• Keynote speakers: Janna Graham and Ahmet Ögüt (more information below) 
• Date: Saturday 26th January 2019
• Location: The Ruskin School of Art, 128 Bullingdon Road, OX4 1QP
• Application deadline: Sunday 23rd December 2018
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What is the role of radical pedagogy within art schools and what potential does education offer contemporary art practices for broad social change?  This one-day conference will look at the way artists, students and educators have challenged, remodelled, and critiqued the function of education within art schools and its implications in shifting social relations. With a format that hopes to encourage intergenerational exchange, including speakers at various stages of their educational and professional careers, as well as more horizontal forms of discussion, we will look at ways of redesigning the art academy and how we as students and teachers can use educational methodologies within our own artistic practices.

Application information

Your presentations should last ten minutes and relate to the above subject area. You might want to present, for example, your practice, research, or project work. Presentations practising alternative forms of pedagogy that are participatory and performance-based are actively encouraged.

We encourage all to apply. We hope to act as a platform for university, school and college level staff and students, as well as applicants from non-academic backgrounds. We have a small budget to support speakers’ travel on a needs basis.

Please send your proposed title with an abstract, maximum 200 words, a copy of your CV, and any special arrangements which we might be able to support you with to ruskinradicalpractices@gmail.com. 

Keynote speakers

Janna Graham is a practice-based researcher who has worked in the field of the curatorial for nearly twenty years, occupying long term positions at institutions such as Whitechapel, Serpentine Galleries (London), the Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto), Nottingham Contemporary (Nottingham) and developing projects for Plymouth Arts Centre, Project Arts Centre (Dublin) Vanabbemusum (Netherlands), the New Museum (New York) and documenta (Kassel) among others. A key figure in what has been termed ‘the educational turn’ in curating, she has developed exhibitions, residencies, research and writing at the intersection of art and contemporary social urgencies including the struggles around migration, gentrification, education, anti-racism and indigeneity. From 2008-13 Graham was initiator and curator of the Centre For Possible Studies, an offsite curatorial programme of Serpentine Galleries that included artistic residencies and research projects in London’s Edgware Road neighbourhood; exhibitions at Serpentine Galleries (On The Edgware Road, 2011; Bidoun Library, 2012; Re-Assembly, 2013); and publications including ‘On the Edgware Road’, (2011) and ’Art + Care: A Future’(2013) and Studies on a Road, (2016).

Ahmet Ögüt is an internationally renowned artist currently based in Amsterdam and Berlin. Ögüt consistently seeks out collaborators from outside of the art world, finding unique ways to grapple with complex social issues ranging from migration to civil unrest with a sense of humour. In 2012 he founded The Silent Universitya solidarity-based knowledge exchange platform by and for refugees, asylum seekers and migrants in collaboration with Tate and the Delfina Foundation, in which participants developed lectures, discussions, events, resource archives and publications aiming to make apparent the systemic failure and the loss of skills and knowledge experienced through the silencing process of people seeking asylum. Recent solo exhibitions include Witte de Witt, Rotterdam (2017), Van Abbesmuseum, Eindhoven (2015), and the Chisenhale Gallery, London (2015) as well as group exhibitions at MAXXI, Rome (2018), Gwangju Biennial (2016), British Art Show 8 (2018), Manifesta 11, Zurich (2016), ICA, London (2014), Whitechapel Gallery, London (2014), Performa 13, New York (2014) and the 7th Liverpool Biennial (2013).

This event is kindly sponsored by Christ Church, Brasenose College, and The Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford.