KELLY RAPPLEYE

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PROJECTS: CURATORIAL RESEARCH All
Water as Method: Space Place & the Hydrological Gaze
Art, Film & Research Symposium
19 - 20 June 2025 Water as Method: Space, Place & the Hydrological Gaze in Moving Images was a two-day symposium (19–20 June, 2025) exploring the poetics and politics of water in contemporary artist moving image (AMI) practices and methods. The symposium reflects on innovative approaches in film and moving image practice that respond to the intersecting planetary crises of climate catastrophe and geopolitical conflict—through the lens of water.

Water as Method Website
Curatorial, Symposium, Programming, Research
Curatorial Research, Symposium, Artists’ Moving Image
Moving Images Within Precarious Structures – Episode 3: Precarious Memory with LUX Scotland
Film Programme
28 February 2025 Curated by Kelly Rappleye, the third episode of LUX Scotland’s Moving Images Within Precarious Structures explores artistic approaches to the archive as engaging with precarious memory through moving image practice. 

How does artists’ moving image address archival gaps, exclusions, erasures and absences to evoke and create space for diasporic, exilic, migratory and displaced memory? 

Episode 3: Precarious Memory considers the role of moving image in mediating and producing cultural memory, exploring how artistic methods of sampling, imitation, fragmentation and aurality can activate the archive as a site of negotiation between the individual and the collective, the intimate and the political, history and memory, representation and exclusion. 

The screening programme reflects on how artists engage the precarity of memory itself across political contexts of displacement, exile, and repression, and between generations and geographies, using film as a tool to gather fragments of social and individual remembrance, redress misrepresentations, gaps and exclusions, and construct personal archives of living histories. 

Films
‘Nazarbazi نظربازی’, Maryam Tafakory (2022) 
 ‘Two Refusals (Would We Recognize Ourselves Unbroken?)’, Suneil Sanzgiri (2024) 
‘UNDR’, Kamal Aljafari (2024) 
‘Another Decade’, Morgan Quaintance (2018) 
In conversation: Morgan Quaintance and Anne-Marie Copestake 

Moving Images Within Precarious Structures is supported by the School of Fine Art (SoFA), Glasgow School of Art, the Scottish Graduate School for Arts & Humanities, and is a partnership between the School of Fine Art, Glasgow School of Art, and LUX Scotland.

LUX Scotland Episode 3: Precarious Memory
Film Programme,  Curatorial Research,  Artist Talk
Film Programme, Artists’ Moving Image, Artist Talk, Curatorial Research, Archives
Suneil Sanzgiri, ‘Two Refusals (Would We Recognize Ourselves Unbroken?)’, 2024. Courtesy of the artist and LUX.
‘Journeys of Belonging' at Tate Britain
Tate Britain, Film Programme
27 January  2025 Curated ‘Journeys of Belonging’ film programme responding to 2024 Turner Prize nominee Delaine Le Bas. The programme drew on themes of nomadism and exile recurring in Delaine Le Bas’ work, reflecting on her British Romani heritage in films exploring land, nationhood, cultural mythologies, and a search for belonging. Featuring films by Leonor Teles, the Karrabing Film Collective, Gelare Khoshgozaran, Jonathas de Andrade, and the Romano Lav youth group these works traverse borders and boundaries, offering profound reflections on displacement, migration, and cultural resistance.

Vibrating with acts of transgression and radical care in the face of xenophobia, dispossession, and bordering, the films reveal how stories and knowledges are passed across generations and geographies for the nomadic and exiled. They show us how home is continually made and remade–and how communities on the margins create belonging through art, tradition, and shared acts of survival.

This was the first event in ‘History Reverberates’ project curated by Ese Onojuero, responding to each of the four 2024 Turner Prize nominees on display at the Tate Britain to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Turner prize. 

Films
Future In Your Hands (2024) by Romano Lav youth Filmmaking Group and Meray Diner
Batrachian’s Ballad (2016) by Leonor Teles
When the Dogs Talked (2014) by the Karrabing Film Collective
The Retreat (2023) by Gelare Khoshgozaran
Olho da Rua (Out Loud) (2022) – By Jonathas de Andrade

‘History Reverberates’ at Tate Britain
Curatorial, Symposium, Programming, Research
Film Programme, Artists’ Moving Image
FieldARTS ‘Infrastructures of Empire’
Research Residency, Infrastructure Humanities Group, University of Glasgow
August 2024 Situated on the banks of the Clyde, between the subtidal sedimentary flows of the Firth and the former Plantation Quay, FieldARTS is a research residency for infrastructural fieldwork in the arts and humanities. Occupying a hydrological vantage point on the Second City of Empire, the residency offers a platform for collaborative field research grounded in sites like Govan Graving Docks, BAE Systems shipyard, Hunterston power station, and the Eerie Port listening posts on Isle of Cumbrae as infrastructures through which the legacies of successive resource frontiers and contemporary mechanisms of military-industrial accumulation appear in intimate relation. Once dredged and engineered as a logistical conduit for tobacco, capital, and sugar from the city’s contrapuntal geographies, the Clyde is increasingly envisioned as an engine of infrastructural regeneration bound up in narratives of energy transition, militarised re-industrialisation, and urban renewal. 

At this material juncture of colonial sediments and transitional horizons FieldARTS asks how environmental artists, researchers, and practitioners might develop methods for field study commensurate with enduring processes of infrastructural dispossession and uneven redevelopment. I joined early career researchers, artists, and postgraduates to participate in a week-long programme of interdisciplinary fieldwork, research voyages, collaborative study, and public-facing events between 26-30th August.

FieldARTS Clyde Corridor

CCA Closing Event: Beyond Colonial Infrastructure Curatorial Research
Curatorial Research, Residency, Fieldwork, Clyde River, Infrastructure
2024 Emerging Curators Group
2023–2024 Tate and Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art
Developing curatorial research on contemporary Scottish moving image practice and receiving professional development with a national co-hort of curators. 

ECG Profile
Curatorial Research
Curatorial Research, British Art Studies, Artists’ Moving Image
2024 Venice Biennale Fellowship01–31–24 - 12-01-24British Council at the Venice Biennale 
Represent the UK at the British Pavilion during John Akomfrah's exhibition at the 60th International Art Exhibition from and they develop my own curatorial research on sonic watery topographies

Venice Fellows 2024
Curatorial Research
Venice Biennale, John Akomfrah, Artists’ Moving Image, Curatorial Research, Fellowship
Turning the Tide Conference
24–04–24 Turning the Tide Conference, April 2024, EU Consortium
Invited to present research on artists’ role in reimagining urban spaces and curatorial research with 16NSt into the Govan Graving Docks for the 2024 Turning the Tide Conference

TTT Project Research
16NSt Curatorial Collective, Urban Space, Artists’ Moving Image, Place & Memory, Watery Topographies, Curatorial Research
Awarded SGSAH/ AHRC Doctoral Training Partnership10-2022 - 03-2026Drawing from urban studies, postcolonial theory, and media/film theory, this practice-led curatorial project investigates how curating moving images can contest and unsettle the social, historical and material aspects of colonial urban spaces. The curatorial practice-led research aims to test and deliver situated methods of ‘spatial’ (Rendell, 2006) inquiry to reveal vital new understandings of Glasgow’s urban space in artists’ moving image. The project will analyze works of artists’ moving image from the past 5 years which have contested Glasgow’s spatial heritage by introducing new affects over and within its urban spaces and infrastructures, including works from Sulaïman Majali, Alberta Whittle, Anne-Marie Copestake, Winnie Herbstein and Tako Taal.  Through curating these disparate forms of moving image together, the research asks if new affective, social, and historical understandings can be developed that shift post-industrial heritage. 

SGSAH Researcher Page AHRC Phd Studentship Award
Academic Research, Curatorial Research, Urban Space, PhD Research, Glasgow School of Art, Research Development, Artists’ Moving Image
Ethical Engagements in Community-Engaged Research09–2023 – 11-2023Co-Organised SGSAH PhD Researcher Training Series, Sept – Nov 2023 for researchers across the SGSAH Consortium of HEIs. Led and facilitated 'Practicising Ethics for Built Environment Research’ event with Dr. Jane Rendell, Dr. David Roberts and Dr. Yael Padan  (Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL). 
Research
Academic Research, Curatorial Research, Urban Space, SGSAH, PhD Research, Research Development
Making the Familiar Strange: Practice Research Symposium26–04–24Queen Margaret University, Practice Researcher Consortium
Invited to Present on curatorial practice-led research methodologies and participate in  symposium panel. 
Conference Research
Practice Research, SGSAH, Curatorial Research, Symposium, Conference, Research Methods
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