This 2022 revised Research Strategy is informed by °Õ²¹³Ù±ð’s overarching mission, purpose and vision1 and the three current institutional priorities:
- Achieving change in who engages with Tate
- Achieving change in who works for Tate and how they are looked after when they do
- Using the collection more to meet the needs of our public and business model2
Vision for Research at Tate
To create a vibrant research culture across Tate that generates high quality3 ethical and sustainable research about art, ideas and practices of institutional, national and international significance, shared openly and accessibly.
Aims
- To enrich Tate, developing new knowledge and partnerships, whilst enhancing the quality and originality of our ideas and the thoughtfulness and effectiveness of our practice, always mindful of the capacity of staff and collaborators
- To contribute to scholarly and practice communities, supporting and providing leadership across the sector and generating new insights that build and embed equitable, transparent, anti-racist research practices at Tate and more widely
- To enhance people’s knowledge and experience, developing and exchanging knowledge equitably and ethically in ways that engage people within and beyond the academic sector and °Õ²¹³Ù±ð’s existing core audiences
Objectives
- To deepen and widen knowledge and understanding of °Õ²¹³Ù±ð’s collection and its history, increasing access to information, and supporting informed criticality towards its interpretation
- To support and facilitate research by curators and other Tate staff that contributes to and extends from a diverse and innovative public programme, including displays, exhibitions, events and publications
- To collaborate with colleagues across Tate to nurture and showcase the range of research activity taking place across the organisation, embedding ethical, care-full scholarly and practice-based research
- To work in collaboration with colleagues at Tate and externally to support major externally funded research initiatives – notably the British Art Network a²Ô»å Hyundai Tate Research Centre: Transnational
- To work with academic and non-academic collaborators, generating insights and knowledge to inform relevant disciplinary fields and provide solutions to challenges encountered in °Õ²¹³Ù±ð’s practice and more widely
- To raise the profile of research internally and externally, communicating its value and relevance
Priority themes
Recognising °Õ²¹³Ù±ð’s institutional priorities, the following interconnected, inter-departmental and cross-disciplinary themes provide a framework through which research activity across Tate can operate. Research on and around the collection underpins each theme, while digital is a feature of all four. Research across Tate will not be confined to these themes, however particular attention and resources will be devoted to furthering enquiry and activity in these areas.
- Curating4 and the collection in relation to the global, national and local
- Interrogating the transnational
- Resituating British art; its history, generation, acquisition, cataloguing and display
- Innovations in collection management, development, conservation and access
- Addressing the evolving needs of °Õ²¹³Ù±ð’s diverse collection alongside developments in library and archival practice
- Progressing museum practices and histories
- Contemporary concerns including decoloniality,5 representation, diversity and identity politics; their impact on art museum collections, practices, structures and audiences
- Ecology, sustainability and the climate emergency
- Creative learning and new models of public and participatory practice
- Interrogating and evidencing the nature and value of learning and engagement with and through art/°Õ²¹³Ù±ð’s collection and innovations in museum participation
Notes
1Ìý°Õ²¹³Ù±ð’sÌýmissionÌýis to promote the public understanding and enjoyment of British, modern and contemporary international art. °Õ²¹³Ù±ð’sÌýpurposeÌýis to champion the right to art for everyone. °Õ²¹³Ù±ð’sÌývisionÌýis to serve as an artistically adventurous and culturally inclusive art museum for the UK and the world, and to be open, bold, rigorous and kind in all that we do.
2ÌýThe institutional priorities are also framed by two principles that underpin all that Tate does ‘in order to protect our future survival’:
(1) Action to address the climate emergency and social equity
(2) Evolving a business model that supports our vision and mission.
3ÌýWe understand ‘high quality’ research to have a clear focus and a creative, critically engaged and care-full (in the sense of being full of care) process that evidences appropriate methods of enquiry, engages a broad range of perspectives and contributes significant new insights that are communicated to our target audiences.
4ÌýWe understand ‘curating’ in the expanded sense, ‘as a multidimensional role that includes critique, editing, education and fundraising… as a way of thinking in terms of interconnections: linking objects, images, processes, people, locations, histories, and discourses in physical space’ (Maria Lind,ÌýPerforming the Curatorial: Within and Beyond Art, 2012).
5ÌýThe terms ‘decolonisation’ and ‘decolonial’ are increasingly under scrutiny and are not clearly defined or consistently used within the cultural sector. We have adopted the term ‘decoloniality’ here to acknowledge the work the museum and Research are doing to attempt to undo ‘the legacies and ongoing relations and patterns of power established by external and internal colonialism’ (Walter Mignolo and Catherine Walsh,ÌýOn Decoloniality: Concepts, Analysis, Praxis, 2018, p.16).
Published August 2022
