The ARI as a site of para-academic experimentation, research and collective reckoning

Dario Vacirca, Lucie Loy, George Akl, Jonathon Nguyen & Mel Deerson

For decades, under various guises across the globe, the Artist-Run-Initiative, Space, or Centre (ARI) - has played an integral role in supporting and championing artistic experimentation, critical discourse and community building. They are at once a springboard, a safe zone, a holding pattern, a cool kids hangout, a site, a platform, an energy, a not-for-profit alternative to the fucked matrix of speculative capital and commercial art. At their core, ARI’s are determined to be uncertain sites of hybridity and possibility that are articulated through practice and interpreted by use and reflection.

The ARI is also fast becoming an important site for pedagogy outside the confines of academia. Whilst many ARI’s have always been a beacon for undergrad students wanting to exhibit (not only for street cred but also to fatten out their CV’s), something has shifted in the ARI scene in the last thirty years that is seeing it play a more directly critical role in research with experimental approaches to pedagogy. This is of course parallel to the dynamics of the ‘educational turn’ seen across the contemporary arts  - from biennales to major institutions - and is in correlation to the increase in ‘practice led research’ in higher education. Alt-art pedagogies are to education as transformative aesthetics and social practice is to politics, and investigative aesthetics is to journalism. ARI’s are a prime example of what para-academic Fintan Neylan describes as bringing theory back to the outside, where due to there being no disciplinary divisions set by institutional administrators, “there is only theory”. Theory is set free.

This presentation addresses the importance of contemporary Artist Run Spaces, and their connection to the broader para-academic movement in platforming and producing what Luis Camnitzer refers to as ‘critical public pedagogy’. In a short lecture, a para-academic inside-outsider presents a survey of the ARI as a site for critical experimentation, research and collective reckoning. Focussing on recent and future visions of Seventh Gallery, the lecture addresses non-hierarchical and non-disciplinary curation, presentation, and research as modes of critical dreaming. This is followed by a panel discussion with Seventh staff, board members and guest artists discussing transindividuation and defamiliarization as para-academic strategies toward a critical post-humanities. With divine intervention from Seventh’s provocateur in residence.