Reworking the Institution in Troubled Times

About

Join us for an evening lecture and discussion event led by Andrew Goffey from the Centre for Critical Theory and Cultural Studies at the University of Nottingham, and Katie Simpson, Senior Curator at Nottingham Contemporary, exploring how institutions can work with cultural practitioners and artists in longer term ways that imprint themselves within the organisation and influence structural change.

In this session we will be drawing on previous research and public programming around institutional analysis at Nottingham Contemporary, specifically work led by our former Head of Public Programmes, Janna Graham. We will start by revisiting work commissioned for the gallery in 2018, 'The Building as a Body' by Manual Labours (Sophie Hope and Jenny Richards). 'The Building' explored physical and emotional relationships to work and Richards will be on hand to discuss it with us and with Graham, who will also be telling us more about her own research, how it addresses institutions and opens up different – transversal – relations between art institutions, communities and politics.

To help contextualise this discussion in the contemporary context, we will also consider the connections between the kinds of creative ways of thinking about institutions that Manual Labours, Graham, and researchers into institutional analysis offer and eco-feminist perspectives on the reclaiming and radical regeneration of broader ecologies of artistic, curatorial, critical and political practices.

How do we navigate the challenges of re-creating institutions in the considerably changed post-Brexit, post-Covid social cultural and political landscape? The final part of session will introduce the recent research of Berlin-based scholar and cultural theorist Elena Vogman to explore – amongst other things – the idea of disalienation as a way to practice the processual, collective, imaginative work of reintegrating subjectivity into worlds otherwise fractured by psychiatric, colonial or institutional violence.

This is the first of two sessions that aim to build on Nottingham Contemporary's ongoing interest and commitment to thinking with communities, and envisioning ways in which organisations can align their visible – public facing work - and invisible facets – their structural work, questioning the role of public institutions today in being sites of change, equity and freedom.

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