Art practice and co-creation

This international collaborative project,

co-organized, co-curated and co-convened by Katarzyna Kosmala explores the themes of

Boundless Creativity/Urban Subversion

The events related to these themes take place

at Bilgi University, Santral in Istanbul on the 1st and 2nd September:

the workshop with presentations/performances, the roundtable and the group exhibition
Old/New New/Old

Altermodern context is based on a series of departures and arrivals. Drawing on Paul Virilo’s aesthetics of disappearance and Marc Augé’s idea of non-place, we have collated a series of the interactive initiatives to co-reflect upon the processes of knowledge exchange. A chaotic universe of communication, travel and migration affects and reflects the multiple genre of representing. A place can be viewed as a relational zone, a geographical landmark, or an area still–to–be–filled with signification and meaning.

Embracing the instability and movement, the project explores a domain of practice/research at the peripheries of dominant knowledge production. At the cross-roads of our academic, social and artistic expression we map the examples of creative practice at boundaries in order to reflect on alternative forms of organizing and processes of transient knowledge production, including:

Umbilical viators and exiles (Miguel Imas /Alia Weston)
Art installation and resisting dominant (Katarzyna Kosmala)
Market Estate Project: A triptych (Maria Daskalaki)
I love deadlines! Performing time (Jean-Luc Moriceau)
Music: Breathing out as organizing beyond controlling (Nick Wilson/ Howard Milner)

By intertwining a complex structure of more or less obvious connections that frame art practice today, the included and the excluded territories, localities as well as their organizational forms, we experiment with the field of potentiality for boundary-less creativity. An altermodernity becomes a method of engagement, opening up ideas for cultural production. The hybrid ways we live and work are acknowledged as the consequences of intersectionality of global markets and dominant ideologies that are continuously mediated by translation, multiculturalism and fragmentation.

The question remains and haunts us: Can creative borderline processes of a more nomadic nature carve a legitimate space for itself in a dominant culture of global markets, digital technologies and shifting social and political forces?

Contemporary Art and Environmental Aesthetics

UWS Lecturer in Digital Art Samantha Clark has just published this article in the journal Environmental Values. Abstract follows: 


Aesthetic debates within contemporary art have been tangential to the debates in environmental aesthetics since the 1960s. I argue that these disciplines, having evolved separately in response to the limitations of traditional aesthetics, may now usefully inform each other. Firstly, the dematerialisation of art as the focus of aesthetic experience may have environmentally useful consequences. Secondly, Gablik's 'connective aesthetics', like Berleant's 'aesthetics of engagement', folds aesthetic experience into the social as a kind of environmental aesthetics. Thirdly, contemporary art's flexible readings of 'framing' can respond to 'frameless' natural environments, and finally, Kester's 'dialogical aesthetics' may be enriched by Berleant's systematic account of 'contextual aesthetics'.

Spaces of encounter: Artists, conversations, and meaning-making

Several members of the UWS research community have just been at RGU in Aberdeen for the North East Scotland Visual Arts Research Network's doctoral summer school. Alongside presentations of some fascinating practice-led doctoral projects, including UWS' Kirsten Mcleod's work on participatory film making and community media, there were keynote presentations and seminars from Ray Langenbach, Jay Koh, Kathleen Coessens, Chu Chu Yuan, and Graham Jeffery. 

The slides from Graham's presentation are reproduced below.

Spaces of encounter: artists, conversations and meaning-making

View more presentations from generalpraxis.