Ma Space

As part of Create’s Conversations for Change series with leading practitioners, thinkers and activists, we are delighted to host curator and artist Megs Morley and New York based artist, activist and writer Gregory Sholette. This series aims to amplify the means of creative and social solidarity between artists and communities, much needed in these unprecedented times.

Survival is not Enough!

Covid 19 has magnified what was already broken in a hyper-deregulated economy: its deadly precision targeting the most vulnerable and precarious, including those already falling-through the badly fractured social safety net. But all revelations of what was previously unseen (or unseeable) releases both good – collectively progressive, sharing and politically imaginative – and not so good – resentful, reactionary, xenophobic, anti-democratic – species of dark matter swarm agency.

The crisis of global democracy has been normalized, but with Covid 19, bare-bones governments such as in the US are being forced to remember their role governing capitalism. Our task is to prevent a “return to normal” from ever happening, while realizing that their idea of “normal” means both “like it was,” and like they have always wished it to be: a limitless debt-drive subscription to disciplinary systems of social control.

Drawing from historical and recent examples of civil resistance and artistic disobedience, Morley and Sholette reflect on what moments from the archive act as potential disruptors to our understanding of the now, whilst considering the role that artists might play in the radical reimagination of the world. They ask; how can the tools of socially engaged arts practices reinvigorate critical capacities? How can collaboration, democratisation, critical and creative intervention, trans-disciplinary exchange, and the building of relationships of reciprocity and solidarity create counter political imaginations and be re-purposed for world change?

Survival is Not Enough! (Subtitled) - Megs Morley and Gregory Sholette in conversation As part of Create’s Conversations for Change series with leading practitioners, thinkers and activists, we are delighted to host curator and artist Megs Morley…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3SjeAzICGYY&feature=youtu.be

From Greg Sholette - A 42 minute long, 3-part reflection on the public representation of history via monuments, with a focus on the recent de-monumentalization movements of Spring 2020, including the guerilla style collective removal or destruction of monuments supporting white male supremacy and memorials to the pro-slavery US Confederacy. Still, exactly how does a diverse and complex society represent itself as a social whole? Is that even possible today? One artistic project from the 1990s seems to have forecast aspects of this current crisis of representation. REPOhistory was a multi-ethnic collective of artists, activists and educators who were intent on temporarily marking the largely forgotten presence of the city’s 99%: those whose very memory had been erased from its streets, squares and other urban spaces. The third and final section of the presentation focuses on what I call the unpresent: the profound absence of any expectation that the past or the future was or might be fundamentally different, let alone superior to what the late Mark Fisher calls Capitalist Realism: the only system compatible with human nature.From V

Sholette HIstory That Disturbs Update 2020 Democratizing Our Collective Past With Memories that Disturbs the Present A 42 minute long, 3-part reflection on the public representation of history via mon...

Are you interested in a distance learning taught Masters in Socially Engaged Art?

MA Social Practice and the Creative Environment at LSAD is now Irelands first online master’s programme in Socially Engaged Art practice. Building on over ten years of excellence, the programme has been shortlisted twice for the prestigious HEA Graduate Ireland Postgraduate Programme of the Year Awards in 2019 and 2020.

The programme is delivered over one year with contributions from the best international practitioners in the field. Postgraduates will engage in a mixture of theoretical and practical learning modes, with an emphasis on building a sustainable practice that supports our graduates into their future careers. Social Practice is located in the overlap of art, society and politics. It has been described as art activism, critical art, socially engaged art, social practice art, activism, political art, participatory, or dialogical art.

MA SPACE Website; https://lsadspacema.wixsite.com/mysite

To apply for MA SPACE please download an application form at: https://lit.ie/courses/ma-space

MA Social Practice and the Creative Environment working hard. Three modules have moved online to ZOOM, we're adapting fast, staying in touch, supporting each other. Same hours, different room!

You're all welcome to an artist talk next Wednesday morning at 9.45am in the Merriman House campus of LSAD.
Deirdre O’Mahony is a visual artist whose practice is informed by a deep interest in rural sustainability, farming, food security and rural/urban relationships. For more than two decades she has investigated the political ecology of rural places through public engagement, archival and moving image installation, critical writing and cultural production.
https://www.deirdre-omahony.ie/

Hosted by MA SPACE and SCM, LSAD

As part of the MA SPACE Visiting Lecturer programme we are delighted to host artist Michael McLoughlin who will give a one hour lecture on Thursday 5th March, 9.45 am, in Merriman House Boardroom.
Michael is an Irish visual artist working in a wide variety of media including drawing, video, sculpture and sound. His work examines the value placed on the feelings of ownership, belonging and connection experienced by both the individual and the collective. In addition, he is particularly interested in the relationship between public spaces, institutions, the public they aim the serve and the potential meeting ground with contemporary visual arts practice within these contexts.
This event is co-organised by MA SPACE and SCM.
All welcome
http://mmcloughlin.org/

MA SPACE and SCM are pleased to invite you to join us for a talk by US Artist Sean Miller, Thursday 27th Feb, 9.45am Merriman House, LSAD

see more at http://www.seanmillerstudio.net/

Images from today's live radio broadcast of 'Space and Place' by MA SPACE postgraduates for Wired FM.

Visiting Lecturer Gareth Kennedy will be giving a talk in Merriman House campus, Boardroom on Weds morning Feb 12th at 10am. All welcome

Gareth Kennedy's work explores the social agency of the handcrafted in the 21st century and generates 'communities of interest' around the production and performance of new material cultures. Deploying an anthropological approach as an operational aesthetic these works draw on the particular social, cultural and economic histories of a location. Outcomes typically include architectural or designed structures, hand crafted objects, as well as live performative events which bring these physical entities to life within specific public contexts.

Hosted by MA SPACE and SCM, LSAD

more from MUKUHURU

MUKUHURU English Subs The Youth of one of Kenya's biggest informal settlements "Mukuhuru"seek to understand their rights to claim and own the land they have lived on since their b...