In collaboration with Lux Scotland, the second episode of a year-long programme Moving Images Within Precarious Structures is curated by Deborah Jackson, Michelle Hannah and Hayley Jane Dawson. This screening explores themes of social class and its theoretical, practical and ideological implications that intersect with, for example, education, migration, sex, gender, race, ethnicity, and inclusionary /exclusionary politics.
Delivered in partnership with Fine Art Research (School of Fine Art) at the Glasgow School of Art (GSA), and LUX Scotland, Moving Images Within Precarious Structures is a year-long programme of episodes that start from the proposition that precarity is a condition of artist moving image practice. Through screenings, talks, workshops, and publishing, Moving Images Within Precarious Structures examines the ways precarity structures the aesthetics and politics of artist moving image, and how new ways of making, materialising and thinking the moving image can work in opposition to the conditions, effects and affects of precarity.
Programme:
‘The Irreducible Difference of the Other’ (2013), Vivienne Dick (26 mins)
‘Tower XYZ’ (2016), Ayo Akingbade (3 mins)
‘The Expulsion’ (2019), Larry Achiampong (15 mins)
‘Tory Stories – An Ugly Steak of Violence’ (1984), Peter Savage (2 mins)
‘Soon Come’ (2022), Matthew Arthur Williams (20 mins)
The curation of films for this episode is an elaboration of ideas that are being explored under the banner of Class Matters, a research group I started at GSA with a number of colleagues from GSA and beyond, artists, students, and GSA alumni. We have held a symposium and an exhibition so far and I have a chapter in a book relating to class and art education that will come out next year. We also have the all-important Instagram presence classmatters.gsa
The research group Class Matters was established about 18 months ago to further amplify discourses and practices that negotiate class within the art world. As do the selection of films included in this screening. The films intersect with class, refracted through a myriad of lenses including feminism, the diasporas, gentrification, immigration, politics, social mobility and so on. But is not only from within the subjects of the films that class is broached. Class remains resolutely with us in in what was deemed to be ‘class neurotic’ Britain by Dan Fox’s article in Frieze in 2016 titled: Know Your Place: the complications of class in the art world.
This event, as part of the broader Class Matters research, examines how in the face of longstanding and ongoing financial precarity in the arts; the social, economic and cultural conditions for making art specifically and art and cultural work more generally, is increasingly the preserve of those who can afford. The performative disregard of class structure, as idealised by the myth of meritocracy that has long been espoused by those who argue that individual achievement is the most important principle determining access and success, can no longer believed. For too long the internalised belief in the myth of meritocracy whilst paradoxically experiencing a reality that reflects the contrary has been dismissed.
