Supported by the Sir Frank Bowling Scholarship, J. Paris’s doctoral research traces the entanglements between built environments and stigmatised social experiences, attending to immersive modes of historicising that exceed nationalist borders and orientations.
A Certain Gait
Research Activation | Exhibition
Site-specific exhibition presented at the Royal College of Art (RCA) Library.
Spanning the Library’s informal exhibition spaces, A CERTAIN GAIT examines coordinated movement as a tool for institutional critique and socio-political engagement, past and present. Choreographing bodily gestures into GAIT, the exhibition inaugurates critical situations that confront unstable tensions in geography and history. The exhibition originates from ongoing research into the Black British composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (1875–1912), interweaving photographs from the RCA Archive with his composition A Prayer, from African Romances, Op. 17. Setting poetry by Paul Laurence Dunbar, African Romances emerged from Coleridge-Taylor’s student years at the Royal College of Music (RCM). In 1900, he conducted the Royal Choral Society in his debut of Song of Hiawatha at the Royal Albert Hall, staged theatrically between 1924–39 by T. C. Fairbairn. During his seven years in South Kensington, the emerging cultural estate of Albertopolis, Coleridge-Taylor left a meaningful yet overlooked legacy.
Operating between the visual and the rhythmic, the exhibition reactivates the legacies of both Coleridge-Taylor and Dunbar in Albertopolis, now often known as the South Ken Culture Quarter. Through site-specific installations in tribute to their life and work, alongside personal archival items from the artist’s own past, the exhibition re-evaluates personal histories’ capacity to confront historical institutional conditions. In doing so, it directs attention to the movement of bodies across Albertopolis and traces interwoven histories across the Royal Albert Hall, the RCM and the RCA’s former and current sites.The display, inspired by conceptual artist Sanja Iveković’s canonical action Triangle (1979), occupies a linear corridor of traditional vitrines and informal exhibition spaces such as bay windows. Echoing Iveković’s contested balcony, the exhibition claims the Library extension’s vantage point over the geographical intersection of the RCA, RAH and RCM. Here, the work unfolds through sustained passage, creating a field of contingent encounters: walking, pausing or returning, and reframing the corridor through this durational activation, with movement less as transit than as a mode of attention. These walking itineraries, either led by invited guests or self-guided using a reimagined map, aim to reactivate a route described in 1954 by Sir Griffith Williams as demanding ‘the most astonishing physical stamina’. Once trodden by royals and dignitaries along Exhibition Road, these paths are navigated today by tourists, students and cultural workers. Through the collective activation of this historic experience, the GAIT of walking invites contemplation on the consequences of the imperial past of Albertopolis and critical imaginaries of a pluralist landscape.
Curated by Yanqi Huang