Reading Relationships: A Curatorial Case Study

Since completing my BA Art History & Visual Cultures, a number of interconnected themes have continued to nourish my work:

• feminist discourses, the decolonisation of art history and cultural identity;

• representation, visibility and equity;

• body politics, gender studies and power dynamics;

• and the overarching role of language in shaping our understanding of the world we live in.

  
  

While all these themes often appear separately in mainstream public debate, I am more interested in looking at how they intersect and how visual cultures can help us think through this complex entanglement. It was through one particular photographic display that these intersections became especially clear to me.

This wall of portraits remains to this day the most illuminating illustration of the kind of approach to curation that informs my practice today.

Display of women's portraits at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh. Photo: Amandine Vincent. Copyright National Galleries of Scotland.

The display was presented from 26th October 2024 to 16th March 2025, as part of Celebrating 40 Years of Scotland’s Photography Collection, held at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh. It brought together eight portraits and self-portraits by women photographers, spanning more than 150 years of photographic history.

Using this display as the subject of my degree dissertation, the final chapter focused on the ways meaning was produced and constantly reshaped through the arrangement of photographs. My observations were all pointing to a key aspect of curatorial practice: exhibitions do more than present a selection of objects, they create conditions that influence how audiences understand what they are seeing. Curation is therefore a form of visual storytelling, with the challenge to determine how much of that story should be prescribed.

One of the strengths of this display was its capacity to suggest interpretative angles while leaving viewers free to bring their own readings. In other words, it proposed multiple connections without drawing conclusions. While this approach carries risks, particularly when contextual information is limited, it crucially recognises the viewer as an active participant in the construction of meaning.

Among the eight photographs, I concentrated on five whose relationships gradually became central to my analysis. Beginning with the largest, unframed work and moving across the wall to the right, each work complicates the reading of the others.

The one-by-one-metre work by Arpita Shah titled Tudong is part of her series Purdah, the Sacred Cloth. The portrait depicts a young woman wearing a vibrant head covering. Within its original context, the image seeks to expand and complicate understandings of the tradition of veiling by exploring shared practices and experiences across different communities of women.¹ However, alternative interpretations can quickly emerge when the image is taken out of context, as happened in this exhibition. In particular, I raised the possibility that, when seen through a white Western feminist perspective, an instinctive interpretation of Tudong may rely on a narrow and uninformed understanding of veiling.

This example asks a simple question: is cultural representation enough? In recent decades, institutions have rightly invested significant effort to increase the visibility of marginalised, underrepresented, and stigmatised cultural groups. However, greater visibility alone cannot guarantee greater cultural understanding. Any image can be brought into a well-intentioned curatorial approach while still being misunderstood. Therefore, the question is not only who becomes visible, but also how they are interpreted. In the case of Tudong, Shah's argument is likely to have been partly lost through the process of re-contextualisation.

The distinction between representation and equity has become more and more significant in discussions about intersectional feminism. For decades, and again more so in fairly recent years, public figures and writers have highlighted the importance of asking not only who is represented, but also who controls how representation is understood.² This is precisely where the role of curatorial work gets its importance: effective curation does not simply increase visibility, it creates the conditions that support more nuanced forms of engagement. Individual objects see their meaning expanded and refined through their relationships with other objects. Placing Tudong next to Sarah Lucas's Self-Portrait with Fried Eggs was, in this instance, a very clever juxtaposition.

Unlike Shah's photograph, Lucas's image is entirely resistant to fixed interpretations. Slouched in an armchair, the artist adopts a posture that looks casual and confrontational.³ In the series of self-portraits to which this photo belongs, Lucas repeatedly plays with postures and objects, drawing attention to the body as an instrument of self-expression, while refusing straightforward conclusions about identity or selfhood. In Self-Portrait with Fried Eggs, Lucas exposes the social and cultural mechanisms through which identity is constructed and performed, rejecting the idea that it is innate and fixed. From that perspective, her work illustrates effectively how unstable the meaning we extract from works of art can be. Re-contextualised in the portraits display, the photograph acquired additional significance: its visual language challenged other representations of womanhood on the wall, reinforcing simultaneously the exhibition's broader interest in the diversity of lived experiences.

Similar observations can be made about Annie Leibovitz's photograph of John Lennon and Yoko Ono. Seen in isolation, the image invites interpretations about intimacy, vulnerability and gender dynamics.⁴ Yet within the display - focused on women artists and subjects - the work introduced another layer of complexity. Despite Ono's status as an established and influential artist in her own right, both the composition of the photograph and the display reinforce the asymmetry of Lennon and Ono's public visibility: Lennon has consistently overshadowed Ono in cultural memory. In my view, this tension strengthened the display as it did not attempt to eliminate the contradictions, an approach I find particularly valuable.

Too often, interpretation is treated as the expectation to reach definitive answers. I suggest that interpretation should not reduce complexity, but that it should reveal it, while making it understandable.

Whether working with artworks, exhibitions, cultural projects or public-facing communications, I remain interested in the same fundamental question: how do we make meaning of images and objects? Even the answer to this question cannot be fixed: meanings emerge through context, relationships, language and perspective. Understanding those connections allows us to move beyond surface-level readings and engage more critically with the stories we tell, the stories we inherit and the stories we choose to foreground.

The questions that keep my research going do not resolve neatly because lived experience, representation and interpretation all converge on the irreducibility of being human. As a case study, this display remains the illustration of what I consider a successful approach, because it illustrates how thoughtful curatorial work can create space for viewers to participate actively in the production of meaning.

---

¹ More on Purdah at https://arpitashah.com/Purdah-The-Sacred-Cloth

² More on intersectional feminism here.

³ More on Lucas's self-portrait at https://www.nationalgalleries.org/art-and-artists/76022

⁴ More on Lennon and Ono's portrait at https://www.nationalgalleries.org/art-and-artists/42479