Critical Pulse invites you to reflect on your position and needs in the current art landscape. Explore your existence in our immediate creative ecosystem by generating text and image-based responses to the selected questions by University of Sussex alumni as part of the Sussex Festival of Ideas.
What are the possibilities for the art sector? How can culture serve the public? We are encouraging photographic, written, or audio-visual responses to project what an artistic idealism and creative utopia might be like.
Your personal and universal contributions will result in artistic vibrations that will pulsate within the Attenborough Centre for the Creative Arts (ACCA) this autumn, resulting in a collective embodiment of responses, where we become the answers to these questions. Are you interested in taking the pulse of the art sector with us?
The Questions
‘How can cultural institutions ensure that artists/creators are recognised and valued as their core assets without which they could not exist?’ – Gilane Tawadros, Chief Executive, DACS
‘How can arts organisations make the world a better place?’ – Sarah Philp, Director of Programmes and Policy, The Art Fund
‘How should artists be rewarded?’ – Bertie Carvell, actor
‘How can we be of service to you?’ – Cara Courage, Head of Tate Exchange
‘How can our cultural sector unite to respond collectively to the widespread and systematic ideological, political, and financial attacks? How will we take a stand together?’ – Helen Cammock, artist
The Callout
You can submit your responses to the questions in three ways:
Post an image dump* on your instagram page and tag it @sussexuniMAH, @undr_xposed, @photoworks_uk and #criticalpulse. Your contribution can include figurative/literal or abstract visual responses to the questions, and can include text. Repurpose and recontextualise past images or create new ones.
*Image dump – grouping several disparate photos together for one casually captioned post
We will share one question a week for the next five weeks on the @sussexuniMAH and Photoworks twitter account, inviting you to respond with a max of 280 characters.
Respond @sussexuniMAH, @undr_xposed, @photoworks_uk and #criticalpulse.
Dropbox
If you want to contribute anonymously and privately then you can deposit materials in Dropbox. We welcome longer text responses (such as diary entries, previously authored related essays), visual responses that may come in a variety of formats (such as collages, image dump, single images – new or recontextualized), as well as audio responses (such as ambient sounds, spoken responses).
You can access the Dropbox link here.
Deadline:
Closing for responses: 1 August
The Commission
Your contributions will provide the basis for a creative output produced by UnderExposed and exhibited at the ACCA in the autumn. UnderExposed have played a crucial role is shaping our vision for the overall project and is a platform and collective dedicated to artistic collaboration and exchange.
Based in Brighton, England, since 2018, UnderExposed are an art platform that believes in global collective action. They are interested in mutual learning processes and facilitating spaces for sharing.
UnderExposed aim to develop a network of art practitioners that can collectively address the different challenges people face through community-driven interventions and (un)learning practices. Previous projects include Collective Enquiry with Photo Fringe, Draft.Knot.Wake with ONCA Barge, Common Rituals with the Brighton CCA, and Action Points at Fabrica Gallery.
