Curating at Home: Making Personal Spaces of Creative Agency

Held fortnightly, this course invites you to see the spaces where we and others live as sites of creative agency. Drawing on art practices, histories, philosophy, exhibition-making, and collaborative exercises, we will explore how we organise art in our homes, what we choose to display for ourselves or others, what we overlook or hide, how these choices guide our living, and how our homes are read.

Led by artist, curator, and educator Dr Mark Rohtmaa-Jackson and hosted by IMT Gallery, each session includes case studies, creative exercises, and guided activities designed to challenge the thresholds between exhibition and life — asking how art can make space for living. Between sessions, you’ll be encouraged to continue developing self-directed activities that expand on the ideas, practices, and themes introduced in each class.

Session 1: Exhibition-Making in the Home

We begin the course by asking how the works of our ‘collections’ interact with the concepts of the homes in which we live. We will look at artists and curators who live with the art they work with, or who turn their home inside out to the public. We will consider the ways in which mainstream concepts of homes, like those of art galleries, are political, privileged spaces that invite and exclude, that are seen through legacies of power and the ebbs and flows of capital entangled with the rise of the bourgeoisie. Together we will discuss what we want our homes to be as spaces of spectacle, consider ideas of being ‘host’, queering our encounters with familiar objects, and creating diagrams and choreographies that describe relations that exist as well as new possibilities for how we each share our personal space with art. Between these sessions we will work on altering and reimagining the spaces we live in, and find new ways of questioning the reason for art being in them.

Session 2: Listening to What Art Needs

This session explores ways of listening to art. Here we consider art as a presence of its own, with its own needs and desires that might distract from or contradict our own. We explore how moving art in space leaves traces of its journey. We consider how we often think of art as something that decorates life, how museums and galleries work to take art out of life, and consider cases in which art acts as a thing around which the rituals of life rotate. We will consider whether or not such distinctions have any connection to our lived experiences and how such reflections can speak back to the concepts we built together in the previous session.

Session 3: Manifesting an Art Relationship

In the third session we will identify and focus our attention to a single work of art, or object of curiosity or fascination within our own homes. We will look at how it moves, what we ask of it and what it asks in return. We will look at ways of challenging its comfort, determining, destabilizing and disorienting its positionality in turn. Through critical discussions we will learn about the ways in which the conditions of home and the demands of art often come into conflict, and look for solutions to curatorial impasse. This session will create new plans of living with art that may have a wider impact on how we navigate art out in the world.

Session 4: Making Publics

In our final session together we shall disentangle ourselves from the position of the audience and consider who else our publics might be. Perhaps they might include family, friends and other acquaintances, or indeed something more abstract. We will consider how these publics come to artwork in the space in which it rests, how this has an effect on how it is read, and how we are read in turn. We will ask what it means to be ‘local’ or ‘located’ and consider how artworks interact with the concepts of the home and gallery that we have curated, and with the visitors who we invite into or who invade these homes. We will think of being hosts for ideas and experiences, and of how what we have learnt and discussed might form the basis of ongoing work with our artistic and exhibition-making practices.

We’ll stay connected through a dedicated WhatsApp group, offering a space to share reflections, ideas, and inspiration as the course unfolds.

About Mark Rohtmaa-Jackson:

Mark Rohtmaa-Jackson is an American-British artist, curator and educator based in Iceland, where they are the Director of the experimental art situation ‘LungA School’. They have held teaching and curating positions at numerous galleries and universities in the UK, and as an artist and curator have worked primarily with collaborative, intermedia practices. They have a PhD on the tape experiments of William S. Burroughs as a curatorial strategy in sound art. They live and work in Seyðisfjörður, and their book on curating, Contemporary Exhibition-Making and Management: Curating IMT Gallery as a Hybrid Space was published by Routledge in 2023.

Curating at Home: Making personal spaces of creative agency is an entirely new course developed from Mark’s work at LungA School, and previously as the curator of IMT Gallery, and as a senior lecturer in undergraduate and postgraduate teaching in art history, practice and theory.

Whether you are an artist, collector, or curator (or simply curious about how art can live alongside us), and whether you’re working in the wake of relational aesthetics and social practice or re-examining your own art practice or collection, this course offers new ways of understanding and rethinking how we host, display, and live with art.

Reserve your place now via the booking details below to join this online course in creative curating.

🐦 Early Bird rates are available until 9 January at 11:59pm GMT.

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Images:

[1] Crystal Morphology 01 (2025) by Mary Yacoob
[2] Postcard for Seyðisfjörður from Hub of radial paths (2025) by Rupert Hartley
[3] Untitled (2025) by Giulia Ricci
[4] Crystal Morphology 02 (2025) by Mary Yacoob

Part of the project Postcards for Seyðisfjörður organised by H_A_R_D_P_A_I_N_T_I_N_G, exhibited at Sluice Expo 2025 at LungA, Seyðisfjörður, and the Icelandic Embassy, London. From an original photograph of Seyðisfjörður by Mark Rohtmaa-Jackson.