Art in Public Domain: Intervention and Action

 

This andragogical attempts to generate critical, historically reflective, and socio-politically conscious art practice within a broad parameter of creative engagement in the public domain. In this primarily practice based engagement, parallel theoretical association will be developed as per individual student projects. Considering social art practice in the multiplicity of possibilities, encourages interdisciplinary, non-instrumental, collaborative, community based, dialogic, participatory modes, bearing in mind discourses of relational aesthetics and other critical modes of framing and engagement with “public domain”. It will also invite students to challenge the perceived notions of art through innovative methods of practice that provokes, reorganize, and build productive conversations. What are the possibilities of using the dialogue embodied in participatory and collaborative art making to create more co-authored works of art and how might an expanded notion of 'the artwork' as well as a distributed sense of 'the artist's identity/subjectivity' support one’s own cultural production? Such an approach also calls for engaging with the existing issues of censorship, dissent, protest, and resistance in the domain of socio-cultural politics, with an attempt to rethink and re-strategize familiar notions of art practices.

The mode of study lays emphasis on the advancement of individual students’ concerns pertaining to their chosen topics and related engagements. Students are also expected to be conscious of the questions of responsibility and sensitivity (empathy), methods and medium, poetics and politics of practice, while working outside the hegemonic institutional structures and spaces. The course could involve traveling and field work to realize in-situ projects. Students are expected to critically engage with the reading material, participate in discussions, conduct site visits, interviews, collaborate and think collectively. The students develop their practice benefiting from exchanges between their peers, one on one sessions with the mentors. Intra and inter school cross-disciplinary collaborations will also be encouraged. Students are required to maintain journals to keep notes; record their ideas, and document various stages of their projects.