Lecturer, Conducting Critical Artist Interviews, The Academy of Fine Arts & Aalto University
This workshop aims to provide artists, curators, educators, and other arts
professionals at all stages of their careers with a greater understanding of the
methods and skills needed to conduct meaningful artist interviews.
To democratise overlooked art-historical narratives and to lay the groundwork
for contemporary ideas, one must pay attention to individual artist voices.
Particularly for artists and scholars belonging to different marginalized groups,
the lack of critical voices perpetuates ways in which these communities feel
excluded from knowledge-production that is definitive of their experiences.
Artist interviews focus on exploring artworks, but in the voice of the artists that
do the work through months of research and practice. Interviews construct the
artists’ public image, increase their visibility in the public domain and aid the
commercial appeal of their art. Artist interviews can be seen as an independent
critical genre through its situatedness at the intersection of art history, critical
practice and dialogic aesthetics.