Photo by Marley Starskey Butler
The Lilac House
The Lilac House is a queer, feminist, and working-class curatorial counter-practice by Jazz Swali and Marta Marsicka.
The Lilac House is concerned with:
Through The Lilac House, we’re creating space for critical dialogue, research, resistance, and joy.
The Lilac House is concerned with:
- The precarisation and erasure of marginalised curators from the arts
- The omission of curators from national and public discourse on creative capital
- The mental health and well-being of marginalised curators
- The need to imagine and construct curatorial futures for those on the margins
- The value of solidarity and sustainability through collaborative practice
Through The Lilac House, we’re creating space for critical dialogue, research, resistance, and joy.
In October 2026, we published Pantry - a research publication emerging from the lived realities of curators navigating structural inequality, precarity, institutional tokenism, and the emotional labour of cultural work. It centres perspectives stemming from intersectional experiences of working-classness, minority ethnicity, migration experience, gender, queerness, and disability, and speaks to the challenges of sustaining a practice on the curatorial margins within systems that continue to exclude, instrumentalise, and undervalue.
Access Pantry here.
Activity:
1. 2.09.2025 - Serving Pantry, Nottingham Contemporary
2. 15.04.2025 - Pantry in Practice, Grand Union, Birmingham
Back to homepage