Module overview
This module provides opportunity for the handling and presentation of cultural products, and an understanding of their capacity for value, significance and relationships with other objects and in a range of contexts. It develops a critical approach to issues of display and representation, and develops your ability to apply sound theoretical study around Material Culture, curation and handling, to the delivery of practical projects and presentation.
You will examine ways in which we read and understand objects, in the context of archives, collections and contemporary displays. Objects will be discussed in their historical and contemporary contexts, in the light of Visual Culture, and artistic outputs in many forms, which may be performative, ephemeral, digital, as well as material. In the digital context, it interrogates how we understand materiality when we do not have the material object. How do we collect, archive and display/exhibit such objects? You will learn how collections/archives are put together, cared for, stored and other museological practices.
You will apply this understanding of objects to small-scale displays and presentations, a synthesis of skills learned during the course of the module to more public outcomes. You will experience practical curation as part of a group, and will have your first chance to devise and realise light-touch curatorial projects from start to finish, in a variety of fomats. You will utilise the unique access WSA provides to the University of Southampton Library Special Collections, together with negotiated access to collections held further afield.