An event with Clare Nattress, artist and lecturer at York St John University.

In this session, we will explore some difficult questions around performance and participatory art practices. We will take as a starting point Claire Bishop’s analysis of the “delegated performances” and encounter many different important art examples that challenge the limits between performer, participator and spectator, and where the ethical responsibility lies for each.

Yet, the main focal point of this session will be to explore to what extent these ethical
ramifications differ when we engage with artistic performances and participatory art research methods in regards to invisible “slow violence” (R. Nixon, 2011).

For this Visual Ethics Network event, we will be joined by the artist Clare Nattress who will start the session with an introduction about her practice based research in relation to air pollution and participatory performative cycling as an artistic method.

This will be followed by a Q&A before we move to the main part of the session, in which we will utilise the World Café Method, and we will engage in a series of small group discussions based on a few set questions and visual examples.

The theme of the session will embark from the set readings, which participants will receive after they RSVP through the sign-up link.

Set reading:

• Bishop, C. (2012) Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship. London: Verso. (Pages 219-230 & 238-239)

• Nattress, C. (2021) “Airpocalypse, Performance Research”, 26:7, 73-79, DOI: 10.1080/13528165.2021.2059267

• Nixon, R. (2011). Slow violence and the environmentalism of the poor. Cambridge, Massachusetts:, Harvard University Press. (Page 2 definition).