Paulina Seyfried and Paloma Nana, Temporary Gallery, February 2023

For the project Islands of Kinship, Paloma Nana and Paulina Seyfried were hired to help with their expertise to improve aspects of hospitality and local outreach. They formulated together with other members of Temporary Gallery the sustainability and inclusivity areas that they want to focus on during the project. 

Hospitality and local collaborations 

Hospitality is an important aspect in the curatorial concept of Temporary Gallery. We want to be a place where as many people as possible feel welcome. Therefore, we often serve food and include content-free parts during our events to provide space for informal conversations and to support community building. We want to improve and critically interrogate our outreach by opening up to local communities and the neighborhood to see who and what kind of needs exist. As part of this proposition, we will repurpose one of our rooms as an experimental space for smaller projects in 2024. These projects can for example focus on supporting upcoming (local) artists or other practitioners, who are part of the communities/neighborhood. In the framework of ongoing exhibitions, hospitality is also directly linked to how we welcome, address and assist our visitors. Therefore it is indispensable for us to develop a code of conduct that can be applied to every exhibition.

Language 

Language is power. Especially in the art scene, where most people have an academic background and therefore speak and write academically, language becomes an exclusion factor. Such discourse complicates or even prevents non-academics from entering the art world with its often abstract terminologies and curatorial concepts. We want to look at our texts critically and improve our accessibility concerning language within these two years of the IoK program. For the first exhibition in 2023 (Unruly Kinships), we started with an extra text in simple language, but we are still in the process of discussing other styles of mediation. For this, we also want to consult and exchange ideas with the other social responsibility coordinators/ombudspersons, which could then lead us to organizing trainings etc. Furthermore, we want to experiment with audio guides as a tool to facilitate the accessibility of an exhibition.

Outreach – teenagers 

The lack of diversity in cultural institutions is a decidedly structural problem and as such extends into classrooms. What is the use of job advertisements aimed at a supposedly diverse group of applicants if the access to professional fields in the arts/culture is largely determined by factors like class, education and “ethnicity”? Institutional discrimination and thus the invisibility of certain positions is inherently interconnected with the segregating German educational system, which is organized around differing school forms. The project thus asks how young, and in particular, (post-)migrated adults can be integrated into institutional work in a more sustainable way and, above all, as serious agents; how can they gain a tangible affiliation with the arts and cultural sector and feel represented while also impactful within it? In the framework of a collaborative Youth Program, participants aged 16-21 years will have the opportunity to gain insights into the productional and curatorial work of Temporary Gallery. Through a variety of artistic/educational workshops*, excursions to art exhibitions or a membership at TG, they will receive an alternative art education that is flexibly oriented towards their needs.

*e.g. postcolonial art education, “the ABC of curation”, gardening, collective cooking, empowerment etc.