AUDIO Description
‘Participatory Practices, Art and Democracy’ ARTIS Conference in Oxford
Art & Politics: In Conversation with Anisha, Hang and Laura
Invited to give a lecture as a representative of weißensee kunsthochschule Berlin (ARTIS), Anisha Gupta Müller chose to invite two UK-based artists who inspire her—Laura Lulika and Hang Linton— to join her in a conversation. In this talk, the three cultural workers will explore how they navigate political realities through their artistic practices. The conversation will likely also address exclusions in art education, creativity in a ‘democracy,’ and the challenges of art-making in a system that resists it.
Laura Lulika is an unprofessional working-class queer disabled and neurodivergent artist and parent living in Leeds, UK. Leaning into the chaos of embodied experiences of precarity, Lulika works with whatever scrap materials are available to offer non-normative perspectives on sickness and disability through queer and caring frameworks.
Hang is a self-taught, interdisciplinary artist, working in music, performance, dance, video, sculpture and installation. Their personal practice explores otherness through sound, non-linear time concepts, community & public art.
Anisha Gupta Müller is an art educator and workshop host specialising in developing anti-discrimination pedagogies in art education. Her interdisciplinary courses bridge the gap between art theory and local activism, questioning the relationship between power, privilege, and our own creativity. Her practical work focuses on feminist body practices and Safe(r) Spaces, including FemmeFitness, a dance fitness class she founded. Currently based at weißensee kunsthochschule Berlin, she has given talks and workshops at Universität der Künste and Haus der Kulturen der Welt Berlin.
TRANSCRIPT
Transcript Summary (not exact) with names:
Anisha: Okay, so I am recording this talk if anyone needs a transcription… and you can see that there’s subtitles. Afterwards, when you record a talk, it comes out with a full transcription. So if you need to translate it or anything like that, just get in touch with me afterwards.
If you need to take any breaks, please do. Hang and Lulika cannot even see you, so from our point of view, you can just take a break if you need to, go out or grab a snack; it’s all super chill. We are all navigating access barriers in different ways. I know from my stance today that I have a migraine, so I brought my very cool fake Ferrari sunglasses. If I put them on, that’s the reason for it. On your end (speaking to Hang/Lulika), you might not have been able to get childcare. We’re just juggling as people do, so bear in mind if there’s kid fun happening in the background.
You already got a bit of an introduction with Laura and Hang’s bios. I met Laura specifically through certain disabled and sick supportive networks and possibly social media. Through Laura, I also met Hang.
I thought I would start with a little anecdotal introduction that is particularly amusing for me. I get to invite my two friends who I met in Berlin to a talk in my hometown. I actually grew up in Oxford, just down the road. In my classes, I teach anti-discrimination through art and design. We always first have to think about how we got into the space, who got into the space, and where we’re talking from. Recently, my mum took me on an uncomfortable history tour which can provide an interesting alternative angle on what’s normally discussed in the beautiful spires of Oxford and where all the money actually came from.
During that tour, a Rhodes Scholar—notably a white South African—took us through the colonial history of Oxford. At the end of the tour, she told me I was the first person from Oxford who had come on the tour and had a proper conversation with her. This highlights the divisions that exist in every context.
It’s interesting to contextualize being in a space connected to Oxford University when I had to go through a different university and country to be able to come full circle to talk about the city I grew up in. This reflection made me think of Nana Adusei Poku, a Black German scholar who discusses her experiences as an academic in Holland. She noted that being received as a foreigner was far more comfortable for her than in her own context of upbringing. She emphasized her foreigner status because homegrown resistance is much harder to cope with. The term „foreigner“ could also be replaced with „expat,“ depending on perspective.
On the flip side, I’ve had similar experiences coming from the UK as an expat going to Berlin; there’s often a narrative that gets forgotten about who can speak on issues like colonialism and anti-racism within academia. In Germany, people from working-class migrant backgrounds often don’t even make it to higher education. It’s interesting how my UK connections allowed me into that space in Berlin, which has now led me back here to talk in my own hometown.
These reflections inform how I approach this invitation—to see how I can bring others who don’t have similar opportunities along with me. I’m excited to share this space today with Laura and Hang as well. And I actually think I wouldn’t have been able to do it in the same way without having two colleagues of mine also coming in from Leeds. That was just a little reflection about how I’ve come to be in this space or how I feel I have. I don’t know if Laura or Han, you want to do a similar kind of reflection. You know, you’re also online. That’s not a coincidence. Yeah, how are you entering today?
Laura: Hello. It’s really strange, talking to the computer and not being able to see anybody. So I’m kind of trying to imagine a room of people listening. It’s really nice to hear you speak, Anisha, about why you’re coming into this session. To give a little introduction about me:
I am an artist and a community worker based in Leeds. My practice spans lots of different formats. I’ve dabbled with live performance, sculpture, sound, and all sorts of different things, like participatory workshops. But I would say at the moment, and always really, the most important part of my practice is how I relate to my own local community and the way we work together and what we work on together.
I am a trustee of a local arts organization called East Leeds Project, which facilitates a lot of community arts activity in my local area of East Leeds. I think that is the most important detail about me. Most of my work really focuses on access barriers and what are the barriers to working in the arts or pursuing dreams and desires of working in the arts or being creative, not even working necessarily. And that comes from my own perspective as somebody who’s chronically sick and disabled. That’s why I’m here sitting in bed and not sitting in that room with you, but it’s nice to virtually join you all and I’m looking forward to the conversation.
I’ll pass on to Hang.
Hang: Thank you, Laura. Yeah. Hi, everybody. Thank you very much for welcoming me. Thank you very much, Anisha, for making this happen. It’s really nice to just be here and get to talk about this kind of stuff, and be invited into these spaces because I think as Anisha was touching on, I feel like someone who’s self-taught, I wouldn’t even know the access point to doing this kind of work so thank you so much.
My personal practice explores otherness through sound and telling stories and lived experiences of myself and friends and people who I meet. I explore nonlinear time concepts and also community and public art. I work with a healthy holidays program, which is putting on an art program and food for kids during the holidays, these are kids who normally have free school meals.
I guess my intention with most of the performances or most of the work that I do inside of artistic spaces is usually to disrupt the white cube, you know, and try to encourage people who feel uncomfortable in these white cube spaces or don’t feel welcome to feel a bit more supported or welcome inside of these spaces. I do this by disrupting it through sound or performance or something that people can touch and engage with instead of it being like „do not touch this.”
And I like dismantling the kind of barriers between performer and audience and also kind of like we’re all performers, we’re all artists we can all do something there’s no hierarchies. So yeah, that’s I guess that’s my practice, what I’m into. And I just love kind of what you mentioned Anisha about accessing this kind of stuff and kind of with community work, the voices of the community and the people that are doing it should be the ones speaking instead of getting recommendations of who is doing good work from a list of people who aren’t actually involved. So yeah, but they’re just my first musings of what you said so thank you for having me again.
Anisha: Can I just ask, is it loud enough? Yeah, okay, cool. Yeah, actually, when we were in the planning for this talk it felt very big in terms of… we all have different connections to the kind of key terms also in the title of the conference. And we talked quite a bit about participatory practice, art, even democracy, these huge loaded terms that we kind of decided that it’s difficult to begin a conversation about these topics without having a kind of grounded shared definition. If we start talking about democracy and we all have very different understandings of what that is, or where that is, it kind of loses track a little bit. So maybe this is a good moment. Laura, you want to do a kind of participatory, obviously not enforced, practice class altogether? Yeah, well, I’ll let you jump into it before we talk more about these words and terms.
Laura: Yeah, so I’ve been to lots of conferences like this one, and I think that in those days when I was able to attend, what I remember is that a lot of these terms are thrown around and there’s always terms that come into popularity. What you notice is that, as Anisha said, not everybody actually has the same idea of what these terms mean and we’re throwing all these terms around and talking about them, but without thinking about the baseline, like what is our personal definition of these terms.
So I just wanted to offer a simple exercise. (Oh, thank you. My child is giving me a kiss of support while I’m talking, which is really nice.) So I wanted to offer just a simple exercise for us to have a think. You can close your eyes if you want to and think about it. You can write some notes if you want to. And I’m just going to talk and offer some kind of points for everybody to think about and to question within ourselves. And at no point will you be asked to share anything. You don’t have to. It’s literally just for us all to have a little think.
Okay, so I’ll start. I’m going to read from notes. What is a participatory practice? Is it an artwork or performance that requires audience interaction? Is it any artwork that requires audience engagement including just being viewed, witnessed or experienced? Is a sculpture a participatory practice? What is the difference of experiencing or participating in an artwork online or in person? Is a workshop a participatory art practice? Are workshops considered in the same way as artworks are?
So that’s just some questions that I had about participatory practice. And I wanted to invite you all to think about your own experiences of what you consider to be participatory artworks or artworks. And that could be anything. Performance can be something online or in person. And I want you to think of an example of experiencing a participatory artwork that made you feel good. And question why it made you feel good.
And I’ll give you some time to just have a little bit of a think. Maybe let’s say I’ll give you like two minutes and we can just sit and have a think about that. You can write some notes if you want to.
So I’ll repeat that. Can you think of an example of experiencing a participatory artwork that made you feel good? And can you think of why it made you feel good?
Okay, and then we’ll move on to the next question. Which is now, can you think of an experience of a participatory artwork online or in person that made you feel uncomfortable? And in what ways or why did it make you feel uncomfortable?
And again, I’ll give you two minutes to have a think about it. And I’ll repeat it again. Can you think of an experience of a participatory artwork online or in person that made you feel uncomfortable? And in what ways and why did it make you feel uncomfortable?
And the next question to think about: Can you now think of a participatory artwork that you experienced that made you feel indifferent or disengaged? Maybe you felt so indifferent you don’t even remember it. But I think if you’re somebody that works in this area, then I think we all know this feeling where you’ve seen something and it just makes you feel nothing. The experience just leaves you feeling indifferent, you feel disengaged.
And I want us to think about, is that worse than feeling uncomfortable? Was that a worse experience than the artwork that you were thinking about that made you feel uncomfortable?
And I’ll repeat that. Can you think of a participatory artwork that you experienced that made you feel indifferent and disengaged? And is that worse than feeling uncomfortable? And you can also think about the ways it made you feel indifferent or why.
Okay, and lastly, and this is a big one, so I might give you a little bit of extra time for this one. What is your personal definition of democracy? And what does that look like in your life and work?
So that’s a bit of a bigger one. So I’ll give you a little bit more time for that one. What is your definition of democracy? And what does that look like in your life and work?
Okay, so just ask you to finish and close up your thoughts and your notes. And I hope that it was helpful to just take a little bit of time to think about what those terms mean to you and how they play out in your life and your work. And I hope thinking about it before we jump into our conversation is helpful because I think that when you attend a lot of conferences and talks, we’re hit with lots and lots of information and we’re rushing to scribble notes down and things and you don’t get a lot of absorption time. So I hope it just gave everybody a little bit of time to absorb what these terms mean to us before we jump into the conversation. So hand back over to Anisha.
Anisha: Yeah, I really appreciate sometimes being mindful of our own capacity to consume information. In my own teaching practice, I’m very careful to not just lecture… it has been proven as ineffective in terms of knowledge gaining and learning and exchange but it is the most capital efficient form of imparting information. If you have one person teaching a big lecture as opposed to small groups of back and forth information that there’s like… There’s a reason why that’s quite a standard form of, for instance, university teaching.
For me, like, yeah, I don’t know if we should go into it too much, but I think the last question you had stuck with me from the beginning of the conference description to conversations about this idea of democracy. And when I was writing notes about it, I got quite lost, I think, in how I wanted to make my own definition versus definitions that exist versus how it is used in practice. You know, is a democracy a place where 5 million people can’t vote? That’s the same for the UK as in Germany. Is a democracy a place where, you know, there are people who fear going to their work because of far-right pogroms? Is a democracy a place where you risk your career by speaking out for oppressed people? That is extremely the case in Germany right now.
And once you put all the experiences of the most marginalized in a context at the forefront, at least for me, it starts to disintegrate what kind of notions I want to hold on to an idea of democracy. I don’t believe we live in a democracy like putting history up out there. But with that kind of experience, when you are navigating, you know, many many barriers… how like I think one of my questions I wanted to ask you, how do you navigate those political realities in both of your work, in your collaborative work, in your community work, or also just your artistic work? I don’t know if you differentiate both of you. Maybe I’ll ask Hang first how do you navigate this moment in time or just generally like political realities… your practice.
Hang: Yeah, for sure. Thank you. So I think for me, like I find it quite difficult to actually… I guess kind of like speak out directly about the things that are going on because I feel like they directly influence me and the people that I care about. So it kind of feels… I don’t know it just feels difficult to do it in a non-performative sense for me. You know, I find it much easier to… find it much easier explore and express these realities through my music and art. And I’m not sure. I think for me personally, it gives me the space and distance. It gives me the space and distance to approach it through not just my lens. If that makes sense like I can kind of obviously it is through my lens but I can also adopt other people’s stories and experiences and it feels… I don’t know, it feels a lot less difficult to express myself when I’m performing compared to… compared to making an Instagram post that is talking about what is going on because I also feel like, I don’t know that kind of just sometimes just feels like noise to me in some way like I feel like also very performative but in a different way I don’t know. I don’t really know.
But yeah, I think like for me it’s very… I don’t know democracy and I also do not believe that exists. I believe that like corporations and elites have more power over our… over our state of living than we do as people. And I think it’s our right to explore alternative ways of living that are chosen by us or the options are given to us and we have a choice you know. But yeah, I guess that’s how I navigate… I just do it through the actual like thing that I’m doing the expression, the sound the… the story, the tale. Yeah.
Anisha: Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. You know, people who are so closely directed or are thinking sensitively about certain topics, it’s like there’s not an easy solution to approach. I often have a situation with my students, they say, look, I’m kind of privileged, but I want to help and I want to do something and I want to… I’m an artist. How do I navigate these realities? But like you say, the kind of quick fix solutions are always going to be detrimental in the long run. And of course, like when you have stories to tell from your own gut or your soul or wherever it comes from, it speaks for itself. It says a lot.
Hang: Yeah, even what you were just saying then, though, I feel like if your white students are saying stuff like that. And I feel like it links back to just like what we mentioned earlier about working with the community and giving a voice to people, you know so like maybe like, I don’t know, use your privilege. You know what I mean? But like use it to elevate and celebrate and maybe harness and bring the story from someone else with you but bring that person. You know like don’t just tell their story, like bring them into it like work with them and work directly with people that you know make sure people are getting paid well and paid fairly. All of these little things that kind of can build up to you having… For sure, it’s not a quick fix, but these little things over time where the voices start to get heard more and celebrated more can have a difference, I believe.
Anisha: Laura, maybe same question. How do you navigate, if that is even a choice, political realities in our artistic practices?
Laura: I think listening to both of you two speak, it reminded me of, I don’t teach, but I occasionally get asked to come and talk to students for like their professional practice module, which is really funny because I don’t know. I think one of the reasons I get invited is because I always say don’t be professional. It’s not important. Be unprofessional.
But I’ve started to be asked this question as well sometimes when I’m talking to students. And my answer was that you have to put your… if you have privilege and you’re white, then you have to openly put yourself at risk. And so that means when, and you know and be really clear about what’s important to you when you’re invited to work on things. So when I receive invitations to work on things, I would always ask, you know, I would look at where is this project, who’s working on the project? And I would tell them what’s important to me and whether they’re able to provide me with information about who’s going to be involved and whether that really reflects the community that they’re working in.
And there have been times where I’ve done that and invitations have disappeared or I’ve been you know ghosted or whatever and that’s fine. And that’s the, you know, that’s the risk that you put yourself under. But I think that like you say, I think the kind of first maybe like a quick fix that people think of is to like you know post online statements. And I think there is a certain amount of activism that can happen online that can be helpful. But I think that it can’t be the only thing that you do.
I think one of the ways that it can be helpful that I’ve noticed and that I try and encourage when I’m working with arts organizations because I do a little bit of EDI work (equality, diversity, inclusion work) for different arts organizations and access work. And one of the things that I try to explain to them is when they say that you know oh you know, Palestine doesn’t affect us. We don’t work with Palestinian people or you know, this doesn’t affect us or you know anti-racism or, you know, like any of these different things or any of these things which actually, if you think about it, all of these things do impact marginalized communities locally in the UK.
And by speaking out about them and making actions to support local organizers is one of the ways that you can indicate to the local community that you are safe to work with and safe to be around and safe to interact with and safe to engage in and you know, you can’t as a community arts organization complain when there’s conflict or when you’re being when your safety is being questioned if you’re not making those markers and making those actions ensure that people know that you are safe to work with. And, you know, one of those ways is to make statements online, but I think it’s also, you know, like, can youoffer space? Can you offer resources to local organizers?
And actually, you know, become involved in what organizing and you know and what campaigns are important to the local community. I think that’s one of the ways that you you know engage and integrate with people. And I think more and more now that arts organizations have these obligations and responsibilities to safeguarding and things like the prevent campaign which, you know, you see horrible outcomes from specifically with the prevent campaign and that really impact children and especially racialized children that because as an organization or a CIC or a charity, you are obligated to have those policies, you do and you’re you know you’re funded by the state most likely and you know it makes you an actor of the state.
And I think that that’s why it becomes important that you need to become involved in local organizing and it’s your job to prove yourself that you are safe to work with and safe to engage with. And I think a lot of arts organizations and institutions, they don’t feel like it’s their responsibility. I think it’s really… Yeah, or they feel like or they feel like I don’t know that people should be grateful for this instead of… instead of being like oh we need to prove ourselves they should just be grateful for the fact that we’re doing something.
Anisha: Oh, I have so many thoughts and responses. Hang, what you just said, of course, touches on lots of issues of collaborative work that slips into white saviorism. Something that I think is very important or something that I’ve talked a lot about with my students is this idea that in certain contexts there are limits. Diversity has a cultural capital. And when there are people who are realizing this cultural capital, but they don’t want to do the kind of dirty work of community work and getting involved and which is also a long process. I’ve talked to Laura about that, that if you turn up and do an exhibition somewhere regardless really of positionality, you really need to spend time there. You need to spend, you know, I would say it took me five to seven years to understand deeply and feel the political landscape of Berlin before I could actually say, okay, I know how the isms work. I know how things are played out against each other. I know how things are instrumentalized.
But something that Laura, you were saying that is also such a privilege is also this idea that some people can opt in and out of statements they can choose when they want to make political agendas public. They can choose when they don’t. And in the context of Germany, that choice for a lot of people has been taken before you can even get into a conversation. I know like there’s one, I mean, there has been a plethora of examples of people losing their jobs, losing gigs. But there are examples where there was one, I think a photographer, a Muslim photographer who was doing an exhibition about local Muslim experiences in their neighborhood. And it got cancelled because they said it was too polemic for them to talk about their own personal life experience.
And I thought that was, I mean, there were many instances like that. Usually people using their voice to support Palestinians. But in that case, it wasn’t even that. They were not connected. They were showing their own lived experience. So there are people who move through our contexts who they just say, I am this person or this is my experience and they get blocked out they get you know that very being is politicized.
Which is why I also think it’s really important to turn around you know this idea of like what I do is what I do, and then I can opt to be political because everyone has a role to play and everyone is… You know, like that famous quote from, I think it’s Toni Morrison who says all good art is political. I think I wrote it down. And the ones that try hard not to be political are political by saying we love the status quo. If you can move through your life and not have to be politicized, that is a type of power. It is a type of access which we don’t often look in that direction so much.
I’m just thinking, well, I feel like we’ve talked lots of questions in a different order to… Yeah. Okay. So we are too keen and over the time, which is true, we’re well over the time.
Are there any last like takeaway thoughts that you want to add? Either of you.
(Pause) …No takeaways. Stop trying to summarize our work, haha!
Laura: No, I don’t know. There was just so much more, I guess, that we all wanted to say. But I did say that we were going to… the time was going to fly by. But yeah, we could definitely talk about this a lot and I think that…
I’m so sorry. Cyd’s telling me I’m being too loud. Maybe that’s a good time to wrap up then.
Yeah. Oh, wow. Thank you.
Hang: But yeah, I was just gonna… I think that like… Thank you so much for having us. Thanks for talking. I feel like we could go on for like it would be like a three hour podcast. Do you know what I mean? I feel like it could…
Anisha: Absolutely. Obviously.
Hang: Yeah, it’s really easy. I feel like we’ve only like kind of scraped the surface of… Yeah… all of the, I don’t know, topics that could be unpacked from here. But yeah, I don’t know. I just think like maybe like just from what you were saying, it’s like there’s a lot of privilege, right? And I feel like if just start using your privilege in the right way. Like, I don’t know like that’s kind of my takeaway like if that’s what… And yeah, yeah, I’ll leave it there.
Anisha: Yeah. Yeah. I also agree and I think like being really honest with yourselves and how you relate to other people. If you’re going to do community work, if you’re going to do collaborative work, if the end line is you in some way or another are getting the most capital, there’s a problem there. So, you know, this, I mean, he’s connected to having privilege in these contexts but… Yeah, I think it’s also be unprofessional, like Laura said. That is really important if you want to actually connect with people, you can’t come in with this white institutional way of working and…
Yeah, I think I’m also kind of, we have so many things part of all of our practice is to deal with these topics consistently. Which is also one of the reasons why we could talk about it for hours and hours. It’s because we’re forced to do so in every interaction, every time we’re invited somewhere, these kind of sharing access riders, talking about where their funding comes from. It’s like additional work and additional labor that goes that is invisibilized by people who navigate… Also who want to have some kind of ethical trajectory in their career. Part of it is also desire to not just capitalize from all the violence that we live amongst.
But yeah, thank you so much, both of you, for joining with all the things that you’re going through as well. And yeah, I think, did you want to have one? I don’t know if you have time for questions, do you think?
Audience comment: Please do make a podcast!
Anisha: Yes, sure Pay us, haha. We’ll do it.
I mean, you can look up our names, there we all have Instagram and share things. I do a lot of anti-discrimination work. I do have podcasts. So like it’s there, you just gotta look
for it, but also look for it in your own context right in your local context, who are the people doing that.. you know in the shop next door down the road?
Yeah, thanks so much.