A one-day conference, in partnership with Arts University Bournemouth, which will explore ‘The Rural’ as a central concern within contemporary art practice and debate. Artists today make work in or about rural locations, producing startling visions and radical conceptions of life and space beyond the urban centres. This conference will approach ‘the rural’ by exploring relations between people and places, including the visible and invisible inhabitants that populate or traverse it. What is the lure of ‘the rural imagination’ as a site for alterity or a space of existing power relations? How might critical art discourse and practices reimagine or reinvent the rural for our present moment?
The conference will be held at a ‘rural’ venue ( a pair of treehouses) within the New Forest, a national park in the south of England, providing a suitable backdrop for exploring these ideas. The New Forest is an area that invokes multiple concerns: the cultural consumption of landscapes, tourism, ecological change, land ownership, access, animal ethics, ecological justice, and more. The conference is part of More than Ponies programme that seeks to reinvigorate the New Forest as a site for contemporary art engagement, discourse and practice.
Speakers and participants include: Julian Stallabrass (The Courtauld Institute of Art), Rosemary Shirley (University of Leicester), Catherine Elwes (independent scholar), Anna Sofie Hvid (Founder, Ruralagentur, Denmark), Jenny Holt (Manchester School of Art), Katarzyna Depta-Garapich (Slade School of Art), Feral Practice (independent), Marina Velez (Anglia Ruskin), Ben Roberts (Artistic Director, Brighton CCA), Adam Chodzko (independent artist), ZOOX (independent artists), Harry Meadows (Arts University Bournemouth), Paul Finnegan (Arts University Bournemouth), Javier Rodriguez (Standart Thinking), Victoria Lucas (Sheffield Hallam University).
Convened by Dr Colin Perry ( Arts University Bournemouth).
Presentations include:
Katarzyna Depta-Garapich: ‘Polar Bear from Krupowki’: the clash between mass tourism and rural life in the Tatra Mountains, Southern Poland.
Catherine Elwes: 'Faking It: Parks & Gardens in Artists' Film and Video'
Jenny Holt: ‘New narratives of labour and landscape in rural Northamptonshire: The Great Bear.’
Anna Sofie Hvid: Field trip to the Danish countryside
Feral Practice: Sexual Libertarianism and Reproductive Slavery in Honeybees
Rosemary Shirley: Farm Noir and other Rural Mythologies
Julian Stallabrass: Entangled in the Forest of Brexit
Marina Velez: Art at the Periphery: other knowledges and other cognitions as resistance to monocultures of the mind