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Contemporary art is constrained by its institutionalization within the culture industry (Bourdieu 1993). Contemporary artists operating outside these contexts, collaborating with or addressing communities outside the culture industry often do not possess a model of production that would allow them to engage fully with the people with whom they are working. The paper contends that innovative pedagogy offers “dialogical” artistic practice (Kester 2004) a means of addressing this gap. A teacherly sensibility becomes critical in informing contemporary art practices that are dialogical and that operate outside the normative categories or habitus of institutionalized art. Yeoville International- Wall Literatures is a community-based art project that involves a series of iterative, small-scale collaborative events between myself and members of the Yeoville community. In exchange for interviewing a resident I produce a “gift”- a cultural object that may be useful to them within the context of their everyday life. The information I elicit from the resident in the exchange is then translated into a public art event where the next informant is identified. The series of these exchanges, gifts and public events will culminate in the production of a conceptual and narrative map representing the Yeoville Community. The project will ask how pedagogical models can assist in the production an “art of communicability” drawing on the work of critical pedagogy, constructivism, chaos and complexity theory, the Multiliteracies Group and genre literacy. The conference presentation will take a visual form, comprising of documentary evidence generated in the early stages of the project,- drawings, plans, conceptual representations, sketches, art objects, excerpts from interviews, photographs and video recordings.

Stream: Creative Arts and Learning

Paper: A paper has not yet been submitted.

I graduated from Michaelis School of Fine Art, UCT, in 1998 with distinction in painting and theory. I completed my higher diploma in education in 2000 with distinction. I work as a visual arts, design, arts and culture educator from 2000- 2004 also participating in a number of community education projects. I worked as a researcher and programme consultant for the Artists in Schools programme run by the Curriculum Development Project in partnership with the Wits School of Art. I am currently a lecturer at Greenside Design Center, and is busy completing my Masters in Fine Arts looking at art as a dialogical and pedagogical practice. I have participated in two person show at Gordart in May 2005 and held my first solo called “Free For All” in 2006.