Past Residents Marianne Mulvey
Marianne Mulvey is a curator, writer and educator. She has curated programmes around queer sincerity and performance architecture, amongst other things, and teaches at art schools in London and internationally on curating, public programming and critical writing. From 2009-16 she was Curator of Public Programmes at Tate Britain / Modern programming talks, symposia, film screenings, courses and workshops, performance and interdisciplinary events like Late at Tate Britain and ‘The Tanks: Fifteen Weeks of Art in Action’ at Tate Modern in 2012. Recent programmes included the panel series ‘Nordic Art and its Discontents’ (2015/16) and the course ‘How Speech Acts: Art and Life’ (2015) where participants learnt about performativity through contemporary artists’ practice. Marianne is a Trustee of Fierce, a festival of performance, dance, live art and experimental theatre in Birmingham. She researches and writes about performance, specifically it’s pedagogic potential and the value of bringing low art to spaces of high culture. Marianne will begin a PhD on the queer potential of the public programme within the art institution with Tate and Birkbeck in partnership with Open School East and MIMA in October 2016.
Marianne’s research project for Helsinki International Curatorial Programme (HICP) is about the relationship between shyness and performance. The inspiration comes from artist Joceline Howe who named ‘shy showing off’ a research strand of hers during a course Marianne was running at Tate some years ago. The phrase resonated with Marianne’s interests in shame, embarrassment, sincerity and authenticity in contemporary performance practices. Starting by mining her own and others’ personal history of shyness and showing off, she hopes to go deeper into the economy of shame and celebrity as described by Jaqueline Rose: “Shame requires an audience… [it] only arises when someone knows, or fears, they have been seen. Shame relies on the art of exposure” to develop a performance programme and “school for shy show offs” running in parallel. Marianne says sheis intrigued to see how the artists and curators she meets in Helsinki will respond to her project, and what she can learn from them about the cultural and social connotations of shyness and showing off, here and elsewhere.