The Council Estate as Artistic Medium and Practice: Doing Good or Do Gooders?
May 28, 11am-12.30pm
Canavan's Pool Club
188 Rye Lane, Peckham, London, SE15 4NF
Speakers: Barby Asante, The Drawing Shed, Jordan McKenzie
What motivates artists to work on estates? Many times when working in ways that may be termed ‘socially engaged’ the artist has to work in a double register, making work that in meaningful ways benefits residents of the estate but also fulfils the demands of making, showing and producing ‘contemporary art’. How do artists negotiate this? Has ‘socially engaged practice’ managed to critique the art market or been co-opted by it? By working with these communities are artists just doing ‘social work on the cheap’? The panel will discuss the complexities of working in these ways in regard to their own work as practitioners and the wider territory of social engaged practitioners working in this area of arts production.
BARBY ASANTE / Artist, Curator, Educator
Barby is interested in creating works that stimulate dialogue around the cross-cultural and multicultural and how we view and frame these questions in contemporary Britain, often using familiar or popular culture triggers as a means to begin the dialogue. Barby shifts freely between roles as artist, curator, educator, facilitator and other roles exploring and emphasizing the importance of the conversational and social aspects of creative and artistic practice. Exhibitions include Funk Chorus (South London Gallery, 2006); Barby's Karaoke (Studio Voltaire, 2009), Bamboo Memories (Picture This, 2009). More recently she has turned her focus on working with young people exploring how their voices are heard in society. Works include the Noise Summit commissioned by SLG, working with school-aged children who live on an estate in South London.
SALLY LABERN & BOBBY LLOYD / Artists: The Drawing Shed
Visual artists Labern and Lloyd collaborate on projects and interventions in the ‘public’ realm, using diverse media and exploring preoccupations with the hidden, resilience and resistance. As lead artists of the drawing shed, they bring other artists and processes into the frame to develop and expand on these concerns. Their mobile studios act as artist-led project resource for collaborations and form central platforms for the work which bridges in and out of durational projects on the shed’s east London estates’ base. Both artists have worked and exhibited independently for over two decades in galleries, site specific and public settings in the UK and internationally.
JORDAN McKENZIE / Artist and Curator
McKenzie is a visual performance artist whose performances, installations, drawings and video works have been exhibited both nationally and internationally. For two years he co-curated LUPA (Lock Up Performance Art) from a disused garage on the council estate that he lives on in East London. In 2014 he was awarded a Live Art Development Agency DIY award to hold a summit meeting focusing on art and social practice for an invited group of artists and cultural theorists that was held in his flat. He lectures at Camberwell College of Art (UAL).