In 2005, three artists, Stephan Dillemuth, and Jakob Jakobsen, wrote There Is No Alternative: The Future is Self-Organised (TINA1). They went on to issue a second call in 2012 with the same title that focused on reclaiming self-organisation from what they saw as several forms of appropriation (TINA2).
Having recently launched Artists’ Mutual Aid UK, I am reposting my article from this summer written for Freedom Press.
Please feel free to join Artists’ Mutual Aid UK here and start help shape what the movement might look like and what it could become.
Also, have a look at a recent talk I gave on mutual aid for artists and arts workers for the Bristol Artist-Led Forum here.
Perhaps, it’s time for artists to learn from the COVID-19 Mutual Aid groups that are self-organising and self-seeding across the UK and the globe? Imagine if artists set up local Artists’ Mutual Aid groups to support each other through these difficult times; to begin setting out ways of speaking to power with coherent voices; to start using art to demand radical changes to the way we work and live together.
This is a guest blog by curator and researcher Ghazaleh Zogheib. It’s a review of Gil Mualem-Doron’s exhibition Cry, the Beloved Country.
Dr. Gil Mualem-Doron (1970) is an Arab-Jewish artist, born and based in the UK. His work is research-based, often collaborative and focuses on issues such as identity politics, nationalism, placemaking and histories of place, social justice, and transcultural aesthetics.
This is a revised version of Duty Now for the Future – an article commissioned by Collecteurs NY to help launch its SUBSTANCE 100 initiative . The original article was written before the COVID-19 pandemic swept through the UK , Europe and the USA. Duty Now for the Future 2.0 is a call for everyone in the art world to finally wake up to our responsibilities in a world there can be no going back to the crass inequity of our lives before Corona virus.
I presented this paper at Art and the Urban symposium at Senate House last week. It reflects some of my PhD research.
Screenshot from ‘Birdhouse in Your Soul’ (Official video) by They Might Be Giants.
Fifty years ago, Henri Lefebvre wrote that ‘Everyday life, the social territory and place of controlled consumption, of terror enforced passivity, is established and programmed … [so that] as a social territory it is easily identified, and under analysis it reveals its latent irrationality beneath an apparent rationality, incoherence beneath an ideology of coherence, and sub-systems, or disconnected territories linked together only by speech’ (1968).… READ MORE
I was invited to participate in the final day of Imagined Biennales which was produced by the Winchester School of Art at Tate Exchange on 13th May 2018. I wrote SPEAR THISTLE a non-manifesto for an Anti-Biennial. This is the transcript of my piece which I performed as a prose poem at the event.… READ MORE
I was kindly asked to talk alongside Labour MP Laura Pidcock, Jessie Jo Jacobs (Policy and Campaigns Officer, Northern TUC) and Ramona McCartney (National Officer for the People’s Assembly) at the People’s Assembly event, “In Place of Austerity”, in Newcastle on 20th January 2018. It was an incredibly inspiring day!… READ MORE
Cartoon courtesy of Southwark Notes
An amazing thing happened this week. The plans to redevelop Elephant and Castle shopping centre and the surrounding area by tax-avoiding, Tory-supporting property developer Delancey and London College of Communication/University of the Arts London where rejected (subject to confirmation on 30th January 2018) by Southwark Council’s planning committee.… READ MORE
I was invited to lecture at Winchester School of Art on 3rd November 2017 as part of their Talking Heads series. This is a transcript of my lecture along with a link to my lecture slides (with notes) and a link to an edited recording of my discussion with Nick Stewart afterwards. … READ MORE
