Past Event
The Whitechapel Gallery is committed to making all of our events as accessible as possible for every audience member. Please contact access@whitechapelgallery.org if you would like to discuss a particular request and we will gladly discuss with you the best way to accommodate it.
– Information about access on site at the gallery is available here https://www.whitechapelgallery.org/visit/access/
– This includes information about Lift access; Borrowing wheelchairs & seating; Assistance Animals; Parking; Toilets and baby care facilities; Blind & Partially Sighted Visitors; Subtitles and transcripts; British Sign Language (BSL) and hearing induction loops; Deaf Messaging Service (DMS).
About This Event
– This event takes place in the Zilkha Auditorium at Whitechapel Gallery, a ground floor space.
– You must purchase a ticket to attend the event. Concession tickets are available. If you require a Personal Assistant to support your attendance, we can offer them a seat free of charge, but it must be arranged in advance.
– If the ticket price affects your attendance, please email tickets@whitechapelgallery.org to be added to the guest list (no questions asked, but dependent on availability).
– This event is suitable for those over the age of 16
– We are unable to provide British Sign Language interpretation for this event
– We are unable to provide live closed captioning or CART for this event.
– This event last approximately 1.5 hours. There are no rest breaks currently scheduled during this event.
– An audio recording of the event can be obtained by emailing publicprogrammes@whitechapelgallery.org following the event.
Transport
– To the best of our knowledge, there are no planned disruptions to local transport on the date of the event.
– Our nearest train station – Aldgate East Underground (1 min) is not wheelchair accessible. The closest wheelchair accessible stations are Whitechapel (15 min), Shoreditch High Street (15 min) or Liverpool Street (15 min).
– Free parking for Blue Badge holders is available at the top of Osborn Street in the pay and display booths for an unlimited period. Spaces are available on a first come, first served basis.
£5 or £20.16 (includes book pre-order, with a 20% discount)
Join editors Afonso Dias Ramos and Tom Snow alongside special guests including Lina Khatib, Gavin Grindon and Mel Evans to unpack what activism means in the context of contemporary art today.
Artists have consistently engaged in activist discourse, lending their skills to social movements, and regularly participating in civil and social rights campaigns while also boycotting cultural institutions and exerting significant pressure on them. From ACT UP and its affiliate groups since the dawn of the AIDS crisis to the counter-spectacle and street theatrics of the Arab Spring and Occupy, to ongoing protest movements such as Black Lives Matter, Rhodes Must Fall, and Decolonize This Place, activist aesthetics has proven increasingly difficult to define under traditional classifications.
Ticket information
If you select the book pre-order option with your event ticket, your copy will be available for collection from the information desk on the evening.
Tom Snow is a Lecturer at the Sotheby’s Institute of Art.
Afonso Dias Ramos is a Researcher at the Art History Institute (NOVA FCSH/IN2PAST) and a Guest Lecturer at NOVA FCSH.
Lina Khatib is Director of the SOAS Middle East Institute and Associate Fellow at Chatham House. Her work is firmly interdisciplinary, spanning international affairs, Middle East politics, and visual culture and communications.
Her books include Image Politics in the Middle East: The Role of the Visual in Political Struggle (2013) and she is a frequent writer and commentator on current affairs in the Middle East. Her music projects include co-founding and co-leading the World Metal Congress. She very occasionally creates screen-based art, more frequently designs and makes avant-garde headpieces, and has written a theatrical dark comedy about the Middle East.
Gavin Grindon is senior lecturer in Art History and Curating at the University of Essex. He co-curated Disobedient Objects at the V&A; Cruel Designs at Dismaland; Werbepause: the Art of Subvertising at Kunstraum Kreuzberg; and The Museum of Neoliberalism in South London. He is currently writing a history of activist-art, and has published writing around that topic in Social Text, The Oxford Art Journal, Art History and Third Text.
Mel Evans is an artist and campaigner part of Liberate Tate. After six years making unsanctioned live art interventions in Tate galleries – which included live tattooing, assembling a 16.5 metre long wind turbine blade, and sleeping in the Turbine Hall overnight – Liberate Tate succeeded in ending BP sponsorship of Tate. Liberate Tate is an art collective that takes action, and its performance interventions have involved hundreds of people. Their work shows the power of art to make real change happen. Mel is also author of Artwash: Big Oil and the Arts (Pluto, 2015), which examines the function and impact of oil sponsorship, has chapters in The Routledge Handbook of Radical Politics (Routledge: 2019) and ArtWork: Art, Activism and Labour (Rowman and Littlefield: 2018), and is currently head of Climate at Greenpeace UK.
