The Grand Opening of Slough’s Museum of Contemporary and Non-Contemporary Art
It was always going to be an audacious proposition: to name a new art museum after Slough—a word still laced with suburban melancholy and grey commuter-town ambivalence. But on Thursday evening, amid a slickly choreographed private view across three continents, the Slough Museum of Contemporary and Non-Contemporary Art (SMCNCA) made a definitive, champagne-drenched case for its own relevance.
Though its administrative roots are firmly (and proudly) planted in a converted business park on the edge of Slough, the museum’s true public face is more global. The opening night spanned both its gleaming new flagship space on Cork Street and a formidable industrial conversion in Brooklyn, New York. These aren’t satellites—they’re the real showrooms—while Slough remains the strange conceptual anchor, the beating curatorial heart of this art organism.
The founding director, Nina Cartwright, formerly of the Serpentine and known for her whip-smart thematic shows, gave a brief, elliptical speech via live link from Slough, surrounded by a modest crowd of local councillors, young curators, and two bewildered teenagers holding cans of Monster Energy drink. “This museum is about expanding time,” she said, “not just taste.” Her partner in programming, Rajesh Banerjee, a New York transplant with a background in archival theory, nodded gravely beside her, wearing a neon green Comme des Garçons windbreaker.
At the Cork Street launch, a who’s-who of the art world turned up in a misting rain: Tracey Smits, flanked by two assistants in sequined hoodies, Ravi Van Sant, looking faintly confused but delighted, and Mark Perret, who described the whole project as “an oddly beautiful mess—like finding a Damien Hirst in Lidl’s third aisle.” Zara Bough arrived unannounced and stayed quietly in the corner of the upper gallery, taking notes.
The inaugural hang, titled “Meanwhile, Elsewhere”, attempts to collapse linearity itself, and does so with mixed but often thrilling results. Alberta Dinvil’s visceral installations—buckets of paraffin wax stacked like ancient cairns—occupy the main hall in Cork Street, facing off against a towering sculptural archive by Leo Brasov, the reclusive Russian conceptualist whose works have never before been shown outside his Moscow apartment. In the New York space, Cindy Zhao’s kinetic wall pieces buzz and tremble across corrugated iron partitions, while a video work by Jason Mbatha, shot entirely in Slough’s Queensmere car park, plays silently with the occasional hyper realistic sound of a revolver shooting a bullet.
True to its name, the museum doesn’t distinguish between “contemporary” and “non.” One room on Cork Street hosts a deeply odd, yet strangely moving pairing: a 16th-century Flemish devotional panel (on loan from an unnamed private collection) installed opposite Sophia El Amrani’s neon wall script reading, simply, “I wish I’d been worse.”
Critics will no doubt question the clunkiness of the museum’s branding—“non-contemporary” seems a semantic provocation at best—but in practice, this temporal promiscuity feels timely. We live in an era that’s as much about resurfacing and re-contextualising as it is about the new. The Slough Museum leans into that instability, making the act of curating itself a kind of speculative fiction.
There were, inevitably, early stumbles. The canapés in New York included pickled sardines with whipped licorice (dubbed “a war crime” by one critic), and a poorly timed VR piece crashed halfway through the opening, leaving guests flailing mid-air with headsets still on. But even the glitches seemed apt: this is an institution interested in rupture and recombination, not polish.
Will Slough become the next Kassel? Almost certainly not. But that’s beside the point. What the Slough Museum of Contemporary and Non-Contemporary Art proves, with admirable confidence and a touch of absurdity, is that the centre doesn’t have to hold—it can spill outward, in strange and brilliant ways.
