adapt day 4 / We get ready to open physically as lockdown is lifted

Anyone who has put together an exhibition will know how it goes. Best laid plans and all that. But we have got there. Renegotiating and changing arrangements until the very last work was fitted.

During this year, this month and even this week we have had our flexibility tested to constantly shift our lives, work and expectations around constraints put in place due to Covid. Unexpectedly taking time off to get tested or wait for results, where best to display the obligatory hand sanitizer, trying to make sure there is enough room for visitors to step back and appreciate the work and allow for social distancing; and the reality of social distancing when you are trying to organise and hang an exhibit as part a team.

In this technological, digital, social media and now Covid era, the expectation to produce online content is necessary and now not only as a means of promotion for something physical, but as an active means of participation; but the desire to be physically somewhere when free to do so, is still very real. Like a craving.

Existing, shifting, creating and curating between virtual and physical realities is harder for some than others, often, but not exclusively relating to age. The exhibit has been twice the work to hang virtually and physically and it has forced me adapt my thinking about how to arrange, exhibit, share and reach people. That even when Covid has gone, the reality and culture of virtual experiences are not going away. Those of us to which the virtual still seams unreal, will have to adapt or risk disappearing into the either.

It would have been easier to run the exhibit virtually, with all the ‘can we, cant we’ and ‘will it wont it’ going on, but the desire to use the physical space we have to share work, and to celebrate and see artists work next to one another in an actual room, is tradition. We all need to adapt, but how much should we let go of?