'Whitemess' - Invitation to Artists and Presenters

Whiteness/Whitemess: creative disorders and hope
Wellington, 15-16 May

INVITATION TO ARTISTS AND PRESENTERS
http://www.whitemess.blogspot.com/

May 15th to 16th 2010 will see a weekend of presentations and conversations being hosted in Wellington for artists, writers, theatre makers, performance artists, dancers, musicians, activists and academics who are using their various disciplines and mediums to examine Pakeha relationships to historic and current colonisation, in particular exploring ideas from the slippery fields of critical whiteness studies.

Over this time the Toi Poneke Gallery in Wellington will be exhibiting work by visual artist Jack Trolove exploring some of these ideas. The intention with this show is to initiate some momentum around these themes and provide an opportunity to draw together people working in this area.

The weekend of events is being curated by theatre practitioner Madeline McNamara and Jack Trolove and will include an excerpt entitled 'The Attitudes' from Madeline's current performance work in progress. We would love to hear from you if you have work you would like to present in this forum. Works presented might be finished work, works in progress, excerpts or simply starting points.

The weekend will include facilitated conversations which will give participants an opportunity to respond to the works and contribute fully to discussions around these themes. The emphasis of these conversations will be on how we use various art forms to articulate some of the unspeakable complexities of focusing on whiteness/whitemess while resisting the tendency for such a focus to reinforce the 'power' of whiteness. We are asking how through our creative work, can we 'see' ourselves and our positionalities in order not to be 'neutral' or 'passive participants' in conversations around identity and power.

From a curatorial perspective, the works we wish to show during the weekend, sit within something of a void of Pakeha artworks on issues of race, power, 'whiteness', privilege and colonisation in Aotearoa. While the works in focus specifically examine Pakeha relationships to privilege and colonisation, this decision is a response to decades of work by Maori, Pacific, Asian and other artists, activists and academics who have called pakeha to develop an understanding of our cultural paradigm (including dominant culture).

This weekend is open to anyone for whom these conversations are useful.

At the epic end of the dream-spectrum, we hope the works and conversations will contribute to an unsettling of settlement.

contact us on critical.creative.gathering@gmail.com