Curated by Alice Cicolini for gallery director Mark Davy, the exhibition took place on the top floor of Foyles bookshop. "An Ode to A Rebours" in keeping with its location, took its inspiration from a novel. The starting point for the project was Des Esseintes, the protagonist at the centre of J K Huysmans’s 19th century novel "A Rebours."

"The enduring appeal of the dandy, both in literature and practice, seems to sustain for every generation," writes Alice Cicolini. "As one of the key works of the French Decadent movement, "A Rebours" offers something for those both inspired and horrified by the opulence of Des Esseintes’ material consumption. This exhibition focuses on his appreciation of master-craftsmanship, his rendering of nature through the surfaces of the domestic interior, and of the sensory spectacle he develops around himself, to explore the work of twelve contemporary practitioners whose practice draws inspiration from similar themes."

With the focus on the spectacle of nature, the exhibition includes work by Shaun Leane, Emma Yeo, Timorous Beasties, Glithero, Studio Swine, Jason Marks and Fabien Cappello, amongst others. The project also saw Alice collaborate with sensory branding agency Vetyver, who use sense technology to create 3D experiences. Here they worked with ceramicist Jason Marks, sound engineers from Nottingham University and their own in-house perfumers to enhance and emphasise the opulence and cool refinement the curators were trying to achieve.  

Exhibition design was by Alice Cicolini and graphics by Giulia Garbin.

Judith Clark was commissioned by Kenny Park, CEO of Seoul-based luxury handbag makers Simone, to put together a collection of over 300 bags to form a museum. Judith Clark, together with Project Manager Alessandra Grignaschi, designed and coordinated the delivery and installation of the museum over 2 years. Alice Cicolini collaborated with Judith Clark to commission three of the installation mannequins in the 20th century room, selecting, briefing and producing designers Justin Oh, Felicity Brown and Una Burke to create fragments of dress that responded to, or encapsulated, the design identity of particular eras.

This project was conceived and curated by Alice Cicolini and Christopher Breward.

The exhibition launched in 2001, at a time when the figure of the dandy was a source of increasing fascination for many writers, artists and designers, many of whom had alighted on this sartorial identity as a way of expressing a form of contemporary British masculinity. As early as 1996, The Chap and The Idler were exploring dandy lifestyle and dress as an antidote to a social and retail landscape that was dominated by globalisation and brand.

Drawing on this energy, 21st Century Dandy explored six sartorially self-conscious male typologies in contemporary British culture of the time, illustrating the debt each owed to dandy philosophy. Nigel Shafron’s photographic portrait commissions that accompanied the exhibition and the book showed how dandyism is at once an exclusive and democratic stance - democratic because it appears so easily attainable, but elusive in that so few succeed in getting it right.

The exhibition launched in Moscow and toured internationally. The project later became the subject for New English Dandy, published in 2005 by Thames & Hudson.

Exhibition design by Stafford Schmool; Graphics by Miles Murray Sorrell FUEL.

In 2010 Alice Cicolini worked with Wieden + Kennedy India to develop the strategy and first year programme for their Delhi gallery W+K Exp. Central to the concept was W+K's belief that "art shouldn’t have to be ‘arty’ and that culture is not something that should be put on a pedestal and worshipped," to create an experience that connected to wider audience, stripped of "art-speak". 

The work that the gallery chose to show reflected an India that wascomfortable in its own skin. Campaigns combined regional flair, values and tastes with global aesthetics and pop culture. Shows that Alice curated included; “Butterflies, Birds & Spray Cans”, a solo show of work by British graffiti artist Xenz; “Typographica / 50 Years of Seminar,” a juxtaposing Kemistry Gallery's show on the iconic graphic design magazine with selected covers from 50 years of typography-led Indian magazine Seminar; and “Dog Father, Fox Mother, Their Daughter & Other Stories”, the first exhibitions in India to showcase a traditional Indian practice within a modern gallery environment.

Curated by Alice Cicolini for W+K Exp

“While paintings of the contemporary Gond art movement are now internationally celebrated, its three-dimensional expressions remain surprisingly neglected. Thus this solo exhibit - the first to focus on a Gond sculptor - is long overdue. Sukhnandi’s engaging, bold and earthy sculptures will astonish and captivate many Indian art devotees.” John H Bowles, art critic and author of “Painted Songs & Stories: The Hybrid Flowerings of Contemporary Pardon Gond Art.”

Sukhnandi Vyam’s work gives visual expression to the musical bana tradition among the Pardham Gonds of eastern Madhya Pradesh, transforming oral storytelling to formal sculpture, losing none of the power to stimulate the imagination that the words, set to music on the bana, contain. Sukhnandi Vyam was born in 1983 in the eastern Madhya Pradesh village of Sonpuri, and works as a sculptor within the Bhopal-based contemporary Pardhoan Gond art movement inaugurated by the pioneering artist Jangarh Singh Shyam (1960 - 2001). Both Sukhnandi and Jangarh belong to the Pardhan Gond tribal community, which serves as the traditional keeper of their people’s cultural heritage and lineages - remembering family genealogies, and transmitting legends, sacred myths and oral histories through songs and storytelling.

In 2002 Sukhnandi won the Madhya Pradesh State Government Award for an unusually elaborate wood-carved ritual mangrohi wedding totem, and his wooden sculptures were extensively featured in Udayan Vaipeyi’s authoritative book Jangarh Kalam (produced by Vanya Prakashan of the Madhya Pradesh Tribal Welfare Department.)

Notable in this age of industrially manufactured art, Sukhnandi has wrought his magic using the most basic of tools, under a blue tarpaulin-sheet studio outside a two-room home shared with his extended family. Whilst he works within a traditional lineage, the exhibition aimed to challenge preconceptions of Vyam's practice as in anyway dated or kitsch. By placing the work in a contemporary gallery context Alice's goal was to question why artists working in this way are not viewed as part of India's 'modern' visual arts landscape - either at home or abroad.

Judith Clark curated Louis Vuitton’s latest exhibition in Paris, entitled La Galerie. Built upon objects from the house’s archive from the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries it is based in the original Vuitton family home of Asnières-sur-Seine in the suburbs of Paris. This fundamental site that is described as the ‘cradle of the company’ is also the original 19th-century workshop, where all special commissions and trunks are still made to this day. "Revealing the intimate aspects of Louis Vuitton’s history, highlighting its ties with the ateliers, underlining the presence of the Louis Vuitton universe… These were some of the challenges that curator Judith Clark sought to tackle in the new creative, playful and timeless space she so vividly imagined," write Louis Vuitton.

Alice Cicolini collaborated with Judith Clark to commission a series of mastercrafted interventions within the structural landscape of the exhibition. Responding to the centuries and the aesthetic motifs of the exhibition, Alice commissioned Jim Sanderson and Jason Marks to create inlaid flooring and encaustic tiles that we embedded into the fabric of the show.

Alice Cicolini has collaborated with Futurecity since 2012 on strategy and curatorial commissioning for a series of clients including Canary Wharf Group, Hutchinson Whampoa, Qatari Diar and The Crown Estate. Futurecity's founder Mark Davy is a leading thinker around placemaking and the creation of identity within urban space through the commissioning of visual artists. 

For Linden Homes' Blackfriars Road development, Alice expanded these principles into a concept that drew on Southwark's distinctive theatrical identity.

"Historically outside of the jurisdiction of the City of London," she wrote, "Southwark was a place of relative cultural freedom; successive centuries saw north Londoners take a boat trip south to the Rose theatre, to places of intrigue, liaison, ribaldry and entertainment. If ‘Southwarkness’ can be described as a love of theatre, performance and live action, then the borough can be proud to have embraced change without losing its cultural heritage. Modern theatres such as the Young Vic and the Southwark Playhouse, supported by the engine rooms of the Jerwood Space and National Theatre Studios, have sustained the production of independent, innovative theatre; new live, immersive productions by experimental companies such as Shunt and Punchdrunk have found new spaces and audiences. Even the Tate Modern has got in on the act with the opening of its ‘Tank Galleries’ offering a programme of experimental live arts events.

As the research showed, there can be no doubting the importance of the existing theatre offer to Southwark’s local economy. Supporting its significant number of working theatres are over 50 SME businesses and institutions, and beyond this a significant network of emerging companies and individual practitioners. By ‘joining the dots’ a creative district concept built around theatre could draw in businesses working in prop making, fabrication, scenery design, fashion and textiles, arts and craft, design and social media, as well as an extended ‘theatre family’ that includes the food and beverage industry. Futurecity believe a theatre district concept will provide a catalyst for the reinvigoration of Southwarks neighbourhoods: it is the idea of a new theatre district for Southwark that resonates."

Curated by Lesley Jackson, the exhibition was produced by Alice Cicolini in her role as Design & Architecture Project Manager for the British Council.

The exhibition demonstrates how profoundly British design has been enriched by immigration and by the internationalisation of education, business and cultural discourse. Further education accounts for a lot of the cultural influx, a question that is asked, is why do so many designers stay in Britain to pursue their careers, when this country offers neither a manufacturing sector that consistently supports designers, nor a particularly design-and innovation-friendly general public?

The catalogue text, accompanying the show, by the curator Lesley Jackson, gives some interesting answers to this question. Her interviews with each designer paint a picture of a country that, while having conservative and sceptical elements, promotes imaginative freedom, collaboration and interdisciplinary practice. The ability to ‘be oneself’ in spite of established roles and precedents is a repeated theme of the interviews. A general sense of the mixed-up, ‘jamming’ nature of the art and design communities is another motif. The risk of globalism to design is that bigger audiences and markets than ever before will breed a diffuse, homogenous set of forms and surfaces. But Import Export bears testimony to the opposite possibility: more intense and differentiated cultural hybrids in design.

An exhibition curated by Alice Cicolini in 2004 in her role as Head of Arts at the British Council India.

In the globalised world of the twenty-first century, we are all “cultural commuters”, ‘chutney’ hybrids in an increasingly sophisticated play with identity. A potent mix of global branding, migration, international travel and high speed communications technology is facilitating an ever greater and more complex understanding of national cultures once considered distant, one dimensional and exotic.

Global Local address the impact of this immediacy on a group of designers based both in India and in the UK. The work explores their differing understandings of the way in which cultural sensitivities can be expressed through material objects, finding new spaces between stereotype and a total disengagement with place and identity.

The results convey some sense of the degree to which national identity is fluid and personal. The designer’s understanding of identity may be rooted in either materials, processes, form or aesthetic, but ultimately the power of these objects as cultural signifiers rests in the emotional responses they elicit from the individual consumer. If they in any way encapsulate a contemporary national identity, it is in the hands and homes of those who purchase.

A British Council touring exhibition curated by Emily Campbell. Alice Cicolini was the co-curator and a contributing writer to the catalogue.

“Luxe Lingerie, Alice Cicolini on Janet Reger today” reviewed the life and work of the controversial lingerie designer Janet Reger: “the queen of luxe lingerie.” Controversial because she came to light in the aftermath of the Women’s Liberation Revolution, a movement which saw bonfires of bras becoming a feature of London’s streets. Throughout her career she received acres of hate mail but also three decades of global admiration.

Using Janet's words, “ I think that our wide-spread appeal proves that regardless of class, wealth and education, women want to attract men and men want women to be attractive. I see nothing wrong in this. It works in reverse too, and it is natural for people to feel this way. It certainly keeps the world going round.”

The project was conceived and commissioned by Alice Cicolini in her role as Head of Arts at the British Council, India

Directed by Tim Supple, the performance was a spectacle that combined the astonishing skills of 23 actors, dancers, musicians, martial arts experts and street acrobats from a hugely diverse range of locations and backgrounds across India and Sri Lanka. Performed in English, Tamil, Malayalam, Sinhalese, Hindi, Bengali, Marathi and even a little Sanskrit. The show created a sensation in Mambai, Delhi, Kolkata and Chennai. A world tour followed, sell out performances in Australia, USA and Europe, in London they performed at the Roundhouse and the RSC’s Swan Theatre, a critic for The Times writing, “This is the kind of dream that leaves you rubbing your eyes and wishing that you never had to wake."

As part of the North Finchley Outer London Fund regeneration programme, Alice Cicolini conceived and produced the project with Director of Collections Zoe Hendon.

The Museum of Domestic Architecture (MoDA) at Middlesex University houses the collections of Arthur Silver's Silver Studio and the graphic designer Charles Hasler. The Silver Studio created some of the most iconic Liberty print patterns, including "Peacock Feathers", the print which has become synonymous with the collection.

Charles Hasler and the designers who worked for the Silver Studio acquired lots of material for visual reference. The collections of ephemera held at MoDA include everything from cigarette cards, postcards and newspaper cuttings to an important collection of Japanese katagami stencils. Alongside the designers’ finished works they form a unique insight into the nature of creative inspiration and its impact on practice.

As part of the North Finchley Outer London Fund regeneration programme, Alice Cicolini conceived and produced the project with Director of Collections Zoe Hendon, inviting professional designers in fields relevant to the North Finchley retail landscape (interior product, fashion, graphics, accessories, textiles) to collaborate with the archive to create a new piece of work inspired by the collection. The five artists were Jo Angell, Katie Horwich, Leigh Cameron, Aviva Leeman and Yemi Awosile.

The project was part of a wider regeneration programme called Ten Grand Arcade, which saw the North Finchley Town Team(NFTT) take over three units in the local 1930s shopping arcade, running a business centre and a community space alongside the gallery. The London Borough of Barnet commissioned MUF Architecture to restore the arcade to its former glory, bringing its rich historical character back to life. By placing the arts within the wider regeneration project for North Finchley, the NFTT supports and builds on the growing creative industries sector within the borough.

In her role as Head of Arts at the British Council India, Alice Cicolini conceived the project, developed the early concept, research phase (with IIM Bangalore) and collaborative partnerships, and commissioned the brand from Ulhas Moses.

The platform: The creative industries sector contributes eight percent to the UK’s GVA, employs 1.9 million people and in London alone, employs more people that the financial sector. The creative export market is growing at 15% (against 3% for other sectors) and is currently valued at 11.4 billion. Globally, the creative industries are estimated to account for more than 7% of the world's GDP and are forecast to grow on average by 10% per annum. 

Though the structure of the creative market makes it difficult to measure the contribution of the creative industries on the Indian economy, India’s creative potential is likely to be its trump card as it competes for space in the world market. With stiff competition coming from China in the traditional manufacturing sector, the Indian economy, will stand to benefit by exploring and nurturing its creative industries.

The British Council believed that it was time for the UK to demonstrate its creativity and experience in supporting the creative economy by sharing with its Indian counterparts some learning from that experience - with the intention both to forge new bonds and joint ventures in creative business between the UK and India, and to pave the way, by creating local champions for creativity, for UK creative business to succeed in India in the longer term.

The "Creative Futures" journey began with a a countrywide competition from which they selected twenty young creative entrepreneurs who were offered the opportunity of spending two weeks at the Creative Future School, a tailored residential workshop at the Indian Institute of Management in Bangalore. Over this time, they had the opportunity to develop their business skills with some of India’s best lecturers and business people, and to meet creative entrepreneurs from India and Britain to learn from their experience. Through a specially designed course methodology comprising of lectures, case study discussions, workshops, business games, interactive sessions with guest speakers, mutual learning techniques and one-on-one mentoring, the school aimed to equip the twenty participants to succeed.

On 24th & 25th August 2006, the twenty applicants made individual presentations of their business ideas to a jury panel including Andrew Senior (Head, Creative Industries, British Council) Sunl V (Artier, A Partnership) and Darshan Shah (Weavers’ Studio Kolkata.) They shortlisted three candidates based on their readiness to present their business proposal to UK investors.  The selected three travelled to the UK in November 2006 for a week long, individual tailored tour followed by two days in London to share their experiences and prepare their pitches to UK investors. The pitches took place in London to a group of business angels.

A couple of months later the selected three were given another opportunity to present their ideas to a different jury, this time comprising of Chris Powell, advertising guru and senior advisor on the creative industries in the UK, Ian Livingstone, Creative Director of ELDOS, responsible for the success of Tomb Raider and Lara Croft, Sujata Keshavan, founder of Ray & Keshavan and one of India Today’s top 50 in Indian business and Niret Alva, co-founder of Miditech, one of India’s leading broadcast producers. They will be joined by Sanmit Ahuja, Director of Global Investment for the Commonwealth Business Council (CBC.) Andrew Senior, Head of Creative Industries, British Council, will Chair. CBC has also partnered with the British Council to give the selected finalists the opportunity to pitch to business angels in India over a two day period.

Alice Cicolini worked as a curatorial consultant to the festival director, Di Robson. She was particularly involved in the commissioning of “Games for the Games” “Utterly Elegant,” “Campo del Cielo, Field of Sky” and "The Agreement."

EXHIBITION ROAD SHOW was a free to attend festival on Exhibition Road, that explored the creative potential of this extraordinary new urban streetscape with games, dance, scientific experiments and debates, music, acrobatics and aerial displays, new writers’ commissions and visual art installations. It ran from Saturday 28 July to Sunday 5 August, the first nine days of the London 2012 Olympic Games, providing a celebratory festival of culture to mirror the sporting celebrations. The programme included a ROAD SHOW ballroom; extraordinary choreographies and circus feats by resident performance company The Exhibitionists; vintage board games to try your hand at; and music from acts ranging from Eliza Carthy and Band, the Royal College of Music Brass Quintet, Ebony steel band, St Andrew’s College Drum & Pipe Band and folk fiddler Dave Swarbrick.

"Campo del Cielo, Field of Sky"

Alice Cicolini was involved in the commissioning of “Campo del Cielo, Field of Sky” by Katie Peterson.

Guided by experts and a plethora of amateur ‘meteorite hunters’, Katie Peterson took a meteorite that had travelled through space and time for 4.5 billion years, cast it, melted it, then recast it back into a new version of itself. The piece was exhibited on Exhibition Road for audiences to gather round and touch. No stranger to out-of-this-world projects with an earthy dimension, Paterson has collaborated with leading scientists and scientific institutions including the W.M. Keck Observatory and Caltech.

"The Agreement" 

Alice Cicolini was involved in commissioning Tomas Libertiny in creating the public living art work, "The Agreement." Studio Libertiny teamed up with Peter James from the Physics Chelsea Garden and Rudolf Moravčík from The Beekeeping Museum in Slovakia.

Studio Libertiny designed an organic tower-like structure on which the bees were invited to build their home (wax honeycombs). The skeleton was carefully engineered to accommodate for tensions and stability as well as minimal obstruction for building of cells. The title of the work insinuates the fragile relationship between nature and technology / one can not force nature only invite her when the conditions are set right hence the mutual agreement.

Written by Alice Cicolini, commissioned and published by Thames and Hudson. The book explores in more detail the themes that arose from the exhibition “21st Century Dandy.” 

The British man and the designers who design for him stepped into the international style limelight when journalists proclaimed that the “noughties” were a decade of British tailoring. With the shifting sartorial identity of the contemporary Englishman, the dandy was a figure that many designers alighted upon to express the nature of modern masculinity.

The book, a fashion handbook and treasure trove of fashion ideas tailored to the well-dressed man. Six chapters offer six takes on the twenty-first century dandy. Each thematic section features a specially commissioned sixteen-tape fashion shoot by a rising star of fashion photography and eight pages of bespoke inspiration, instruction, interviews and insight. A reference section has a tailor’s glossary and contact information. Whether your taste runs to the classic or the modern, the English dandy sets the pattern for the twenty-first century male.

Alice Cicolini worked as a curatorial consultant to the festival director, Di Robson. She was  involved in the commissioning of “Games For the Games.” The event was designed by Andrew Stafford’s Office.

A special selection of six extraordinary vintage board games from the V&A Museum of Childhood collection were made available to the public. Some games questioned Victorian morality whilst others invited the public to challenge one another to a classic game of strategy. 

Alice Cicolini conceived and delivered the project in her role as curator for the British Council.

Three UK stylists were selected to style a photoshoot for a high profile local magazine in Egypt, Venezuela and Russia. The project was part of a much wider British Council run initiative, “Fashion Machine” which provided workshops and working opportunities in the field of fashion production, photography, forecasting and styling. 

NJ Stevenson styled a fashion shoot for the Venezuelan magazine, “Ocean Drive” whilst Sarah Richardson worked with the photographer Gleb Kosorukov on a photoshoot for OM magazine. As a result of the pictures taken, Sarah and Glebb worked together on another project this time commissioned by London’s ID magazine.

Alice Cicolini worked as a curatorial consultant to the festival director, Di Robson. She was involved in the commissioning of Utterly Elegant.

A late night celebration of quintessential British style: they asked the public to “come in your finest clothes to catch the eye of fashion photographer Marius Hansen, reviving the V&A’s Day of Record series.” They could get advice from celebrity stylist Grace Woodward,  or join Noel Stewart’s millinery workshop to complete their look, or they could be led on an elegant whirlwind performance by dANTE or dIE,  or take a twirl on the Road Show’s outdoor Ballroom.

Alice Cicolini wrote the text for the exhibition and catalogue of "Washed Up"

In support of Selfridge's "Project Ocean", "Washed Up" highlighted the impact of over-fishing on the environment. The exhibition, curated by Judith Clark, was held in the Selfridges’ Wonder Room, and showcased 26 ocean-inspired couture garments and accessories by designers including Alexander McQueen, Hussein Chalayan, Gareth Pugh, Iris Van Herpen, Philip Treacy’s lobster hat (on loan from Lady Gaga), a bespoke Swarovski crystal-encrusted swimming cap, designed by Naomi Filmer and a selection of historic garments, in particular a Victorian bathing outfit. The exhibition staged victorian cabinetry within a desolate landscape of dead coral recovered from UK customs. 

Alice conceived, commissioned and delivered the exhibition in her role as Curator for the British Council

“Man has always preferred to design in straight lines, with our bricks and blocks, rulers and plumblines and Roman roads….So what is in Nature that seems to prefer a curve?”

Spheres is a small attempt to re-start the conversation about the curve in the present climate of cold, square Neo-minimalism. Human-friendly spheres have taken a minor roll in architecture and design in the last few decades. This exhibition and Dixon’s designs, seek to redress the balance.

Alice Cicolini curated and produced the exhibition Re-Living Britain for the British Council, the British Embassy and Trade Partners UK.

"Re-Living Britain" launched at the Living Design Centre on October 4th 2001 as part of the prestigious Tokyo Designers Week. The exhibition developed seven themes and concerns that have informed British design over the generations: travel, childhood and play, nature, suppressed eroticism, industrial process, family pets and memory and emotion. Tatsuya Kanemura designed the exhibition with graphic design by Alexis Burgess. 

Writing at the time, Alice Cicolini suggested, "contemporary British design combines a fascination with materials and manufacture with an awareness of the power of the object to express and evoke memory. In some cases, this impression of material memory centres on the expression of the personal; in others, it articulates an awareness of national identity that manifests itself through humour and a wry sense of irony. Many of the concerns that occupied the British consciousness in the Victorian period continue to influence contemporary design. Re-Living Britain addresses these concerns and the expression of contemporary national identity at the heart of the British interior."