Art on the Streets: Creative Responses to the Urban Environment
Symposium

This symposium explores the diversity of creative responses to our changing urban environment – from street art and graffiti to yarn bombing and urban photography. We will discuss our creative connections to, material engagements with, and affective responses to, our urban environment, and the relevance of contemporary urban interventions to a critical understanding of the lived city. Our programme brings together leading contemporary researchers, curators, artists and photographers in the field of urban creativity.


PROGRAM

13:00
Welcome and Introduction (Phil Healey & Susan Hansen)

13:10
SESSION 1: ART ON THE STREETS

Olly Walker: The Fight for London's Streets
Is London losing its place as the global center of urban/street art? Once seen as the most vibrant and art rich city in the world, London has been left behind and now is struggling to find investment, organization and invention to gain walls and space to paint thus struggling to attract the best artists and interact with local communities.

Ulrich Blanché: Street Art vs. Gallery Art and its Viewers
What happens when Street Artists become Urban Artists when they exhibit in a gallery? And connected to that: what kind of different viewers of Street Art and "gallery art" exist? Ulrich Blanché analyses artistic strategies often used by artists who work on the street and in the gallery as well.

Magda Sayeg: Working Creatively in Urban Environments: Unpicking Gendered Preconceptions
The artist will discuss her 10-year body of creative work. She engages in the reappropriation of what is traditionally considered craft decorative and feminine traditions, placing them in a male dominated sphere. The dialogue that takes place with the viewer who comes upon this work is open to ambiguous interpretation. The artist's intention is to question the preconceived notions that viewers have about what is street art's role and who does it – revealing the gender polarities within the street art script.

14:40 COFFEE BREAK


15:00
SESSION 2: CREATIVE RESPONSES TO THE URBAN ENVIRONMENT

Sabina Andron: Regeneration vs Degeneration: What Happens when Graffiti Takes Over?
This talk proposes graffiti as a force of urban regeneration in London's biggest open graffiti area, the Leake Street Tunnel. Using repeated photographic documentation of the area, the presentation will illustrate the sociable impact of graffiti writing, in the light of a rise in prominence of figurative muralism.

Susan Hansen: Street Art and Graffiti as Aesthetic Protest
This talk examines the transformation of public space that occurred after Banksy's Slave Labour was cut from a wall in North London, transported to Miami and listed for auction. The excision of Slave Labour provided a ‘gap in the sensible' and the conditions of possibility for the emergence of a visual dialogue, which transformed this otherwise apparently unremarkable London side street into an arena for aesthetic protest and critical social commentary.

16:00 COFFEE BREAK


16:20
SESSION 3: DOCUMENTING THE URBAN

Phil Healey: Shopocalypse
In 1968 John Berger wrote "A photograph is effective when the chosen moment which it records contains a quantum of truth." In the urban documentary photographic work in the Shopocalypse series, I have been searching for a truth about the collapse in the numbers of independent shops along the high streets in London. The portraits of buildings in the series tell a story, the images symbolise how important parts of our communities can be swept away by the winds of change if we as a society don't value them or understand their value to us.

Panizza Allmark: Seeing the Outside In: Photography, Shopping Malls and Spectacle
This talk explores my urban photographic work, which focuses on the walkways within shopping malls. These spaces could be described as the new High Street, but undercover and intensified. My photography conveys the spectacle in shopping malls which follows the Surrealist tradition of ‘making familiar the strange and the strange familiar'.

Paul Halliday: Democracy Wall
This photographic project focuses on the materialities of urban spaces with images made in various English locations. Paul's starting point will be to question how theories of urban change influence the ways in which an artist approaches the subject of locale. His work problematizes ideas of documentary truth, drawing on a critique of objectivity, subjectivity and the autobiographical. Through this project, the artist questions notions of memory, eventfulness and the archive.