INCIDENTAL ARTISTS
Artists are catalysts. We are the dreamers and doers, collaborators and supporters, guests and hosts who work alongside others to make art and imagine and co-evolve our civic infrastructure.
Since 2022 Eastside Projects has been inviting practitioners to work as Incidental Artists in Birmingham. Across this time Abbas Zahedi, Sahjan Kooner, n:u (melissandre varin), Alice Theobald*, Verity-Jane Keefe*, Marley Starskey Butler*, Seema Mattu and Harriet Bowman* have worked as allies, collaborators, agents of wider change and attention magnets in a variety of contexts over extended periods of time.
They have made portals, villages, folk-punk bands, space ships, radio plays, exhibitions, films, after school radio clubs, drawings, Sangeet parties, performances, listening spaces, langar, sound baths, food ceremonies, mud splattered walls, workshops, and most recently a tour bus which is a vehicular bridge between worlds.
We have collaborated and partnered with artists, musicians, filmmakers, sound recordists, technologists, writers, ecologists, a bio scientist, researchers, a yoga teacher, an integrative therapist, an amateur improv class, students, The Friends Institute Charity shop, the Punjabi Women’s Writing Group, the Bhagwan Valmiki Sabha, Chandos and Manor Park Primary Schools, Sahjan’s mom, Arts All Over The Place, Beacon Family Services, tyre shredders, and a National Express garage and trim shop in Aston. We have made and shared work in the gallery, in the Archers studio, in the Bullring outdoor market, in Kunsthal Gent, on a rooftop in Dakar, Senegal.
*Supported by Wheatley Fellowships
THE OPPORTUNITY
The Incidental Artists programme has been informed by the work of the Artist Placement Group (APG) who in the mid-1960s proposed to radically transform artists’ relation to society. APG considered artists a hugely underused human creative resource that could offer the benefit of tangential thinking and making in a range of contexts, adopting the role of the incidental person.
Through this open call we are looking for our ninth Incidental Artist. This is not imagined as a placement at either the School of Art or Eastside Projects, but as an opportunity to spend time working in and with the city, supported by and connected to both organisations, with funding from the Wheatley Fellowship and Eastside Projects.
As APG proposed, Incidental Artists begin with an open brief and the freedom to ‘watch the doings and listen to the noises’ in a particular context. This period of R&D builds into a Feasibility Study and a proposal that is developed and realised through collaboration with Eastside Projects. Previous projects have varied in scale, complexity, and ambition and therefore timelines are responsive to ideas, but as a guide we would hope to achieve some kind of public outcome within 12 – 18 months of the start date.
The selected artist will be expected to engage with students and the research community at the school during their Fellowship – what this looks like will also be developed during the Feasibility Study stage.
For more information, visit Eastside Projects
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