SHCG Conference 2025: Curating Communities
- Carolina Lio
- Jun 20
- 1 min read
We’re pleased to announce that Looking Forward’s curator, Sylvia Keck will be speaking at the Social History Curators Group (SHCG) Conference 2025, taking place on 25–26 June. This year’s theme, Curating Communities, brings together practitioners exploring how museums and cultural organisations engage with the publics they serve.
Sylvia’s talk, titled Programming Community: Creative Health Practices in London’s Art Sector, offers a critical reflection on the rise of creative health—a term that encompasses the use of creative practices to support mental and emotional wellbeing—as a particularly generative form of engagement across the UK arts landscape.
Drawing on her work with Mental Fight Club, a charity dedicated to using art to support mental health, as well as and conversations with curators at Serpentine, Whitechapel, and Barbican, among others, in the framework of our Feedforward programme, Sylvia examines the growing shift from outreach models to more reciprocal and socially embedded forms of institutional engagement.
The session raises important questions about how engagement is practiced, who defines its parameters, and how impact is measured when the focus shifts from cultural enrichment to social care. Through examples including peer-led workshops and sensory collections, Sylvia explores both the possibilities and the constraints of working within institutional frameworks—foregrounding inclusion, while acknowledging the structural limitations that shape curatorial and educational practice.
Crucially, the talk also addresses the museum itself as a community—an entity defined by its people, histories, and foundational structures—and asks how this identity conditions its capacity to hold space for care.
