On Wednesday evening I attended another of the Contemporary Photography talks. This time it was Lydia Yee, curator of the current Barbican exhibition Martian Museum of Terrestrial Art.

She showed imagery of exhibits, as well as of some of the signage that has been used, and explained how they'd organised the exhibition of contemporary art according to anthropological categorisation. So, the exhibition is broken down into sections such as "Kinship and Descent", "Magic and Belief", "Ritual" and "Communication". Amongst the exhibits is a copy of the calibrator that Damian Hirst created to go to Mars on Beagle 2 - it is present because it might well have been one of the first earth based objects that a Martian would come across.

Lydia was a very engaging speaker, and did an excellent job of explaining how the exhibition came together, as well as describing the taxonomy and organisation of it. There are another 2 of these events to go. Next week is Anne Hardy, and the final talk, on the 7th May is Julian Germain.