“Shall we name it our shame or is our shame the same as it is” was commissioned for Nothing Twice, the opening exhibition of Cricoteka Centre for the Documentation of the Art of Tadeusz Kantor in Krakow. The exhibition, curated by Joanna Zielińska (Chief of Performance, Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art), aimed to contextulise work by contemporary artists, including Paweł Althamer, Shana Moulton and Jim Shaw, alongside that of the Polish artist.

The research developed through a critique of the wider curatorial context of this exhibition, using the form of a large, deceptively simplistic 3D beast motif to rigorously consider the relationships that curatorial practice can assert between contemporary and historical art practices that share broad thematic approaches. The beast was a hybrid being, providing an absurd means to display artworks from Kantor’s archive, whilst simultaneously performing to the interpretative conventions afforded the contemporary art artefact.

This continues Tatham’s ongoing research, carried out through a 23 year creative collaboration with Tom O’Sullivan, within which she considers the various behaviours against and within which contemporary art practice operates. “DOES THE IT STICK” (2014) at Bloomberg SPACE, London appropriated previously commissioned works to consider the curatorial premise of practices utilised by the commissioning organisation; “A petition for an enquiry into a condition of anxiety” (2016), Glasgow International at The Modern Institute, reframed the rhetorical devices that represent the production and exhibition of art, using photographs of artists in their studios alongside re-purposed scale models of realised sculptures.

A catalogue published after the exhibition included an authored text by Tatham and O’Sullivan, since reproduced in a 2016 anthology of their writing; plus essays by Catherine Wood and Marie de Brugerolle. A 2000 word essay on the exhibition by Wojciech Szymański was published in Magazyn Szum.