How to Curate an Exhibition – Commissioning New Work & Working with Emerging Artists

Linder (b.1954, Liverpool, UK) is known for her photography, radical feminist photomontage, and confrontational performance art. Emerging from the Manchester punk and post-punk scenes in the 1970s, Linder focuses on questions of gender, commodity and display. Her highly recognisable photomontage practice combines everyday images from domestic or fashion magazines with images from pornography and other archival material. Cut and collaged by hand using a scalpel and glue, the juxtapositions recall a rich art history harking back to Hannah Hoch and the Dadaists.

For her solo shows at the Hepworth Wakefield and Tate St. Ives in 2013, Linder collaborated with choreographer Kenneth Tindall of Northern Ballet for a major performance piece, The Ultimate Form (2013), inspired by the artist’s research into the work of Barbara Hepworth. Her residency at Tate St. Ives, also in 2013, was recently followed by her appointment in 2017 as the inaugural artist-inresidence of Chatsworth House where Linder created four installations that explored the female voice at Chatsworth in the centenary year of the Act of Representation.

Recent solo exhibitions include Nottingham Contemporary, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, and Museum of Modern Art/PS1, and Linder’s work has been included in group exhibitions at Tate Modern, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Museum of Modern Art, Tate Britain, and Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. In 2017, Linder was awarded the Paul Hamlyn Foundation Award.

Laura Smith was appointed Curator of Whitechapel Gallery in February 2018, where she is delighted to be working with artist Helen Cammock, winner of the 2017-19 Max Mara Art Prize for Women, on her forthcoming exhibition, as well as on a major new commission for Elmgreen & Dragset’s first UK survey show. Prior to the Whitechapel Gallery, Laura was Curator at Tate where she was responsible for a series of international historic and contemporary projects by artists including Rebecca Warren, Jessica Warboys, Linder, Marlow Moss, R.H. Quaytman, Bridget Riley, Lucy Stein, Nashashibi/Skaer and others, as well as group exhibitions such as Turner Prize 2016 (2016), The Modern Lens (2014) and Images Moving Out onto Space (2015). Most recently she curated Virginia Woolf: An Exhibition Inspired by Her Writings which is touring the UK throughout 2018.

Cameron Foote is Assistant Curator at Whitechapel Gallery, London. Before that, he held similar positions at Tate St Ives in Cornwall and The Museum of Modern Art and MoMA PS1 in New York. Recent exhibitions he has contributed research or texts to include The London Open (2018), Thomas Ruff: Photographs 1979–2017 (2017), Alicja Kwade: Medium Median (2017), Eduardo Paolozzi (2017) and Yoko Ono: One Woman Show (2015).