WORKSHOP 'The Circulating Department' V&A Great Exhibition Road Festival 7 and 8 June 2025

WORKSHOP 'The Circulating Department' V&A Great Exhibition Road Festival 7 and 8 June 2025 12.00 - 18.00

Two-day drop-in workshop around Gayle Chong Kwan's work 'The Circulating Department' (2021) made as Artist in Residence at the V&A between 2019 - 2020. Gayle Chong Kwan explored the museum as process and movement rather end-point display. She worked with people in transportation, cleaning, conserving, acquisition, disposal, and pest management. Gayle Chong Kwan was interested in the Circulation Department from 1850 to 1977, the first ‘travelling gallery’ in the UK, it loaned original works and copies to provincial and national museums, libraries, art colleges, and schools. It had a higher than usual intake of women, its staff were from art college rather than Oxbridge, and some were members of the Communist Party. She took photographs of objects of personal and emotional meaning to staff, made headpieces with millinery shapes based on inserts used to transport collection objects. They were installed in the Raphael Cartoons, and photographs made of each worn by the person with whom she worked, in rooms with objects of sensory, emotional, and professional resonance to them.

Event Details

7th June 2025

V&A, London

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