The Ethics of Encounter Research Workshop

Feminism, Capital, Biopolitics: Notes on Ethics and Post-Representational Art
The paper argues that although questions of ethics and art in globalisation are more likely to be discussed in connection with art's new 'bad boys', the rise of biopolitical art raises particular issues for feminist analysis. Here the designation 'biopolitical art' refers to art that is executed in the actual field of social relations, or better socio-economic relations. In other words, biopolitical art is directly located within the field of power relations that shape both the choices of the artist and those subjects who are typically addressed as 'collaborators' as 'real life' choices. Biopolitical art claims therefore a departure from the politics of representation that defined feminist interventions in art during the heyday of postmodernism. But executing art as life does not necessarily mean realising art as better/more decent/more emancipated life; rather, it may mean that the artist places herself and those she necessarily interacts with into contexts that may make apparent the reification of human relations under the ubiquitous principle of exchange. The paper looks at works by two women artists from diverse backgrounds, Tanja Ostojic from Eastern Europe and Andrea Fraser from the US, where gender is deployed in a variety of ways to highlight specific relations of power, ranging from access to geographies (read: economies) of privilege to a critique of artistic labour as such. The paper is not so much concerned with what ethical issues arise in the context of these works but with how ethical concerns interact with such works' articulation as a politics.
Biography
Angela Dimitrakaki is Lecturer in Contemporary Art History at the University of Edinburgh. She is currently completing the book Gender, Art/Work and the Global Imperative: A Materialist Feminist Critique (Manchester University Press) while involved in editing two volumes: one on feminism's impact on curating and another on media art and feminism from Eastern Europe. She is a member of the Leverhulme research network 'Transnational Perspectives on Women's Art, Feminism and Curating' and Corresponding Editor of the journal HM: Research in Critical Marxist Theory. She has written for journals such as Third Text and The Oxford Art Journaland her chapter 'The Spectacle and Its Others: Labour, Conflict and Art in the Age of Global Capital' will appear in Jonathan Harris, ed, Globalization and Contemporary Art, Wiley-Blackwell 2011. She joined the research group Global Visual Cultures at the University of Barcelona in 2011.

Becoming Communities: Civic Society and the Politics of Contemporary Art Practices
What happens when art practices co-opt communities and individuals into the process of making art?

Taking this question as a starting point, the following talk examines a number of separate but nonetheless related issues. Firstly, what forms of critical analysis do we have to address the success or otherwise of so-called socially engaged or collaborative practices?

This question may seem initially confined to contemporary debates about aesthetics but it finds considerable further purchase in discussions about the role of neo-liberal policies in the formation of notions such as communalism, inclusivity, consensus and social cohesion. The myth of these latter ideals is that they create a community of equals — a becoming community, so to speak — upon which a platform for rational debate is built and claims to equality can be heard and taken into account. What these notions and ambitions continue to mask is the precariousness of such voices and how forms of moral communalism can abnegate and suspend debate in the name of depoliticized forms of consensus.

The question that will be addressed throughout this talk is thereafter relatively straightforward: do collaborative practices originate in the increasingly ascendant patterns and policies that underwrite the communitarian, civic ethic of neo-liberal politics (nowhere more so than in the ascendant policies of the so-called ‘Big Society); or can they, conversely, question precisely such an ascendancy and thereafter give rise to a meaningful debate about inclusion and access and the emancipatory potential of the encounter between artists and communities?

Biography
Anthony Downey sits on the editorial board of Third Text and is the Programme Director of the M.A. course in Contemporary Art at Sotheby’s Institute of Art, London. Recent and upcoming publications include “An Ethics of Engagement: Collaborative Art Practices and the Return of the Ethnographer”, in Third Text, issue 100, 2009, pp. 593-603; “Camps, or, the precarious logic of late modernity”, Fillip 14, 2010; “The Lives of Others’: Artur Zmijewski’s ‘Repetition’ and the Aesthetics of Surveillance”, in Conspiracy Dwellings: Surveillance in Contemporary Art, ed. by Outi Remes and Pam Skelton, Cambridge Scholars Press, 2010; “The Burden of Representation: Contemporary Visual Arts in the Middle East”, in ‘Representing Islam: Comparative Perspectives’, Cambridge Scholars Press (forthcoming, 2010); “Zones of Indistinction: Giorgio Agamben’s Bare Life and the Ethics of Aesthetics,” Third Text, issue 97, 2009; “Thresholds of a Coming Community: Photography and Human Rights”, Aperture , issue 194, spring 2009); “At the Limits of the Image: Representations of Torture in Popular Culture”, Brumaria, 10 (Spring 2009); The Production of Cultural Knowledge in the Middle East”, in Art and Patronage in the Near and Middle East (Thames and Hudson, 2010). He is currently researching a book on ethics, aesthetics and politics and establishing a research forum on visual culture in the Middle East and North Africa.

‘Mutirão’ or the Importance of a New Extended Solidarity
This paper draws upon empirical research undertaken within a small community in Brazil. It examines the reclaiming of tools from artistic practice for sustainable development projects.

In 1993 the Brazilian government decided to eradicate Chagas disease in Pernambuco’s State, a disease transmitted to humans by an insect that nests in the local rammed earth houses. With the eviction of the insect, began the history of Vila União (Union Village). Though the government provided the materials, the construction of the new buildings was left to the local population. The women organised themselves into mutirão (collectives) and worked together to build 25 family houses. Since then, the community has grown and the mutirão continues to function in terms of agricultural work and in brick making. However, clean water has not yet arrived, subsistence agriculture is still their main resource, the land remains in the hands of a couple of colonels and education is difficult to access. Under these circumstances several local, national and international organisations have coordinated an ambitious project involving a group of local and foreign artists, filmmakers, NGO workers and residents. In the Summer of 2011 they will come together to renovate the now 72 homes in Vila União, painting and plastering the buildings before going on tp collectively create a visual identity for the village which celebrates the community’s singularity.

The Portuguese Intercultural Movement IDENTIDADES has been working with the region of Conceição das Crioulas, where the community is based, since 2003, and on this project since 2009. Despite the fact that the movement is mainly composed of visual artists, art is never directly mentioned. Vila União Project does not have the support of art institutions; it is not an artwork of an individual or collective, it is not even an art project. Nonetheless we claim to be applying knowledge gained through art practice and believe we will harvest new knowledge for our individual practices. Why then is Vila União Project still relevant for artistic discourse? Why is it not mere politics and social practice? Does positioning such activity within contemporary art discourse jeopardize not only its political effects but also its ethical stance? How does the project sit within the intricate relations between politics and aesthetics? What is its potential for instituting and fostering democracy?

Biography

Born - Vila Real – Portugal 1977.

Currently researching for an MPhil/PhD in art practice at Goldsmiths University of London (since 2009). MFA at the Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam, The Netherlands, 2003. Degree in Sculpture from the Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Porto, Portugal 2001.

Member of several national and international art collectives, such as ZOiNA, Caldeira 213, ROOM, CLANITICA, Ateliers Mentol, Switch Metaphors, Identidades, Palindromes and AC.

Manages the blog and exhibition project All My Independent Women on art and gender and the critical blog Porto Público on participation, public space and politics.

“Her work, sometimes strikingly visible, sometimes no more than a rumor, is concerned with the social constructions that we make and reassert every day in the attempt to question and even undermine these constructions, whether these constructions are gender related, about European Identity or even the privatization of the public sphere and the notion of citizenship. The viewer, participant or passer-by is trapped by the anodyne visuals and forms of her work, which usually disguise less innocent content, and pushed to reconsider his values and pre-conceptions with what is presented by her work.”

This statement, written many years ago by my friend Suzanne van Rossenberg, is still the best rendering of my practice.

The Discipline of Art Praxis
This paper is an exploratory draft for a book I am writing called 'This is not Art: Activism and other not art', about contemporary art practice within neoliberalism. This paper is on the 'disciplinarity' of art practice. It will inform the penultimate chapter of a book. In this chapter I attempt to define the discipline of art practice as a distinct discipline with its own mores, knowledge base, language, methodologies and assumptions, especially understanding the assumptions about what counts as knowledge or as valid art practice.

With Foucault in mind and other critiques of disciplinarity, I argue that art practice is comparable with any other academic discipline, be it philosophy, art history, archaeology or anthropology or any other discipline of 'praxis', to coin a phrase, like education or activism. But it is also distinct from these. Art practice is something else and it is self-defining and self-regulating, even when we don't recognise that this happens. Both academic and praxis disciplines share methods of self-legitimating and self-regulating. Perceived crises within a discipline from time to time are ways of consciously thinking about this process of regulation and legitimation.

I will argue that the value of art must be understood as based, not on outside measurements derived from the market (econometrics like artnet) or the state (funding outcomes), but instead on endogenous, inside, art-practice-specific values: 'Value', rather than measure, as the idea of measurement or efficacy speaks of governmentality and self-instrumentalisation. This paper signals the distinctiveness of art practice from what activists and educationalists do but also from art history (what art historians do) and from aesthetics (what philosophers do). The paper argues that by viewing art this way, as a unique and important knowledge producing discipline, we may be able to value what art does, what contemporary art practice produces and offers society, and wider culture.

Biography
I am currently writing a book to be published by IB Tauris later this year called 'This is not art: activism and other not art', which explores the ethics, aesthetics and politics of contemporary art practice. In some respects, the book is a continuation of, and corrective to, my PhD thesis (2008 Oxford Brookes) 'Art as a Democratic Act: the interplay of content and context, London 2000-2006'. It specifically addresses the effects of neoliberalism on the contemporary artworld. I am currently AHRC Creative Fellow with the Museum of Archaeology & Anthropology, University of Cambridge until 2014. I engage with the theory and philosophy of art as an artist with a philosophy and art history training. My undergraduate studies combined philosophy, history and philosophy of science, art history and art practice. I graduated with Distinction in Painting in 1990 from Victoria College, Melbourne, Australia. From 1992-94, I studied at Birkbeck College for my Master's in Gender, Society, Culture. Since then I have flirted with the commercial art world and promptly turned my back on it; I have participated in exhibitions in the UK and various parts of the globe, some of which have been of national significance apparently; I have curated and organised events since 1997 primarily under the auspices of terra incognita arts organisation. At terra incognita, we are currently working on a life-long collaborative project that aims at making connections across theory and practice; making, doing and thinking; arts and science; artists and non-artists; human and non-human; urban and rural; practical conservation and ecology; called 'the field', located in a 13 acre woodland near Stansted airport.

Mapping Ethics in Public Art
Following and building upon, Mapping the Future: Public Art in Scotland, three public seminars organised by PAR+RS, Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design, and Creative Scotland, October 2010, this joint proposal seeks to disseminate some of the insights from those events in respect of salient ethical aspects of public art practice. This is in advance of a more detailed report and publication of findings, which might constructively draw upon the debates to be generated by the Stills event.

This paper focuses on one prominent theme offered to the Mapping discussions by Dutch artist Jeanne Van Heeswjik. For Van Heeswjik a productive ethics can emerge from that form of participatory art practice which facilitates ‘temporary fields of intervention’ which in turn foster the ‘intensification of trivialities’. By these means, the citizen experiences a constructive encounter with their own locale, one which lingers in lore if not in artefact: the encounter might be termed ethical by Van Heeswjik as she encourages the participant to ‘act up’ in their environment and to take ownership of the locale for the duration of the project and beyond.

Questions which emerged from discussion of Van Heeswijk’s practice, especially, and also from the presented work of Graham Fagen and Tracy Mackenna & Edwin Janssen, relate expressly to the following suggested inquiries:
• What is the role of aesthetics in relation to the ethical and the political?
• Should the artist be subject to the same ethical codes and responsibilities as practitioners from other disciplines?
• Is the viewer’s relationship with an artwork ethically different from our other encounters with objects, knowledge, individuals and communities?

With contextualisation by way of reference to Ranciere’s observations on the paradox of political art, and David Schwartz’s defence of art as dress-rehearsal for democratic politics, the paper speculates in conclusion on the ways in which practices explored at Mapping the Future: Public Art in Scotland might offer models for thinking further about how to circumvent Ranciere’s identified risk of critical art practice promulgating consensus by hubris or by accident.

Biographies
Dr Ken Neil is an academic, writer and Head of the Forum for Critical Inquiry at The Glasgow School of Art. He studied painting and the history and philosophy of art at Edinburgh University as an undergraduate, before achieving an MFA in Painting from Edinburgh College of Art (ECA) in 1995. He completed a PhD in art theory in 2003, while teaching Humanities and History of Art at ECA and the Universities of Edinburgh and Glasgow. From 1999 he was lecturer in Contextual and Critical Studies at Gray's School of Art, taking on the Headship of Fine Art and Fine Art Critical Studies in 2002. In 2005 he led a new MFA in Critical Social Art Practice for Gray's before being appointed Head of Historical and Critical Studies at The Glasgow School of Art in 2006.

His research interests cover three broad territories: theories and philosophies of the real; issues of tradition and access in contemporary art education; and, contemporary art practices with an emphasis on theories of the public domain. Recent publications and conferences along these lines include: ‘The Rules of Collective Art’, AAH Conference Session, March 2010; 'Accessing and Decoding Communities of Cultural Capital', paper at 'Lifelong Learning Revisited', Centre for Research in Lifelong Learning, University of Stirling, June 2009; 'Realism, Reification, Pragmatism', paper at 'Visualising the Everyday', School of American Studies, University of Nottingham, September, 2008; 'Telling Stories: the films of Duncan Campbell', MAP, Edinburgh: MAP Magazine/SAC, Issue 15, Summer 2008; 'Surface Depth: The Photorealism of Fred Schley', exhibition catalogue; An Tuireann, Skye, March, 2006; 'Steven Duval: Courting the Public' in Aberdeen: A Social Laboratory, Monika Vykoukal (ed.), Aberdeen: Peacock Visual Arts/SAC, 2006; 'Art of the Public' in MAP, Edinburgh: MAP Magazine/SAC, Issue 4, Spring 2006; 'Double Trauma: Mute Art of Terror' in Art In The Age of Terrorism, Graham Coulter-Smith and Maurice Owen (eds.), London: Paul Holberton International, 2005; 'Repeat, Entity, Ground: Visual Art Practice as Critical Differentiation' in Thinking Through Art: Reflections on Art as Research, Katy MacLeod and Lin Holdridge (eds.), New York: Routledge, 2005; 'Institutionalised Fine Art Research As Stigmatised Knowledge' in Journal of Visual Art Practice Online, NAFAE, 2005.

Professor Tracy Mackenna is Chair of Contemporary Art Practice at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design (DJCAD), where her roles have included Head of the School of Fine Art, Associate Dean of Art & Media and Acting Dean (2010). She regularly speaks and writes on contemporary art and on art in higher education. Committed to the development of the arts through active participation, contributions through advisory roles and board memberships include; Glasgow Sculpture Studios (a Founding Director), Hospitalfield Arts Programme Strategy Group, Pier Arts Centre’s feasibility study into new academic partnerships in the Orkney Islands, MAP magazine, Botanic Garden Dundee, Scottish Sculpture Workshop, DCA Dundee Contemporary Arts, Art Connexion France, CCA Centre for Contemporary Arts, Glasgow, Pépinières Européennes pour Jeunes Artistes, Paris & London; and to policy as a member of the Reference Group, National Policy for Public Art, Scottish Arts Council.

Since 1997 she has worked collaboratively with Edwin Janssen. Their art practice is a discursive site for production, social engagement, participation and reflection. Central to exhibition projects are environments that integrate art making, presentation, exchange, education and reflection. Research explores the mediation of history and personal archives, construction of identities, museum culture and the role of creative writing in visual practice. Activities take the form of exhibition projects, exhibitions, publications, public commissions, curation and writing. Over the last decade major projects and publications have been commissioned by, amongst others, P3 Art and Environment, Tokyo, Stedelijk Museum Schiedam, the Netherlands, Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Ikon Gallery Birmingham, Migros Museum, Zürich. Public commissions include The Merchant’s House Garden, Kirkcaldy, I put my name on everything, The Tron Theatre, Glasgow and a major commission for The Scottish Office, Edinburgh.

Elusive Practices: A consideration of the ethical and museological dilemmas facing artists and curators in the commissioning process of Learning-based projects

 This proposal emerges out of the data and findings of a major three-year research project ‘Tate Encounters: Britishness and Visual Culture’ (www.tateencounters.org) which was funded by the AHRC’s strategic programme ‘Diasporas, Migration and Identities’ and responds to three specific questions in the Call for papers:

• What are the implications of this ethical turn for the processes of reception and interpretation?
• What is the role of aesthetics in relation to the ethical and the political?
• Can ‘good’, ethically sound, artistic practices be subjected to critique and, if so, what methodologies and frameworks should be employed?

Drawing on issues raised by artists who participated in Tate Encounters, with specific reference to Faisal Abdu’Allah and Raimi Gbadamosi who have worked on educational projects for young people at Tate Britain, the paper will consider how relationships are approached, negotiated and managed between artists and young people in relation to issues of ethical engagement which emerge around concepts of ownership, interpretation and display, both during the life of the project and after its formal period of engagement has concluded. To what extent are young people’s understandings of their participation secured in the production and reception of ‘collaborative’ work? As many learning-based projects are often funded externally, through Corporate Social Responsibility budgets of companies or educational trusts focused on cultural diversity, social inclusion and cultural access agendas, how are such learning projects designed to ensure and protect the integrity of the artist’s aesthetic, the creative license of young people and the social objectives of funders? Finally, the paper will consider the ambiguous status of the final artworks within the gallery and museum setting and the historical position of the latter in rejecting such artworks as legitimate artefacts due to their ‘instrumental’ origin.

Biographies
Victoria Walsh is Head of Adult Programmes at Tate Britain and her work spans both the Research and Learning departments. Her research work at Tate includes her role as Co-investigator on a major AHRC collaborative project 'Tate Encounters: Britishness and Visual Culture' (www.tateencounters.org) and also 'Art School Educated: Curriculum Development and Institutional Change in UK Art Schools 1960-2000’ funded by the Leverhulme Trust. She is co-supervisor on AHRC collaborative doctorates looking at the Vision, Patronage and Building of Tate Modern and the agency of visitor information in the museum’s audience development practices. Previously, she worked as a freelance curator, project manager and research consultant in the fields of visual arts and architecture including co-ordinating the competition to select an architect for Tate Modern, relaunching the Fourth Plinth Project in Trafalgar Square for the Mayor's Cultural Office, and project managing the exhibition 'Open Systems: Rethinking art since 1970'. She holds an MA in Art History (Courtauld), in Curating (RCA 1995) and a doctorate on the artist Whistler (Oxford Bookes 1996) and has published on post-war British artists Nigel Henderson, Francis Bacon, Gilbert & George and architects Alison and Peter Smithson.
Mark Miller is Curator of Youth Programmes at Tate Britain and responsible for creating strategies, programmes, projects and events which enable a wider range of young people (13 -25yrs) to access, interact and contribute to British culture through contemporary art practice. At Tate Britain he has organized projects such as Portfolio Advice Day, Enslaved, I-Dent fashion projects with Arts Aim Higher and University for the Arts London, as well as Stolen Sanity, working with the artist Faisal Abdu’ Allah and Tate Shift with artist Raimi Gbadamosi. He is currently working with artists Eleni Zagkali, Kimathi Donkor and Raksha Patel as part of the ‘Seeing Through Project’. The Youth Programme displays at Tate Britain aim to reveal the process, value and questions related to collaborative art practice and the role of art as a catalyst for social, cultural, and political engagement. Having graduated with an MA from Central Saint Martin, Miller continues to work as a practicing artist combining music and visual arts to explore the interconnecting themes of traditional Jamaican narratives and their parallels to urban British culture.

The Ethics of Encounter & The Educational Turn
This paper will address The Ethics of Encounter through an examination of ‘the educational turn’ in contemporary arts practice. The term, coined by Irit Rogoff in 2006, has been used to describe a range of artistic practices, proposals and events, from Manifesta 6 and Documenta 12, to Copenhagen Free University and the Serpentine Gallery’s The Edgware Road Project: The Centre for Possible Studies.

However, how effectively do these initiatives respond to a desire to formulate our own questions ‘as opposed to simply answering those that are posed to [us] in the name of an open and participatory democratic process’ and how would we – artists and participants – know the difference?

The risk is that ‘the educational turn’ has become a stylistic device through which pedagogic practices are aestheticised. Given the politicisation of the current education debate, a rigorous evaluation of these practices has become ever more urgent. If artists and curators are to avoid the accusation of making empty gestures or simply engaging in ‘critique-lite’, what frameworks might be employed to evaluate the success or failure of these activities, and who is best placed to apply them?

The current models of evaluation, particularly within museums and galleries, tend to follow the pattern of question and answer between the participant and the institution (where the institution poses the question). This paper argues instead for a rigorous self-reflection not on the part of the institution or the participant (as is traditionally the case), but rather by the artist engaged in the role of ‘facilitator’. Often excused from this admittedly difficult process by an unquestioning equation of the pedagogical with the ethical, the artist can operate according to vague notions about ‘emancipatory’ pedagogy without elaborating effective frameworks for describing and evaluating their activities.

This paper will indicate where these frameworks for self-reflection might be found and how they can be elaborated.

Biography
Michaela Ross is an artist and lecturer currently working towards a PHD at Chelsea College of Art and Design, University of the Arts London. In 2005 she was awarded an Arts and Humanities Research Council studentship to research the relationship between the artist and the institution, and contemporary artists’ preoccupation with education as both a theme and a site for practice.

She has collaborated with museums and galleries including Tate, the Serpentine and Nottingham Contemporary and has worked on international projects as part of Critical Practice, a cluster of artists, academics and researchers based at the University of the Arts London.

On Redundancy: The Ethics and Ontology of Post-Mimetic Art

Recent years have seen the gap close between art and the mere real thing: art no longer merely resembles or represents other human activities and contrivances -- from investigative journalism and opinion polling to gardening, from libraries to community work and house painting outfits -- it has in many cases become one with them. Not merely symbolically, but effectively, even while retaining a self-understanding as art. This raises a host of ethical issues to be sure, but in order to frame those ethical questions pertinently, it is perhaps first necessary to address an underlying ontological question -- regarding the ontologies of these new forms of practices which enjoy a "double ontological status", being at once whatever they are, and propositions -- that is, artistic propositions -- of the same thing. They are fundamentally "redundant" in Deleuze and Guattari's sense of that term. Ontologically redundant. Some theorists -- I'm thinking of literary theorist Thomas Pavel -- have tried to address the logical paradoxes of these issues in fiction and non-fiction by introducing the concept of overlapping ontological landscapes. This may be a useful approach; at any event, the ethics of artists and viewers' engagement with post-mimetic art practices cannot be addressed in any meaningful way without first clarifying the ontological paradox in which art now finds itself -- an ontological fate it seems to share with no other walk of human endeavour.

Biography
Stephen Wright is a Paris-based art writer and professor of art theory and history at the European School of Visual Arts. He has curated The Future of the Reciprocal Readymade (Apexart, New York), In Absentia (Passerelle, Brest), Rumour as Media (Aksanat, Istanbul) and Dataesthetics (WHW, Zagreb), and is currently preparing Withdrawal: The Performative Document as part of a series of exhibitions examining art practices with low coefficients of artistic visibility, which raise the prospect of art without artworks, authorship or spectatorship. In 2010, he co-organized the weekly discussion platform www.plausibleartworlds.org, focusing on art “worlds” or art-sustaining environments substantively different than the mainstream (often unpluralized) variant. He is currently on the editorial advisory committee of the journal Third Text. A selection of his writings in English may be found on the collective blog n.e.w.s. http://northeastwestsouth.net/

Dr Dominic Paterson works at the University of Glasgow where he teaches 20th and 21st century art and theory. He wrote his doctoral thesis on the place of aesthetics in the work of French philosopher Michel Foucault, and his research interests include critical theory as well as modern and contemporary art. Essays are forthcoming on Lucy Gunning, Jimmy Robert, Yvonne Rainer and Stina Wirfelt. He is a regular contributor to MAP magazine as a writer and critic, most recently addressing the work of Mexican artist Martin Soto Climent and Christine Borland's project 'Cast From Nature' for Glasgow Sculpture Studios.

Kirsten Lloyd is Associate Curator at Stills, Edinburgh, where she is currently curating a three-year programme of exhibitions, research workshops, public lectures and residencies entitled Social Documents, intended to examine artists’ mediation of social, political and economic realities. The exhibition The Ethics of Encounter launched the project in 2010 with an interrogation of the complex interfaces which have emerged between aesthetics, politics and ethics in art’s most recent ‘social turn’. This will be followed in 2011 with an examination of the mapping of the operations and effects of globalisation through lens-based documentary modes and then, in 2012, with a programme dedicated to exploring how contemporary artists address the subject of labour (2012/13). Previous projects have included Nicky Bird’s Beneath the Surface/Hidden Place (2006-10), charting the effects of economic change and regeneration in Scotland and the Martha Rosler Library with Anton Vidokle (2008). Her interest in the mediation of politically engaged contemporary art led her to co-organise a conference at The National Galleries of Scotland entitled ‘Radical Complicities: Curating Art in the 21st Century’ (2010) with Dr Angela Dimitrakaki, involving leading international and Scottish curators. She has also presented papers on the theme, including ‘Sleeping Cells and Double Agents: Curatorial Tactics within and beyond the Institution’ and ‘Mediating Social Documents’ at The University of Edinburgh and as an invited participant at the Curating Now symposium in Detroit hosted by ArtServe Michigan and The Kresge Foundation (both 2010). Lloyd is also an AHRC-funded PhD candidate in the History of Art Department at the University of Edinburgh. Her doctoral research examines the turn towards documentary modes in contemporary art, linking it to the demand for the circulation of social knowledge and the increasingly urgent questions of representation and realism in the 21st century.

Harry Weeks (b. 1986) is a PhD student in History of Art at the University of Edinburgh. His current PhD research project is entitled 'Activism, Acvtivity, Activation: Transformations of community in contemporary art' and examines the relaionship between post-communist politics and contemporary community-engaged art practice. He graduated from the University of Edinburgh in 2008 and completed an MSc by research in 2009 entitled 'Re-cognising the post-Soviet condition: contemporary art in the Baltic States'. A revised version of this paper was published in March 2010 in 'Studies in Eastern European Cinema'. In 2009 he curated an exhibition of Scottish video art called 'You and me and the TV makes 3' as part of the Edinburgh Annuale and in 2010 wrote the catalogue essay for the 'What Drives Baltic?' exhibition in Riga, Latvia. He is currently curating the 'Ethics, Nationalism and the Theatrics of Documentation' Film Lounge programme at Stills Gallery, Edinburgh and is co-convener of the 'Ethics of Encounter' workshop, to be held at Stills in March 2011.