VIRTUAL: Prague Heritages
Abstract
London South Bank University (LSBU) is home to a collection of over 150 paintings and drawings by British artist David Bomberg (1890-1957) and selected former pupils bequeathed by independent collector Sarah Rose in 2012. The challenges for the Sarah Rose Collection have always been those of belonging, status and legitimation. The establishment of a narrative of heritage, key to which is Bomberg’s pedagogical legacy as well as his position within an art historical lineage, failed to secure its legitimisation. Budget cuts in 2016 led to the effective closure of the Borough Road Gallery and rendered what was once public facing, and fully accessible, ostensibly physically inaccessible and requiring privileged access. Rose’s idiosyncratic vision of and for the collection – characterised by an opposition to hybridity and a persistent commitment to purification – explain in part the struggle LSBU has faced in attempting to narrativise Bomberg (and The Sarah Rose Collection) differently as well as the ways in which such intransigence can be seen to contribute to the artist’s art historical and cultural isolation and thus unsettled and insider-outsider status. And yet, despite such a struggle, subsequent attempts by former curators of the collection have sought to render its heritage useful and relevant to today by departing from the exhibition of prescribed artworks, and placing emphasis instead, on contemporary artist residencies, as well as art, poetry, music, and dance commissions. Furthermore, the hiring of specifically ‘digital’ curator has resulted in the commissioning of short stay exhibitions and performances, as well as talks, workshops, and screenings. In embracing the invisibility of the collection – reconceptualised as an archive – opportunities have been created for contemporary artists to respond to its hibernation. Unconventional and multidisciplinary, such events connect Bomberg with a far more diverse and democratised set of outcomes.
Dr Nicola Baird is an independent curator and researcher affiliated with the Centre for the Study of the Networked Image, LSBU. In 2021 she completed a PhD, which was a Collaborative Doctoral Partnership between London South Bank University and the Ben Uri Research Unit. In 2018 she curated ‘The Making of an Englishman’: Fred Uhlman at Burgh House and the Hatton Gallery. In 2021 she curated an exhibition of the early work of Gustav Metzger at Ben Uri Gallery and Knots: Jonny Briggs x Burgh House: Contemporary Interventions into an Historic House, Burgh House 2021- 2022.