Dear Diary has been co-curated by Dr Polly North, Director of the Great Diary Project and Professor Clare Brant, Director of the Centre for Life-Writing Research, King’s College London.

The exhibition celebrates diaries and the ways in which diarists capture human experience. Revealing the extraordinary and the everyday in individual lives, diaries stage important issues for the individual and society. Diaries are a profoundly personal springboard into some of the 21st century’s most crucial questions, including how do we identify, understand, portray and share aspects of ourselves?

Forms of diary have for millennia been a cornerstone of self-examination. Over 1,800 years ago, Marcus Aurelius was asking himself: Who am I? Am I good? Twenty-first century diarists ask themselves the same questions. This exhibition is about the personal experience of living day-to-day: what it is to think, feel and experience in the world. The exhibition show-cases hundreds of personal entries that were made on paper, in apps and on devices. It is through these records that we step into the shoes of others and in rendering their reality recognise and better understand our own.

Diaries can be confession, therapy and aide memoire. They are also used as appointment books and historical or medical resources. The diarist may use the diary as private refuge, a place where only he or she can be judged, or as a mental gymnasium in which to work out ideas. Diaries, and the narrative pattern they encourage, have been described as a forum in which individuals can claim and shape identities and as a cipher or filter for the influences that perhaps act upon individuals.

You can read the Exhibition Diary here