- Convenors:
-
Emilie Flower
(University of York)
Zihan Karim (Institute of Fine Arts)
Shohrab Jahan (Institute of Fine Arts, Chittagong)
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- Format:
- Roundtable
Short Abstract:
A roundtable about art, civic space and political imagination with moving image and installation artists and researchers, Emilie Flower, Shohrab Jahan and Zihan Karim presenting a series of multimodal artworks made apart and alongside one another in Bangladesh and England over the past 5 years.
Long Abstract:
Artworks rarely produce measurable results, but their role in keeping deliberative space open is assumed to be critical for sustaining democratic freedoms and civic space (Mouffe, 2008; Kester, 2010; Nussbaum, 2010). In the recent possibilist turn, art is positioned as having a central role in generating the situated and plural political imaginations that will enable sustainable futures and solidarities to be formed (Duncombe and Harrabye, 2021; Glaveanu 2021). Examples of how these symbiotic relationships will be produced, and what they will look like when they occur are less well described. Given the multimodal forms social art takes - appearing and disappearing within online and offline conversations and dispersed across different locations over extended periods - these forms are hard to see or account for, with implications for anthropologists entangled in the process of documentation and 'sense' making.
In this roundtable moving image and installation artists and researchers, Emilie Flower (University of York/ Pica studios), Shohrab Jahan (Chittagong Institute of Fine Arts/ Jog Art Space) and Zihan Karim (Chittagong Institute of Fine Arts/ Jog Art Space) will discuss a series of experimental projects and artworks made apart and alongside one another over the past 5 years. When considered together, they evidence how artists generate political imagination, unsettle prevalent logics and open space. The conversation will begin with a film-based presentation from each artist followed by a conversation referencing a series of artworks devised within research at Goldsmiths University and the Centre for Applied Human Rights at the University of York (www.developmentalternatives.net).