection. We asked her to talk a little about the works:

“We are living in unprecedented times. The start of the second decade of this millennium has fundamentally shifted the way we live, work and socialise. Our homes have become fortresses, incubators, spaces which literally track and trace all our movements and our thoughts.

We have all been displaced. The irony of being confined to our homes has generated feelings of protection and heightened insecurity. Equally, some of us may feel strangely liberated or more frustrated, compelling us into activism. Having experienced that sense of isolation, what is it like to 'return' to the world? Can things ever be 'normal' again?

For this year's Members’ Show, I have selected artworks that resonate with the theme of displacement. The uncertainty with which we must now live exposes greater vulnerability, yet nurtures deeper resilience.”

Uthra Rajgopal is an Independent Curator. Formerly at the Whitworth and the V&A, she has developed a specialist interest in fibre arts and South Asian textiles. In 2019 Uthra received the Art Fund New Collecting Award, to build a collection of artworks connecting South Asia and the diaspora in England. Her curatorial practice includes the exhibitions Beyond Borders, Four Corners of One Cloth, Bodies of Colour and MIF. Most recently she was appointed as the Curator for the Banu Rangoonwala Sculpture Terrace for the new South Asia Gallery at Manchester Museum, due to open in Autumn 2022.