Art and International Conflict: Building Networks, Discourse and Understanding

At a time of serious conflict across the world, the purpose of this application to the AHRC Research Networking scheme is to create a forum for experts with diverse perspectives and experiences to reflect critically on the diverse roles, quality and purpose of visual art produced during and after conflict. Participants will include academics, artists, and representatives of arts commissioning bodies, charities and government. 30 members of the network will meet 4 times in workshops over 12 months across Britain. These events - organised by theme rather than by geography - will feature international participants with considerable experience of making and commissioning art in this context.
Visual art has played an active and diverse part in recent and current conflicts. Artists in Syria, Belarus and other countries have been imprisoned, abused or bullied into exile. This is in stark contrast to the historic practice of commissioning a 'war artist' to record and witness events. This can again be contrasted with the role of artists employed by charities and development agencies to work at the site of conflict in more instrumental ways to help alleviate trauma or to bridge ethnic differences. These various practices raise significant questions about artistic autonomy, the responsibilities which accompany representation and the politics of memory. These issues are heightened by shifts within contemporary art itself. Increasingly produced and consumed outside the gallery, art often takes the form of interventions into public space that are designed to produce immediate and unpredictable public responses and participation, as well as the attention of the mass and social media. There is much interest in producing 'social engagement' through art. The workshops will ask what effects can and do such schemes produce? Are there examples of art levering real and sustainable change?
This is not only a topical proposal: it is one which aspires to shape future practice. The global context presents an unprecedented set of challenges beyond the sadly familiar ones of compromised human rights and the effects of inequality and inequity. Population growth is highly likely to become one of the greatest threats to peace in the future. Developing nations are becoming consumer societies, adding hugely to the strain on diminishing natural resources. It is widely predicted that wars over these resources will increase and intensify unless we act constructively. As these different challenges impact on each other, we urgently need new perspectives and a diversity of means in response. What is the potential of the visual arts in this unstable future?
The UK context for this network is important. The country is implicated in a number of conflicts by its history and by its present activities, most recently and actively in Northern Ireland, Iraq and Afghanistan. Journalists and politicians, NGOs and other activists - and the armed services - have also been engaged in various ventures in Egypt, Lebanon, the Balkans, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Sudan, Syria, Israel and Palestine and elsewhere. What are the responsibilities of UK-based artists and NGOs when they operate outside the UK? How critical can art be of the operations of the State?
The objectives of this scheme are to improve the quality of exchange between people working in the arts sector and development agencies and, in particular, to improve and guide the process of commissioning art. The workshops will be paralleled by the activities of a steering group which will develop a major application to develop an international research project into culture and conflict which will, perhaps, embrace other areas of the arts and have full international partners. To provide important resources and perspectives for the wider academic community and the public - who are keenly interested in the issues raised here - material presented at the workshops will be published on-line and in print.

As a research network, the immediate non-academic beneficiaries of the project will be the participants in the workshops - artists, curators, representatives of NGOs, charities and government. Invitations to participate will be extended to trusts and foundations (Prince Claus Fund, for example); governmental organisations (including the Foreign & Commonwealth Office and the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Conflict). Active in key aspects of making, commissioning or critiquing art produced in the aftermath of conflict, commissioners will have opportunities to examine current practices across the sector and potentially to improve practices in the field. Those NGOs and charitable bodies which, for instance, have had relatively little experience of commissioning art will have a serious opportunity to evaluate and improve their own practices and develop 'tools' for evaluating the impact of art in the context of conflict. This may well result in better commissioning practices.

Visual artists will also form another order of beneficiaries. Whether directly participating in the workshops or accessing the related materials on-line, they will have opportunities to better understand the interests and activities of agencies working in conflict resolution.

Curators and educators outside the university sector will also be addressed by this network. Representatives of the Federation of International Human Rights Museums will be invited to participate. This body represents museums which deal with sensitive and controversial subjects such as the Holocaust and human rights and has a remit to share new thinking and initiatives in the field. Participating educators - whether those teaching the children of those who came to Britain as refugees or curating public exhibitions - will have opportunities to better understand the ways in which traumatic memories of conflict can be given form in the visual arts. The longer term benefit of these insights will be novel and perhaps more sophisticated approaches to education and exhibitions.

As a research network with relatively modest range of activities, there are limits to the claims that can be reasonably made for it. Nevertheless, the social potential of the visual arts in the context of violent conflict is truly considerable. They have a part to play in how conflicts are given visual expression, how traumatic memories are voiced and, perhaps, how they can be resolved.