Informal Art

Open Call: The Global Informality Project invites submissions to the Informal Art Hub with a prospect of a volume on Informal Art for the UCL Press Fringe series:

• Art that operates in fringe sites/spaces

• Art embodying fringeness

• Art that is made using fringy techniques

Any existing link to the work/artefacts/ exhibitions/ private spaces, galleries and museums/video and visual material/archives, transmedia that you would consider informal (please explain why you think your submission fits in).

We seek to assemble a collection that captures the spirit of ambivalence: artistic visualisation of the invisible; verbalisation of the non-verbal; art as a by-product of life, rather than intended production; artful responses to formal constraints; performative artefacts and practices that resist archiving. We are looking for documentation of completed visual art projects that relate to themes of informality. Through this archive, we want to explore the artistic approaches that can contribute to our understanding of informality.

The Global Informality Project (GIP) is an interdisciplinary research project led by the FRINGE Centre with support of the UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies. It explores the social and cultural complexity of informal practices and structures from a global perspective since 2014. Through its comparative and ethnographic investigations, the project explores practices of resilience, resistance, subversion; multiple moralities and relationships with social norms emerging in cultural production all over the globe in response to the challenges and constraints of the contemporary world.

While the focus of the Global Informality Project is on unwritten rules, open secrets and hidden practices, the prospective volume will embrace artwork that questions or supersedes our ability to categorise clearly, associated with tensions of decolonisation, trans practices, post-humanity, digitalisation, migration, care of self and the planet; as well as conceptualise informal art.

Please contact us via at informalart2024@gmail.com with an expression of interest. Your preliminary submission should include:

• Name of the Artist

• Name of an entry (if any)

• Four hi-resolution images to be hosted directly on in-formality.com – you must indicate who holds the copyright for these images

• Date and Venue of Exhibition (if relevant)

• Location/link to the website (if available)

• Short description (not exceeding 100 words)

• Email subject containing the phrase: "Expression of interest, volume 3, and keyword of your submission"

The project team runs a self-nominated system of deadlines, so please suggest a deadline that is realistic for you to prepare your final submission. We offer no payment for submissions, as the hub will be in Open Access. Below you can see submissions towards this project here.

NO TALKING // NO READING // NO DRAWING (2019)

The Invigilator Research Network (IRN) is an evolving group of visual artists who work as gallery guards, while using their jobs as sites of performance. Produced by this partially anonymous UK network of 16 guards, the 2019 exhibition examines the informal practices contesting the existing rules for invigilators. This contemplative collection of drawing and writing when on duty explores the degree of privacy and freedom at the workplace. Such practices have no collective name: they are less universal than individual doodling at meetings, but more consolidated, even if by word-of mouth, as practices of secret resistance to the gallery management culture. Identifying these semi-covert, knowingly overlooked, or unacknowledged informal practices is a step towards the conceptualisation of the transgressive, bottom-up performances of self-expression by invigilators in art galleries and museums across the United Kingdom.

Author: Invigilator Research Network

Venue: Transforming Finance Conference 2019 by People's Private Equity, University of Greenwich, London

Link to the work: https://invigilatorresearch.org/nodrawing/

Direct link to the catalogue: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1BJ6JGFF1ToKBiSF7QKA8qFlADehnQC-m/view

Gallery: See more

Further reading: Mathur, S. and Singh, K. eds., 2017. No Touching, No Spitting, No Praying: the Museum in South Asia. Routledge

NO TALKING // NO READING // NO DRAWING © 2019 by Simon Farid is licensed under CC BY 4.0 / Attribution 4.0 International