I received a Developing Your Creative Practice grant from Arts Council England in 2021 that funded a residency at the Zentrum für Kunst und Urbanistik in Berlin for five months between May and October 2021.

The residency was an opportunity for me to further develop the artistic and curatorial aspects of my work, especially in regard to the museums research I had been pursuing at this time.

During the period of the residency, I planned to further examine the role of culture as fundamental to civic life and justice in cities. I united work on the evolution of museum practice and development, with the emerging field of night studies. How far are policy agendas on the Night-Time Economy and creative engagement policy (such as Arts Council England’s ‘Let’s Create’) driving change in the way institutions interact with their local surroundings? Berlin offered a new comparative perspective on this work, as the world’s first city with a ‘Night Mayor’, and as a place widely acknowledged for its thriving nightlife culture.

During the period of the residency the object of my interest turned to the Humboldt Forum, a new museum space that opened during my residency on 20 July 2021. The highly controversial project had initially been billed as Germany’s answer to the British Museum, through its amalgamation of Berlin’s ethnographic collections.

At the end of the residency, I produced the studio exhibition ‘The Late Museum‘ about the work I had pursued on the Humboldt Forum.

Find out more: zku-berlin.org/fellows/590