Curatorial Reflections: Living Art at the Sainsbury Centre
Join Tania Moore, Head of Exhibitions for a candid talk and tour exclusively for curators and museum professionals and learn about her experience of helping to bring Director, Jago Cooper’s vision to fruition, including the learning curve, challenges, rewards, and opportunities associated with this new way of working.
Friday, 9 May 2025, 10:30-13:00
Sainsbury Centre, University of East Anglia, Norwich NR4 7TJ
£5, in-person.
Programme
10:30: Tea and coffee
11:00: Introduction to the Living Art strategy and discussion
11:45: Tour
13:00: Lunch provided
To mark its 50 anniversary in 2023, the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts launched a radical new strategy, aiming to “become the first museum in the world to recognise art as being alive”. In a series of interventions being introduced across the whole site, visitors have been invited to meet living art in a different way to traditional galleries and museums and encouraged to treat works as they would another person rather than an inanimate object.
Visitors are able to choose their own journey through the gallery spaces via three approaches: digital, analogue and experiential. The new museum concept invites people to connect with art on an emotional level. Touch is encouraged where possible: visitors can hug Henry Moore’s Mother and Child sculpture, just as the artist originally intended. Other interventions allow visitors to lie in a chaise longue while talking to a Giacometti portrait, or experience becoming a living exhibit on display in a showcase, with artworks peering in on them. Meanwhile, exhibitions, displays, interventions, artist residencies and sculpture park programmes activate art to explore the most challenging questions facing society today, inviting audiences to think about these questions in a new light.
This small-group event for curators and museum professionals is an opportunity to learn more about the practicalities of this way of working.
SPEAKER BIOGRAPHY
Tania Moore is Head of Exhibitions at the Sainsbury Centre where she has implemented a programme that tackles the most urgent questions facing society. Curated exhibitions include Darwin in Paradise Camp: Yuki Kihara, Lindsey Mendick: Hot Mess, In Event of Moon Disaster, Liquid Gender, and Jeffrey Gibson: no simple word for time. Publications include Can the Seas Survive Us? (2024), What Is Truth? (2024), Rhythm and Geometry: Constructivist Art in BritainSince1951 (2021) and Henry Moore: Friendships and Legacies (2020). In 2019, she received the New Collecting Award from the Art Fund to acquire sculptors’ drawings by contemporary women and non-binary artists for the Sainsbury Centre collection.