Paul Goodwin

Paul Goodwin is an independent curator, lecturer and urban theorist based in London, where he is the Chair of Black Art & Design and the director of the Research Centre for Transnational Art, Identity and Nation at University of the Arts London. His curatorial and research interests span the fields of art and migration, urbanism and critical curation. As a curator at Tate Britain from 2008-2012 he directed Tate Britain’s pioneering Cross Cultural Programme, a multidisciplinary platform exploring the impact of globalisation on contemporary art in Britain. He has curated and co-curated a number of internationally significant exhibitions including Migrations: Journeys Into British Art, Tate Britain 2012; Thin Black Line(s), Tate Britain, 2011; Go Tell It On The Mountain: Towards A New Monumentalism, 2011 and Ways of Seeing, 2012, 3-D Foundation Sculpture Park in Verbier, Switzerland; Coming Ashore, 2011, Berardo Collection Museum in Lisbon, Portugal; Underconstruction, Hospital Julius De Matos, Lisbon, Portugal, 2009.

An extract from his presentation Uncurating and Recalcitrance: Notes on Opacity and the Under Commons of the Museum:

  "What is the under commons of the museum? And if it doesn’t yet exist what can it become? The under commented museum might be not a place or a physical entity (sic) opposed to power and a critical binary. You are either in or you are out. In that it becomes more of a mind-set orientation, a positioning in relation to power, an unstable assembly of strategies. How mixing around the idea of refusal or indeed opacity to dominate a lot of power. In relation to the under commons it involves supporting and extending what they call black sociality. A way of being together, eating, drinking, having sex, being in common for each other, loving each other, in other words studying it. It already exists in some sense. I think we are doing much of this work. That’s what we are doing here in this very room. But we need to extend it, we need to spread its message and power, infiltrate the museum one step at a time so the under commons can be pursued in this sense as a mode of modern day recalcitrance."

Goodwin’s presentation explored the disturbing way in which African ontology is spoken about in the North which is connected to aesthetic injustices this entails. His radical idea is not to do away with museums but to treat them with a healthy dose of skepticism and not take them as enlightenment spaces which are always good and always about perfect knowledge. The knowledge should be then used to connect independent spaces around the world which are outside the dominant museum.