At this online public event Gilane Tawadros, Chief Executive of DACS and founding Director of the Institute of International Visual Arts (Iniva), shared her response to a series of conversations which critically appraise current pedagogical practices and speculate on relationships to art making, art works, societies and cultures more broadly.
Gilane reflected on closed conversations held with Prof. Magnus Quaife (University of the Arts, Helsinki), Ana Laura Lopez de la Torre (Universidad de la República, Uruguay), Dr Gurnam Singh (Coventry University) and their respective invited guests, focused around the question: Post pandemic, how can we imagine, critique, and challenge conceptions of art in the future without confronting the hierarchies, systems, structures, and relations which form its present?
Taking the grammatical function of brackets as a metaphor for the art school within the ‘art world’ and society more widely; looking to the minority within the majority; to the ‘folds’ within the institution in which transgressive practices and dialogues challenge the broader status quo, this event sought to coalesce plural discourses around institutional change. Gilane’s external position to the art school enabled her to reflect on these conversations from outside of the debate, and to bring them back into significant conversation.
Gilane Tawadros has spent her career in the visual arts. She has curated numerous exhibitions and has written extensively on contemporary art. She was the first art historian to be appointed as the Blanche, Edith and Irving Laurie Chair in Women’s Studies, Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. She is Chair of the Stuart Hall Foundation and Trustee of the Stuart Croft Foundation. Her most recent book, The Sphinx Contemplating Napoleon: Global Perspectives on Contemporary Art and Difference, is published by Bloomsbury.
Documents/links:
Transcript – please email MPF to request a copy of the Transcript
Recording of event:
Watch the event recording on Vimeo
Image credit: K.Squires 2022