In this talk, curator and contributing editor of Frieze Tom Morton discusses the recent preoccupation among contemporary artists with the artefacts of the distant past, and the real and imagined histories they summon up.
Tom Morton (b.1977) is a London-based curator, writer, and Contributing Editor of Frieze. He was co-curator of the quintennial travelling exhibition British Art Show 7 (2010-2011), and has worked as a curator at the Hayward Gallery (2008-2011) and Cubitt Gallery, London (2006-2007). He also co-curated the 2008 Busan Biennale, and curated the exhibition How to Endure for the 2007 Athens Biennial. In 2013, he curated the exhibition The World is Almost Six Thousand Years Old: Contemporary Art & Archaeology from the Stone Age of the Present in venues across the historic city of Lincoln, and the major survey British British Polish Polish – Art from Europe’s Edges in the Late 90s and Today at the CSW Ujadowski Castle, Warsaw. Morton’s writing has appeared in numerous exhibition catalogues, and in journals including frieze, Frog, Bidoun, and Metropolis M.
Image: The World is Almost Six Thousand Years Old: Contemporary Art & Archaeology from the Stone Age of the Present, installation detail, curated by Tom Morton at The Collection and Various Venues, Lincoln UK, in 2013. Photo credit: David Rowan