Talk on ‘Art-Led Participative Processes (ALPP) – Dialogue & Subjectivity within Performances in the Everyday’ by Jay Koh

June 20 2015
@ Run Amok Gallery

11407298_1055868397831348_7450772704157684463_nRun Amok hosted a talk by Jay Koh on ‘Art-Led Participative Processes (ALPP) – Dialogue & Subjectivity within Performances in the Everyday’.

“The Everyday is perceived by me to be the most conducive environment for engaging others in the public sphere. Activities and interactions framed as ‘performances in the everyday’ are used to underpin my research on art-led participative processes (ALPP), in which I work with individuals to respond to real world situations. In such performances, individuals’ identities are acted out in public as ‘fronts’ (as discussed by sociologist Erving Goffman), communication of resistances can be practised as ‘hidden transcripts’ (as discussed by sociologist James C. Scott) and supportive behaviour is often ‘relationally responsive’ (as discussed by communications theorist John Shotter).

ALPP are cross and interdisciplinary activities that explore openness, reciprocity and indeterminism. They engage with audiences’ and participants’ embedded subjectivities in relation to intra and inter-cultural differences. In ALPP, encounters and interactions progress through various social stages: from being strangers, acquaintances, friends, co-participants, and possibly collaborators. In the process, interactants and co-participants explore commonalities, reveal embedded tensions and accept differences to realise various forms of transitional communities.

ALPP are grounded in the critical concepts of ‘dialogical aesthetics’ by art historian Grant Kester and ‘dialogism’ by philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin, which provide ethical considerations and answerability to the independence of others in intersubjective interactions. In this talk, I will use anecdotes from my art-led activities in Myanmar and Ireland – discussed in my book – to illustrate the working of the above-mentioned concepts within ALPP.” – excerpts from Jay Koh’s ‘Art-Led Participative Processes – Dialogue & Subjectivity within Performances in the Everyday’

About the speaker

Jay Koh, born in Singapore, identifies himself as a Southeast Asian artist-curator with a multifaceted practice that seeks responsive, dialogical and critical engagements. Jay has created diverse public participatory art projects across Europe and Asia, directed art spaces in Cologne and Yangon and run the Open Academy, art-led, learner-driven, capacity building programmes – in Hanoi, Hue, Ulaanbaatar and Yangon in collaboration with Malaysian artist Chu Yuan. In Ireland, he took on additional roles as an evaluator and mentor in art related and resource development activities. He has attained his Doctor of Fine Arts in cross-disciplinary artistic research with the University of the Arts, Helsinki. Jay has published widely and continues to research on the ecological validation and answerability of public engaging art praxis.