https://aparticularreality.co.uk/

Since 2018, APR continues to develop and pilot a unique approach to promoting conversations around anti-racism, centring the perspectives of POC arts students and alumni.

“A black visual art is an innovative expression of a particular reality – a reality set in the framework of specific cultural and historic forces. These are: cultural domination by Western Eurocentrism and marginality to it; the experience of exploitation, appropriation, slavery, inequality and racism; and the long and abominable history of colonialism. A black art emerges from this framework and is vitalised by these forces.” Gavin Jantjes, Art & Cultural Reciprocity, Talk delivered at the East Midlands Art Conference, 12th April 1986

Visions of professional and academic projected futures in the arts tend to re-inscribe white-centred trajectories, even if the content of practice-based curricula attempts to address liberation and de-colonisation. This has a particular impact on BIPOC students at all levels, who cannot see themselves represented; this results in lower energy, motivation, desire to share their work and in turn lower retention progression and attainment.[1] With a focus on anti-racism within and beyond practice-based learning, A Particular Reality (APR) tackles this issue by collaborating with HE arts students to analyse and intervene in current approaches, via supported peer-programming.

The over-arching research question asked by APR is: What types of issues are faced by BIPOC arts students and therefore constitute their ‘particular reality’ / experience of HE education, and how might these be addressed / improved through co-construction and Peer Programming of key aspects of their curriculum?

By addressing this question through multi-platform, context-sensitive activities, this inter-institutional collaboration between students, academics and alumni has multiple aims: to raise awareness around barriers faced by BIPOC arts students; to identify opportunities for informing systemic change in arts HE education; to develop culturally responsive pedagogies; to develop relevant art-based and/or theoretical research outputs, informing relevant discourses and practices; to work with our stakeholders to provide connections between and opportunities for early career BIPOC creatives UK-wide.

A project initially devised in collaboration with Michelle Williams-Gamaker, it is sustained and developed by multiple artist educators, including Murat Adash, Clementine Bedos, JJ Chan, Albert Dumas, Ali Eisa, Alice Gale-Feeney, Sarah Howe. Participating institutions include working with predominantly POC artists studying Fine Art in Goldsmiths University, Kingston School of Art, Manchester Metropolitan University and Middlesex University.

[1] Burke, Penny Jane and McManus, Jackie (2009) Art for a Few – Exclusion and Misrecognition in Art and Design Higher Education Admissions (National Arts Learning Network [NALN] Research Report)

A Particular Reality Zine Edition 1 2020

Drawing on a history of instructional practice in art and in teaching and learning, No Working Title (2009-2016) provoked dialogue / exchange between student artists, academics and curators, in which participants exchanged instructions for making artworks. Throughout eight consecutive years a total of just over two hundred and fifty students from a total of ten UK art schools exchanged instructions for making artworks and met to discuss their findings. With thanks to Camden Arts Centre and Tate for hosting events.

Tate Research Centre selected No Working Title as one of three projects to produce a film exploring practice as research. Screened as part of You Are Welcome, Tate Exchange.

http://www.noworkingtitle.co.uk/

https://www.tate.org.uk/research/research-centres/tate-research-centre-learning/practice-as-research

https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/tate-exchange/workshop/you-are-welcome

Exhibition / events programme comprising 26 artist / lecturers, including Overtime: alternative curriculum for HE art students.

https://www.tintypegallery.com/exhibitions/work-work/

Inventory of Behaviours

This multi-platform project comprises an ongoing series of performance events and texts jointly conceived and co-authored by Jo Addison and Natasha Kidd. Arising from a curiosity about the habits of artists, The Inventory of Behaviours is comprised of multiple parts; through a collection of artists’ responses to a callout and the subsequent staged participatory events that bring their rituals and habits in to sharp focus, we propose that the ordinary behaviours of artists may have much to tell us about how art is made and learning is experienced. Following a pilot at and blip blip blip, Leeds, 2017, two subsequent participatory performances took place at Tate Exchange. In 2019 Tate commissioned the Inventory of Behaviours as part of Uniqlo Tate Lates, at which over 300 artist’s instructions were made available through film, sound and print to over 10,000 visitors, who were invited to put on one of 60 blue overalls and alongside others, enact instructions in Tate Tanks.

Instruction no 3. ‘Unroll approximately 4ft of bubble wrap on the floor, fashion a pillow, lie down and snooze’. Adam Gillam. Photograph: Raine Smith

Instructions: In advance, and during each event, artists were invited to describe their own creative activity in the form of an instruction. The subsequent and accumulating collection could be encountered in multiple formats – text, image and sound.

Enactment: Participants, who comprised large groups of invited students and members of the public, were invited to familiarise themselves with the range of artists’ behaviours by selecting instructions to enact alongside one another.

Video and photography: Enactments were recorded through still and moving image, and this material was used to aid discussion and illustrate the accompanying texts.

Seminar: Invited experts from a range of disciplines – amongst others, ethnography, physics, filmmaking, architecture, psychology, and neuroscience – played a key role in the way data was selected and relayed on site. Having observed events as they unfolded, and interviewed participants, findings were presented as the subject of closing debrief seminars. These were recorded in photography and transcripts, providing content for subsequent texts and events. Recurrent themes, such as Regulation, Resistance, Readiness provided the focus for seminars that considered whether behaviours like crying, sleeping, staring at the wall or sorting things are strategies, conscious or not, that are integral to creativity.

Instruction no 32. ‘Sort things; colon, by width, by height, by colour, by type, by any other arbitrary system’ Natasha Kidd. Photograph: © 2019 Tate

The methodology incorporates teaching and learning strategies from our experience in gallery and higher education contexts. By siting the events in the museum context, where art is most commonly encountered as the product of creative enquiry, this research seeks to make public the types of activity that have shaped that product – the types of activity that constitute process in the broadest sense.

The various sites of the events are carefully prepared in order to situate participants within the space in a range of different ways and invite them to take part in the research both actively, through dialogue and enactment, and passively, through observation and listening. These events are the first to systematically document and analyse through performance the rituals, traits and habits that define the production of artists’ work in the physical, digital and psychological realm of the studio.

With thanks to all of the artists who have contributed behaviours; to individuals who have performed  as students, or as members of the public; and visiting practitioners and academics: Adesola Akinleye, Choreographer Writer; Dr Claire Maklouf Carter, Artist; Dr Michelle Williams Gamaker, Artist; Benji Jeffrey, Artist; Kelly Large, Artist, Dr Eleanor Morgan, Artist Writer; Curator; Harold Offeh, Artist; Dr Ed Roberts, Neuroscientist, Professor Sasha Roseneil, Professor James Saunders, Composer; Nicola Sim, Ethnographer; Social Scientist; Raine Smith, Photographer; Trevor H. Smith, Artist Writer.

Guest artist and speaker Harold Offeh is invited by participants in blue overalls to be challenged over his superiority as a red-suited ‘expert’.

Special thanks to Elly Rutherford, Artist; Will Kendrick, Artist; Jennifer Cooper, Artist and Joseph Doubtfire, Artist; who facilitated all of the above events.

Instruction no 8. ‘Real Life & How to live it: The Studio. Play the 3 chords G, C and D in any order at any tempo in any style on any musical instrument over and over’. Ross Sinclair. Photograph: Raine Smith

Instruction no 63. ‘On a cold sunny day, make a hot water bottle and get into bed fully clothed. Set the alarm on your phone for 22 minutes and see if you can go to sleep’. Lucy Clout. Photograph: Raine Smith

Instruction no 62. ‘Be both in and out’. Melanie Stidolph. Photograph: Raine Smith

Instruction no 1. ‘Cry’. Jo Addison. Photograph: Raine Smith

Supported by Freelands Foundation; Tate; Kingston University, Bath Spa University.