Jason E. Bowman

I am an artist with a curatorial practice and a senior lecturer and researcher in Fine Art at HDK-Valand Academy – Art and Design, Gothenburg University. With Dr. Julie Crawshaw (Northumbria University, UK), I am working on an edited voume project that advances from research originally funded by the Swedish Research Council and engaged with the question of how the activities of the artist-led may be made exhibitable, as much as the art that they produce. The book, "Organising Artists: Curating Stretched" will also interrogate the lesser-known intercessions between self-organisation and ‘the curatorial’. I am currently questioning participative methods in socially-engaged art practice. "Human Resources: Remediating Art's Socially Engaged Participants" is a research proposal to interrogate how to re/mediate the under-researched contributions of citizen-participants to the development of participative methods in socially-engaged art projects. With Drs. Dave Beech (University of the Arts, London), Julie Crawshaw and James Schofield (Liverpool John Moores University) I am co-organising a conference and exhibition, "Between Dissent and Professionalisation: Debating Artist-Led Self-Organisation" with Liverpool John Moores University’s Exhibition Research Lab for late November 2026. With Dr. Mandy McIntosh I am undertaking preliminary research for an exhibition project that aims to re-socialise the skills, politics, aesthetics and communitarian dynamics of community arts in Glasgow between 1967-2005. I am an external examiner for the MA in Intercultural Practice at Central St. Martins (University of the Arts, London). I contribute to the editorial board of the “Journal of Feminist Art Practices and Research: Cosmos” (Taylor and Francis).

‘For the Record Panel Discussion’ on what curating socially engaged art (or socially engaged curating) might be and mean today.

What and Who is Curated, by Whom, and How in Socially-Engaged Art.

In a 15 minute presentation, prior to the panel discussion, I will open up and respond to a series of questions, raised via my own practice, over how curatorial methods, their authorship and implimentation may be identifiable and determined, or concealed and obscured, in the multi-relational dynamics inherent to socially-engaged art. My aim is to position that less attention is being paid than is required to how artists shape and deliver socially-engaged arts initiatives via the development and application of curatorial methods that can contribute to recent and current discourse on what socially-engaged curating may be. In particular I will place emphasis on what the implications are via the contention that curating socially-engaged art and curating engagement cannot ignore the question of how citizen-participants are curated within such practices.