Today more than ever, young people have an outlet for their voice, through public social media platforms, but are they being heard?
YOUTH UNCOVERED brings together a team of young people from three different South London secondary schools and invites them to take a chance and step outside of their comfort zones and commonly prescribed roles to curate a contemporary art exhibition. The YOUTH UNCOVERED team joined forces in 2015, placing an international call for submissions and making their selection from an outstanding number of proposals. Since then, they have been working unfailingly to shape the exhibition, both learning from and leading the professional artists in their research and understanding of what it means to be a young person today. The YOUTH UNCOVERED exhibition is the collective voice of the team.
When the YOUTH UNCOVERED team met for the first time in the gallery of a freezing multi-storey car park in Peckham, the task ahead of us seemed momentous. Although the team are diverse in background and upbringing, our experiences as young people shared similar trends - expectations in education, technology dependence and social pressures (to name a few).
We each had unified messages we wanted to share with a wider audience, but, for most, curating an exhibition was an entirely new experience. How would we keep the show personal, but also communicative our ideas to an audience? What was most important for us to address? By working with experienced artists we were able to work through the process, developing our thoughts and opinions into vocal installations and sparking debates across generations about the changing face of youth. The project gave us a playground to experiment, as well as a platform to discuss the extraordinary aspects of youth culture we disregard as everyday life. The result is a non-typical display of what it really means to be a young person today: our anxieties and fears, our hopes and dreams.
YOUTH UNCOVERED CURATORIAL TEAM: GEORGINA BAKER, THOMAS BUGG, KELLY COUGHLAN, GABRIELLA DREW, SAPPHIRE HALES, CAMILLA MAKHMUDOVA, SIÂN NEWLOVE-DREW, MICHELLE NGUYEN, WILL NICHOLLS, HARPREET UPPAL, ELLIOT WEDGE, HOLLIE WILD
Youth Uncovered was conceived, and designed and delivered by Amy Ash. Amy is multi-disciplinary artist whose practice incorporates curatorial projects, teaching and learning, installation, collage, illustration and other forms of making.
