Leeds Beckett University - City Campus,
Woodhouse Lane,
LS1 3HE
participatory practice research group
Leeds School of Arts
Academics within the Participatory Practice Research Group use socially-engaged methodologies for processes of research and production, often working with under-represented, marginalized and diverse groups. Through social art projects the Participatory Practice Research Group aims to give space and visibility to marginalized, vulnerable and diverse groups, amplifying their voices and helping them find their own tools for change. Projects produced by academics from within the Participatory Practice Research Group use practice-led non-hierarchical participatory methodologies. These methods span various creative medium drawing, performance, play, sculpture and installations, often resulting in new temporary or sometimes permanent interventions in existing civic spaces.
Projects led by our academics from the Participatory Practice Research Group have improved the lives of children, young people and adults from diverse, marginalized and vulnerable communities in Palestinian Refugee Camps in the Middle East, Roma communities in Portugal, Council Estates in South East London, Psychiatric Intensive Care Units in the UK, and Favelas in Rio De Janeiro. Our researcher’s work has given communities confidence to self-advocate, improved the social development and confidence of participants, created new permanent creative spaces for communities, and influenced subsequent social art commissioning.
The Participatory Practice Research Lab focuses on the following key strands:
- Participation
- Social Art
- Play
- Curation
Participatory Practice Research Group Members
Hafeda is an artist, designer, writer and academic. His work employs art and architecture practices as research methods to negotiate the politics of urban space, focussing on the issues of borders, refuge, displacement, representation and spatial rights. Through this, Hafeda engages with communities to produce counter representations and spatial alternatives that span urban interventions, media representations, art installations and writings.
Febrik works on site-specific projects and collaborates with local communities, NGOs and cultural institutions. Their projects include residencies and exhibitions at the Serpentine Galleries, South London Gallery, Victoria and Albert Museum, Mosaic Rooms, and Architecture Biennale Rotterdam.
Dr Claire Hope is an artist and Lecturer in Fine Art with a research interest in questioning the status of the image. How to produce images critically amidst their overproduction in capitalism is a key concern for Hope, particularly seen in the context of internet-based systems and platforms that frame how images are accessed and understood.
Having made artwork for 21 years, and moving image artworks and performances since 2004, most recently Hope initiated ‘The Distributed Image’, an online project interrogating the image in transmission through the work of contemporary artists and thinkers, considered in the context of each user’s relationship to images.
By setting out to disrupt how we think the internet through the context of art, Hope is interested in challenging existing approaches to knowledge and asks how and by whom contemporary art, as much as information itself, is produced, disseminated and received.
Harry Meadley is an artist born and based in Leeds, UK, who takes a conversational and co-operative approach to art making, often working ‘on location’ within galleries, arts organisations and institutions in the development of projects that address how art operates in a social context and the exigencies of its production.
Harold Offeh employs a range of strategies, including found footage, performance-based videos, live art and workshops to assess contemporary popular media representations of race, identity and desire. His interest in video stems from his research into early video practitioners such as Vito Acconci, William Wegman, Bruce Nauman, Adrian Piper and Martha Rosler, all of whom used the medium to explore the body, space, race and gender as well as the relationship between addresser and addressee.
He has exhibited widely in the UK and internationally. In 2017 he exhibited as part of Untitled: art on the conditions of our time at New Art Exchange in Nottingham, UK and Tous, des sangs-mêlés at MAC VAL, Museum of Contemporary Art in Val de Marne, France. He'll be the 2017 Open House residency artist at Kettle's Yard in Cambridge and a summer artist in residence at Wysing Arts Centre. He lives in Cambridge and works in Leeds and London, UK.
