Serpentine Galleries

Image credits: Jasleen Kaur with the Portman Early Childhood Centre, Everyday Resistance, 2019, A Changing Play commission by the Serpentine Galleries. Design: Cecilia Serafini. Photograph: Mike Din.

 

The Serpentine Education and Civic Projects team share experiences working with artists and communities, responding to political and social urgencies. Through long term, collective processes, these projects centre embodied ways of learning, knowing and being that respond to the world and create spaces for people to imagine alternative visions for the future and collectively move towards liberation. The curators of the Education and Civic Projects team will share examples and methodologies that have emerged from embedded collective projects that take place in settings as varied as early childhood centres, care homes and migrant justice organisations. Against a backdrop of the breakdown of the care system in London over the last ten years, these projects ask how do we care in times of austerity?

Amal Khalaf is a curator and artist and currently Director of Programmes at Cubitt and Civic Curator at the Serpentine Galleries where she has worked on the Edgware Road Project since its inception in 2009.  Here and in other contexts she has commissioned and developed residencies, exhibitions, workshops and collaborative research projects at the intersection of arts and social justice.  Through Implicated Theatre (2011-2019) she has developed an arts and migrant justice program using Theatre of the Oppressed methodologies to create interventions, curricula and performances with ESOL teachers, hotel workers, domestic workers and other migrant justice organizers.  The projects she commissions look to histories of radical pedagogy to create spaces to work collectively, developing a political practice beyond institutional frameworks. She is a founding member of artist collective GCC,  a trustee for not/no.w.here and Art Night and on the artistic committee for Arts Catalyst.  In 2019 she curated Bahrain’s pavilion for Venice and in 2016 she co-directed the 10th edition of the Global Art Forum, Art Dubai.

Alex Thorp is a curator and educator who is interested in the potential of the arts for social change. Currently Education Curator at the Serpentine Galleries, she leads on collaborative research programmes with children, young people and families, commissioning artists, producing toolkits and developing podcasts. Alex was co-curator of Rights to the City? an international symposium of artists, organisations and practitioners that seeks to explore the place of social and political activity in art making and is currently co-editing a book reflecting on five years of Serpentine community-based projects. Between 2007 and 2014 she worked at Manchester Art Gallery developing programmes and spaces with children.