I am Batoul Algasra and I'm responsible for looking after all of the picture frames that are going up on the wall, making sure that they're stable and look aesthetically pleasing.
Frame is an integral and important part of a painting. It not only protects the painting in a structural way from any damage, but it also helps guide our eyes into the subject of the painting. They are both one entity, existing in symbiosis with each other.
My favourite part of my role is the technical part, the analysis and the examination. I'm tapping on these applied ornaments to see if there's any internal cracks. I find a consistent sound first, so that's the consistent sound and then I listen for a different sound and that's how I know that's where I need to inject my syringe. I will be using the syringe to inject some diluted glue underneath that area that I just tapped that sounded a bit detached. Yeah, so that's going in very nicely and spreading in all the cracks that I want to seal.
Any practical intervention, we try to have most of our treatments reversible. So these are watercolours, so in the future if someone wants to remove my touch-ups, they can do that very easily by just using water. So that's one loss there and that looks very distracting, I'm just gonna very lightly with my brush go over that. The trap of this is the more you stare the more you'll find, so at one point you need to know when to stop.
It's very relaxing, it's very serene when it's just me and the artworks. It's a bit of a kind of mindfulness thing because it's very quiet, and you’re just here with yourself and your thoughts and so it's always a pleasure.
