Socially engaged art

U–jazdowski / Program / Debates / Culture Tensions / Socially engaged art

02/02/2023

discussion panel

featuring Anna Berry and Pierre d'Alancaisez

Anna Berry
is a self-taught U.K artist. She is best known for her grass roots interventions in non-gallery environments, as well as large scale immersive installation.
As her work encompasses a wide variety of processes and ideas, it can be hard to pin down, but it often involves non-archival materials, long repetitive making, and short-lived ephemeral outcomes. As such, her practise operates at the intersection of making, performance, installation, and recording. Her work is responsive to place, community, politics and is often concerned with our experiences of reality.
Selected shows include: Jerwood Art Fund Makers Open 2021, MK Calling at Milton Keynes Gallery, Tate Exchange with Shape Arts and South Bank Centre with Unlimited.
Anna was born in Glasgow, but is currently based in Milton Keynes. She is also a musician, writer and photographer.
Pierre d’Alancaisez
is a critic, curator and researcher working with the multiple politics of the arts. For a decade, he was director of Waterside Contemporary in London, a gallery that pioneered social practice and art activism approaches in the art market. Having trained in the sciences before coming to artistic practice, he also worked on the development and implementation of cultural exchange and engagement strategies in higher education and the charity sector and has held senior positions in publishing and financial services.
d’Alancaisez is currently a doctoral candidate at Birmingham City University, where he researches interdisciplinary knowledge exchange in social and political art, the relationship between artists’ access to non-arts knowledge and skills and the impacts of their practices. He is a host for the podcast New Books Network and his writing has appeared in ArtReview, Arts of the Working Class, Third Text and Compact, among others.
Manick Govinda
independent writer, artists mentor, lecturer, curator and arts consultant. He has written for The Critic, Index on Censorship, Arts Professional, Open Democracy and Spiked. He is the co-curator, alongside Agnieszka Kolek, of Culture Tensions, a new series of public discussions and conversations at Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art. Manick describes himself as an Eclecticist, open to different ideas and thoughts, open to unresolved contradictions. He was cancelled in 2019 by many English arts institutions for his gender critical comments and humour on social media and for his vocal criticism against the European Union.
Agnieszka Kolek
artist, curator and co-founder of the Passion for Freedom Art Festival in London. Through supporting artists forbidden to exhibit their art, she exposes the silence of many and challenges the comfortable position of those who inhibit “safe spaces”. Agnieszka survived the terror attack in Copenhagen in 2015. She continued the meeting on art and blasphemy after the attack by saying: “They not only want to kill us. They want us to stop talking, so we should continue.”