Just Around the Corner is an online curatorial project by the Master of Curation students at UNSW Art & Design that crosses geographic distances between people to build networks, connecting participants and readers through shared stories. The nature of our social encounters  have shifted over time, from physical encounters to virtual conversations through digital devices. Through the process of sharing photographs, poems, videos, art and creative projects, Just Around the Corner seeks to strengthen and build connections between people through creativity. 

​

Just Around the Corner is a project that begins with a personal word of mouth participation invitation, extended to friends and colleagues. The project seeks to build a network of reciprocity, support and exchange, focusing on stories of the local, personal experience of each participant. Each new invitation extends the developing network, taking the project and its participants across the globe, fostering and nurturing an online network of interconnectedness, story by story. 

​

The potential for the network to grow is endless and unexpected as each invitation maps a trail that moves further away from the beginning point of the curatorial cohort and its immediate connections, drawing disparate participants together to speak through a creative outcome of what for them, in their part of the world, is ‘Just Around the Corner’. 

​

The project focuses on creativity and the ability of art, in its most expansive and contemporary definition, to speak to our lived reality and experiences. Just Around the Corner capitalises on the current circumstances that see the curatorial team, Master of Curating students, located in as diverse places as China, Indonesia and Taiwan. From their ‘corner’ they connect in conversation and invite others to share in this conversation. 

​

The outcome of the project will be a website with ‘casual snapshots’ of people’s neighbourhoods, artwork, street art, poems and projects, accompanied by short text describing the stories behind these. This will appear as a curated exhibition. The project is accompanied by an online reading area sharing local and global examples of projects that have had a similar conceptual framework, or have had similar positive outcomes.  In this way it is hoped that people will feel more connected to others through the project by sharing their work, and also through viewing the work of others.  Although their ‘corner’ may differ, the notion of this need for connection is something that many people might have in common.  

​

The project’s title,  Just Around the Corner, contains layers of meaning, referring to our local environment, its identity and its social character, while also saying that though living at great distances from one another, we are close - ‘just around the corner’. We hope that such images encourage people to pause and reflect, while also contributing creatively to a project that will transcend countries and celebrate art and connection in a meaningful way.