Leeds Arts University Repository (CREST)
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Belonging through assessment: Pipelines of compassion QAA Collaborative Enhancement Project 2021
No full textIn February 2021, colleagues from University of the Arts London (UAL), Leeds Arts University (LAU) and Glasgow School of Art (GSA) secured funding for the QAA Collaborative Enhancement Project – Belonging through assessment: Pipelines of compassion. The project began against the backdrop of the Covid-19 pandemic and the team identified a shift in assessment practices across the three participating arts institutions. This offered an opportunity to further our work, in collaboration, to address social justice, belonging and inclusion through compassion.
This project aims to:
1. Identify areas of enhancement in assessment policies and practices to promote student sense of belonging and tackle issues of social justice.
2. Link this relational work with attainment gap/awarding differentials agendas in the creative arts.
3. Develop collaborative, dialogic, polyvocal and affective resources for staff development across the HE sector.
Three research strands emerged from themes relevant to our own institutional priorities, mutually informing the project and institutional practice and policy. These are pass/fail grading, trauma-informed policy and compassionate feedback. Initial cross-institutional research and evaluation into pass/fail assessment was taking place at UAL and at LAU in the wake of measures introduced during the pandemic. The trauma-informed policy strand developed from academic enhancement work on Fostering Belonging and Compassionate Pedagogy at UAL. The compassionate feedback research strand linked to enhancement work in progress at GSA around assessment policies and practice and with UAL work on formative feedback practices and assessment design.
The following sections introduce and then delve into each of the research strands in turn, providing both theory and practical advice. The final section of the resource outlines indicators for compassionate assessment across both higher education policy and practice
The Deviant Leisure of Gym Bodies, Militarized Branding and Fascistic Creeps
No full textThis chapter explores the rapid acceleration and viral dissemination of masculine fitness culture as a deviant leisure activity (Becker, 1963). We historically situate the current virality of the digitally-networked and gym-built male body, from the advent of physical cultures in the era of The Great Exhibition (1851), to the rapid mainstreaming and growth resulting from the 2008-2009 financial crisis and introduction of social media, to the current triple crises of Covid 19, far-right authoritarianism and identity politics (Hakim, 2020; Chow, 2021, Luger, 2022). We argue that fitness supplements with militaristic, nationalist and violent rhetoric and imagery in their branding and marketing – such as ‘Merica Labz (US), and Grenade and Chemical Warfare (UK) – suggest that gym-built bodies are deviant.
In performing offline and online fitness and bodybuilding culture during Covid 19 lockdowns, deviancy is expressed through societal norms of what are deemed essential, versus non-essential hobbies (Chow, 2021). Secondly, these bodily performers and digital representations, along with the brand-scapes that target this lifestyle, allow for a deviant space of masculinity, juxtaposed against the mainstreaming of feminist, queer and non-white identities, perspectives, and perceived power geometries: in other words, a safe space to perform white-nationalist-masculinity (Cornwall et al., 2011; Olou, 2020). Thirdly, we present this space as a deviant space of class hybridity and fluidity, where the notion or trope of the working-class, industrial, militaristic male body is mimetically adopted by users through the mainstreaming of fitness branding and offline/online gym and body culture (Cornwall et al., 2011; Chow, 2021). Substantively, we suggest that periodic crises (or ‘backloops’, Wakefield, 2020) in neoliberal society, including the Covid 19 pandemic, and the banality of fitness praxis, are helping to catalyse an authoritarian, extremist masculinity, both mirroring and mirrored in chauvinistic political figures on the far-right
An Encounter with Marternal Materiality: Cathy Wilkes and the Green Dress
No full textIn the British Pavilion for the 58th Venice Biennale in 2019, sculptor Cathy Wilkes installed artwork and objects that were sparse, melancholic and materially resonant. Moving through the rooms of this understated exhibition of objects made and found; it was the materials themselves that invited closer consideration, materials resonant of the intimacies of the home and of the maternal body. In room three of the Untitled installation, one encountered a doll figure clothed in a green dress of the kind known in 1950s Britain as a ‘house dress’, the kind made at home and worn to cook, clean and care for children in, the kind of dress worn by women of small means, the kind of dress worn by women in images of poverty and deprivation, like those by Walker Evans (1941) and Dorothea Lange (1939). Wilkes’ work invokes reproductive labour and female affects of care (Sliwinska, 2020). The green dress is adorned with small paper images of children eating soup, yet the figure who wears the dress is isolated from the smaller child-like figures who stand apart in other rooms, the dress invoking Rozsika Parker’s (1995) maternal ambivalence. Materiality in Wilkes’ installation is resonant of the temporality and spatial uncertainty of the threshold (Meskimmon, 2019), the unstable materiality of objects at the boundaries (Boscagli, 2014). As a sculptural object, the green dress in Wilkes’ installation inhabited the room like a mother guarding the domestic realm, a materialisation of the history of working-class women’s ambivalent domestic experience
Data Garden: Kyriaki Goni
No full textThe output is an exhibition catalogue accompanying Kyriaki Goni’s research exhibition Data Garden at the Blenheim Walk Gallery, Leeds Arts University curated by Tsionki. The book is edited by Tsionki, including her curatorial text Data Garden and the essay Learning from Narcissus by writer Tom Jeffreys, as well as documentation from the exhibition.
Data Garden explores assemblages of a biological and digital nature, issues of storage and privacy on networked technologies, and environmental impacts. It presents the stories of two endemic plants, Saxifraga depressa, indigenous to the Dolomites, and Micromeria acropolitana, which grows exclusively in the rocky terrain of the Acropolis. Secret communities attempt to protect the plants while experimenting with new technologies of storing data in the plants’ DNA. Fiction and scientific facts are intertwined in order to suggest alternative futures and forms of resistance. The stories are presented through two research-based installations that represent the two iterations of the project. Through developing a critical analysis of the two iterations, Tsionki’s curatorial vision and text offers a unique contextualisation of the overall project which presented as one for the first time at the Blenheim Walk Gallery, following two major commissions by the 8th Gherdeina Biennale and Onassis Stegi.
Data Garden is an Open Access publication published by RSS Press, which can be downloaded from the LAU repository and RSS website
Viewing Daughters of Darkness through the lens of Queer Fear
No full textLeeds International Film Festival (LIFF) was founded in 1987 and is supported by Leeds City Council, West Yorkshire in the UK. "Queer Fear", which aims to chart queer communities’ lasting association with the horror genre, has been included in the Festival since 2021, previously screening The Haunting (Robert Wise, 1963 ) and The Old Dark House (James Whale, 1932). In 2022 Queer Fear chose to screen a 4K restoration of Daughters of Darkness (1971) at Vue cinema. When the film had finished there was an opportunity for the audience to discuss, “its enduring impact and legacy of LGBTQIA+ representation and female empowerment within horror, as well as its iconic brand of European erotica”, with the film’s director and co-writer Harry Kümel.
I suggest that the experience of viewing the remastered film in the cinema enhances the visual and haptic qualities that contribute to how the film’s narrative is read and understood by the audience. Costume rather than schlock gore is used to evoke the blood-lust of the vampire. The fabrics, surfaces and textures are important elements that construct meaning and support narrative pleasure. The works of Jennifer Barker and Lauren Marks provide a lens through which Daughters of Darkness can be analysed in regard to how the eye can become an organ of touch. In particular, the Queer Fear screening of Daughters of Darkness opened up opportunities to view its narrative, visual and haptic pleasures that underscore how integral queer discourses are to its meaning
Decade of the Damned: Notes on School of the Damned 2013 – 2023
No full textOne of the benefits of 'graduating' from an alternative art school is that you don't get Alumni emails from the Careers department. This is especially unlikely if you graduate from The School of the Damned - an unaccredited, student-led MA Fine Art programme that effectively resets every year, with each outgoing cohort passing pedagogical authority over to the next intake. Whatever the issues with this model, it has become a central feature of The School, founded in 2013 and still going strong in 2022. Such a radically amnesiac approach to institutional legacy might seem resistant to any kind of definitive history, and that is certainly not my intention with this essay.
I was part of the co-founding cohort of The School of the Damned, and will reflect on the 2013 program — in theory and in practice — as well as speculating about the School's interim past and soon-to-be-reset future, canvassing opinion, anecdote and analysis from all former and current students. Necessarily subjective, and a partial history in both senses of the former word, this discursive essay aims to capture some of the ambition and spirit of the ideas and positions that formed The School of the Damned, a project initially conceived in protest, using free labour exchange as its primary and exclusive means of funding and organisation. Whatever is remembered or forgotten, I hope this essay opens dialogue with past and future students, artists, educators and activist
Backgrounds and Backdrops
No full textThe output ‘Backgrounds and Backdrops’ is a curatorial research project by Taylor and Paul that brings together two short artists' films and interdisciplinary materials such as photography, painting, and domestic objects.
Collaboration Contribution: This exhibition brings together works by Painter Taylor and Filmmaker Paul. The collaboration was facilitated by Tsionki.
Research Process: The exhibition is an investigation into concepts of class and gender in relation to value systems in art and design practice. The two films, L’amour Pouf Du Vent, and Ghost Grey are new collaborations. The interdisciplinary practice (painting, photography and objects) forms a visual narrative thread that both responds to and links the two films both physically and conceptually.
Research Insights: Backgrounds and Backdrops considers how a curated space might continue the debate around a post studio practice, the concept of working together in a shared practice, in person or remotely, and the engagement that a curated site can offer as a situation of extending practice in a transdisciplinary way. Transdisciplinary in this context considers both the expectations of medium specific engagement such as film or painting and blends, morphs and identifies new threads made good for contemporary politicised consideration in relation to class, gender and hierarchies of value.
Dissemination: The exhibition was hosted at Leeds Arts University gallery B, 24th February - 27th April 2022, open to all users of the University and to the public by appointment
Deconstructing writing in arts education and beyond
No full textWriting, in an art institution and beyond, can be viewed as a form of creativity, a tool of pedagogy and a way of questioning traditional concepts of knowledge and power. This study explores the complex and shifting relationships between writing, the art institution and constructs of dyslexia. The writing lives of six art students with dyslexia were investigated over the course of an academic year. One student’s writing life is presented as a detailed case study. Writing is interrogated in some of its many manifestations, notably writing as an academic, assessed and measurable outcome and writing as a form of fluid and imaginative communication.
By placing writing in the art school, both institutional power and constructs of the art school are explored. The study examines how these notions interact with and create each other. Through the work undertaken in a specialist arts university—among students both with and without the defining label of dyslexia—a possible scope for change is understood. Both in the positioning of student identity and in the way that writing is explained, explored and taught alongside a creative arts practice
Tailor-made Maternal PKU Diet Education and Women with PKU: Reproductive Experiences and Needs Throughout the Journey
No full textThe output is an educational video. It was commissioned for an international teaching event for healthcare professionals to gain an insight into the metabolic PKU (Phenylketonuria) condition and the maternity perspective.
Research Process: This research engaged with a focus / interview group made up of individuals that had PKU and been through the maternal journey. Chimiak created an open and non-intrusive atmosphere (utilising a multi-camera setup) to help relax the participants to unwind and express their journeys.
Research Insights: The research provides an educational insight into the interviewee’s first-hand experiences with maternity and the PKU metabolic condition to healthcarers.
Despite Chimiak having PKU himself, the maternal side is something he has no personal experience of. For him the research provided insights into the PKU metabolic condition from a new perspective.
Dissemination: The research and conversations were shared with over 170 healthcare professionals throughout the world during an international online teaching event
Networks of Trust
No full textThe output is a curated exhibition titled 'Networks of Trust'. This exhibition forms part of Tsionki’s research project 'A Common World in Transition – An Assembly', exploring eco-aesthetic manifestations of commoning as a new paradigm of economic, political, social and cultural practice.
Research Process: Through expanding notions of insular, remote, or localist existence and imagination flourishing
from the island (both as reality and metaphor), the project focuses on the idea that decentralised Wi-Fi networks
offer privacy and anonymity, but also new ways of connectivity and togetherness. Whether solitary or as part of an archipelago, an island may appear separate, isolated from the continent, yet it is defined by its potential to connect with the rest of the world, beginning anew, becoming a space of mobility and connectedness. In a similar way, the island’s seemingly solitary spatiality becomes a possibility to reconsider the past, present and future of networks through a poetic interconnection of the natural, human and machinic, where the mobilisation of data is shaping forms of co-existence. Using these concepts to touch sharply on the future of networks and connectivity, exhibition participants are invited to imagine possible futures of climate change, technology and migration and share their stories through this network.
Research Insights: Since 2020, conversations between curator Tsionki and artist Goni have taken place in the form of knowledge sharing and storytelling resulting in a curatorial collaboration which has developed into an upcoming publication. This exchange has impacted both practitioners and informed the collaborative thinking around the development of the research exhibition 'Networks of Trust' at the SixtyEight Art Institute as part of Tsionki’s curatorial project 'A Common World in Transition – An Assembly'.
Dissemination: the work was exhibited at SixtyEight Art Institute in Copenhagen from 6th May – 18th June 2022