Calendars:Networked Media Calendar/Networked Media Calendar/23-09-2016 -Event 2

MEiA: PUBLIC TALK: Making Things Public” with MEL JORDAN 19:00 - 21:00

The Master Education in Arts cordially invites you to the lecture series: “Making Things Public”, which will present new developments in art education outside the institutional environment of the school or academy. Guest speakers engaging with art education in different ways will present their conceptions of 'publics', and how they 'make things public’ within the field of art.

As our first speaker we welcome Mel Jordan, an artist and academic working collaboratively with Dave Beech and Andy Hewiit as the Freee art collective.. Jordan's research and subsequent artworks present a critical examination into the degree to which public sphere theory can contribute to an expanded understanding of art and its publics. Her research proposes that the notion of ‘public’ in the idiom ‘public art’ should be understood as a discursive construct as opposed to a physical, spatial understanding as in the term public realm. This revision considers the act of being public as a process, a series of inter-subjective experiences, rather than a spatial condition. This helps expand art’s role from an autonomous field of exhibition making into a position of publishing, thereby recognizing art as a contributor to collective opinion formation.

Mel Jordan is Reader in Art & the Public Sphere and Head of Contemporary Art at the Royal College of Art, London. Recent exhibitions include Part of the Game nGbK, Berlin, 2014, Critical Machines, AUB Art Gallery, Beirut, 2013, Agoraphobia, the prologue exhibition to the 13th Istanbul Biennial; TANAS, Berlin 2013. Site, Rant, Choir, workshop and new work commissioned by ON, Bologna, Italy, April 2012. Mom, Am I Barbarian?, 13th Istanbul Biennial, 2013. The Narrative Show, Eastside Projects, Birmingham, 2011.

Save the date: October 22, Making Things Public - Talk #2, Anna Santamouro will present her research on socially engaged artistic practices as micro politics in the Mediterranean.