This evening of conversation with artist Katy Beinart, writer Lizzie Lloyd and curator Marianne Mulvey will consider their shared interests in socially engaged or participatory art projects.
The event accompanies a new publication developed by Beinart and Lloyd through a collaborative project called Acts of Transfer which also resulted in series of short films, an audio work, photographs, drawings, performances, and texts that document and reactivate a selection of artworks from the past that contain elements of social engagement or public participation.
They worked with a selection of artists to develop this work including: Matt Stokes, Warren and Mosley, Eelyn Lee, Young In Hong, Benjamin Owen, Harun Morrison, Gil Mualem-Doron, and a place of their own (Paula McCloskey and Sam Vardy).
The focus of the evening will be on the role of socially engaged artworks and projects. We will ask:
What is the afterlife of such projects? How do you meaningfully document socially engaged projects? How do you recreate the ‘feel’ of a moment in time to share with audiences who weren’t there? And how can returns, re-enactments, repetitions and retellings help understand the experience of socially engaged artworks for participants, artists, and audiences?
Acts of Transfer has been generously supported by Arts Council England, the Centre for Spatial, Environmental and Cultural Politics at the University of Brighton, Phoenix Art Space, Brighton Centre for Contemporary Art, SEAS, and Towner Gallery, and University of the West of England and the Social Art Library.
Dr Marianne Mulvey is Senior Lecturer and Programme Leader, Curating MA/MFA, University of West England. She has run courses for Tate and Photographers’ Gallery and taught at various HE Institutions nationally and internationally including The Royal College of Art and Westminster University. As a curator she works with contemporary artists on public programming and performance and is also experienced at collecting, preserving and exhibiting object and screen-based art practices. Marianne has curated Public Programmes for Tate Britain and Modern (2009-16); been a Trustee of Fierce Festival, Birmingham (2014-18); Acquisitions Coordinator for the Arts Council Collection, Hayward Gallery, Southbank Centre (2004-07). In 2016 Marianne received a Collaborative Doctoral Award between Tate and RCA, graduating with the thesis ‘Becoming Public(s): Practising the Public Programme in the Contemporary Art Institution’ in 2021.
Katy Beinart is an interdisciplinary artist whose artworks include installation, public art, film and performance. Using processes of participatory research and social practice to respond to the context and history of places and people, her work examines relationships between heritage, history and memory, culture and environment, performance and ritual, migration and home. She aims to reveal and question pasts by asking how these belong in the present circumstances of places, and how they might shape their futures. She is a Senior Lecturer in Architecture at University of Brighton and her PhD thesis, ‘Détour and Retour: Practices and poetics of salt as narratives of relation and re-generation in Brixton’, was completed in 2019 at University College London.
Lizzie Lloyd is a Bristol-based art writer and Senior Lecturer in Fine Art / Art and Writing at University of the West of England. She explores art writing that holds theory, practice, experimentation, and subjectivity in the balance. She has contributed to numerous magazines, books, and publications commissioned by Temple Bar Gallery and Studios, Workplace Gallery, Field Art Projects, New Art Projects, Foreground, and Exeter Phoenix among many others. She has writes regularly for Art Monthly and has previously contributed to artnet, Art Review, Journal of Contemporary Painting among other art magazines and journals. Her doctoral thesis ‘Art Writing and Subjectivity: Critical Association in Art Historical Practice’ was completed in 2019 at University of Bristol.
