This forum will explore the potential for publically-sited art to meaningfully engage with social issues beyond the art world. If one accepts that art can and should be marshalled towards social justice, then what are the specific artistic competencies that are best deployed towards these ends? What have been some of the successes and failures of socially and politically charged art in the public realm? And can art enact social change and still be good art?
About the artist/s:
Speakers
Deborah Kelly is a Sydney-based artist whose works have been shown in streets, skies and galleries around Australia, and notably in the Singapore and Venice Biennales. Her collaborative artwork with Tina Fiveash, Hey, hetero! has been shown in public sites from Sydney to Glasgow, and is taught in universities from Winnipeg to Hong Kong. She is a founding member of the art gang boat-people.org, who have been making public work around race, nation, borders and history since 2001. Kelly was commissioned by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney and produced a cross-media work considering the rise of religiosity in the public sphere. Her work won the 2009 Fishers Ghost Award, the 2009 Screengrab International New Media Art Award, and was shortlisted for the Sadlers Wells Global Dance Contest and the 2010 ReelDance Awards.
George Egerton-Warburton is a 2010 Next Wave Festival artist whose solo project The Chicken Stampede will be presented in the streets of Fitzroy and Collingwood. His work contains a lo-fi, low-brow, nervy aesthetic derivative of only the bad aspects of showmen such as Alexander McQueen, Italian Renaissance Architecture, Lanvin storefronts, Tadashi Kawamata and Barry McGee. It is informed by the emotional maturity of a twelve-year-old school-girl, with the conceptual backing of a crack-fuelled orgy between Dan Brown, Eckhart Tolle, Paulo Coehlo, and Kojonup’s Catholic priest.
Lucas Ihlein
is an artist who writes, performs, prints, blogs, and speaks. This year, he’s become obsessed with business philosophy, and is thinking of qualifying as a Marriage Celebrant.
Iain McIntyre is a Melbourne-based writer who has been involved in community radio, political activism and DIY publishing for more than 20 years. He produced the first volume of How To Make Trouble and Influence People, which gave rise to two sequels, in 1996. The best of these volumes along with hundreds of new listings and images, and 12 interviews with creative activists, was published by Breakdown Press in 2009. Since 2003 Iain has run Homebrew Press which has self-published three of his books (Revenge of the Troublemaker, Disturbing The Peace: Tales From Australia’s Rebel History and Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life: The AIDEX ’91 Story) and two of his pamphlets (UAWMF! and Lock Out The Landlords: Anti-Eviction Resistance, 1929-36). In 2006 Wakefield Press published a collection he edited entitled Tomorrow Is Today: Australia In The Psychedelic Era, 1966-70. Iain continues to contribute to various publications and provide radical dates in Australian history to Community Radio 3CR’s Seeds Of Dissent calendar. 2010 will see Verse Chorus Press release an expanded edition of his 2004 collection Wild About You: Tales From the Antipodean Rock Underground, 1963-68, co-written with Ian Marks.
