Alserkal Advisory has announced A Feral Commons, a co-commissioning arts project joining members of the Global Cultural Districts Network (GCDN) across four continents.
Each will present a public art installation responding to the theme of the climate crisis. More specifically, its first cycle of 2022-23 will explore how ‘cultural districts can engage in knowledge-sharing and collective action… how artists in these locations can rise to new challenges and rethink modes of working, create new models of the commons and new ways of living’.
Participants include Alserkal Avenue, a creative hub in Dubai; Kingston Creative, a cultural co-working space in Downtown Kingston; Onassis Stegi, a cultural centre in Athens; and Victoria Yards, an urban commercial complex formed around the idea of community and social development in Johannesburg.
Tairone Bastien has been appointed as curator of the first cycle. Bastien developed the theme alongside the participating districts, and has previously co-curated the first two editions of the Toronto Biennial of Art. A Feral Commons proposes an ‘alternative vision of the commons’. drawing upon the scholarship and writing of American anthropologist Anna Tsing.
Bastien expands: “We are inviting each artist to make a work for public space that draws on their individual beliefs, ways of knowing and being, and unique ways of working to explore the non-human relations, indeed worlds, that overlay their own. I want to dream with others of radical horizontality, a vast common ground shared by humans and their more-than-human kin. And search for non-human protagonists of stories that have yet to be told.”
The list of participating artists will be announced in full early next year.
