UnDoing

Exhibition and Research-Through-Curation, 2019

UnDoing was an exhibition I co-curated with Sally Stone, Matthew Pendergast and Tom Emery, held at Castlefield Gallery. The project brought together artists, architects, and academics to explore how buildings, places, and artefacts are re-used, reinterpreted, and remembered.

At its heart, UnDoing asked critical questions about the relationships we have with space, history, and change. How do architects navigate the tension between the needs of the present and the value of the past? What is lost when a building disappears forever? And how do we live with - and within - the layered legacies of place?

The exhibition presented a diverse collection of work from disciplines including architecture, interactive art, sculpture, collage, film, photography and installation. The contributors spanned international contexts - from Manchester to Tehran, Edinburgh to Ghent - and explored both real and imagined landscapes, forgotten structures, cultural memory, and spatial storytelling. Alongside the exhibition, we curated two public tours across Manchester: one focused on art, the other on architecture - extending the conversation into the city itself.

Featured artists included James Ackerley, Nazgol Ansarinia, Tom Dale, Connor + Darby, Malcolm Fraser, MAP Studio, Abigail Reynolds, Larissa Sansour, Adrien Tirtiaux, Sarah Westphal, and Manchester School of Architecture.

Sally Stone and I later documented the project in the paper UnDoing: A Research-Through-Curation Project that Investigates the ReUse of the Built Environment, published in the Journal of Cultural Heritage Management and Sustainable Development. The paper reflected on the process of curating the exhibition and discussed the exhibition as a space to critically reflect on memory, transformation, and how the act of reuse can generate new ways of seeing and inhabiting the built world.