Public and Participative Art: Performance in Everyday Life
An international symposium at the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts,
December 14th & 15th 2009
Organised by Jay Koh
Auditorium, Kuvataideakatemia, Kaikukatu 4
Attendance is free of charge.
It aims to investigate and update on the status of Practice as Research(PaR) and contemporary art practice in Public and Participative Art. It also centres its attention on the research on artist initiated and/or sustained public and participated activities in Everyday Life as durational performances.
The colloquium consists of 3 parts. The first investigates ideas, concepts, critical frameworks, ongoing transformations, assessment methodologies, social rituals and micro expressions governing relationship building and durational participative art practice, with papers delivered by Grant Kester, Ray Langenbach and Jay Koh.
The second part will look into the ecology of art in everyday life with a presentation by Anne Douglas and Chris Fremantle using the concepts developed by the economist Jane Jacobs as a counterpoint to frame a discussion on the various artistic research and practices they have been investigating in the last 8 years within the On The Edge research initiative. This part also includes a presentation from Deirdre O’Mahony using her rural art project, X-PO in West Ireland to illustrate the conditions and contexts of engaging creatively with an Irish agricultural community within the domain of the EU.
The last part consists of presentations from the cross cultural artistic activities of Swedish artists duo Erik Sandelin and Åsa Ståhl, particularly on their experiences during an artist-in-residency in Burma working with local contexts and from Ibrahim Qurashi, an artist and theatre director who is based in Paris and New York and works internationally particularly across the Islamic and western countries, to engage with divergent contextual realities and transgress monolithic perceptions of The Other.