Collective for Art and Social Engagement (C.A.S.E.)
What is CASE?
CASE is a collective of artists who have social engagement as core to their practice.
Collective
A group of artists who come together because of mutual interest, a desire to develop their practice, and/or for common projects. The collective is about mapping out networks of artists' practices and consolidating nodes of activity and knowledge.
Social Engagement
This includes artists who work on and around issues of gender, politics, race, identity, the media, health, economics, power, etc. This definition is not fixed and the group is critically developing what we mean by 'social engagement'.
Core
By core, we don't only mean that work is 'about social issues'. Core could also mean that artists' practices come out of or are deeply informed by social engagement, whether the artists' outputs are overtly socio-political or not. In this way, CASE is also interested in understanding more fully the translations between artists' work and their 'inspirations' or motivations from the socio-political field.
Practice
Arts practice is too wide for us to include all disciplines. So we refer here only to the visual arts: sculpture, painting, photography, sound and text art, live art, film, applied arts, design, etc. However, we also include emerging and experimental practices within visual culture, as well as cross-disciplinary practices with other art forms (dance, theatre, music, literature).
What CASE does
As a collective of social engagement art practitioners, we straddle two worlds: art and the socio-political world. We want to come together to develop our understanding of our practice. This knowledge is not only good for us, but also for the socio-political world that we are interrogating via our practice.
As such, CASE aims to:
1. support and resource artists' work and development in socially engaged practice; and
2. develop NGO, Public and Third Sector organisations' understanding of art practice.
CASE's objectives are to:
1. commission and develop projects, activities and exhibitions exploring the interstice between social engagement and art practice;
2. resource and inform artists' practices by providing opportunities for debate, peer criticism, talks, a library and professional practice advice;
3. research and publish knowledge we have gained;
4. create conversation between artists and the third and public sectors by forming networks of knowledge and activity; and
5. provide expertise on the area of social engagement and art practice
