Socially Engaged Art

This practice-based doctoral research explores the nature of the feral, as manifested in an object-based installation practice of contemporary art that scavenges - physically, socially and metaphorically - in the gap between defined spaces. My conception of the feral draws out the political promise of this indeterminacy: the state of being partly wild and partly civilised. The page is also constructed materially, as a space where
heterogeneous elements meet: different voices expressed through the writing and images of my practice.

In claiming the feral as a critical concept, I reject its more common, derogatory, usage. In particular, during the 2011 London riots, the former British Lord Chancellor Kenneth Clarke labelled the rioters a “feral
underclass”, seeking to fix them in this uncivilised, abject position. I unfix this separation, through a feral interpretation of my objects, as they interpenetrate domestic, institutional, and civilised public spheres.
Mother’s milk solidifies as plaster-filled condom bombs, at once phallic and breast-like, poised to ignite a pyre of social theory texts in a gallery project space, a former factory; haphazard conglomerations of plant matter and urban debris are strung together in bunting on an inner-city community hall.

The feral becomes here a rival concept to Julia Kristeva’s formulation of abjection, as the seeping bodily organs evoked by my objects are not defined in terms of the individual, but reflected on through the formless
mass of the social body, the displaced undercommons of Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, the wild of Jack Halberstam, the rioters of Joshua Clover.
The feral has an antagonistic quality, but it cannot fit the relational models of art put forward by Chantal Mouffe and Claire Bishop that seek to civilise this antagonism. Neither can the positivity of Rosi Braidotti’s posthuman new materialism extract the hybridity of materials I use from the precariousness of the social conditions from which they are drawn. My practice, like the feral, resists these separations.

In her 1984 essay “Trojan Horses: Activist Art and Power” feminist activist and writer Lucy Lippard famously ponders whether “the Trojan Horse was the first activist art work.” My inquiry here is, however, not the Trojan Horse of Ancient Greece nor the Trojan Horses of a North American tradition of activist art, but rather, how Lippard’s Trojan Horse can be read in the context of socially engaged art projects in rural China. This article is, in other words, concerned with the Bishan Commune Project; a long-term socially engaged art project initiated in the southern part of Anhui province—it is concerned with the artists and intellectuals who were involved, the villagers they met and the local authorities they negotiated with. In 2010 artist, editor, curator and filmmaker Ou Ning drafted a notebook titled The Bishan Commune: How to Start Your Own Utopia. In 2011 the Bishan Commune was established in the village of Bishan in rural Anhui Province and in 2013 Ou Ning left Beijing and moved to Bishan with his family. The main question of this article, fed by curiosity and wonder, is thus exactly the question of how the Chinese countryside (and political landscape) can provide the backdrop for an anarchist, utopian community? In other words: how do you start your own utopia in the Chinese countryside?

Socially engaged art since the 1990s has become a global trend. The practices of socially engaged arts, while creating new kinds of arts and opening up the entire institutional domain of the art world, are inseparable from the practices of museums that undertake significant changes. In this essay, I theorize the concept of “socially engaged art museum” - a practice that unveils art as an aesthetic force for rendering everyday life performative or playful - to examine both socially engaged arts and museums under what the philosopher Jacques Rancière calls “aesthetic regime of art” (2009). Comparing with the current scholarship that mostly examines European and American examples, I examine cases from Chinese contemporary art. Specifically, I discuss artistic practices of the Yangdeng Art Collective in Southwestern China. My argument is that a socially engaged art museum - qualitatively different from a conventional art museum that engages social life through its curated collections and exhibitions - is both a context-specific artwork of aesthetic experience and a technology of the individualized self in contemporary risk society. Not only does this study question the common scholarly view of socially engaged arts as “post-autonomous” or “anti-aesthetic,” but it also advances a notion of sociality that accounts for the complexity of everyday life.

This chapter revisits Socialist visual legacy and its contemporary appropriation in public art through investigating the public art project "Dinghaiqiao Mutual-Aid Society." Launched by a self-organized group in a historical working-class neighborhood in Shanghai, it is a collectively run facility for learning, reflecting, and creatively working together, among others. By exploring ways of gathering and producing art/knowledge, this project pursues interaction, assistance, and cooperation among neighbors under the principle of "mutual aid", a concept adopted as one of the strategies of Socialist "mass line," which was the political, organizational, and leadership method developed by Mao Zedong. Through analyzing how the group appropriates "mass line," the chapter argues that mutual aid as an artistic strategy enables the project to promote the power of the mass in public spaces, reactivate the Socialist legacies, and provide a different perspective to think about participation in contemporary public art.

На основу идејне, тематске и уметничко-стилске срод- ности која је уочена у књижевном деловању неколико београдских ауторки, у овом раду се њихов књижевни корпус и континуитет стварања
одређује терминолошком синтагмом ангажована женска проза и посматра као издвојен и целовит феномен. Циљ рада је да апстрахује основне карактеристике ове књижевноисторијске појаве која је имала ненарушен континуитет од 30-их до 50-их година 20. века и постави један од могућих појмовно-теоријских оквира за даља читања, тумачења и компаративна истраживања датог и сличних књижевних корпуса. Методолошки ослонац за опис и објашњење ангажоване женске прозе делом се може пронаћи у ранијим књижевноисториографским и теоријским
разматрањима југословенског покрета социјалне литературе, затим у Сартровом одређењу ангажоване књижевности, као и у феминистичким истраживањима историје жена, феминистичких покрета и женске књижевности. Циљ рада управо и јесте да укаже на нужност повезивања три наведена методолошка усмерења када је реч о проучавању контуинираних процеса еманципације жена којем припада и дати књижевни ток.
Тачније, Сартров концепт ангажоване књижевности артикулисан после Другог светског рата узет је као везивна нит излагања: он се примењујe на ранију, односно женску, прозу, и обратно, тумачења те прозе обогаћују дати концепт, придодајући му један дијахронијски дубљи и један потенцијални феминистички аспект. Коначно, резултати истраживања и разматрања могли би да нађу примену и у оквиру студија ангажованости које се у домаћем контексту обликују у последњих неколико година
као друштвено-хуманистичка поддисциплина

The practice of repurposing  resources  that  already  exist—versus innovating or engineering new ones—is an area of significant overlap between contemporary art and twenty-first-century capitalism. Low-risk and relatively low-cost, the process of creative reuse generates fantastic value-adding possibilities. Or so it seems. For even as real estate speculators and city planners discover the value of high culture for upgrading urban infrastructures, so too have a growing number of contemporary artists learned to mimic and perhaps intentionally mistranslate neoliberal enterprise culture's urban strategies into a repertoire of exonomic tools and “art+realty” hybrids that game the system against itself. Whether post-Fordist capitalism now resembles art or vice versa, virtually everything we thought we knew about “serious” culture has been peeled away with astonishing force, leaving  behind  a  raw,  and  in  some  ways  vulnerable thing: a bare art world, fully congruent with the political and economic emergency that marks our contemporaneous present.

This PhD thesis engenders new approaches to the understanding, appreciation, and experience of modern and contemporary ceramic art. It focusses on two recent outputs. The initial, Scorched Earth: 100 Years of Southern African Potteries (2016), a scholarly publication, and the latter, Post-colonialism? (2016/2017), a socially-engaged international exhibition, held at the Benyamini Contemporary Ceramics Centre in Tel Aviv, Israel. The moral philosophy ubuntu was proposed as a component of self-reflexive methodology for research and curatorial projects. The term cryrator was advanced as constituting an approach to curatorial praxis in conflict zones. These concepts make an original contribution to existing methodologies and research that historicise, de-westernise, and decolonise knowledge.

This essay is an observational and evaluative text of a short term socially engaged art workshop and project titled UNSEEN in Kuala Lumpur, 2016, led by a Singapore based artist, Alecia Neo, working with a multidisciplinary team of facilitators with backgrounds in music, theatre and photography and volunteers. This workshop is directed towards engaging visually impaired early adult individuals, commissioned by the social entrepreneurship of Dialogue in the Dark and sponsored by the state funder, the Singapore International Foundation. The analysis is made using the open framework of Art-Led Participative Processes (ALPP) conceptualised as a dynamic of dialogue and participation in engaging the construction of subjectivity within the performances of the self in the everyday. ALPP is discussed through the trans-disciplinary artistic research of artist-curator, Jay Koh, its author. About 70% of this text was published in the documentation Unseen: Constellations as part of the exhibition showing Neo's activities with visually impaired pupils of a secondary school in Singapore.

Chapter 5, Experiencing the Art Museum: Methods for Public Engagement:

Methods for interactive, socially engaged art museum experiences are explored. They examine the utility of developing larger, institutional philosophies to specific techniques via case studies at the U.C.L.A. Hammer Museum, the Oakland Museum of California, and the Walker Art Center. Employed by a spectrum of practitioners such as artists, designers, and museum professionals, these approaches created new avenues for interaction. Specifically, artists entering into visitor services to drive institutional evolution, techniques for engaging atypical visitors, and approaches for engaging with “the crowd” with ephemeral art movements.

Tired of the lack of criticality present in many 'socially engaged practices' in design, I wrote this post as a way of starting a discussion on what 'social design' might mean. The post was originally published in my website / blog, where it trigger some important -and somewhat missing- discussion: http://www.pablocalderonsalazar.com/?p=2430

THE TURN المنعرج presents artistic interventions that emerged in the wake of the Arab Revolution. They are committed to collaborative action and direct engagement in relation to the prevailing social climate. They are ambitious art projects that aim to have a transformative impact on society and envision – together with the citizens of Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, and Syria – scenarios and solutions for a better future.

Mon texte intitulé "Dans le gueule du loup" publié par Courtes Lignes dans le cadre de l'action "Vos plumes contre la Barbarie"
http://www.courteslignes.com/

Et si les mots pouvaient aider à supporter et penser l'impensable ?
Courteslignes aimerait modestement, à sa mesure, y contribuer en publiant rapidement des textes qui, à leur manière, rendent hommage aux victimes et tentent de soulager notre peine collective en évoquant autrement la tragique actualité.
http://www.courteslignes.com/dans-la-gueule-du-loup/#more-1828

In summer 2014 Glasgow played host to the 20th Commonwealth Games. As well as a celebration of sport, there was an extensive cultural programme including new work by world-leading and emerging Scottish and international artists. Emphasis was on accessibility, shared cultural traditions and contemporary creativity. Expanded practices that call upon public collaboration as a means of production are becoming a customary feature of the contemporary art landscape (and often a requisite of funding). Ontologically this process challenges traditional attitudes to material and nominal authenticities, with the artist not necessarily involved in the ‘making’ of the work. This paper explores issues of authenticity in relation to this growing contemporary art practice of social engagement and public participatory collaboration. With funding bodies seeking evidence of social ‘impact’, contemporary art production is becoming increasingly tied to project-based events rather than autonomous installations or material objects. How does this affect our understanding of nominal and expressive authenticity? This subject is explored in relation to the practice of Rachel Barron, whose participatory project Assemble took place across two venues in Glasgow during the Commonwealth Games.

История и теория искусства по-прежнему рассматривают социополитический контекст как набор внешних факторов, относя взаимоотношения между искусством и политикой к отдельной области социологии искусства. На примере раннесоветского авангардного искусства мы показываем взаимосвязь между чистотой формы в искусстве и политической ангажированностью как неотъемлемую характеристику и конструктивный фактор самого авангарда. Мы берем за отправную точку короткий период преподавания К. Малевича в Витебске в УНОВИС как ключевой момент выхода супрематической эстетики в широкое прикладное социальное поле. С помощью оригинальной эстетической концепции французского философа Ж. Рансьера пытаемся показать, что именно последовательная разработка возможностей своих медиумов творцами чистых форм (беспредметниками) привела в пореволюционной России к их прямому вовлечению в жизнестроительную программу. И наоборот, новая политическая реальность не могла быть представлена средствами традиционного искусства и затребовала новых художественных форм репрезентации и языков выражения. Таким образом, между эстетикой и политикой, между автономией искусства и его идеологической ангажированностью обнаруживается достаточно сложная диалектическая взаимосвязь, способствующая на определенном этапе появлению более новаторской и динамичной художественной практики.

This article describes how a fine art teacher, an art therapist, and a social worker analyzed art works created by students taking an art course in a masters-level social work degree program. The premise of this research is that the fine art teacher, the art therapist , and the social worker hold different perspectives about art in general, and including art produced by students in this course. The three different visualizations expressed by our subjects about the art works are then broken down and compared. Our assumption is that we will find different understandings of the art based on understandings about relationships between technique, composition, content, process, and artist intentions. These visualizations intersect and thus help to redefine the role of the art as well as offering important connections between social practice and the arts.

As the introductory essay for the Works on Water Inaugural Triennial 2017 catalogue essay, I argue that contemporary artists are taking to the water in response to ecological change, and compare this "Water Art" movement to the Land Art, Conceptual Art, and Performance Art movements of the late 1960s-1970s.

The term "post-colonialism" can confuse with its depth and complexity just as easily as it can confound with the nearly fraudulent vagueness of its definition. Characteristic of much post-modern intellectual discourse, one can argue that post-colonialism finds its meaning somewhere between elitism and chicanery, on a middle ground favoring subjectivity over specificity and polyvocality over a singular, authoritarian narrative. But let us attempt to accelerate, to speed past the idea of post-colonialism as an abstract theoretical inquiry altogether and brace for a collision with how we see it, or fail to see it, lived by people around the world.

This article argues and demonstrates that a distinction between
artistic and non-artistic methods in community/socially engaged
arts can open new discussions that advance and challenge the
practice. While the boundary between art and non-art is far from
clear, several widely read publications on community/socially
engaged arts have categorized such works as the same class of
engagement, investigating primarily their political and cultural
impact, leaving the experiential dimension of the engagement
overlooked. The ethological perspective of art presented by
anthropologist Ellen Dissanayake is drawn upon for a definition of
art that connects the experiential and social experience of art with
the survival and thriving of individuals and their communities.
Through an interdisciplinary approach, this definition of art is
integrated with theories of psychology and social psychology for a
multifaceted explanation of the phenomenon of collaborative art
making. This discussion reconsiders the simplistic understanding
of the oft-quoted phrase ‘everyone is an artist’, the ‘lowestcommon
denominator’ critique of collaborative art making, and
the instrumentalization of art.

This article is an artist facilitator's response to audience collaboration in Manuel Vason's Still Image Moving: a participatory community art project which took place in Bristol, December 2010. The response is one of scepticism towards the rubric of audience 'empowerment' in socially engaged art, but it aims to be constructive in assessing what space there might be for such an empowering practice to emerge. By addressing empowerment in relation to authorship, concepts of ownership and different ways of conceptualising the audience within the artwork, this article looks to examine the possibilities for an equal and empowering collaboration between artist and participating public. With reference to examples from Still Image Moving, this article looks to establish a personal and critical reflection on the mechanics of the relationship between Vason and a participating public by drawing on the documentation of participant responses and a theoretical framework on the themes of ownership, authorship and empowerment. This article discusses Still Image Moving, a participatory community project by Manuel Vason in Bristol, December 2010. The project was co-produced by InBetween Time Productions and the Bristol City Council Neighbourhood Arts Team. In this project, Vason and a team of artist facilitators took to the streets of Bristol to engage passers-by, inviting people to participate in the creation of an image with Vason. These images were projected at the end of each day on the side of a shipping container that was home to the project, as well as on large central buildings in Bristol. Still Image Moving visited four urban Bristol communities over twelve days: the city centre, Bedminster, Stokes Croft and St Paul's. The intention was to engage non-traditional arts audiences by creating an interactive intervention in urban Bristol communities. The project engaged 'artist facilitators,' who approached potential participants and engaged them within the project, as well as helping them generate ideas for their image. InBetween Time Productions described the role of the artist Platform, Vol. 6, No.

This paper examines the possibility of art activism through a discussion of Brian Holmes’ work on art activism. “Eventwork” is a concept proposing four effective vectors in the cultural strategies in the history of social movements. The aim of eventwork is to activate one’s autonomy to a political form of living as well as to articulate participation and coalition to subvert the cultural confinement of the current borders of professions and disciplines.
Eventwork is a convergence of art, theory, media and politics mixing multiple professional skills. To examine these modes of eventwork, we will examine a cultural event called ‘Tucumán Arde’ in 1968. Here, vanguard artists used counter-information, proliferated their images and deployed experimental art to challenge government propaganda.
According to Brian Holmes, Fordist modernization and post-Fordist alienation and immaterial production generate complex social problems such as ecological destruction, economic inequality and the repression of minorities. Additionally, Holmes denounces artistic and cultural resistances established in simply institutional terms such as “relational art” or “critical theory”. For Holmes, art activism is an earnest counter-movement against modernization and capitalism.
However, there is another perspective or strategy for art activism. The Japanese artist and art critic Yoshio Shirakawa proposes an attitude of being anti-Capitalist in both institutional and non-institutional forms. Shirakawa, for instance, argues that some tribal museums develop their own criteria of collection to support minorities and counter culture. He also points out anonymous and individual protest activities should be included in art activism.
In conclusion, we will define art activism and the forward agenda of the Eventwork concept: how to realize cooperative cultural practice in contemporary society? It seems to be difficult to expect fundamental transformation in the post-Fordist era as we are faced with critical problems such as nukes, repressive laws, and neo-liberalism. That is why artists are likely to be, or expected to become, mediators between individual talents, public engagement and social problems via aesthetic expressions. A significance of art activism is to utilize tactics to make alternative relations within and beyond the norms of each field and also of the notion of art activism itself.

Documenting a residential, socially-engaged project in the Karoo town of Laingsburg, facilitated by Kathryn Smith and Verna Jooste (2010/11) and produced by Visual Art students from Stellenbosch University and members of the local community.

A series of temporary and permanent artistic responses to the legacies and memorial practices of the 1981 Laingsburg Flood were produced, retrieving and presenting alternative and undocumented experiences of an event which remains South Africa's greatest natural disaster.

Initially commissioned as a single memorial artwork by the local municipality, the project was selected as part of the major National Lottery-supported initiative,  2010 REASONS TO LIVE IN A SMALL TOWN, led by the Visual Arts Network of South Africa (VANSA), which allowed us to engage more fully with the community as a whole, over a meaningful period of time.

In January 2017, settler Australian artist, Amy Spiers, launched a creative campaign to contest habitual associations at the site of Hanging Rock in Central Victoria with a white vanishing myth. Entitled #MirandaMustGo, the campaign’s objective was to provoke thought and unease about why the missing white schoolgirls of Joan Lindsay’s fictional novel, Picnic at Hanging Rock, prompted more attention and feeling in the general public than the actual losses of lives, land and culture experienced by Indigenous people in the region as a consequence of rapid and violent colonial occupation. The campaign incited significant media attention, substantial public debate and some reconsideration of the stories told at Hanging Rock. In this article, Spiers will describe how she conceptualized the artwork/campaign as a propositional counter-memorial action that attempted to conceive ways in which non-Indigenous Australians can acknowledge, and take responsibility for, the denial of colonization’s impact on Indigenous people. She will do so by discussing the critical methodology that underpinned this socially engaged artwork and continue by analysing the public reception and dissensus the campaign provoked. She will conclude in presenting some thoughts about what #MirandaMustGo produced: a rupture of the public secret of Australia’s violent colonial past, a marked shift to the discourse concerning Hanging Rock and an ongoing, unresolved agitation stimulated by Picnic at Hanging Rock’s persistent reproducibility.

The following text was commissioned by the project Artecitya. Envisioning the City of Tomorrow (2014-2018), organized by Goethe-Institut Thessaloniki. It was first presented publically as part of the conference " The role of culture and 'art for social change' in the sustainable development of a city " at LABattoir, Thessaloniki (2015) and was later published on the project's website: www.artecitya.gr

Shortly before the demise of the worldwide Occupy movement, two watershed events mark its final transformation. Two collaborations with international art exhibitions in Germany, that not only changed the fate of the movment, but brought up deep contradictions concerning protest as a form of art. The essay scrutinizes these transformations and critically assesses the activist’s goals and the ramifications of their artistic practices.

This text was written for KOW ISSUE 1 and part of the exhibition at
KOW’s storge space at Brunnenstr. 9, Berlin (27.02.– 21.03.2009).
It was inspired by conversations with Nikolaus Oberhuber and
Franz Erhard Walther.

Published in: KOW ISSUE 1, Berlin 2009/2013

According to Cathy Lang Ho, curator of the exhibition Spontaneous Interventions: Design Actions for the Common Good, there seems to be "a larger movement in which citizens all over the world are devising and implementing clever, low-barrier urban interventions to make their cities more inclusive, sustainable, pleasurable and safer." However, these trends are also at risk of losing spontaneity and vitality if politicians, entrepreneurs, professional designers and academics succeed in

Příspěvek se zabývá rolí kresby a ilustrace v rámci přímého i nepřímého vizuálního aktivismu současné doby. Důraz je kladen především na témata a oblasti, která se v souvislosti s angažovanou ilustrativní kresbou objevují nově – konkrétně na oblasti psychického zdraví, ekologie a environmentalismu, genderu a transgenderu, problémů urbánního života a společenského vyloučení.  Na konkrétních příkladech je ukázána pestrá škála podob, které může kresba coby vizuální aktivismus nabývat – od přímé podpory demonstrantů po snahu očistit vizuální komunikaci od stereotypizujících klišé. Příspěvek rovněž naznačí širší souvislosti angažované ilustrace s aktuálním kulturním a společenským děním. Co znamená a s čím souvisí návrat papírových médií a self-publishingu v době Webu 2.0? Jak se liší jejich úloha ve státech západní Evropy a v zemích s autokratickou tendencí, např. v Maďarsku? Kolem jakých center je současná angažovaná umělecká ilustrace organizována? Příspěvek byl přednesen v rámci konference Teritoria umění pořádané Akademií múzických umění v Praze 18. 10. 2019, vyjde rovněž jako součást stejnojmenného konferenčního sborníku (NAMU, plánované vydání 2020).

Focusing on three overarching concepts—“the new masses,” “participation” and “the institution”—this work examines their variations in different historical moments of China. It specifically explores how historical, socio-political and cultural contexts of post-socialist China affect the changing aesthetic value of new mass art, and how this aesthetic value redefines the connotation of the three concepts. It also captures the complex dynamics of the categories of the collective and the individual in contemporary China within the phrase “the new masses,” and examines how new mass art practices have become integral to the emergence of these people—enabling them to define themselves as individuals as well as members of a political collective; as consumers and producers simultaneously; as both the audience and the medium of new forms of participation in art. This dissertation argues that new mass art in post-socialist China demonstrates a hybrid aesthetic value that is profoundly associated with the social, political and cultural characteristics of China’s post-socialism in which socialist and capitalist systems exist alongside each other and mutually inform one another. In post-socialist China, the hybrid aesthetic value is embodied in the visual formats of both “art for the masses” and “art as the avant-garde.” The former is a type of art which uses mass participation as means to work in, with and for the institution. The latter emphasizes civic participation as a subversive power to attack the institution and challenge authoritarian discourses. The two visual formats are ever-changing in new mass art practices. They have been shown in different approaches of participation, the “art-institution” relation they deal with, and the new identity of the people the artworks engender.

Part of "What guns mean: the symbolic lives of firearms," collection of essays edited by Jonathan M. Metzl.

Gun violence impacts our experience of public spaces, including how we represent and memorialize tragic events stemming from guns in public ways. Immediate memorials, complete with flowers and other ephemera, frequently appear at the sites of gun violence, at times to be followed by permanent memorials with contemplative spaces and names of victims etched in stone. While communicating loss and grief, both of these strategies usually evade any real political action or consideration of the complexities of gun violence or its causes. Mirroring the stalemate in our political dialogue around guns and their proliferation, our dominant strategies of memorialization similarly offer little more than "thoughts and prayers". In what ways can contemporary art break through these evasions and even prompt dialogue or change around the complex array of issues that arise with the increased presence of guns in American society? How can art generate experiences for viewers that allow for a more complex consideration of gun-related violence than the cycle of grief seen in immediate and permanent memorials? In this paper, I survey works of art that produce possibilities for transformative conversation around the issue by considering guns as what Bruno Latour calls "actants". I begin by examining guns in the gallery, first offering new readings of Chris Burden's Shoot (1971) and Marina Abramović's Rhythm 0 (1974), both of which notoriously included real firearms, and then turning to sculptural projects that literally disarm guns, rendering them deliberately strange and prompting complex conversations about their material presence in American life. I then shift focus towards the public sphere to consider works by Krzysztof Wodiczko, Jenny Holzer, and Michael Rakowitz, artists who rewire established circuits of monumental commemoration, public space advertising, and vernacular immediate memorials to generate a sense of distance, and even a safe space for dialogue in the public realm.

Published on Arts Education Archive Malaysia: https://myartseducationarchive.com/meta/

This article is a preliminary attempt to locate the practice of non-formal arts education in Malaysia since the 1970s, tracing and intersecting its growth across a broad panorama of cultural, social, and political change highlighted in the AEAM Meta-Timeline. My reading considers how the trajectories of this field may have responded to overlapping currents in civil society and pedagogy, as well as parallel movements in regional cultural practice.

This book is concerned with socially engaged art projects in the Chinese countryside, with the artists and intellectuals who are involved, the villagers they meet and the local authorities with whom they negotiate. In recent years an increasing number of urban artists have turned towards the countryside in an attempt to revive rural areas perceived to be in a crisis. The vantage point of this book is the Bishan Commune. In 2010, Ou Ning drafted a notebook entitled Bishan Commune: How to Start Your Own Utopia. The notebook presents a utopian ideal of life based on anarchist Peter Kropotkin’s idea of mutual aid. In 2011 the Commune was established in Bishan Village in Anhui Province. The main questions of this book thus revolve around how an anarchist, utopian community unfolds to the backdrop of the political, social and historical landscape of rural China, or more directly: How do you start your own utopia in the Chinese countryside?

What does it mean to do Practice-based research? In this presentation, I introduce the ways in which I use creative research methods to produce and disseminate my practice. This includes exploring the differences between arts-informed and arts-based methods, and how research is produced in collaboration with other artists, researchers, and participants.

I highlight examples of my projects which incorporate practice based research, such as socially engaged art, eliciting responses from participants using artistic methods, and producing creative visualisations of research.

Outcomes include the creation of a public sculpture in response to an inner city area of Leeds, producing a visual interpretation of research into translanguaging, and documenting the experiences of German nationals living in Yorkshire.

These projects often focus on elements of co-production, where participants are encouraged to become active artists and researchers through the process of producing the work. The presentation details how through using creative methods and co-production, hierarchies inherent within traditional ethnographic techniques can be shifted to ensure that participants’ voices are more fully represented within the research.

Coinciding with the 2014 Dark Mofo festival in Hobart, the "Southdale" exhibition opened with little announcement and much secrecy at the Museum of Old and New Art (MONA), Hobart on 16  June 2014.  Visitors to the museum were confounded and disoriented as MONA had mysteriously been made over to resemble a shopping mall. During the four-month long exhibition,  Southdale continued to confuse and agitate, with many elements of the exhibition attracting controversy.

In this essay, I reflect on the response to "Southdale" and examine what I think the work produced. To begin, I will describe the exhibition and my encounter with the work. In the second part of this essay, I discuss some of the controversy the work attracted and offer a reading of Southdale as an example of subversion through the means of overidentification. Drawing on Slavoj Žižek’s concept of overidentification and Rancière’s notion of dissensus, I will explore the strategy of mimicry in Southdale and the discursive public sphere the work provoked.