University of Gothenburg
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Jason Bowman

Senior Lecturer

The Crafts and Fine Art
Unit
Telephone
+46 31-786 51 28
+46 766-18 51 28
Mail
jason.bowman@akademinvaland.gu.se
Visiting address
Kristinelundsgatan 6-8
41137 Göteborg
Postal address
Box 131
40530 Göteborg

Programme Supervisor

The Crafts and Fine Art
Unit
Telephone
+46 31-786 51 28
+46 766-18 51 28
Mail
jason.bowman@akademinvaland.gu.se
Visiting address
Kristinelundsgatan 6-8
Göteborg
Postal address
Box 131
40530 Göteborg

About Jason Bowman

I am an artist with a curatorial practice, who teaches and conducts research. I have been active as an artist for 30 years and come from a working class background. I teach because I believe in education as a shared, societal force for critical thought and action. I make art because I want to critique and contribute to the world we make. I curate because it also brings me - through proximity to the thoughts and works of others, including artists - a further arena in which we consider how we may organize the potentia and discontents of art within the public sphere. I research because I need systematic processes to understand the possibilities of art; and respond to, critique and contribute to my areas of concern.

I am especially engaged in questions relating to: artist-organisation, collective and collaborative practices; performance, performativity and the choreological; curatorship, art institutions and non-institutional practices; site and context-oriented art; and social practices, participation and the production and coercion of publics, and of counter-publics.

I have produced performances, installations, films, video works, text works, photographs, drawings and sculptures. Solo iterations of commissioned projects have taken place with: the ICA (London); Situations (Bristol); Franklin Furnace (New York); Raven Row (London); BALTIC Contemporary Art (Gateshead/Newcastle); Tramway (Glasgow); de Beweeging (Antwerp); the Whitworth Art (Manchester) and the Gallery of Modern Art (Glasgow). Curatorial work has included the first major survey in Europe of the works and practices of Yvonne Rainer and the official presentation of contemporary art from Scotland at the Venice Biennale (co-curated with Rachel Bradley). Work as a film producer led to a BAFTA nomination.

With a background in performance and expanded notions of choreography, my most recent practice-based research departs from the interface between Queer Theory and Institutional Critique and towards a consideration of 'organisation' as a means to identify and consider the implications of curatorial methods, especially when applied by artists.

I have received mutiple grants and research grants including from the Swedish Research Council. In 2015, as a Principle Investigator, I began my current research project, entitled 'Stretched: Expanded Notions of Artistic Practice via Artist-led Cultures', via a research grant from the Swedish Research Council. In 2018, I was selected and trained as a future research leader by the University of Gothenburg. I have conducted peer reviews for journals such as PARSE Journal, The Journal of Visual Culture in Britain and The Journal of Visual Arts Practice. Recent pre-publication manuscript reviews for imprints include The Manchester University Press and Palgrave Macmillan.

Previous research secondments include with the EU-funded project, NEARCH interrogating relations between contemporary art and archaeology. I was a co-researcher during - and sole-editor of the culminating publication - of the Swedish Research Council funded project, 'Esther Shalev-Gerz: Trust and the Unfolding of Dialogue'. This included commissioning and editing texts by: Georges Didi-Huberman, Andrea Phillips, Jacques Ranciere, Jacqueline Rose and James E. Young. I am currently developing:

1. 'Everything is Beautiful in its Own Way': a research proposal with Professor Andrea Phillips (Northumbria University) interrogating social aesthetics and facilitative processes and techniques within community arts in the UK;

2. 'Human Resources: Curating People*: a research project interrogating modalities of curating in the human-centred dynamics of socially engaged artistic practices.

As a visual art consultant I have written strategies and policies for organisations such as: Arts Council England (Head Office); Optima Housing Association; Arts Council (West Midlands) and Creative Scotland, the latter to which I was an advisor for over 5 years. Other consultancy clients have included: National Galleries, British Council, Tate Britain, SPACE Studios, Castlemilk Environment Trust, a-n: The Artists Information Company; the Banff Centre for the Arts and the Olympic Legacy Company. For artevents, I was responsible for writing the intellectual framework for the Exhibition Road Festival for London's Cultural Olympiad: a partnership between the Natural History Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum and Serpentine Galleries.

I am an elected fellow of the Royal Society of the Arts (UK); a member of the steering group of PARADOX: The European Forum for Fine Art Education and of an international research group interrogating issues relating to the collecting of performance works by museums. In 2019 I was appointed as an external examiner for the BA strand of Visual Cultures at Edinburgh College of Art, for the MA in Contemporary Art Theory and as a PhD supervisor at the same institution. In 2021 I became an external examiner for the MFA in Visual Arts Study Programme at The Eugeniusz Geppert Academy of Art and Design in Warsaw, Poland.