This project explores the intersections of art activism and political theory to examine conceptions of political violence. We are seeking to organise an interdisciplinary workshop to ask the question: What can art activism do to shape public debates on the ethics of political violence and how does that public debate shape art activism? Working from art activist perspectives and drawing on conceptions of political violence from political theory literatures we aim to explore (i) how art activism is defined or described; (ii) how political violence can be understood or interpreted through art activism; (iii) how publics are understood or identified and (iv) how art interventions are designed to shift, challenge or respond to public perceptions of political violence and/or are constrained by them. The intuition informing this workshop is that art activists not only contest prevailing norms about political violence but also engage consciously and overtly with publics in debates through their activism. Art activism thus opens up questions of responsibility, legitimacy and the ethics of violence, which political theorists also examine, but which are typically probed within the academy.

Our intention is to use the workshop to plan an event at Nottingham Contemporary as a first step towards taking the discussion of these issues to new publics and to construct an interdisciplinary scholarly/practitioner community of interest for future research.