Emotional Practices

prototype 1.0

Emotional Practices is an online art programme exploring how emotions shape our work, and how artists position the self emotionally in the process of art creations. The aim is to draw on decolonial thinking to privilege emotions as a critical lens of enquiry into subjectivity and our world views, experiences, feelings and lexicons. The programme was curated by OPEN research initiative.
‍
- OPEN is a research initiative that draws on decolonial methods to explore how our world views translate.

- We (re)think individual positions in terms of diversity and difference of experience.

- Our aim is to discover and develop OPEN art and design practices with transformational capabilities that are inclusive of emotional work, self-care, respect and positionality.


As a prototype show, Emotional Practices was created within a number of technical parameters. We acknowledge the following, and encourage visitors to feed back through rca.thisisopen@gmail.com on further limitations that may have fallen within our own blind spots:
‍
- The code and format underpinning Webflow - the platform used to build the Emotional Practices website - contains its own biases that we have had to work with, rather than actively counter in our work.
 
- We feature our OPEN logo and details prominently on the front page, but we appreciate that foregrounding our voice in this way might run counter to a non-hierarchical model that seeks to prioritise the artist rather than the curator.
‍
- Owing to team skill and time capacity, we could only offer a limited number of artists an individual page, built through one-on-one work with our curators. Artists that were not offered this opportunity can be found on the portfolio page. The decision as to which artists received their own space was informed by how closely artists’ work interacted with our own research questions and objectives, and the technical ability of our team to translate artists’ visions into a webpage. However we acknowledge that ideally all artists would have a tailored page that allows users to interact uniquely with their work.