Protea – International Curatorial Exchange
This programme is closed, and we are not accepting Expressions of Interest.
We have produced two reports relating to this work:
- A final report about Protea, published in November 2022 (this report is available by clicking here)
- A report about Protea and its impacts on curators one year on, published in January 2024 (this report is available by clicking here)
An overview of Protea
As part of our 50th
anniversary celebrations to mark the creation of John Ellerman Foundation in 1971, we devised Protea, an international curatorial exchange programme between curators in South Africa and the UK.
Our anniversary presented a special opportunity to build on the Foundation’s existing work in supporting curatorial development via our Museums and Galleries Fund. Protea enabled us to extend our understanding of what curating is, the forms it can take and where and how it can have impact. It also supported us to acknowledge our founder's, Sir John Ellerman 2nd Bt., love of the UK and South Africa - the two countries in which he spent most of his life.
Eight curators from the UK and South Africa were invited to undertake field research in the form of 10-day bilateral visits taking place between April and August 2022.
Protea provided valuable opportunities for individual curators to undertake field research that supported their personal and professional development - acquiring new knowledge, international contacts and wider networks that will be of value to them and their institutions.
Curator candidates were selected through a two-stage process comprising initial expressions of interest, followed by requests for proposals.
The successful candidates for this exchange are listed below, and they were both ambassadors for their practice and their institutions as well as being part of a new international enterprise that may serve as a model for others.
From South Africa:
- Annelize Kotze, working with Chief Curator of Art & Social History, Iziko Museums of South Africa, Cape Town
- Dr Melissa Boonzaaier-Davids, Assistant Curator (Marine Invertebrates), Iziko South African Museum, Cape Town
- Francois Lion-Cachet, Curator, Public Engagement, Constitutional Court Art Collection, Constitutional Court Trust
- Dr Motsane Getrude Seabela, Curator of the Anthropology Collection, Ditsong Museums of South Africa’s Cultural History Museum
- Dr Erica de Greef, Co-Director African Research Institute AFRI, Curator at Large in Fashion at Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCAA), Cape Town.
From the UK:
- Dr Andrew Mills, Curator for Archaeology & World Cultures, The Hunterian, University of Glasgow
- Dr Njabulo Chipangura, Curator of Living Cultures, The University of Manchester, Manchester Museum
- Alison Moloney, PhD candidate on the Advanced Practices Programme within the Visual Cultures department at Goldsmiths, University of London and Associate Member of the Centre for Fashion Curation, UAL.
Through Protea, the institutional partners involved – which included national or regional museums, archives, research centres, heritage asset owners, universities, local authorities – built new contacts, imported and shared expertise, and identified strategic openings to advocate for action/change.
For curating as a practice and discourse, we hope that Protea brought insights that illuminated the value of curating as a means for unlocking creativity, building alliances, fuelling support, influencing power, and driving change.
The full report outlining our initial findings from Protea, which we published in November 2022 shortly after the programme came to a close, can be accessed by clicking here.
Protea – One Year On
In August 2023, we conducted eight interviews with each of the Protea curators to explore the following:
- Their motivations for participating in Protea
- What they had found most surprising, rewarding and challenging about participating in Protea
- The progress of their work one year on from Protea
- Their ideas and perspectives on curatorial practice in the sectors and context they operate in
- If they would do something like Protea again and recommend it to others.
All eight curators were emphatic in their support for Protea, citing in particular its flexibility and trusting approach and how this had supported them to build and exchange knowledge in meaningful ways. The curators were able to expand their expertise in their research fields, which included repatriation and restitution.
The curators felt they had been able to develop their curatorial expertise and practice during their exchanges, and in the year since, with some curators sharing their learning with wider audiences through conferences, lectures, articles, research publications and exhibitions.
You can read the full report exploring the impact of Protea one year on for the eight curators that took part by clicking here.
Whilst we are unable to run a programme like Protea again, we would welcome discussing this work with others and would be very happy to share our project materials in support of this.