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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

About Jason Bowman

About

I am an artist with a curatorial practice from a Scottish working-class background who teaches and conducts research. 

I have an expanded practice. I make art because I want to critique and contribute to the world we make. I teach because I believe in education as a shared, societal force for critical thought and action. I research because I want to develop and share ideas that can nuance how art and its potential can be advanced. I curate because I want to mediate the complexities of what artists do as much as what they make. 

My artworks address the coercion of publics via participatory methods. The concept of each work is re-articulated through the influences, skills, and actions of other people. This has resulted in 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 Gallery (Manchester),  and the Gallery of Modern Art (Glasgow). Recent exhibitions include at LOKALE (Copenhagen) and Cora Hillebrand Gallery (Gothenburg). Curatorial work includes the first major survey in Europe of Yvonne Rainer's works and practices, the official presentation of contemporary art from Scotland at the Venice Biennale (co-curated with Rachel Bradley), and the first survey of the art and practices of the Theatre of Mistakes. Work as a film producer led to a BAFTA nomination (dir. Mandy McIntosh).

Interests

I am especially engaged by questions relating to:

  • artist-organisation, self-organisation, collective and collaborative practices
  • performance art, choreograohy and dramaturgical approaches to fine art
  • curating, art institutional and non-institutional practices and expanded exhibition practices
  • site, situated and context-oriented art
  • art's social practices and participation

Teaching and education.

I have been involved in formal and informal education, including in community contexts, for most of my life - as a student and/or teacher. I was previously an educator for the Deaf-Blind and have worked in schools, community centres, prisons, care contexts and in various social services and in Higher Education.

At HDK-Valand, I mostly teach and examine in the MFA Fine Art programme. My teaching ranges from practice to theory across multiple courses. I also co-teach a Methods course for PhD candidates. I contribute to multiple free-standing courses, including HDK-Valand's Commissioning and Curating Contemporary Public Art course. I am currently developing a new online course on Self-Organisation in Contemporary Art, hopefully launching in Autumn 2026.

Current research and practice.

In 2025-26, with Dr. Julie Crawshaw (Northumbria University), I am working on a book project. It departs from research funded by the Swedish Research Council. Organising Artists: Curating Stretched will interrogate the lesser-known intercessions between artists-as-organisers and curating towards a consideration of 'organising' as a means to identify and consider the implications of curatorial methods, especially when applied by artists.

In 2025-26 artist Mandy McIntosh and I are developing new processes and works that examine the transferability and replicability of participative methods between our 'socially-engaged' practices. The first iteration took place at LOKALE27 in Copenhagen in October 2025. The second iteration happens in Scotland in 2026. 

I am currently questioning the production of participative methods in socially-engaged art practice. Human Resources: Remediating Art's Socially Engaged Participants is a 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.

More

I am an elected fellow of the Royal Society of the Arts (UK); an external examiner for the MA in Intercultural Practice at Central St. Martins (London), and on the editorial board of the Journal of Feminist Art Practices and Research: Cosmos. From 2019-2024, I was an external examiner for the BA strand of Visual Cultures at Edinburgh College of Art, for the MA in Contemporary Art Theory. I remain as a PhD supervisor at the same institution. In 2021, I was an external co-examiner for the MFA in Visual Arts Study Programme at The Eugeniusz Geppert Academy of Art and Design in Warsaw, Poland. I have externally examined practice-based and practice-led PhDs.

My previously edited books include Esther Shalev-Gerz: Trust and the Unfolding of Dialogue (Art&Theory, Stockholm). This includes commissioned texts by Georges Didi-Huberman, Andrea Phillips, Jacques Rancière, Jacqueline Rose and James E. Young. I have written catalogue essays for numerous galleries and museums.

I was trained as a future research leader by the University of Gothenburg. I have undertaken peer review for journals such as PARSE Journal, the Journal of Visual Culture in Britain, the Journal of Visual Arts Practice,  the Journal of Art and the Public Sphere, and SYNTEES Journal.  I have reviewed manuscripts for imprints such as The Manchester University Press and Palgrave Macmillan. I have also reviewed for funders, including the Leverhulme Trust and assessed career progressions for institutions such as New York University and the Glasgow School of Art.