Serving Pantry

Join us for the launch of Pantry - a new research publication authored by The Lilac House.

Pantry emerges from the lived realities of curators navigating structural inequality, precarity, institutional tokenism, and the emotional labour of cultural work. It centres perspectives stemming from intersectional experiences of working-classness, minority ethnicity, migration experience, gender, queerness, and disability, and speaks to the challenges of sustaining a practice on the curatorial margins within systems that continue to exclude, instrumentalise, and undervalue.

Rooted in collective reflection, Pantry insists on a curatorial practice that is situated, emotionally grounded, and structurally aware. It challenges institutional exclusion and asks to move beyond the current optics of diversity. Pantry is an offering to those working across and against traditional hierarchies seeking to build practices of solidarity, sustainability, and structural transformation whilst centring care, accountability and redistribution.

The launch of Pantry will feature a panel conversation with the co-founders of Lilac House, Marta Marsicka and Jazz Swali, with Ricardo Reverón Blanco, and Saziso Phiri who will respond to the themes of the publication through the lens of their own lived experiences as curators navigating the arts sector.

We are inviting you, curators, artists, and cultural workers to join and explore the emotional, political, and structural realities of curatorial practice today.

A limited number of physical copies of Pantry will be available for free at the event (40 copies available) with a digital copy available shortly afterwards.

Supported by the British Art Network (Seminars 2024 Fund).