Exposition

Materialising the Social (2018)

Anna Catherine Hickey-Moody
open exposition

About this exposition

Socially engaged arts practices make new forms of sociability. They are intra-active, diffractive methods through which we are able to craft new social faces. Quantum literacies are the modes through which socially engaged arts practices occur: they are at once critical, performative, intra-active. Quantum literacies enable us to examine generative intersections between artistic research and academic research regarding life and matter, nature and culture. Taking into account the multiple processes of material-discursive production, translation, transformation, and diffraction that constitute socially engaged arts practice, this paper considers the material-discursive space of socially engaged arts practice as a way of re-assembling and re-making multicultural urban spaces currently fractured by differences in belief. The transversal line of socially engaged art practice with interfaith youth zigzags across, and brings together, a diverse selection of bodies, beliefs, knowledges, skills, and creates a material-discursive documentation of group subjectivity. Through an excavation of my recent arts workshops with interfaith children, I will examine the ways aesthetic practices perform a group subjectivity created through collaboration. Such a bringing together of nature and culture, of different races and beliefs in urban environments, is urgently needed. The British Government spends 40 million pounds on an annual basis on The Prevent scheme. For those unfamiliar with the scheme, Prevent is just one strand of the UK government’s counter terrorism policy which has 4 strands – to Pursue, Protect, Prepare, and Prevent. Through prevent funding, local UK police forces have specialized Prevent officers, and both teachers and children are trained to identify radicalised children. On the southern side of the Globe, between 2015-16 Australian budget committed $22 million to ‘countering violent extremism’. This financial commitment reflects the fact that the everyday atmosphere of Australian life, in addition to British life, is characterised by implicit and explicit relationships to 'terrorism' prevention. This emphasis, indeed this atmosphere, and the financial investment it requires, has not reduced the quantity or severity of terrorist threats. More than anything, increased securitization has inspired a corresponding increase in violence and anxiety. The atmosphere of Islamophobia at the heart of such national imaginings that are mobilised to justify funding ways of ‘countering violent extremism’ is increasing. Taking these nationalizing cultural atmospheres as a point of departure, I look to establish transversal strategies for changing public culture and crafting interfaith belonging in Australia, and in the UK, through arts practices and public aesthetics. This paper reports on the early stages of a trans national art project that is designed to intervene in Islamophobic cultural imaginaries through socially engaged art as a vehicle for relationship building and social cohesion.
typeresearch exposition
keywordsQuantum literacy, art practice, children
date12/06/2017
published16/03/2018
last modified16/03/2018
statuspublished
share statusprivate
affiliationManchester Metropolitan University & RMIT University
licenseAll rights reserved
urlhttps://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/371583/371584
doihttps://doi.org/10.22501/ruu.371583
published inRUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
portal issue9. Practicing New Materialisms in the Arts
external linkinterfaithchildhoods.com


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397856 banner of shared values Anna Catherine Hickey-Moody All rights reserved
403628 black and white of symbols that matter Anna Catherine Hickey-Moody All rights reserved
403895 coloured balloons Anna Catherine Hickey-Moody All rights reserved
403897 two churches Anna Catherine Hickey-Moody All rights reserved
403899 feet Anna Catherine Hickey-Moody All rights reserved
403901 glittery union jack Anna Catherine Hickey-Moody All rights reserved
403903 red bit in the middle with white figures Anna Catherine Hickey-Moody All rights reserved
403905 paper mache balloon cat Anna Catherine Hickey-Moody All rights reserved
404352 world Anna Catherine Hickey-Moody All rights reserved
446544 Manchester bee Anna Catherine Hickey-Moody All rights reserved
446545 Irish Catholic girl Anna Catherine Hickey-Moody All rights reserved
446546 Sri Lankan Australian girl Anna Catherine Hickey-Moody All rights reserved
447516 Manchester bee Anna Catherine Hickey-Moody All rights reserved

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