Research Interest:

• Intersectional Feminist curatorial approaches in both theory and practice
• Digital curation and immersive curatorial and artistic experiences
• The artist's voice
• Conversation-as-form
• The biennial as phenomenon
• Relationship between the analogue and digital
• South African contemporary art
• Art and ethics
• Interplay between artist and curator
• Dialogical art
• Hospitality and conviviality
• Interdisciplinary approaches to curatorial enquiry.

Mining down further:

• Ethics of the encounter – online
• Sustainability, legacy and archiving of artwork
• International syntax of the curatorial in the digital
• Enclaves of practice: nationally, linguistically, the Dark Web
• Inbuilt duration, the life and death of the artwork
• Locating the artist, the artwork and the site.
• The plurality of digital experience.
• Simulating the real in the digital.
• Transversal curatorial approaches

Biography:

Alexandra Ross is Lecturer in Contemporary Art and Curation at the University of Glasgow, also co-convening the M.Litt in Curatorial Practice (Contemporary Art) at The Glasgow School of Art. She has taught and supervised at undergraduate and postgraduate level at universities throughout the UK and has recently been accepted on the advisory faculty of the Transart Institute, New York. She read an honours law degree at the University of Edinburgh, followed by a Masters in Museum and Gallery Studies, University of St Andrews, and a Master of Fine Art, and a PhD in curatorial practice from the University of Dundee. 

From June 2014-January 2015 she was Curatorial Fellow with ATLAS Arts, on the Isle of Skye. In May 2015 she was an invited tutor at Vessel Curatorial Retreat, Bari, Italy and writer in residence Skaftfell (2015 & 2016), Centre for Visual Art, Seydisfjordur, Iceland.

From 2015 to 2017 she was Postdoctoral Research Fellow with Centre for Curating the Archive, the University of Cape Town. Her more recent research works with the sonic space and the voice, with a curatorial focus on AR, VR, and virtual networks. Ross is recognised as a specialist in the exploration of the nuance and scope of conversational activity within curatorial critique and practice. In particular, her work explores the notion of critical conviviality as a vital and rich space that sits at the nexus of critical debate and hospitable generosity. With this, she plays with the conventions of tapping into and gathering the interstitial moments of recording and documenting curatorial and artistic process.

She completed a PhD in the field of curatorial practice exploring the scope and efficacy of conversation-as-method within curatorship and the capturing of its history. The fieldwork of this practice-led investigation into curatorial conversation focused on Manifesta 8, European Biennial of Contemporary Art; the 54th Venice Biennale; and Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art. The biennial provided a rich context in which to situate her research, although this was not the exclusive domain of investigation: also including curatorial education; virtual, international networks; and experimental choreographed environments.

She has worked in a variety of organisations including, IZIKO, South African National Gallery (Cape Town), Manifesta 7 (Bolzano), Bonhams Auctioneers (Edinburgh), and the Fruitmarket Gallery (Edinburgh), Impact International Printmaking Conference and the Print Festival Scotland.

She works largely collaboratively with artists, choreographers, dancers, and educators assessing the boundaries, language and genealogy of curatorial practice. Forthcoming projects include a ‘Polyphonic Essay on Memory’ for NEoN Digital Arts Festival in November and she is also working on a publication on Dieter Roth and his time in Seyðisfjörður, East Iceland. 

List by: Type | Date

Global Challenges Research Grant - £7000, University of Dundee. To reaslise workshops as part of Fak'ugesi African Digital Innovation Festival, Johannesburg, 2017.

Actively seeking supervision in the following areas:

• Digital curation
• Art (and ethics) in the post-digital era
• Working with the artist's voice; dialogical practices
• Curatorial enquiry
• Interdisciplinary projects with art theory or art practice main point of enquiry
• Practice-led or practice-based PhDs
• Conversational and dialogical art theory and/or practice
• (Intersectrional) feminist enquiry into art history or curatorial theory
• Digital curation with possible emphasis on A/R, V/R

• John, Susan
  Satire and Suffragettes
• Lawal Agoro, Amina
  Trace Elements: a curatorial approach to the reconstitution of late 19th century ‘vernacular’ architecture in Lagos, Nigeria (A Practice Based PhD Project)
• Myers, Christiana
  Curating COVID-19: Epidemiological Metaphor in Contemporary Societal and Museological Shifts
• Odubanjo, Pelumi
  Fragmenting the Archive- Encounters, Memory and Futurity
• Sebastian, Olivia
  The Post-Digital Audience: Understanding Institutional Approaches to Aspects of Engagement in the Post-Pandemic
• Vale, Francesca
  Re-figuring Disfigurement: A Cultural Analysis of Mastectomy in Art Using a Curatorial Approach

Selected

Convener of the Curatorial Practice (Contemporary Art) Masters Programme. This programme is delivered between the University of Glasgow and the Glasgow School of Art. Convener since August 2017

Teaching during Post Doctorial Fellowship at the Centre for Curating the Archive, Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town. In particular on the Masters of Fine Art and Honours in Curating Programmes. 2015-2017

Tutor on the 2016 Vessel International Curatorial Retreat, Bari, Italy. 2015.

Selected links:

An ongoing curatorial project., "A Polyphonic Essay on..." with Gayle Meikle:

"A Polyphonic Essay on Memory", Berlin, 2016.
"A Polyphonic Essay on Memory", 2017, Dundee.
"Towards A Polyphonic Essay As Form"
"(Un)spoken: The register and display of the artist’s voice in the museum"