Border STEW: De-colon-ising Art and Learning in MART Gallery Rathmines – 23 June 2018
Curated by: Something Human in collaboration with Livestock
Featuring: Alice Feldman, Jesse Jones, Dr Helena Lim, Dr Glenn Loughran, Lynn Lu, Vukasin Nedeljkovic, Katherine Nolan, Julieann O’Malley, Paul Moore, Eleanor Phillips and Sau Bin Yap
An experimental Long Table where discourse is the main course:
the heat is turned up with border anxieties, environmental decline and increasing conflict, how can art and education cook up a future world? Together, we marinade ideas and insights from around the world. We partake and digest intercultural and intersectional discourse.
Co-hosted by Something Human in collaboration with Livestock, with Alice Feldman, Jesse Jones, Dr Helena Lim, Dr Glenn Loughran, Lynn Lu, Vukasin Nedeljkovic, Katherine Nolan, Julieann O’Malley, Paul Moore, Eleanor Phillips and Sau Bin YapPart of Something Human’s 2018-2019 Rolling Stock programme. With thanks to Lois Weaver and Alessandra Cianetti.
Alice Feldman (School of Sociology, University College Dublin) draws on — what no doubt appears to many as a Frankensteinianly transdisciplinary variety of traditions to mobilise decolonial praxes that intervene in the global colonial legacies underpinning the current necropolitical moment. Her work inheres through critical explorations and experiments at the intersections of radical aesthetics, epistemologies and pedagogies. In research terms this currently involves troubling Irish and European colonial amnesias, particularly when it comes to migrants arriving from the Global South, by re/entangling Irish and Nigerian diasporic histories through archive-assemblage practice. In teaching/learning contexts it means using aesthesic pedagogies and assignments to support students’ self-directed journeys around and through light topics such as decoloniality and onto-epistemology, aest-ethics and reflexivity, interpretive research and research justice. Ultimately her work is all about convoking and occasioning encounters that might inspire and make manifest imagining, being and doing ‘other-wise’. Over the past two decades, she has worked in research, advisory and volunteer capacities with many civic, community and other organisations in Ireland involved in anti-racism, migration and interculturalism work. She has recently launched a new masters programme on Race, Migration and Decolonial Studies and a Decolonising the Curriculum Platform at UCD racemigrationdecolonialstudies.com
Jesse Jones is a Dublin-based artist. Her practice crosses the media of film, performance and installation. Often working through collaborative structures, she explores how historical instances of communal culture may hold resonance in our current social and political experiences. Jones’ practice is multi-platform, working in film installation, performance and sculpture. Her recent work proposes a re-imagining of the relationship between the Law and the body through speculative feminism. Using a form of expanded cinema she explores magical counter-narratives to the State drawn from suppressed archetypes and myth. She represented Ireland at the Venice Biennale 2017. Other recent exhibitions and projects prior to representing Ireland at the Venice Biennale in 2017, include the major new work In the Shadow of the State, with Sarah Browne, commissioned by Artangel (UK) and Create with funding support from Ireland 2016. Currently, the exhibition of Tremble Tremble is on show at Project Arts Centre from June-July 2018.
Dr Helena Lim is an independent researcher and consultant with over 20 years of experience in UK higher education. She has held senior roles at Southampton Solent University and the Higher Education Academy (HEA) and is the founder of the UK and Ireland Higher Education Institutional Research (HEIR) Network and Co-Convenor of the European Association for Institutional Research Special Interest on Institutional Research for Management Decision Support. Her research interests have focused on student learning, the experiences of diverse learner groups, staff and student perceptions and experiences of curricula, and business modelling of student enrollment and retention. She has presented at national and international conferences and is regularly invited to deliver keynote presentations and workshops. She continues to publish in the area of pedagogy and has recently co-authored a chapter on UK higher education in an international volume on Democratizing Higher Education. Helena is a Principal Fellow of the HEA as recognition for her contribution to leading innovation in learning and teaching in the UK and internationally.
Livestock is an artist-led initiative set up to support, encourage and promote performance, the artists and their work. The bi-monthly event is an opportunity for performers to show new or evolving work. Central to their ethos is the creation of a positive and welcoming environment where artists can perform their live work to an appreciative audience. We believe performance facilitates a relationship between artist and audience, creating an intimacy and a space for dialogue between both parties. Livestock has been part of Dublin Live Art Festival since 2012, exposing Irish performance artists’ work to International artists taking part in the Festival. Co-curated by Francis Fay & Eleanor Lawler.
Glenn Loughran is an Artist and a Lecturer in Fine Art at the Dublin School of Creative Arts and Media (DIT). He is also course co-ordinator of the B.A in Visual Art on Sherkin Island (B.A.V.A), and director of strategic development in GradCAM. Originally from Belfast, N.Ireland, Loughran holds a B.A in Fine Art Painting, (N.C.A.D/ 2003), an M.A in Sculpture (N.C.A.D / 2005), and a doctorate in education (N.C.A.D /GradCAM/2013).
Lynn Lu is a visual artist from Singapore. She trained at Carnegie Mellon University, École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, École Marchutz, San Francisco Art Institute, Tokyo National University of Fine Art and Music, Musashino Art University. In 2010 she was awarded the degree of Doctor of Philosophy by the University of Newcastle.
In her practice, the sentient body is seen as the main medium for perceiving and presenting (versus representing) meaning (versus message) through direct personal experience. Engaging vigorously with the present reality of all that is here-and-now, the meaning of her context-specific works often manifests in the resonant relationships created between herself and her audience, and between the audience themselves.
Paul Moore is a British/Irish artist based in Belfast. He has recently graduated from the Art Research and Collaboration [ARC] Ma from at Dún Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design and Technology [IADT], Dublin in 2017. In 2012 he was an Artist in Residence at the Digital Art Studios, Belfast. Moore was awarded the Arts Disability Ireland [ADI] Mentor program with Firestation Artist Studios, Dublin, 2013. In 2015 he was awarded the Individual Disability Arts (iDA) grant by Art and Disability Forum, Belfast. He has been supported by the Arts council of N. Ireland through the Support for the Individual Artist Program Award (SIAP) 2012, 2014, 2016. Moore’s practice challenges interpretations of our being, geographically, mentally and physically, interrogating the ambiguity of information and its ability to express more than one interpretation of reality. He explores the human condition and its relationship within this modern technological landscape, invoking memory and sense as a language in forming a narrative of the present.
Vukasin Nedeljkovic holds a Masters in Visual Arts Practice at Dunlaoghaire Institute of Arts, Design and Technology. He is a PhD candidate at Dublin Institute of Technology. He exhibited both nationally and internationally. His recent contributions include Reiterating Asylum Archive: documenting direct provision in Ireland, 2018 and Asylum Archive: an Archive of Asylum and Direct Provision in Ireland, 2016, 2017. He was awarded recently Arts and Activism bursary from Arts Council and is working on Asylum Archive publication at the moment.
Vukasin Nedeljkovic initiated multidisciplinary project Asylum Archive.Katherine Nolan is an artist, lecturer and curator specialising in gender and new media. With particular focus on tensions between the experiential and the spectacular body, her research investigates gender, identity and desire in the context of digital cultures. Recent publications include The Camera and the Selfie: Narcissism, Self-Regulation and Feminist Performance Practices (DRHA, DCU 2015). She has exhibited internationally in Europe, America and Asia and regularly curates with MART and Dublin Live Art Festival. Her extensive teaching experience, includes a course leader role at the University of the Arts London and visiting lectureships at The National College of Art and Design, Crawford College of Art and Design and Central Saint Martins, London. She is a member of Monster Truck Studios and the Society of Women in Philosophy in Ireland.Julieann O’Malley is an interdisciplinary artist based in Liverpool. Her practice both for galleries and public space is fundamentally live durational performance installations, video work, sound and photography. O’Malley likes to test the limits of her body during durational performances. She condenses an idea and uses semiotics as a communication method and finds ways to explore, engage and have open discourse and dialogues about the ever changing environments and practices of society.
Eleanor Philips works within a collaborative framework where outcomes are informed by the processes that take place through conversation, production and exploration with others. To each project she takes her belief in the democratising process of collaborative art, her skills as a facilitator and her love of using readily accessible materials and renewable resources to co-create new ways of looking at the world.
Past Projects have included Widow’s Conversation: honouring the experiences of grief within a culture of memorials, Belfast; Minceire, Our People – An Exploration of Them and Us: working with Travellers on the outskirts of Craigavon, Northern Ireland; Bureau of Enquiry: exploring power relations within homeless services, St. Louis, Missouri, USA; The Northsiders Museum: curating a space for free exchange of memory and art within a retail unit, Northsiders Shopping Centre, Dublin. A founding member of Signal Arts Centre, Eleanor has been on the Board of Directors for over 25 years. Together with seven other artists she also founded Outpost Studios, Bray and is co-founder of pff publications with Rachel Fallon and Emma Finucane.
Sau Bin Yap teaches at the Faculty of Creative Multimedia, Multimedia University, Malaysia. He is a member of Rumah Air Panas [RAP], an artist initiative based in Kuala Lumpur. He had received awards in the Young Contemporaries Arts Award by the National Art Gallery, Malaysia in 2000 and 2002 and has participated at the JENESYS Residency program in Japan in 2008. His practice encompasses conceptual work, installation, mapping project and curatorial project with RAP. Yap had also worked on the ‘Narratives in Malaysian Art’ volumes published by Rogue Art. He has also served on the jury panel for the 2013 Young Contemporary Arts Award in Malaysia; as nominator for the Sovereign Asian Art Prize from 2014 to 2016, AIR Programme Recommendation Committee 2016/2017 at Arts Maebashi, and the Hugo Boss Asia award in 2017. Recent curatorial project include ‘ESCAPE from the SEA’ organised by the Japan Foundation, Kuala Lumpur.