Participatory art practice and community engagement has featured centrally in art practice and theory since the 1990s.While many have argued that participatory practices contribute to fostering democratic citizenship, critics have questioned whether participants experience themselves as instrumentalised by participatory practices. This conference forms part of the ARTIS Horizon 2020 consortium grant investigating into the transformative potential of the arts. In order to do so, we invite scholars from a broad range of discipline, such as the arts, political science, sociology and cultural studies, to present papers which fall into one of the following sections:

Friday, 1 November 2024

Session 1
Political Theory: The role of participation
Which role does (civic) participation play in political theory and theories of democracy? How do approaches differ within different regions?

12.30 – 1 pm Introduction and getting to know each other through response*able positionality drawings
1 – 2 pm Keynote Felix Heidenreich (Stuttgart): Recruiting Citizens for
Democracy

Session 2
Community Histories and the museum: Participation and democracy
Community engagement and local histories play an increasing role in curatorial practices. Which curatorial strategies can be endorsed to engage communities?

2.10 – 2.50 pm Holly Broughton and Sara Lowes (Oxford): Valuing Difference: how can alternative public spaces, like Modern Art Oxford, learn and engage with communities through place-based approaches to programming
2.50 – 3.30 pm Priya Atwal (Oxford): Working with communities: History in the making
3.30 – 5 pm Sophie Hope: Response*able break with coffee and cake: This forms part of Sophie Hope’s workshop ‘Who Cares? Compassion-fatigue and exhaustion in participatory arts’
5 – 5.40 pm Sophie Hope (London) and Henry Mulhall (London): What lies behind and beyond participation?
5.40 – 6.20 pm Jeremy Spafford (Oxford): Meaningful Measurement – why it matters
6.20 – 7 pm Victoria Lomasko (Berlin): Transformation of the political artist’s language and role (Film Screening and Presentation)
7 pm Conference Dinner

Saturday, 2 November 2024

Session 3
Decolonising democracy: In many regions of the Global South, democracy is conceived of as a political order imposed by former
colonising countries. Given the colonial atrocities, whichwere legitimised by democracies, has democracy lost its credibility? Which ways are there to bring democratic concepts together with Indigenous forms of political order?

8.30 – 9 am Christian Nyampeta (online contribution)
9 – 9.40 am Florentine Muhry (Hildesheim): Paths into the institution: Rasheed Araeen’s The Other Story and The Whole Story.
9.40 – 10.20 am Çağla Bulut and Marc Hill (Innsbruck): Way of Looking - Experiments in the field of postmigration
10.20 – 10.30 am Break

Session 4
Image Politics
How does politics feature in the arts of global contemporaneity? Which aesthetic strategies are used to convey political messages or to question democratic concepts?

10.30 – 11.10 am Vid Simoniti (Liverpool): Worldmaking in capitalist democracies
11.10 – 11.50 am Margareta von Oswald (Berlin): Curating as participatory research. On resonance in a Berlin museum
11.50 am – 12 pm Break
12 – 12.40 pm Anisha Gupta Müller (Berlin): Art & Politics: In Conversation with Laura Lulika and Hang Linton
12.40 – 1.20 pm Joerg Fingerhut (Berlin): Art in Museums and Urban Public Settings. A Review of the ARTIS Data Collection
1.20 – 2 pm Concluding the conference with a responseable drawing session

Venue
Main Project Space
Ruskin School of Art
128 Bullingdon Rd
Oxford OX4 1QP

A conference organised by Sarah Hegenbart and Kaj Osteroth

Participatory Practices, Art and Democracy
ART*IS Conference in Oxford
1 November – 2 November 2024

Contact: sarah.hegenbart@rsa.ox.ac.uk