Fine Art and Photography Research Group

The Social Place: Work, Practice & Play

We are working towards becoming a centre for issue-based, socially engaged and political practices that imagines new ways of being in the world with each other, understanding how creative practice shapes different experiences of the world.

Collaborative, interdisciplinary and playful strategies are of special interest to our group’s approach, as well as exhibition projects and theory-practice conversations.

The ambition of the Fine Art and Photography Research and Knowledge Exchange Group is to harness the rich breadth and depth of talent in the Programme area and across the university to develop a research centre, with a simple aim to be a leader in the field of practice-based research for the University.

Areas of focus

To this end, we have developed five interrelated themed areas to capture the conceptual diversity of our research and knowledge exchange expertise:

• Social – The social context and function of art, from the discursive to the public sphere forming collaborative and curatorial projects
• Place – Examining how social and cultural identities are constructed, with context-related institutional, political, educational and colonial practices as the testing ground for socially sited production
• Work – Considering the roles, histories and possibilities of labour, including questions of class and identity, as well as the material and cultural processes of the dissemination of ideas and outcomes in forms such as exhibitions, events, texts or archives
• Practice – Enhancing, interrogating and expanding the experience and outcomes of creative practice as a means of questioning and generating knowledge, with particular focus on materiality, process and embodiment
• Play – The production of images, objects, new experiences and new knowledge through experimentation, collaboration, accident, interventions, provocations and events