NOW YOU SEE: Responding/Ignoring, Remembering/Forgetting, Seeing/Unseeing

The MA Curating and Collections course at Chelsea College of Arts, under the leadership of Dr. Lina Dzuverovic, announces the class of 2025 MA Degree Show titled Now You See: Responding/Ignoring, Remembering/Forgetting, Seeing/Unseeing.  This year's cohort has been developing skills through hands-on access to archives and collections, artist collaborations, as well as a series of workshops led by a host of partner organisations including Artangel, PEER UK and The Mosaic Rooms. Additionally, students have developed sector links through our new series of talks entitled Voices Shaping Curating in which we welcomed Olivia Plender, Ann Coxon, Joasia Krysa, Dot Zhihan Jia, Marleen Boschen and Jade Foster to speak about their practices.

This three-part exhibition is a culmination of student research across three curatorial labs, with objects and ideas from Inner London Education Authority (ILEA) Collection (led by Dr. Karen Di Franco and Jacqueline Winston-Silk); investigations into labour and value in the art field, within the And Others: The Gendered Politics and Practices of Art Collectives Lab (led by Dr. Lina Dzuverovic); and Artist-Curator Relationships (led by Jessie Krish) exploring curatorial power structures by collaborating with practicing artists. The three strands of the exhibition share an engagement with the politics of memory and preservation, asking urgent questions about labour and value in the art system, unsettling established hierarchies and subverting these through the very processes involved in curating this exhibition.

Responding/Ignoring looks critically at the invisible labour in the art world, focusing on the often overlooked yet essential processes of ideation, research, revision, and production. By highlighting the behind-the-scenes labour that sustains artistic practices, the project questions structural inequalities embedded within contemporary art systems, through visual display and workshops developed in dialogue with Bare Minimum Collective and artist José García Oliva. 

Remembering/Forgetting explores the materiality of memory and the intimate ways it is archived, transformed and shared, examining how artists embed personal and cultural narratives into physical media, transforming material into vessels of lived experience and collective remembrance. Centering on textile and printmaking practices, the display brings together a diverse range of artworks from Mahnoor Ali Gilani, Tari Esewe-Bastel, Xinmiao Ge, Tulani Hlalo, Eleanor Street, and Xinyue Tao.  

Seeing/Unseeing invites visitors to consider their own domestic objects in a broader dialogue on taste and value. Organised around the principles of “good design”, objects from the ILEA collection are placed in dialogue with other more unruly objects to expand a display that challenges how objects shape and construct the world around us.  

NOW YOU SEE: Responding/Ignoring, Remembering/Forgetting, Seeing/Unseeing is accompanied by a publication and a series of events, workshops, and artist talks, free and open to all.

Curators
Seeing/Unseeing: Angelica Fung, Aurora Little Baños, Dezeta Fantie, Feiya Ye, Hanchong Qian, Huimin Hua, Jingyi Song, Laela Toy, Leyang Wang, Leyi Zhu, Mengqing Yang, Ming Lok Fong, Tung Yeh, Valerie Tsang, Yizhen Ge, Yutong Ye, Yuxuan Hou, Zhen Zeng.

Remembering/Forgetting: Asmin Doga Yuksel, Athena Myers, Huan Chen, Jiajing Wu, Jiangyu Guo, Julia Guglielmetti, Karen Li-Hsuan Huang, Lina Stenman, Runlin Luo, Shintaro Monji, Xing Zhou, Yan Yang, Yanting Liao, Ye Zhang, Yixin Zhang, Yue Shen, Ziming He.

Responding/Ignoring: Antonia Mejía Arango, Chuyan Wang, Denise Lin, Jiaqi Cao, Jimin Lee, Junwen He, Marina Quevedo Bermejo, Mingran Zhang, Natalia Godoy, Qingyang Sun, Qinxue Lin, Samuel Weill, Sara Paowana, Shuhui Yang, Tianyi Xie, Yiyang Jiang, Yu Wang, Zeyue Zhang, Zhining Chen.

MA CC is a fifteen-month programme that includes curatorial labs alongside programming where students learn directly from professionals across the sector, enjoying unique access to art and design archives and collections, and collaborations with practicing artists. For more information contact l.dzuverovic [​at​] arts.ac.uk