Renowned curator, and a trailblazer of “usefulness” in art, Alistair Hudson is the forthcoming Artistic & Scientific Chairman of ZKM (Center for Art & Media in Karlsruhe. Alistair Hudson grabbed everybody’s attention when - with Adam Sutherland - he turned Grizedale Arts, an art institution in Northwest England’s Lake District, into a hotspot of artistic discussion and production between 2004 and 2015. A directorship followed, at the Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art. There he developed the idea of the useful museum, opening up questions on how the museum ‘can be used’ otherwise; simultaneously reflecting on a wide collection as well as new commissions and projects. In collaboration with the artist Tania Bruguera the Van Abbemuseum and Queens Museum, he got involved in the exhibition "Museum of Arte Util", later undertaking the role of co-directorship of the Association de Arte Útil that resulted from the exhibition. This project has become a repository of artistic activities that propose new uses for art, work on a 1:1 scale, and embrace artistic thinking to respond to urgencies, in short, all things dear to Ahali Conversations so far.

We are hosting Nomeda & Gediminas Urbonas (artists and educators, born in Lithuania). They work together as Urbonas Studio, with an artistic practice that combines new media, urbanism, social science, ecology, and pedagogy to transform civic spaces and collective imaginaries. We’ll start off the conversation focusing on their work on Swamps, that disregarded wealth of organic complexity; and together unpack questions around ecology, technology, and artistic practice. You’ll also get to hear about their mode of operation within often contested social and political realities.

We are talking with Daniel Fernández Pascual from the London-based duo Cooking Sections. Together with Alon Schwabe, they use food as a lens and a tool to observe landscapes in transformation. In a broader sense, they examine the systems that organize the world, through food. Their output manifest in a variety of media: using site-responsive installations, performance, and video. Cooking Sections offer a mode of cultural production that navigates the overlapping boundaries between art, architecture, ecology, and geopolitics.

We are hosting the curator, artist, writer and educator Paul O’Neill. We closed our last episode at a crucial and rather existential moment. This second part of our conversation extends to our small group of audience members. You will hear Paul responding to questions on the educational turn, auto-theory, and variations on how to work with artists. Ahali Conversations are often recorded with an intimate group of audience members, so if you’d like to be in the loop, and join live sessions, please feel free to get in touch.

We are hosting the curator, artist, writer and educator Paul O’Neill. Paul is someone who is very attentive and elaborate in figuring out and shaping thought around the curatorial and artistic work. Together, we delve into his take on what publics mean and discuss the importance of opening up spaces of contact and sites for ‘working together’. We also scrutinize the state of art institutions today and their future, along with hearing his take on the convergence of exhibition-making and programming. Along with insights on establishing and running an institution or an art space today.

Our guests are the legendary Raqs Media Collective, formed in New Delhi in 1992, by Monica Narula, Jeebesh Bagchi and Shuddhabrata Sengupta. I like to call them intellectuals-at-large, but their production ranges from artistic to curatorial projects, from theoretical to educational works. The collective also co-founded Sarai—the inter-disciplinary and incubatory space at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies. You’ll hear their unique blend of thinking on technologies and media, from surveillance to bureaucratic interfaces as deeply embedded in societal dynamics; and we’ll get to explore together how they have been producing knowledge as artists. The tidal changes in image cultures; how digital technologies are intertwined with urban infrastructures; how the poetic is also the political; and ultimately the significance of languages are a few of the things that are lingering in my mind and provoking further thoughts after this conversation.

In this episode, we are in conversation with the architect, writer, and Professor of Architecture at Yale, Keller Easterling. Her books include Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space (Verso, 2014); Enduring Innocence: Global Architecture and its Political Masquerades (MIT, 2005); and her latest Medium Design: Knowing How to Work on the World, to which we dedicate special attention to in this episode. I think Easterling’s project boils down to how architecture and design can actually intervene and/or contribute to the cultural change around social justice and ecological crises; through thinking about, and ‘knowing-how’ to work the systems at play. So designing within interplay; rather than the total compliance and submission on behalf of the architectural profession is what she seeks. She redirects our attention to the spatial dimension of how things are arranged, be it politically, financially, or socially.

Design Studio for Social Intervention (DS4SI), is a Boston-based “artistic research and development outfit” that operates in response to social justice and its literal and figurative resonations in public space. Founded by Kenneth Bailey and Lori Lobenstine in 2006, DS4SI invites activists, artists, academics, designers, dreamers, tricksters, organizations, and foundations to respond to critical and urgent social problems in a light and playful manner. Through these encounters, DS4SI questions the impacts of change in social relationships that may affect everyday life and intervenes in the ways of practicing it. In their words, they are “dedicated to changing how social justice is imagined, developed and deployed in the U.S.A”.

Marina Otero Verzier is an architect, researcher and curator, who is also the current Head of the MA in Social Design program at Design Academy Eindhoven. Until very recently, she was the the director of research at the Het Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam. Her work touches on many socio-political and environmental dimensions of design and cultural production; as well as the emergence of new paradigms for institutions.  Together with Marina we unpack what designing the social might mean, and we explore the outer reaches of architectural research; both in the political and ecological realms. I think her particular mix of cautious optimism and her introspective openness allow us to reflect on how culture can be put to work, both in everyday life and in the sites of knowledge production, whether it’s the museum, the school, or the archive.

Mike Nelson is an artist whose influential works oscillate between salvage yards and dreamscapes. He works with things from the present and the just-past, to create these spaces, that ask you to think twice about contemporary culture, and our ways of being. In his words through situations that are on the brink of obsolescence.  Mike Nelson’s lessons on the agency and potency of objects, and his take on his own positionality as an artist; through the metaphor of sliders on an equalizer were thought-provoking. On every occasion, an artist has to decide over a multiplicity of issues, over ethics, politics, effects, income, and many other dimensions. These virtual sliders operate as part of a decision-making process, over the give and take, and to decide how to negotiate as well as reconcile our decisions.