Until Further Notice 2020
MIMA School of Art & Design, Fine Art BA (Hons) Show
MIMA School of Art & Design presents Until Further Notice, a collaborative online exhibition from our graduating class of 2020, BA (Hons) Fine Art. A conceptual place-holder, a gathering point and a moment of collective connection, Until Further Notice contemplates the altered experience of making and sharing work during a global pandemic.
The students, who work in performance, video, installation, paint, drawing, print and sculpture, were not asked by MIMA School of Art and Design to present their work online. Laura Sillars, Director of MIMA and Dean of the School, explains:
“We took the decision not to put pressure on our cohort of emerging artists to present their work online. Not all media suits an online space, not all students’ homes could easily serve as studios, and they had so much to cope with already. Instead, we supported our students to complete their final year of studies. In summer 2021, working with our curatorial and academic teams, we will turn over all of MIMA’s galleries to present a public exhibition of the work of our class of 2020. Until Further Notice has been driven by the students’ own agency and their own agendas, which makes it all the more interesting as a gesture.”
Until Further Notice is peer-led. It was designed and built by the students. It is an invitation to envision and explore their changing contemporary consciousness in a prolonged moment of transition and change - being together and also being apart. We can see the work online but we cannot feel the air around it. The crisis has put practice into a Bertolt Brecht interval, a moment when we are no longer acting and others are no longer spectating. At the same time, it is a moment when historically marginalised voices are taking agency and being raised.
Until Further Notice gives a flavour of the work of MIMA School of Art & Design students and a moment to contemplate the altering of our present worlds. The digital show is not the end point, but the process of what is yet to become.
MIMA School of Art and Design is led by Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art (MIMA), part of Teesside University. MIMA’s approach is to place the museum as a critical platform at the centre of art and design courses. The School of Art & Design takes its values from MIMA’s vision and mission, addressing urgent issues of our era. Our academic and curatorial teams have specialist interests in disability, environmental and social justice, curatorial activism and institutional critique.
