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Leeds Arts Research Centre
Prompting changes in policy and practice in art institutions through participatory art projects.
Harold Offeh employs various practice-as-research methods – performance, video, photography, participatory and social engagement – to produce novel open-ended dialogues that emphasise process over product, in contrast to traditional forms of outcome-driven art. In order to address complex issues – historical memory, identity, race, power and authority – Offeh designs sensitive, multi-faceted interventions such as re-enactments and workshops, creating an equal relationship between artist and participants. The aim is to engender constructive dialogue and develop critical reflection through collaboratively produced responses, prompting new thinking amongst participants about how to address societal challenges. Characterised by a call-and-response approach to dialogue – a form of communication rooted in African diaspora and other cultures – Offeh’s curatorial and artistic interventions prompt participants to take active roles and become creative producers and critical thinkers in their own right. Projects devised by Offeh using these methods include ‘Down at the Bamboo Club’ at Picture This in Bristol, ‘Call and Response Dinner’ at Tate Modern, ‘Futurama’ at Peckham Platform, ‘Cutting Shapes’ at Site Gallery in Sheffield’ and the curation of the 2013 Summer School programme for Tate’s Schools and Teachers programme. Describing the effect and significance of Offeh’s approach, Founding Director of Peckham Platform, Emily Druiff explains how Offeh ‘brings a dynamic bonding between a group through the methods that he’s using’, and that Offeh’s work is regarded by Peckham Platform as a ‘benchmark’, an essential point of reference for all work they commission.
In the case of the 2013 Summer School that the Tate Schools and Teachers Team commissioned Offeh to curate, the ‘Response’ of Offeh’s ‘Call and Response’ methodology resonated with the Tate Schools and Teachers Team long after Offeh’s work on the project had concluded. Offeh’s project became a catalyst for a series of changes which the Schools and Teachers Team at Tate put in place to attract more diverse candidates to join their team, to attract more diverse teachers to the Schools and Teachers programme, and to find ways of supporting and exploring difficult conversations about race and cultural difference in the gallery and the classroom. The Tate Schools and Teacher’s team instigated new research, created a new Audience Action Plan, and made changes to how they recruited workshop artists; finding new innovative strategies for recruitment which would ensure more diversity amongst the workshop artists they worked with. Reflecting on the impact that Offeh’s curation of the 2013 Summer School had on the Tate’s Schools and Teachers Team’s thinking and practice, Leanne Turvey, Schools and Teachers Programme Curator, reflected, ‘‘it really has transformed our team practice, from recruitment of staff, to how we programme, who we work with, how we can diversify what artists we share, which artists we work with … he did have a real impact.’
Offeh continues to make work using a ‘Call and Response’ approach to participatory arts practice, and the significance of his work was recognised in 2019 when Offeh was awarded the £60,000 Paul Hamlyn Visual Arts Award.
Harold Offeh, Call and Response Dinner, Tate Modern , 2013. Photo courtesy of Tate
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