According to Michael Birchall (2014), the role of visual activist artists has become integral to contemporary curatorial strategies because curators are increasingly using exhibitions, and the practice of curating, as mechanisms and platforms for knowledge diffusion. Brenson (1998:16-17) concurs that the role of the curator, within the contemporary art world, has undergone transformation; moving from a “behind-the-scenes aesthetic arbiter to [a] central player in the broader stage of global cultural politics”. As such, the new curator recognises the capacity of art to communicate, to facilitate, to mobilise, and to encourage conversations surrounding issues that inform the contemporary milieu. Curators, like visual activist artists, can similarly give voice to social issues by focusing their exhibitions, their use of space and the selection of artworks and art objects to rethink “[ideologies], methodologies and iconographies both for what they do say, and for what do not say” (Reilly, 2011:22). Co-curators Dr Laura De Becker and Leigh Blackenberg, partnering with Haley McEwen from the Wits Centre for Diversity Studies, staged an exhibition, titled "queer and trans Art-iculations: Collaborative Art for Social Change" (2014), featuring artworks by South African social and art activists, Zanele Muholi and Gabrielle Le Roux. The exhibition, as an intervention sought to address the ongoing violence and hate crimes faced by black members of the South African lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and intersex (LGBTQI) community. Showcasing artworks from Muholi’s ongoing "Mo(u)rning" project, which aims to memorialise the lives of deceased queer womxn of colour, and Le Roux’s "Proudly African & Transgender" (2008-2010) and "Proudly Trans in Turkey" (2010-present) series, two bodies of work “combin[ing] art and activism to… promote social justice” for transgender persons globally. The exhibition highlighted “the importance of art activism as a means to [address] the need for locally situated knowledge and action around issues of sexual orientation and gender identity” (Haysom, 2014:1; Le Roux, 2013:54). Quoted in Blackenberg and McEwen (2014:62), the curators stated that the discursive or theoretical framework, which informed queer and trans Art-iculations’ (2014) curatorial strategy, was based on Steyn’s (2010:50-81) theory of conscientisation. Conceptualised as a method for mobilising critical consciousness, the theory is concerned with a person’s acknowledgement and questioning of how power – in relation to privilege and oppression – operates within social and political discourses, whilst recognising the implications of emotional and affective responses on such discourses; “conscientisation… is both cognitive and affective, and, above all, relational [in its process” (Steyn, 2010:74). Following this framework, the exhibition established a space for viewers to learn and critically engage with issues of discrimination faced by South African queer communities through representations of lived experience. Additionally, the Wits Art Museum (WAM) gallery became a safe environment in which sexuality, sexual diversity and gender could be expressed, discussed and celebrated (McEwen & Milani, 2014:4-5). While the exhibition served as a ‘creative rupture’ to address the injustice and intolerance faced by queer people in South Africa, it could be said that the exhibition addressed the decolonisation of gender within South African discourse. The artistic representations exhibited critique, interrogate and re-negotiate ‘traditional’ heteronormative understandings of gender binaries and sexual identities (Haysom, 2014:2; McEwen & Milani, 2014:5; Wits Art Museum, n.d.). The intention of this essay is to critically examine and unpack how queer and trans Art-iculations (2014) established a framework for the decolonisation of gender and sexuality. Initially, the essay briefly contextualises an approach towards the decolonisation of gender and sexuality. Secondly, the text explores how the inclusion of specific bodies of work, by Muholi and Le Roux, “can be seen as the beginning of a decolonising [gender and sexuality] project that emerges from Africa” (Milani, 2014:75). Finally, it investigates how the engagement and use of a Comments Wall, by the exhibition’s visitors to express their responses, promoted discussions and dialogues surrounding the social and political complexities of gender and sexual diversities.

Link to the paper online: https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/253119/253120 You will find additional audio and video material that completes the paper at the online link. Abstract: Through the arts research project TransCoding (funded by the Austrian Science Fund as PEEK AR 259-G21) we wish to encourage participation in the development of a musical-multimedia show and an audiovisual installation by offering participatory culture via the web 2.0. Since February 2014, the TransCoding team has built a network of various social media channels around a main hub, the WordPress site what-ifblog.net. Here we introduce our topics of multimedia art and contemporary (art) music, community participation, and the ongoing creation of our show under the categories "Art we love", "You, us and the project", and "Making of", respectively. In a fourth category we choose "identity" as our main topic for the content of the show and the blog. The concept of identity offers a framework for the project that is universally relevant and unites our otherwise diverse international community members. The blog is our main contact point with our community, currently at more than 1000 members, and affords them the opportunity to participate in our project. Via calls for entries we encourage our visitors to contribute images, sounds, and texts that we incorporate in our artwork. Through our social media channels we invite to speak out, share discourse and take influence on the creation of our artwork, thus empowering our followers to express their own identities and participate in the creative process. We afford our community members authority in shaping our work and offer them a platform to meet and make their interest clear. As we invite contributors to exercise influence in the joint artwork, we look at change as viewed through the power relationship between artist and community. The (commonly) hierarchic relationship between the artist and audience/followers is being changed into one of permeability and mutual influence. Consequently we explore not only how the artist as researcher can engender social change, but also how the participating community can do so through their contributions to the project. By delving into the participants' motivations, we learn more about their interests as well as about their reasons for creating and for wanting to be a part of our participatory community. The romantic principle of the individual composer-genius working beyond established rules or external controls is obsolete for us; we investigate the role of the artist within this community and ask how granting creative influence to our community alters traditional (power) models of artist-audience relation and if the interaction consequently adds meaning to both. TransCoding is located at the University of Music and Performing Arts, Graz/Austria. Contents: 1. Introduction: Introduction to TransCoding-From 'Highbrow Art' to Participatory Culture: what is it about and who is involved? 2. Methodology: Positioning ourselves as researchers and artists in the respective fields and introducing the central artworks and the strategies employed in our research project. 3. Case studies: Detailed investigation on the level and the area in which we grant authority in decision-making to our community. Outline of areas of success and conflict our project yields. 4. Conclusion: Demonstration of how TransCoding engenders social and/or artistic change. Published online in Ruukkuu, a multidisciplinary, multilingual, peer-reviewed journal on artistic research launched in 2013. It is based on the Research Catalogue (RC), an international artistic research platform and database that enables multimedia publication (http://ruukku-journal.fi/)

This thesis is an attempt to bring together queer critique of space and the art space. Alongside providing a theoretical framework on queer and the queer take on the sociology of space, it also looks at practical examples of queer spaces, such as queer clubs and queer festivals, in order to more carefully look at how spaces are approached and dealt with in a concrete form. Turning then to the art space, the thesis examines the representation of queer culture in a gallery context and is critical of the display of activism as a strategy for social change. The thesis then discusses what other forms queering the art space could mean in terms of re-thinking curatorial strategies. Such as how participation and community building can play a more integral part, while also questioning hierarchies and norms that are part of the exhibition production.

Historically, “queer” was the slur used against those who were perceived to be or made to feel abnormal. Beginning in the 1980s, “queer” was reappropriated and embraced as a badge of honor. While queer draws its politics and affective force from the history of non-normative, gay, lesbian, and bisexual communities, it is not equivalent to these categories, nor is it an identity. Rather, it offers a strategic undercutting of the stability of identity and of the dispensation of power that shadows the assignment of categories and taxonomies. Artists who identify their practices as queer today call forth utopian and dystopian alternatives to the ordinary, adopt outlaw stances, embrace criminality and opacity, and forge unprecedented kinships, relationships, loves, and communities. Rather than a book of queer theory for artists, this is a book of artists’ queer tactics and infectious concepts. By definition, there can be no singular “queer art.” Here, in the first Documents of Contemporary Art anthology to be centered on artists’ writings, numerous conversations about queer practice are brought together from diverse individual, social and cultural contexts. Together these texts describe and examine the ways in which artists have used the concept of queer as a site of political and institutional critique, as a framework to develop new families and histories, as a spur to action, and as a basis from which to declare inassimilable difference.

This chapter presents a case study of a socially engaged artistic research project, Lucas Ihlein’s Bilateral Petersham (2007), a project that proposes blogging as a form of ‘aesthetic auto-ethnography’. The aim of the chapter is to test the provocation that the political and emancipatory nature of Participatory Action Research (PAR) is at work in artistic research. This ‘provocation’ was raised by the feminist philosopher Iris van der Tuin in her opening remarks to the gender studies symposium at Utrecht in 2012, Is Action Research in the Genealogy of Artistic/Creative Research? In this address, van der Tuin stepped out the deeply political and emancipatory nature of ‘action research’ in the 1970s. Worried that action research has now been bypassed and forgotten, she proposed that action research is still at work in artistic research. She put forward the following questions: How would an action researcher approach artistic/creative research? What can artistic/creative researchers offer action research? How does artistic/creative research allow social action practitioners to embrace the surprises of research, its unexpected processes and outcomes? While there are intersections and crossovers between action research and socially engaged art, for example, the claim that the principles underpinning action research are alive inside artistic research needs examination. Can we assume that action research is at work in artistic research? Can we assume that the history, the material and conceptual basis that underpin the ‘artistic interven- tion’ makes it compatible with the values and premises that underpin action research? This chapter offers a dialogue between two voices—those of Barbara Bolt and Lucas Ihlein, two artists investigating the role of socially engaged and artistic research—in addressing the questions of what artists and artistic research can bring to action research. It will proceed in three movements. Firstly, it will test the assumption that action research is still at work in artistic research by comparing the characteristics exhibited in Ihlein’s Bilateral Petersham with the principles that underpin PAR. Secondly, it will ‘trouble’ the ‘fit’ by looking more closely at the operations of Bilateral Petersham and asking the questions: What are the primary ‘allegiances’ of this socially engaged art project; how do the interventions of this artistic research differ from the ‘interventions’ of action research; and what are the consequences? Finally, this paper will give voice to the artist Lucas Ihlein, whose work Bilateral Petersham is the subject of this analysis, in order to draw out the nature of exchange that is possible between these two domains of research.