Suchergebnisse

Momentography of a failure brings essays, timelines, film, photography, and a series of conversations together to deal with Ethiopia's controversial urbanisation and the transformative space of the city. It explores the gradual transition of rural-urban space, inner-city migration, emerging and disappearing spaces, and commoning in public space. Momentography of a failure is established at the verge of a hyper-documented world, a hybrid space of digital sociability. While the media production, its reception, and distribution was pluralized by digitization, practices such as "media-sharing" and "citizen journalism" established new conditions for visibility, reinvented the authorial image, and promoted yet another dematerialization of authorship. The author camouflages in the cloud(s). Adoption, appropriation, and recycling are standardized. Authorship becomes secondary to content and alternative models of authorship are formulated: co-authoring, collaborative creation, interactivity, and strategic anonymity, in which cultural activism is reinforced. Momentography of a failure sets out on this point and draws up a multidisciplinary artistic and urban research platform that calls for practicing forms of participatory citizenship through collaborative thinking, creation, and reflection. Momentography of a failure is a network of artists, urbanists, writers, and activists that stand where aesthetic-artistic practice and sociopolitical activism come together to explore failure--and its various realities--and claim, reaffirm, and dream alternatives

My research is concerned with the formation of artists as creative subjects in an increasingly neoliberalised art world. This study examines to what extent does the artist-run space offer alternatives to current neoliberal orthodoxy in the art world. There has been little research to understand the lived experiences of emerging visual artists within neoliberalism. The thesis is located in museum studies but stretches beyond this field in an interdisciplinary approach to explore the complexity of what it means to both make art and self-organise. The thesis presents multiple case-study research into three New Zealand artist-run spaces; RM, Enjoy Contemporary Art Space and Meanwhile. Qualitative research brings the experiences of artist-run space participants to the fore through interviews, examining how they understand and articulate their involvement, negotiate tensions over power, and position themselves in an art world that seeks to enfold them in its own narratives. I analyse and discuss the findings through a series of connecting theoretical frameworks—assemblage theory, creative labour and governmentality—which together map the distinct practices that shape, and reshape, the artist-run space. My research contributes to literature on creative workers within neoliberalism, providing new knowledge about tactics and strategies deployed by emerging visual artists to carve space for their activities on their own terms. The thesis argues that while artist-run spaces are embedded in the mainstream through both networks of strategic reciprocity and funding imperatives, the nuances which define an individual artist-run space are both broader and messier than their increasingly formal structure suggests. The identity formation of the artists and creative workers whose hard work and passion keep artist-run spaces going is similarly compromised, confounding simplistic readings. I propose that the notion of 'alternative' is too binary an understanding to describe artist-run spaces within a time of neoliberalism, instead, this thesis seeks to complicate and problematise the term.