Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic The first set of photographs Charmaine Toh sought to acquire for the Tate\u2019s collection after she started work as its new photography curator last year was a series made during the Vietnam war. The museum holds significant work on the conflict already. Don McCullin\u2019s 1968 photograph of a US marine waiting inside a civilian\u2019s house, anxiously looking out through the window, was the poster for the museum\u2019s 2019 retrospective on the war photographer. But Toh wanted the newly acquired works, made by the Vietnamese photographer V\u00f5 An Kh\u00e1nh in the 1960s and 1970s, to tell a different story.One of the images shows a group of nurses under a shelter in south Vietnam\u2019s U Minh forest. Knee-deep in water, they are waiting for a patient on a stretcher. Another shows children in a makeshift outdoor classroom holding up their blackboards. \u201cWe are so used to seeing war photographs, often action shots or soldiers,\u201d says Toh, sitting in the spacious corner office usually occupied by Tate director Maria Balshaw (she is away) on London\u2019s Southbank. \u201cBut when you look at the Vietnamese photos of the war, it\u2019s daily life. It\u2019s not grenade throwing. So, suddenly, this definition of war photography is turned around, because what does war mean for the people?\u201dKh\u00e1nh\u2019s photography is important in its own right, says Toh, but in bringing that work into a museum like Tate, it takes on a new significance, challenging certain narratives entrenched within the collection. \u201cWhat possibilities might there be for us to then read Don McCullen\u2019s photographs in a different way?\u201d she says. Toh has been considering such questions since she took on her role at the Tate, one of the most coveted in photography, just over a year ago. The curator of international photography is the figurehead of the Tate\u2019s photographic collection, responsible for building it through acquisitions and curating exhibitions and free-to-visit displays across its four museums in London, Liverpool and St Ives. It\u2019s a weighty role in British art. \u201cYou are, in a very real sense, building a canon,\u201d Toh says of curating in a museum. \u201cWe don\u2019t want to really use that word, but you are.\u201d And an important one, as the museum tries to tackle a funding deficit left over from the pandemic and a more than 20 per cent drop in visitors compared with pre-2020. The appeal of the role for Toh, who relocated from her native Singapore for the job, was in being able to champion one of Tate\u2019s great strengths. \u201cThe Tate has always had a very international focus and they\u2019ve always been very interested in transnational narratives,\u201d she says. Toh\u2019s desire to show \u201cexpanded histories\u201d, which, \u201cback in the day was called global art history\u201d is, as she sees it, \u201cwhy they\u2019ve hired me at this point in time\u201d.Sculpting the mass of photographic history into a shapely narrative for the general public is a familiar task for Toh, who arrived at the Tate after an eight-year spell as curator at National Gallery Singapore. But London is new. Toh was born in Singapore and studied economics as an undergraduate, \u201clargely because Asian parents expect their children to go into something that\u2019s useful,\u201d she says with a smile. She used up all her extra credits studying art history, though, having loved practical art classes at school.She went on to do a PhD in art history, before going into photography curation in a contemporary art centre and, eventually, to Singapore\u2019s main art museum, where she started to become interested in modern and historical photography. The area was exciting, she says, because there was a real urgency to it in Singapore. With no market for art photography and a tropical climate that literally melted photographs into \u201cbricks\u201d, families were throwing the work away as practitioners died. So she began the task of meeting artists and cataloguing their work. The result was a lauded exhibition titled Living Pictures: Photography in Southeast Asia in 2022, the first survey of the history of photography in the entire region. In London, Toh is astounded at the price of a single tube journey and misses Singapore\u2019s abundance of food that is both good and cheap (\u201cI haven\u2019t overcome that psychological barrier to convince myself to pay \u00a316 for a bowl of noodles,\u201d she said in an interview after getting the job). But, though big institutions are familiar ground for her, she has found British museums, with their freely accessible Rothkos and Turner sketchbooks, \u201camazing\u201d. And the Tate\u2019s in particular. Sometimes at the end of a particularly long day, she goes down into the Giacometti rooms in the Tate\u2019s basement \u201cto relax\u201d. \u201cIt\u2019s dark,\u201d she says gleefully. \u201cSo calming.\u201dToh is only the third photography curator the Tate has had. The position was inaugurated in 2009 by Simon Baker, who staged blockbusters such as The Radical Eye, prints from Elton John\u2019s collection of modernist photography of the 1920s to the 1950s. Baker was succeeded in 2018 by Osaka-born art historian Yasafumi Nakamori, who oversaw an exhibition of South African photographer Zanele Muholi, which travelled to six European museums, and a recent show focused on British photography in the 1980s. Catherine Wood, Tate Modern\u2019s director of programmes and chief curator, says Toh has been hired for her experience in making exhibitions for a wide audience as well as her perspective shaped by knowledge of east and south-east Asian art and photography.It all sounds rather serious, but Toh\u2019s first intervention in the gallery is delightfully playful. The free display pairs Salvador Dal\u00ed\u2019s lobster telephone, a favourite of the Tate audience, with a series of photographs of strange animal and plant species by the contemporary Singaporean photographer Robert Zhao Renhui. One shows an artificially dyed aquarium fish in a particularly sought-after shade of \u201cMekong Deep Blue\u201d, another a square apple sold in a department store in South Korea. Some subjects are real and others are inventions of the artist. \u201cIt\u2019s a museum that is open to these unusual pairings,\u201d Toh says. \u201cHow can we rethink the lobster telephone in today\u2019s post-truth era and how can you look at Robert Zhao Renhui\u2019s contemporary, speculative fiction with respect to surrealism?\u201d A more recent room contains a display of the 20th-century Czech photographer Josef Koudelka. Toh wanted a \u201cclean, classical hang\u201d of work pulled from his three signature projects: \u201cInvasion\u201d, made during the Soviet Union\u2019s invasion of Prague in 1968, \u201cExiles\u201d, a meditation made after Koudelka left Czechoslovakia; and \u201cGypsies\u201d, which documented the lives of Roma communities across Europe. \u201cI thought it was a timely room,\u201d says Toh. \u201cWe\u2019ve been talking about alienation, we\u2019ve been talking about displacement, and this is a man who was displaced, yet made the displacement a strength.\u201dToh\u2019s first exhibition, which will open in autumn 2026, looks at the spread of art photography, also known as pictorialism, across the world from the 1880s to the 1960s. The movement, composed of camera clubs and societies that sought to tune into the artistic possibilities of photography, is typically associated with 19th-century artists Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Steichen. Toh aims to bring in other practitioners, including Lang Jingshan, one of the most prominent Chinese art photographers, and the avant-garde German Ilse Bing. \u201cIt was one of those movements that reached out globally and was so active,\u201d says Toh. \u201cIt went through [a period] when countries were trying to gain independence. It saw through all these different shifts.\u201dTate\u2019s mission statement is to seek out the best in \u201cinternational modern and contemporary art\u201d. In Toh, it has appointed someone who is not short on ideas of where to look. \u201cOne of the new research topics that I\u2019m proposing is post-photography or expanded photography,\u201d she says, pointing to the ways that social media has changed how we use photography and to the rise of image generators. \u201cAll of that is affecting art practice,\u201d she says. \u201cEven if the practitioners are quite young at the moment and we might want to observe it for longer, I think we need to start paying attention.\u201dAgeing is another subject she has begun to see in more contemporary work. \u201cIt\u2019s a bit about feeling displaced in society today,\u201d she says. \u201cI think simple stories resonate with people. I love conceptual art, but I\u2019m also now thinking, who are the visitors coming to the Tate, and how can we show things that they\u2019ll care about?\u201d Charmaine Toh with be in conversation with Robert\u00a0Zhao Renhui on May 11 as part of Tate Modern\u2019s Birthday Weekender, marking the gallery\u2019s 25th yearFind out about our latest stories first \u2014 follow FT Weekend Magazine on X and FT Weekend on Instagram<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic The first set of photographs Charmaine Toh sought to acquire for the Tate\u2019s collection after she started work as its new photography curator last year was a series made during the Vietnam war. The museum holds significant work on the conflict already. Don McCullin\u2019s<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":308198,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-308197","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-culture"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/308197","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=308197"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/308197\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":308199,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/308197\/revisions\/308199"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/308198"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=308197"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=308197"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=308197"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}