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Review Mar 18 2009 « | »
Friends of the Divided Mind at the RCA It is rare that curators are given recognition for their attempts to strike a careful balance between art works......

Ruth Collins

It is rare that curators are given recognition for their attempts to strike a careful balance between art works on display and the exhibition space they inhabit. Yet this is exactly what is happening at the Royal College of Art Galleries in a new exhibition organised by 13 graduating students of the Curating Contemporary Art MA course.

The exhibition draws inspiration from British artist Chris Evans, who fly-posted a silkscreen poster around Kilsyth in Scotland advertising the reunion of a fictitious organisation called Friends Of The Divided Mind. Celebrating curatorial artistry and the collaborative efforts taken to display contemporary art for different audiences, the collection seeks to question and simultaneously redefine our ideas of what art, art institutions-and indeed artistic space- can do.

Both separately and in tandem, the exhibition's four components open the students' debate to the public through a range of media. Three of these sections are dedicated to experimental forms of institutional space: from Entrance & Underground which explores three different artistic spaces in London, ULU| contemporary art which presents a newly devised structure for a contemporary art institution in Ia?i, Romania, to Office of Real Time Activity which offers an experimental forum for spatial configuration and stretches the conceptual boundaries of how we perceive both time and institutional space.

The fourth component, Retracing Exhibitions, innovatively brings together an array of works which pay tribute to past exhibitions. Perhaps one of the most striking displays is John Salvest's installation of notes, annotated press releases and postcards compiled by New York art critic Kim Levin over three decades of working in the industry. This piece is emblematic of all the works on display in this section and highlights that artistic processes, along with the exhibitions themselves, should be documented and will stand the test of time. They are testament to the fact that art is not ephemeral, but continues to live and breathe in one new artistic space or another.

Friends Of The Divided Mind runs from 18th - 29th March 2009 11am-6pm at the Royal College of Art. For more information, click here.

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