At Holy Pop! – the new free exhibition that opens today, May 21, and runs until August 9 at Somerset House – fandom is treated seriously. Enter the space and you’ll find loving shrines to Prince and George Michael, a small percentage of the world’s biggest collection of Spice Girls memorabilia, and photos depicting individual pilgrimages to the graves and memorial sites of cultural icons from Biggie Smalls to Dobby from Harry Potter.
If walking through Holy Pop! feels like a small sanctuary where cynicism has no place, then that’s entirely the point. The show may have been conceived and put together by curator and archivist Tory Turk but, as she tells Broadsheet, it’s the “citizen curators” who sit at its core. “I find the word ‘curator’ to be one with quite a lot of ego, where this exhibition is egoless. [Fandom] is the great equaliser,” she says. “It’s like when you go to a football match. You see guys chatting who would never be talking to each other anywhere else, but they can have a conversation about Fulham losing last week.”
The tagline of Holy Pop! is “where fandom becomes devotion” and this spirit of sanctity is tangible throughout. The exhibition is split into three rooms – the first exploring public acts of love and collective mourning, the second looking at private expressions of dedication, and the third given solely to a piece of Nina Simone’s chewing gum, owned by musician and Nick Cave collaborator Warren Ellis. In this last room, the lights are low and churchlike – a visible depiction of the religious nature of true fandom – but throughout the show, objects often seen as trivial ephemera are given respect and weight.
“To be a fan of something is to love, and to love is to be human,” says Turk. “This exhibition is meant to make you feel, and that’s done through the objects that people love. It’s not commercial value that imbues them with an aura, it’s the fact that they have personal importance. Every note that says, ‘Bowie, say hello to my mum, the stars are brighter now’ – that doesn’t tell the music history of Bowie, it shows his human impact on earth.”
With a background including a stint at Hymag, the largest archive of print magazines in the world, Turk understands how important these collections can be to our understanding of our own identities. “The objects that we keep and choose to display in our homes are like a museum of ourselves,” she says. By placing them in the context of an institution like Somerset House, it destroys the gap between “high” and “low” art. A sculpture dedicated to Britney Spears by artist Connor Coulson, or a bust of The Doors frontman Jim Morrison by Graham Dolphin can sit in the same historic building as works by Monet and van Gogh.
Ahead of a season that includes Somerset House’s Summer Series of music and the Laughterama comedy festival, the exhibition also positions the centuries-old space as a place open to all. “I’m very much about finding something that unites everyone,” says Turk. “And that’s usually a pop star or a football team or something that crosses all those other boundaries of class. [Collecting] starts from children and play, and then as grown-ups, we’re still playing. Let’s not just keep something because we think it’s gonna have some financial importance, keep it because it’s important to your soul.”
Holy Pop! runs until August 9 at Somerset House.
