Alice Procter

What happens if we use museums as sites of grief? This talk explores the ways we approach emotion and loss in galleries, and how we can learn to make space for stories of absence and empathy, finding ways to connect to objects and their communities in the supposedly rational museum space.

Alice A. Procter is an art historian and museum enthusiast. When she graduated in 2016 she couldn’t get a job, so she started an irreverent and low-tech podcast called The Exhibitionist, reviewing galleries and museums with friends and terrible background noise.

That turned into Uncomfortable Art Tours, unofficial guided tours exploring how major institutions came into being against a backdrop of imperialism. She runs these regularly at six sites, exploring the role colonialism played in shaping and funding national collections, looking beyond the surface of paintings to unravel the ideological aesthetics at work.

Alice’s academic work concentrates on the intersections of postcolonial art practice and colonial material culture, the curation of historical trauma, and myths of national identity. She is currently writing an MA thesis on protest, disruption and rule-breaking in art galleries.

Her website is theexhibitionist.org and twitter @aaprocter.