Jason is ‘an artist with a curatorial practice’, who trained at MMU (Manchester Metropolitan University) and then took postgraduate studies at the John Logie Baird Centre for Cultural Studies at Glasgow University. A resident of London, he commutes to Gothenburg, Sweden where he is Programme Leader of the MFA: Fine Art and Research Representative: Fine Art at the Valand Academy, University of Gothenburg. A member of the working group for PARSE Journal and Conference (Platform for Artistic Research Sweden), with Suhail Malik and Andrea Philips, he will co-edit an edition of the PARSE journal on ‘Value’ for 2015. Funded by the Swedish Research council, in 2013, he edited the first illustrated anthology to be published (Art and Theory, Stockholm) on the interdependencies of Trust and Dialogue in the work of Esther Shalev-Gerz. Esther Shalev-Gerz: The Contemporary Art of Trusting Uncertainties and Unfolding Dialogues included commissioned writing by: Stefanie Baumann, Jason E. Bowman, George Didi-Huberman, Lisa Le Feuvre, Andrea Phillips, Jacques Rancière, Jacqueline Rose, Esther Shalev-Gerz, Annika Wik and James E. Young.He is currently affiliated as researcher to the EU funded NEARCH project examining intersections between contemporary art, communities and archaeology in partnership with 13 organisations in ten countries, including the Jan van Eyck Akademie, Oxford University and Paris X University. He has long advocated for an expanded notion and understanding of artistic practice, which includes the making of art, but is not to be defined solely by the visibility of an artwork as the definitive result of artistic labour. He advocates for a more intimate awareness of the notion of practice in order to increase knowledge of what artists ‘do’ and what affects they produce, beyond metricisation. He continues to conduct research on the notion of practice within artist-led cultures, which is influenced by the six-year long initiative Midwest, (2003-2008), funded by Arts Council England, in order to develop an artist-led infrastructure from the West Midlands, UK. Midwest was centred on the artist as a catalyst for change in the conditions of production and dissemination developing tools, resources and skills for artist to lead on the change of situation and circumstance. In October 2014, in his role at Valand Academy, he was awarded 3.75 million Swedish Crowns (409, 921 Euro) in order to conduct a three-year long research project entitled Stretched into the expanded notions of artistic practice generated within and for artist-led cultures, from the perspective of the artist-curator. This research will begin in 2015. In this presentation, Jason E. Bowman will seek to provoke whether, within the current status of ‘the artist-led’, we are encountering a de-imagining (Giroux) or amnesia of its instigative circumstances as alternative to the mainstream (Ault). He will consider how the dark matter (Sholette) of artistic practices is being disavowed by the neoliberal era and if the Y in D.I.Y. has truly come to a crisis point by being considered as self-serving (Relyea). Through examination of various endeavours to think through alternatives to, re-interpretations of, or disavowals of metricisation and measurement, Jason will seek to question if the originating values of the artist-led are able to be recuperated when we sustain rhetorics such as leading, centering, running and initiating as key indicators. He will propose that if we begin to think through how practice is stretched and assembled within artist-led cultures, whether new ways of describing its value by recuperating or re-framing its values may become possible. He doesn’t know what the impact of that may yet be and whether it will support survival or become a noose. He wants to discuss that with You.

• published: 08 Dec 2014
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