LOOKING AT WORD FINDING, A PRACTICE-BASED RESEARCH PROJECT ABOUT
PARTICIPATORY AND DIALOGICAL ART PROCESSES

By
Lois Elaine Klassen
BMR (OT), University of Manitoba, 1985
Dip Art History, University of British Columbia, 2007

A THESIS ESSAY SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS
FOR THE DEGREE OF
MASTER OF APPLIED ART IN VISUAL ART

EMILY CARR UNIVERSITY OF ART + DESIGN

2011

Abstract –

The art-based thesis project, Word Finding, is currently being produced through dialogue and
conversation. Beginning with a community process and finally being realized in an art context, Word
Finding asks larger questions about authorship and public discourse. This work and others described
here challenge the reliance on fixed authorship in the way Foucault imagined a future marked by
distributed authorship. In Word Finding authorship is continually distributed amongst the work’s
participants and audience. This project builds on my earlier art practice where I investigated the way
words spoken within a social context produced instability of meaning –how they were interpreted,
retold and translated between people. To contextualize this project and my practice in general, I
present case studies that provide a variety of models for dialogical art strategies. Linda Duvall and
Kutluğ Ataman have produced artworks in which the respatialization of unscripted talking in
aesthetic contexts enables a level of audience engagement. Methodologies surrounding dialogical and
participatory art forms are discussed here with respect to key texts by Mikhail Bakhtin, Grant Kester,
Claire Bishop and others. As an art project, Word Finding investigates the integration of communitybased dialogue and aesthetic use of dialogue within art contexts.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS
ABSTRACT.......................................................................................................................ii
TABLE OF CONTENTS....................................................................................................iii
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS...............................................................................................iv
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS....................................................................................................v

1

Introduction.............................................................................................................1

2

Glossary of Terms...................................................................................................3

3

Word Finding and Other Methods...........................................................................5
2.1

Word Finding................................................................................................5

2.2

Past Works..................................................................................................13

2.3

Case Studies: Linda Duvall and Kutluğ Ataman..........................................17

4

Research Methodologies Surrounding Word Finding………………………………..23

5

Conclusion………………………………………………………………………………..28

WORKS CITED.................................................................................................................29
SELECTED LIST OF WORKS CONSULTED...................................................................31
APPENDIXES…………………………………………………….……………………………...35

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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Fig. 1: Lois Klassen and Elder Financial Abuse Dialogue group, Word Finding, in progress, 2011.
Photos: Ahmad Konash and Celia Goodwin-Cobb.
Fig. 2: Lois Klassen and Elder Financial Abuse Dialogue group, How to Spot a Wolf – Recognizing
and Preventing Elder Fiancial Abuse, 2011. Video still.
Fig. 3: Lois Klassen, Word Finding, 2011. Video still.
Fig. 4: Lois Klassen, Word Finding, 2011. Installation view, Charles H. Scott Gallery, Emily Carr
University of Art + Design, Vancouver. Photo: Karen Garrett de Luna.
Fig. 5: Beatrice Gibson, The Future is Getting Old Like The Rest of Us. 2009. Video stills, with actors
Roger Booth, Corinne Skinner Carter, Janet Henfrey, Ram John Holder, Annie Firbank, John Tilbury,
William Hoyland and Jane Wood.
Fig. 6: Lois Klassen, A New Word, 2009. Video still.
Fig. 7: Lois Klassen, Beds at Home, 2011.Video still.
Fig. 8: Lois Klassen and Mary Oliver, Offit, 2010. Composite photograph of performance and
installation. Photos: Lois Klassen.
Fig. 9: Linda Duvall, Tea & Gossip, 2003. Installation View, Red Head Gallery, Toronto, ON>
Photo: John Loewy.
Fig. 10: Linda Duvall, Where were the Mothers?, 2009. Full-colour catalogue, co-produced with the
Art Gallery of Mississauga and Dunlop Art Gallery, essays, CD-ROM, booklet.
Fig. 11: Kutluğ Ataman, Küba (L), 2004, and Paradise (R), Vancouver Art Gallery, 2008.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This text reflects activity and conversation that has been enabled by the unexpected
generosity of the place referred to locally as “Emily Carr”. I am grateful to this university for
sharing with me its faculty, distinguished visitors, and technical resources.
I especially thank my supervisors Dr. Glen Lowry and Henry Tsang for their patient
supervision and careful guidance on this text and the thesis project.
My research projects and studies were greatly enhanced by funding from the Presidentʼs
Research Fund, the Ron and Martha Burnett Fellowship Award, SSHRC Joseph-Armand
Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarship, the MAA Project Research Fund, and the Emily
Carr Tuition Scholarship. I am very grateful.
I thank my collaborators, partners and participants in the projects that are described in this
text: Jaimie Robson and Cindy Mochizuki of Archive City; Mary Oliver in Offit; Lori
Weidenhammer and Sharon Kallis in Means of Production Artistsʼ Raw Resource Collective
which hosted Garden Gnomad; and finally, Claudine Claridge, Iara Gilbertson, Claire
Kerruish, Glenys MacMillan, Bette Rumble, and Jessie Sutherland in Word Finding.
Thank you also to Dr. Randy Lee Cutler, Sara French, Kriss Boggild, and Elisa Yon for very
practical assistance on this text.
Finally, I owe an enormous thanks to Carl Wiebe.

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1

Introduction

In 1969, Michel Foucault speculated that the future would bring a change to the idea of
authorship.
I think that, as our society changes, at the very moment when it is in the process of
changing, the author function will disappear, and in such a manner that fiction and its
polysemous texts will once again function according to another mode, but still with a system
of constraint—one that will no longer be the author, but will have to be determined or,
perhaps experienced. (953)
In the future, Foucault speculated, readers would recognize that it was the discourse surrounding the
work, rather than the solitary author, that had produced the meanings. The readers’ involvement in
that discourse would produce questions and critical possibilities:
What are the modes of existence of this discourse? Where has it been used, how can it
circulate, and who can appropriate it for himself? What are the places in it where there is
room for possible subjects? Who can assume these various subject functions? And behind
all these questions we would hear hardly anything but the stirring of an indifference: What
difference does it make who is speaking? (953)
More than forty years later, those questions are not at all futuristic. In current artworks and
exhibition projects there is a prevalence of discourse, dialogues, and conversations that open up the
art to an unpredictable and talkative public. In these projects, authorship is distributed through
interactions –among the artist collaborators, the artists and participants, or the work and an actively
involved audience. Often audiences and key individuals are invited to be a part of public dialogues
or community talks about issues surrounding the art. A kind of public discourse is also encouraged
in artworks where the artist has materialized speech or dialogue as a formal element. In these works
1

the need to translate and sometimes complete what is a said is a way of literally involving the
audience in authoring, or in some cases, assuming a subject position.
My thesis project, Word Finding, is an art project that is produced through dialogues and
conversations. Beginning with a community dialogue process and finally realized in an art context,
Word Finding asks larger questions about authorship and authority of public discourse. In finding a
critical context for this dialogical work, this project draws from a growing discourse on discourse.
Grant Kester’s 2004 book, Conversation Pieces, aimed to set out a critical model for evaluating the
use of long conversations and dialogues in community-engaged art projects. My work considers
Kester’s text alongside more inclusive reviews of participatory and social art practices by Claire
Bishop (2006) and others. By materializing dialogue in art, there is a level of refusal of the social
and political monologues that might otherwise suppress the talking in public. Mikhail Bahktin’s
understanding of the function of dialogue in literature, and its ability to subvert official monological
meanings, provides a grounding theory in my own thinking about dialogical aesthetics.
In this thesis document, I present case studies from two artists who have influenced my
work. Linda Duvall and Kutluğ Ataman have produced artworks in which form, content, and
reception are dependent on unscripted talking. Through a reliance on unscripted talking, their
artworks perform Foucault’s multiplying author-function in a variety of ways. In particular, they
respatialize informal and community-based dialogue in art contexts in a way that subverts official
dialogue and engages audiences. So too in my current work, I strive to develop an understanding of
distributed authorship alongside larger questions about the formal or aesthetic use of participation
and dialogue within art.

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2

Glossary of terms

Conversation – Although not directly evident in the Word Finding installation, the overall thesis
project relies heavily on conversation as a production strategy or method. As with many of the
projects used to illustrate theoretical frameworks for community-based art forms in Grant Kester’s
Conversation Pieces, the scope of this project developed through conversations between the artist
and participants that happened in a workshop setting over an extended time period. It was through
that process that decisions over the meanings conveyed and the techniques to be used were
discussed and planned. This text recognizes recent publications that particularize the ways that
conversation, when it is represented in art forms, reveal the possibilities for disruption and refusal
within ordinary conversation (see chapter 4). In the Word Finding installation, the disruption caused
by the speakers’ reconsideration and refinement of what is said reveals that the process ordinary
conversation was an inherent and productive method in this work.

Dialogue – The entire Word Finding project can be seen as the dissemination phase of a community
initiative that involved the participants in a facilitated dialogue about elder financial abuse.
Structured to enable a sense of ownership of the content, the community dialogue process aimed to
empower the participants to publically disseminate meanings about the impact of elder financial
abuse. As an artist outside of this dialogue but reliant on it as the source the material to be
disseminated, I used the Word Finding project to consider how community dialogue, as a form of
discourse, authors public meanings. As with the ordinary conversation that was used to develop the
work, the community dialogue is one of the core production strategies for this work even though it
is not directly represented in the Word Finding installation. This text considers early dialogical
aesthetic theories in terms of how the cultural representation of various forms of speech acts are
dependent on intertextuality and intersubjectivity to produce subversive meanings (see chapter 4).
3

As a representation of a community dialogue, from which meanings evolved through discussion,
transmission and video editing, the Word Finding installation produces in public words that are
finally delivered by individual speakers to individual listeners within a gallery setting. In this
respatializing of the community dialogue, the artwork deliberately distributes its authorship
amongst the participants, the artist and the audience as an unstable and evolving cultural form.

Public speech – This project is built on the participants’ sense of duty to speak out publically on an
issue for which they have specific or situated knowledge, as described by Donna Haraway. Through
the conversations, workshops, scripting, rehearsing and video-making methods their specific
knowledge was further revealed and its public dissemination was rehearsed. As with the crafting of
judgment that Foucault described as necessary for fearless speech, this video project enabled some
of the refinement that enabled the participants to speak fearlessly and publically about the
vulnerability of elders in current Canadian contexts.

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3

Word Finding and other methods
This research inquiry describes the things that artists’ produce—the video installations as

well as non-object based artworks—as methods. Word Finding is research, and currently work-inprogress, involving community-based video production and a gallery installation. I describe it here
in the context of my previous works, recent studio experiments, and the case studies of other artists.

3.1

Word Finding
There are two manifestations of the overall Word Finding thesis project: How to Spot a Wolf

– Recognizing and Preventing Elder Financial Abuse, a public service video that is collaboratively
produced with the group, Elder Financial Abuse Dialogue (North Shore Neighbourhood House),
and Word Finding, a video installation suitable for either gallery installation or a curated public
space. Central to both components of the project are the relationships of the participants, artist and
audience to public speech. The words that are conveyed to the audience through the videos were
initially part of a community dialogue process. The video installation reveals how the texts that are
uttered by the women have been re-scripted through their development of public presentations and
through the making of these videos. With these processes, the participants needed to negotiate the
perceived authenticity of the texts that had been generated in an open community-based process and
the way they would need to alter them in order to circulate the meanings in public. In the resulting
video installation, authorship of the meanings is finally shared: by the participants who originally
found and formed the words, the artist who edits and fragments the words, and the audience who
works to decipher and translate displayed utterances.
Word Finding began with an invitation for me to collaborate on a video production with a
group of women who had completed the Elder Abuse Awareness Dialogue Project. A key feature of
5

the dialogue process that had brought the women together was its participant-driven content
development. The dialogue process was delivered by Finding Home™, a community consultation
service that was founded and is directed by Jessie Sutherland. The explicit purpose of Sutherland’s
dialogue process is to promote community development through the integration of local resources
and participant-led discussions. Through peer discussions, participants gain awareness and generate
solutions to particular problems from their shared experiences (appendix A). The process highlights
the importance of avoiding social isolation during aging as a strategy for resolving or preventing
common problems like financial abuse. Elder Abuse Awareness Dialogue Project is designed to
enable a core group of seniors to develop the awareness, insights, and skills needed to transmit
critical information about senior financial abuse into larger communities. Indeed, the four
participants that I am working with each have professional backgrounds in the areas of banking,
nursing, social work, and management of women’s shelters and seniors’ care homes. They have
shared first hand experience of financial abuse within families and the larger public from their
professional as well as personal experience.
When I met with this group in October 2010, they were familiar with each other and had
been working to develop a public presentation on the financial abuse content generated through the
dialogue process. The women had received coaching from a Toastmasters International volunteer,
and they were preparing to make their first presentations for peers and seniors’ services providers at
local community centres. They were enthusiastic to take on a video project because they saw a need
to have presentation materials that were not dependent on written texts.1 Early in the process of
making a video together, the four participants and the other partners (Finding Home™ and the
North Shore Neighbourhood House Seniors Programs) made it clear that the content needed to be

1

As part of the Elder Abuse Awareness Dialogue Project flyers and graphic recording panels were produced
to sum up the meanings that were generated from the group (appendix B). Although no funding was initially

6

true to the material generated by the participants of the dialogues. This included Farsi-speaking
participants who had generated information about the experiences of seniors from Iran but who did
not have time to attend the video workshop meetings.2
Whereas the participants were clear about their desire to produce an informational video, my
early motivation to participate was complicated. To start, I was eager to participate in a noninstitutional collaboration outside of the art school context. As a proponent of participatory art
projects, I was willing to take on the responsibility of directing a community-media project. I was
also interested in responding to the collective dialogue process whereby these individuals had
developed a sense of agency as public spokespeople. In previous works I had initiated dialogues
and conversations as open or performative elements in artworks. In this project, however, I was
forced to question how could I make art about a dialogue in a situation where my distance from the
process was distinct.
Rather than seeing my distance from the dialogue as an impediment, I approached it as an
opportunity to analyze my critical involvement. The distance allowed me to foreground a growing
concern about the politics of representation and formal strategies that I might employ in my
dialogue-based work. This distance from the content offered me the chance to make a work that
asked new questions of the discourse surrounding community-based art production and dialogical
forms. If I represented a dialogue for which I had little coherence, how would I, and the audience,
participate in the distribution of its meanings? How would my art production translate the authority
of the elderly participants’ voices within an art context?
At the initial meetings, I described how, as an artist, I had a keen interest in their dialogue
process and its impact on them. I outlined my experience in community video production and my
2

At the point of writing this text, the partners have plans to translate the education portion of the video into
Farsi. They are also pursuing additional funding to extend the video process to the Farsi-speaking
participants at a time when they are available.

7

ability to access production resources at Emily Carr University.3 Although the primary interest of
the participants and partners was to produce a public education video to use in their public
presentations, the participants recognized that I was an artist-researcher with an interest in the
process. They frequently asked if my scholastic needs were being met. From their recognition and
acceptance of my position as both an outsider and a student researcher, I was confident that this was
a situation in which I could make an artwork that was reflective of the process for an art audience.
After several meetings in which we discussed the possible intersection of art and the community
video production, I proposed that we undertake two productions that used similar footage but had
different aims and audiences. This division of the project seemed to respond to the interests of all of
the participants and partners. The final agreement was discussed and circulated in the form of a
consent contract. Given the risk to them of their representation in my artwork, I offered the
participants an option for full withdrawal of participation and footage up to the final edit of both
works. This reflected discussions where each of the four women had expressed feelings of
insecurity about their image on screen, despite their strong desire to be the speaking subjects in the
video. The consent agreement also offered the participants and partners full distribution rights for
the educational video. For the video installation, however, I maintained the primary distribution
rights, with the provision for the participants to receive notice of all the public screenings for five
years. This agreement was accepted by all of the participants, as well as the community partners,
and the Emily Carr University Research Ethics Board.
Early in the process I offered community-based media production strategies like media
literacy and consumer-level video production and distribution skills, but these were not of interest
3

In 2009 I had produced two short documentaries for community organizations: “Burnaby Art Gallery
presents Evelyn Roth, Bear Ice” (8:00) and “Means of Production Artistsʼ Raw Resource Collective” (17:00). I
had also made short theatrical videos in a school-based artist project with Lori Weidenhammer (2009) and I
had produced gallery-based video installations (PlasmaTV in CondoBOOM, Theatre Centre, Toronto, 2006
and in Not Home, Cityspace, North Vancouver, 2008; Flowers for Joyce in Serious Women donʼt do flowers,
Seymour Gallery, 2008).

8

to this group. Instead, the group wanted to develop a tightly scripted video that would enhance the
public presentation that they were developing. The participants had a shared desire to produce a
video that would display their competence as speakers, while highlighting their indignation,
personal vulnerability, and compassion in the face of their experiences. Positioned at a distance
from the content, I took on the responsibility of facilitating this production, which at the time of
writing is in progress.

The group’s discussions about ways to deliver the content through the use of educational
video, within the skills and resources available, have determined many of the formal decisions for
both works. The use of a green screen studio in the Film Video and Integrated Media Department of
Emily Carr University has enabled the focus to be on factual and experience-based information that
the subjects deliver in their own words.4 (Fig.1) For the educational video, the background is a

4

In setting up the shots I was imagining the simplicity of informational videos (e.g. TED Talks), which
combine the solo speaking subject who delivers content in a formal, yet conversational manner with
cutaways to presentation media like diagrams and illustrations. To break up the didactic content, an
animation sequence builds on the groupʼs use of the metaphor of a wolf in sheepʼs clothing. In the studio, I
also improvised on a variety of techniques to assist the participants to deliver the content: reading, repetition,
using cue cards, being interviewed, using memorized materials as well as improvising in a group setting. The
presence of an experienced make-up technician on the set was an enormous asset for the participants to
feel confident and ready to deliver material in front of the camera.

9

white space upon which key words and a simple hand-drawn animation prioritize meanings and
create links between the topics. (Fig. 2)

10

Highlighted in the video installation are isolated portions of the video that reveal how the
women were working to find the right words to put in public the meanings that had been generated
within their collaborative and community-based dialogue. (Fig. 3 and 4) As a looping four-minute
sequence, the video features four frames in which short clips from the project transition in and out.
In the left frame, individual participants are seen in silence thinking of what to say next or listening
to the commotion of the video production process. In the next frame the verbatim text of the words
that are heard by the viewer are displayed as a rolling archive. In the two frames on the right, video
clips in which the participants speak the words that reflect core meanings generated from the
community dialogue about elder financial abuse. In some instances, they falter or reiterate the
importance of what they are saying. Various strategies used in the video making process like
reading, reciting and story telling are intermingled.

[Image unavailable.]
Fig. 5: Beatrice Gibson, The Future is Getting Old Like the Rest of Us. 2009. Video stills,
with actofs Roger Booth, Corrine Skinner Carter, Janet Henfrey, Ram John Holder, Annie
Firbank, John Tilbury, William Hoyland and Jane Wood.
11

In thinking about the formal considerations of the video installation, I was drawn to a recent
work by Beatrice Gibson. The Future is Getting Old Like the Rest of Us (2009) was developed
through an exchange with the artist and residents of four Camden’s Care Homes in London, by way
of the Serpentine Gallery’s Skills Exchange program. In this project, attention to the materiality of
conversation is produced through structures gleaned from modernist literature. (Fig. 5) Gibson and
writer George Clark scripted a 45-minute film from fragments of transcribed conversations with the
care home residents who were in the early stages of dementia. In making the film, professional
elder actors re-performed the speech fragments, which the artist and writer had arranged in a
vertical structure, resembling a symphonic score. According to Gibson, B.S. Johnson’s
experimental novel, House Mother Normal (1971), was an inspiration for the script. Distinct
sections of the film reveal repeated narratives from the perspectives of each of the speakers. Like
movements within a score, the themes take on distinct variations through layering and repetition of
speech and images. The viewer is continually required to shift attention and filter out competing
aspects of the dialogue.
In an interview, Beatrice Gibson described how the structure of the filmmaking process
required complex negotiations of authorship that went beyond the engagement with the elderly
participants:
I wouldn’t say this film is a collaboration with me and the residents of an old people’s
home. It is a very structured, composed and authored frame in which people realize a level
of their own authorship, which is something different, maybe.
In the way, Gibson’s experimental structure layers isolated utterances about culture and memory, it
suggests that the viewers’ selective attention is part of a process that involves many authors.
Likewise the video installation, Word Finding, is imagined as a composite of meanings that are
derived from people who have differing relationships with the original content. Starting with the
12

group’s dialogue that was taken up in my collaboration with the participants, through to the
scripting of the words through the video-making process and then in the final configuration that
meets the art audience, the work’s authorship is continually distributed. The eventual aesthetic
isolation of dialogue fragments in the installation can be seen to be a Foucauldian strategy of asking
about the discourse surrounding elder financial abuse: how are these women forming their words in
public? What does their authority produce in their audience? Who are the other authors whose
experiences have informed those pictured? Are they within this audience or another? Will I assume
their position someday?

3.2

Past Works
In my earlier art projects, I have used dialogue with participants as a formal element. For

example, in 2007, I collaborated with Cindy Mochizuki and Jaimie Robson on Archive City:
Portraits of Lulu Island (Richmond Art Gallery). As a self-declared “memory collection agency,”
Mochizuki, Robson and I conducted informal interviews with residents of Richmond to solicit a set
of isolated memories that were materialized through participatory and interactive forms. In 2009, I
developed Garden Gnomad as a mobile documentation cart that I used as a dialogic tool to record
my summer visits with community gardeners and urban agriculturalists. These works set up
situations in which the meanings generated in private speech acts were distributed and re-authored.
In this research, representation of conversation implies an unstable and open process of translation
in the audience as well as the participants.

13

During the course of MAA studies, I experimented with video as a technique to particularize
public speech acts. In A New Word (2009), cell phone video footage of the dialogue between former
Governor General Michaëlle Jean, her husband Jean-Daniel LaFond and artists at VIVO Media Arts
Centre in September 2009 was transcribed, subtitled and re-read by individuals who had been
present. (Fig. 6) In the video, the words of the distinguished guests are simultaneously re-told in an
ensemble of voices that are played over the informally collected video footage. The layering of
words and voices makes evident the process of translation that is both accessed and restricted by a
re-mouthing of words. The project of gathering audience members from the event to repeat the
words delivered by individuals of political and cultural authority, was motivated by my curiosity for
how artists internalize such authority. In the midst of local arts funding cuts, the words of the
dignitaries were delivered to encourage continued experimentation and creative production. My
project staged an opportunity for these words to be mimetically re-authored and then disrupted
through the inevitable confusion, humour and distrust that commonly accompanies the translation
of authority and power.

14

In a subsequent project, Beds at home (2011), an overheard conversation about housing is
re-played through the use of dynamic subtitles sliding over cell phone photos of lavish bedrooms on
display during Vancouver’s recent Olympics. (Fig. 7) In this work, private talking is given authority
through elegant representation. The viewer is presented with images without sound that show a
contradiction of meanings: the desire surrounding the marketing of homes during a mega-event and
the awareness of child poverty that becomes revealed as part of the speakers’ everyday lives.5

5

Up until and during the Olympic events, I was actively observing and responding to the many calls for
participation and involvement that greeted citizens and visitors. I was also producing participatory
interventions, curating a speakers series at VIVO Media Arts Centre and eventually writing about
participation in local cultural programming. Other studio experiments, like the installation and performance
2010 Home Rules (2010), recalled the expectation of compliance with the mega-eventʼs aims that were
eventually carried through the actions of individuals.

15

During the summer of 2010, I participated in a collaborative residency with Mary Oliver at
HubM3 in Salford, Greater Manchester, UK. Offit consisted of a short-run exhibition and two
events at the end of our seven-week residency. (Fig. 8) The entire project considered the potential
social impact of art production in a region facing rapid urban renewal. It began with a hypothesis
that art production in the midst of early gentrification could produce a condition of imbalance, or a
sense of “off-it” in Salford vernacular, where the dominant narratives of urban development might
seem to be “not on it” or “not quite right.” In the presentation of our work, we created an exhibition
environment where the floor surface was askew and where images of Salford’s pre-development
demolition set the stage for conversation and performance. Offit Offsite was a set of site-specific
conversation events that offered the audience a chance to discuss the social conditions for art
making in Salford. As an international collaboration that dealt with local issues, we were extending
to the audience our ongoing conversations about the ways that art production had responded to
urban development in various geographies. By highlighting the act of conversation through the
events, performance, and an interactive exhibition space, we were suggesting that active talking had
produced the work and that it would also be required to complete its reception and distribution.

16

3.3

Case Studies: Linda Duvall and Kutluğ Ataman
I am considering here two artists whose practices demonstrate sustained use of dialogue in

various forms. The artworks of Linda Duvall and Kutluğ Ataman show how authorship and power
are negotiated through the use of private and public talking. In the artworks, the artist is at times a
participant who is coherent with the subjects’ social condition, and at other times they are the
invisible enabler, recorder, or transmitter of words coming from people whose condition is distinct
from both artist and audience. As with Beatrice Gibson’s film project (described above) the case
studies described here cannot be accurately described as collaborations. Instead the artists are
experimenting with structures through which various levels of authorship are produced. This
experimentation, which at times utilizes community-based interventions and dialogue as an
aesthetic element in the installations, is an influence on my practice, and Word Finding in
particular.

In her work Tea & Gossip (2003), Linda Duvall establishes a gallery setting for visitors to
gossip with her about a fictional scenario that is told to them by people on a television screen.
17

Duvall’s video clips introduce visitors to issues relating to complex family configurations resulting
from emergent reproductive technologies. When the artist is not present, visitors can contribute
pieces of gossip to the growing collection on shelves along the gallery walls. (Fig. 9) Duvall’s
enabling and materializing of gossip produces audience involvement that is not expected in the
space of the gallery. In a sense, this is a subversion of officially sanctioned ways for issues
surrounding reproductive technologies to be handled in the public context. In the absence of
institutionalized experts, there is a haphazard approach to ethically disputed scenarios. It implies an
attitude of equality amongst the opinions generated by the participating audience. In this way
Duvall is concerned here and in other works with a respatializing of dialogue: by locating speech
acts like gossiping in the gallery they are given a measure of public distribution. Word Finding
works in a similar way to respatialize the verbal exchange of elders into an art context. The
fragmentation of texts that is a feature of both Tea & Gossip as well as Word Finding is also an act
of dislocation. As in Beatrice Gibson’s film, the isolated utterances in these works require that the
audience actively engage in assembling and thereby authoring the content.
In two other works, Duvall avoids representation of the dialogue altogether. In Cross City
Coffee (2007), she arranged for individuals to exchange visits to the homes of strangers. Matching
participants from economically disparate neighbourhoods and providing transportation and support
as needed, Duvall did not participate in or represent the conversations in artworks. She hoped that
despite the absence of a direct audience, the project would work through the participants to dispel
“myths that surround core neighbourhoods” so that “new understandings of all areas of the city will
develop” (lindaduvall.com). Also avoiding representation, her recent work, Where were the
Mothers? (2009), concerns her involvement in a mothers’ support group. Though this group is the
subject of the work, its verbal content is restricted from the installation’s audience. In its place,
videos of the participants’ hands and their children’s music are used as signifiers. A professionally
18

recorded CD created by the adult children in collaboration with commissioned songwriters provides
a lingering memento that circulates outside of the gallery. (Fig. 10) Present in both of these works is
the unseen dialogue that would be compromised or could be damaging to the participants if it was
made public. Beyond these considerations of ethical representation, however, there is also the
suggestion that even though the audience is restricted from hearing the dialogue, it is generative of
other acts of authoring, such as the subsequent storytelling –between neighbours after Cross City
Coffee coffee dates, or the song-writing of the children in Where were the Mothers?. The restriction
of the original content is a way of isolating dialogue as a continually active, though invisible,
element in the work.

As with Word Finding there is an element of community-based art production in Cross City
Coffee and Where were the Mothers?. Within these works there is the aim to produce socially
ameliorative impact through collective involvement of others. As activist gestures within
disenfranchised communities, they distribute power in ways that are directly felt by the participants.
Through the formal integration of these gestures into art systems, however, Duvall is privileging the

19

works’ dialogical elements. In this way she enables audiences who are distinct from the issues to
consider the agency of talking in the art and the talking that they produce alongside the work.

[Image unavailable.]
Fig. 11: Kutluğ Ataman, Küba (L), 2004 and Paradise (R), 2008. Installation views,
Vancouver Art Gallery, 2008.
In a similar way, some of the dialogue in Kutluğ Ataman’s video installations is grounded in
community involvement. With Küba, Ataman presents to the viewer footage of people describing
their lives in closed zone within the city of Istanbul. (Fig. 11) Küba is a place of asylum for leftist
militants and those outside Turkish law, and is a place where the artist himself sought residence in
the past. His access, combined with experiences of imprisonment, established his legitimacy as a
documenter for this community. The artwork that he produced from the project became a gallery
installation of 40 found TV sets with armchairs of various descriptions set in a grid-like
arrangement in a large gallery. On the screens, they describe their community’s legitimacy in an
animated delivery. Ataman’s interjections from behind the camera along with the intimate
arrangement of furniture implies that the speaking subjects, the filmmaker, and the audience are all
engaged to some degree in an active dialogue about their living conditions. In contrast and perhaps
in order to disrupt this reading of community representation, Ataman produced another installation,
Paradise, to be exhibited next to Küba.6 In it, Ataman presents a nearly silent arrangement of 24 flat
screen monitors with headsets. On the uniform screens, individuals speak about the pleasure of
living in a place that they identify as paradise on earth –a wealthy town in Southern California.
With expertly shot footage, each subject is seen describing the comfort and security of their lives.
Seen together Küba and Paradise are, like Duvall’s Tea & Gossip, a respatialization of dialogue.
6

The first combined exhibition of Küba and Paradise was at the Vancouver Art Gallery in 2008.

20

The installations distinctly contrast the spaces and conditions from which the dialogues were
generated.7 Ataman describes it as a way of demonstrating that geography and history are
constructed through dialogue. He suggests that the spoken exchanges between individuals on a
screen and the camera-holding artist, as well as the patiently listening viewers, can be understood
spatially:
I look at people like buildings. Instead of walls and rooms, we have stories and experiences.
As long as we can live these stories, express these stories, tell and retell these stories, then
we can stand up, the way a building stands. Talking is the only meaningful activity we have.
Once we are no longer willing or allowed to tell our stories, we collapse into conformity. I
like to look at my subjects in this way. My interest in recording them is not a service or
anything like that. I am interested in their stories and how the telling functions in the context
of their lives. (qtd. in Honigman, 82).
Ataman who was trained as a filmmaker has settled on the circulation of these stories
through art installations rather than documentary film, archiving, or activist video. Within the
formal space of the gallery, the viewer is confronted with the artist’s reconstructions of the places
and stories he has captured. The elaborate installations make evident that the artist along with the
audience have a hand in creating the identities and geographies on display. As dialogical works the
installations suggest that the viewer has a number of ways to get involved in the work. Whereas the
quantity of video in Küba and Paradise requires that the viewer make choices about how much to
see and hear, the distinct arrangement of the space –its furniture and technology—requires that the
viewer decide how much of the artist’s construction they should believe and later repeat.

7

For writer, Matthew Stadler the institutional conditions of the worksʼ presentation in Vancouver functioned
as “a kind of Orientalism” (8). By denying the twenty-four speakers in Paradise the capacity to be seen in
dialogue with the audience or the artist, Ataman enabled the commissioning institution a place of power,
according to Stadler.

21

Duvall and Ataman’s works as case studies demonstrate to me that the integration of
community-based actions with the respatializing of dialogue within art settings, can offer the
audience ways to participate in the authoring of the work, despite their distance from the content or
location.

22

4

Research Methodologies Surrounding Word Finding
All this to say that, in the realm of contemporary art, we do not seem to be watching what
we say in terms of holding back. Rather, we may be increasingly interested in considering
the aesthetics of people talking together. (Monika Szewczk, 4)

Grant Kester’s Conversation Pieces (2004) articulates a critical framework for dialogical art
practices, especially community-based and activist artworks. His theoretical analysis makes a place
in art criticism for works that “solicit the viewer’s interaction in a direct or accessible manner,”
after and in opposition to the isolation of formalist critiques (82). Working with theories from
Emmanuel Levinas and Mikhail Bakhtin, Kester discusses the power relations of inter-subjective
exchange within dialogical aesthetics. Many of the case studies featured in Conversation Pieces
demonstrate the challenges posed to artists who enter exchanges that cross boundaries of class, race
and gender. In particular, he notes that there is often an avoidance of critical analysis and fetishizing
of the authenticity of the artist’s coherence with the participant’s social condition. In many ways,
Kester’s book seeks to hold these practices accountable to the avoided critique. Throughout his
writing, he privileges works that enable “active listening,” works that are based on “connected
knowing” out of feminist epistemology, and those that feature interactions “drawn out over
extended periods of time” (151, 113, 112). Kester suggests that each project should be examined in
its specificity: there should be consideration of the artist’s capacity to treat their relationship with
the participants critically and self-reflexively as part of the work itself (130-1). Instead of
reductionist political critique, he is asking how collaborative and process-based works can consider
instead what is achieved through social exchange in art. In the midst of his analysis of dialogue in
community-based interventions, Kester is considering the phenomenological possibilities of
proximity in the extended intersubjective exchanges staged in art:
23

The moment that passes between posing a question and receiving a reply is marked by both
risk and possibility. The risk of doubt and uncertainty, and the possibility of an opening out
to the other; a movement from self-assurance to the vulnerability of intersubjective
exchange. (Untitled 2004)
Though Kester’s open theorizing is useful for an expanded view of conversations in art, the
older theories of Mikhail Bakhtin articulate more specifically the subversive workings of dialogue
in aesthetically presented cultural forms. For artists, his ideas echo the materialist approaches of
artists in early twentieth century Russia in which ordinary things held revolutionary potential. As a
theorist working in the midst of the Russian revolution, he articulated the subversive workings of
“dialogism,” as represented in various genres of speech acts, particularly the literary novel. His
notion of “heteroglossia” contained the dispute and conflict between official and unofficial
discourses within the same language. He recognized that in every utterance there could be found
traces of past and future meanings, which would each be uniquely understood by the speaker and
the receiver. He contrasted the inherently heterogenous characteristic of dialogism to the
“monologism” of official genres like government utterances, for example, which the lower classes
would inevitably have a tendency to subvert through such things as parody or carnival. This
glossary definition gets at how his theories contained political resistance in the context of the 1920s
in Russia:
Dialogue is perhaps the basic trope in all of Bakhtin’s thought. There is no existence, no
meaning, no word or thought that does not enter into dialogue or ‘dialogic’ (‘dialogichekii’)
relations with the other, that does not exhibit intertexuality in both time and space.
‘Monologue’ and ‘monologic’ (‘monolog’ and ‘monologicheskii’) refer to any discourse
which seeks to deny the dialogic nature of existence, which refuses to recognize its

24

responsibility as addressee, and pretends to be the ‘last word’. Such discourse is typical of
authoritarian regimes. (Roberts, 247)
Like constructivist artists who were working around the same time, Mikhail Bakhtin
developed his ideas in the midst of ideological rhetoric that placed high value in the context and the
activities of the everyday or byt. To understand the importance of everyday life in this context, we
can look to Christina Kiaer’s study of the “things” made by Russian constructivist artists in the
1920s. Kiaer describes the widespread intellectual and public discussion of the time around the
question of byt.8 She explains how materialist Marxists situated their rhetoric on a linguistic
division of byt or ordinary life, and bytie, the spiritually meaningful side of existence. A
transcendent aim of early twentieth century Russian culture was not so much concerned with a
distinction of private from public, but of material from spiritual (Svetlana Boym described in Kaier,
52). In a radical use of ordinary life as a site for revolution, constructivist artists offered up new
forms for socialist life that would provide transcendence from both backward peasant traditions and
bourgeois materialism. Their things (working class clothing, furniture, theatre sets, for example)
revealed worker-based industrial production while rejecting, to double effect, folkways as well as
decadence.
For Bakhtin, ordinary speech, which is at the structural core of the novel genre, was a
semiotic cue for readers to recognize the counterhegemonic potential of common discourse. In the
novel form there is a stratification of meanings or “heteroglossia” between characters as well as
between the readers who experience various understandings of the dialogue’s representation
(Bakhtin 332). In this way, the novel contains the anti-authoritarian potential to deflate official and
ideological meanings through mass circulation. It is these ideas about materialized dialogue as a
disruption or distribution of power that are useful in understanding the impact of Linda Duvall’s
8

In 1923 Leon Trotsky produced a set of essays for the party newspaper Pravda. These were later
assembled in a book under the title Questions of Everyday Life.

25

and Kutluğ Ataman’s acts of relocating gossip and neighbourhood banter. In these works, it is not
only that the community-based dialogue achieves authority through public presentation, but also
that the participants’ speech is presented as open to interpretation and re-interpretation. In this way,
Bakhtin explained, the reader or audience is continually involved through reception and translation.
In a recent two-part text, Monika Szewczyk also asks aesthetic and formal questions of the
“discursive turn” in contemporary art. As with Bakhtin’s heteroglossia, Szewczyk wonders if art,
like conversation, can take up more than one position; if it offers a discourse about
misunderstandings. Are the other parts of conversation that are not usually thought of as
conversation considered—like neutrality and silence? How do we “watch what we say”? She calls
up examples from eighteenth century paintings that displayed aristocratic conversation as a way of
transmitting their right to rule. If conversation is seen to be the place where value is negotiated as in
the eighteenth century, what is being displayed by artists who stage conversation now? Liam
Gillick also refers to a discursive turn in relation to power. For him, the parallel nature of the
discursive to the dominant culture built on global capital enables a self-consciousness that can be a
position of strength and weakness. Both writers suggest that within the workings of an argument or
conversation there exist possibilities of disruption and refusal, through speaking and translation. My
recent projects produce words and utterances that circulate within ordinary talking. Like in the work
of Duvall and Ataman, Word Finding is primarily concerned with the construction of subjectivity
and the continual negotiations of authority and power through language or conversation. As with
Bakhtin’s heteroglossia, the words have been generated from various social conditions and power
relations. In this way they offer the listeners an invitation to continually translate and transmit the
meanings within shifting social conditions.
In her 2006 introduction to a reader of theoretical texts and artists’ statements concerning
the use of participation, Claire Bishop suggests that participatory works from the 1960s until now
26

have tended to reflect three categories of social or political intervention. First, many participatory
art projects aim to create an image of an “active subject” who is politically empowered through
either symbolic or physical gestures. Second, participatory art forms often work to distribute the
authorship to many participants, thus to model a more egalitarian social world. Third, these art
forms are also used to materialize a social bond in the face of the isolating effects of capitalism
(Bishop, Participation 12). Bishop’s texts have presented a pointed critique of works that privilege
the ethical over those that have attempted “to think the aesthetic and the social/political together”
(Bishop, Social Turn). This analysis has often been reiterated as a critique of community-based or
activist art for which the emphasis shifts to ethics of representation over the artist’s authorship.
Community-based projects and social art practices often avoid the critical analyses that consider
both formal and ethical considerations, and that in Szewczyk’s words “take up more than one
position”. It is both the challenge and the core expectation that Word Finding be positioned both in
the community and the institutions of art school and gallery. These dual positions aim to combine
the aesthetic alongside the social/political.

27

5

Conclusion
An emancipated community is in fact a community of storytellers and translators.
(Jacque Rancière, 280)

In his pedagogy-based analysis of participatory theatre, Jacque Rancière suggests that, like
the learner, the spectator’s emancipation is not achieved through involvement in the staged action
but instead in the active translation and the ensuing story telling that functions as a form of
distribution. He suggests that the post-production talking amongst the audience needs to be
considered to be as equally intelligent and important as the acting on stage. In this way, the
audience continues to author and circulate the work in dynamic ways that are not restricted by the
artist’s original intention and social condition. Word Finding puts forward the idea that there is an
active crowd within and outside of the artwork that serves to complete the work. Through a
recognition that the work’s formal structure requires mimicry and translation, or through the
storytelling subsequent to the work’s presentation, authorship is neither determined nor fixed.
As an artist making art from conversation as a method, this research project has also called
on me to ask what am I authoring within an unknown crowd of authors. In Word Finding, I see that
my actions create the subject positions of invitation-issuing host, the advocate for video
representation based on negotiations over interests and resources, and the inquiring researcher who
questions the discourse. Alongside artists like Gibson, Duvall and Ataman, the form of my work
implies that active involvement is a continuing requirement for reception of public and private
utterances that are put forward in my art.

28

WORKS CITED
Ataman, Kutluğ. “The Institute for the Readjustment of Clocks.” 21 Nov. 2010.
http://www.saatleriayarlamaenstitusu.com/
Bakhtin, M. M. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Michael Holquist Ed., C. Emerson & M.
Holquist Trans. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981.
Bishop, Claire. “Introduction // Viewers as Producers.” Participation. Claire Bishop Ed. The MIT
Press, 2006. 10-17.
---. “the social turn: collaboration and its discontents.” Artforum. Feb 2006. EBSCOHost. ECUAD
Lib. 10 Nov 2009.
Duvall, Linda. “LINDA DUVALL Visual and Media Artist.” 20 Dec. 2010.
http://www.lindaduvall.com/
Duvall, Linda. Linda Duvall: Where Were the Mothers? (Cataloguue, CD-ROM and booklet).
Mississauga, Ont: Art Gallery of Mississauga, 2009.
Foucault, Michel. Fearless Speech. Los Angeles, Calif: Semiotext(e), 2001.
Foucault, Michael. “What is an Author?” Art in Theory 1900-2000. Charles Harrison & Paul Wood
Eds. Blackwell Pub, 2003. 923-928.
Gibson, Beatrice. The Future is Getting Old Like the Rest of Us 16mm film, 45 min. 2009.
Gibson, Beatrice. “Beatrice Gibson on her new film.” (interview) Lux.org.uk. n.d. 7 March 2010.
http://www.lux.org.uk/media/podcast/beatrice_gibson.mp3
Gillick, Liam. “Maybe it would be better if we worked in groups of three? Part 1 of 2: The
Discursive.” e-flux #2 (01/2009). 30 Jan. 2011. http://e-flux.com/journal/view/35
Roberts, Graham. “Glossary” The Bakhtin Reader: Selected Writings of Bakhtin, Medvedev, and
Voloshinov. London: E. Arnold, 1994. 245-252.
Haraway, Donna J. “Chapter Nine, Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and
the Privilege of Partial Perspective.” Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of
Nature (New York; Routledge, 1991).
Honigman, Ana Finel, and Kutlug Ataman. “What the Structure Defines: An Interview with Kutlug
Ataman.” Art Journal 63.1 (2004): 79-86.
Kester, Grant H. Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art. Berkeley: U
of C P, 2004.

29

Kester, Grant H. Untitled conference paper. Monogahela Conference on Post-Industrial
Community Development, STUDIO for Creative Inquiry, Carnegie Mellon University,
October 2004. 24 March 2011. http://moncon.greenmuseum.org/
Kiaer, Christina. Imagine No Possessions: The Socialist Objects of Russian Constructivism.
Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2005.
Rancière, Jacques. “The Emancipated Spectator.” Artforum International 45.7 (2007): 270-81.
Roberts, Graham. “Glossary.” The Bakhtin Reader. Pam Morris Ed. Edward Arnold Pub. Ltd. 1994.
245-252.
Stadler, Matthew. “Just Here to Help: Global Art Production and Local Meanings.” Fillip 8. 3.2.
(2008), Vancouver. 8, 19.
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Vancouver. 8 February 2011.
Szewczyk, Monika. “Art of Conversation, Part II.” e-flux #7 (06/2009). 27 Jan. 2011 http://eflux.com/journal/view/37
TED Ideas Worth Spreading, 8 February 2011. http://www.ted.com/

30

SELECTED LIST OF WORKS CONSULTED
Agamben, Giorgio. “Notes on Gesture.” Infancy & History the Destruction of Experience. Liz
Heron Trans. Verson NY. 135-40.
Ataman, Kutluğ. “The Institute for the Readjustment of Clocks.” 21 Nov. 2010.
http://www.saatleriayarlamaenstitusu.com/
Ataman, Kutlug. Kutlug Ataman: Perfect Strangers. Sydney: Museum of Contemporary Art, 2005.
Bakhtin, M. M. The Bakhtin Reader: Selected Writings of Bakhtin, Medvedev, and Voloshinov.
London: E. Arnold, 1994.
Bakhtin, M. M. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Michael Holquist Ed., C. Emerson & M.
Holquist Trans. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981.
Bakhtin, M. M. Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. 1st ed. Austin: University of Texas Press,
1986.
Bishop, Claire. “Introduction // Viewers as Producers.” Participation. Claire Bishop Ed. The MIT
Press, 2006. 10-17.
---. “the social turn: collaboration and its discontents.” Artforum. Feb 2006. EBSCOHost. ECUAD
Lib. 10 Nov 2009.
Borgdorff, Henk. “The Debate on Research in the Arts.” Dutch Journal of Music Theory. Vol 12,
No 1. 2007. 1-17.
Bostad, Finn, ed. Bakhtinian Perspectives on Language and Culture: Meaning in Language, Art,
and New Media. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.
Bourriaud, Nicolas. Relational Aesthetics. Dijon: Les presses du réel, 2002.
Bradnist, Craig. “The Bakhtin Circle.” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.15 July 2005. 21 Nov.
2010. http://www.iep.utm.edu/bakhtin/
Cartiere, Cameron. Re/Placing Public Art: The Role of Place-Specificity in New Genre Public Art.
Saarbrücken, Germany: VDM Verlag Dr. Müller, 2010.
Certeau, Michel de. The Practice of Everyday Life / Michel De Certeau; Translated by Steven
Rendall. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984.
Duvall, Linda. “LINDA DUVALL Visual and Media Artist.” 20 Dec. 2010.
http://www.lindaduvall.com/

31

Duvall, Linda. Linda Duvall: Where Were the Mothers? (Cataloguue, CD-ROM and booklet).
Mississauga, Ont: Art Gallery of Mississauga, 2009.
Fletcher, Harrell. “Right On Canada: Some Thoughts in Regard to the Open Engagement
Experience” Open Engagement: Art After Aesthetic Distance Post Conference Catalogue.
Jennifer Delos Reyes ed. 2008. 6 March 2011.
http://jendelosreyes.com/openengagement/post_catalogue.html
Frieling, Rudolf. “Toward Participation in Art.” The Art of Participation. Thames and Hudson,
2008. 33-48.
Foucault, Michel. Fearless Speech. Los Angeles, Calif: Semiotext(e), 2001.
Foucault, Michael. “What is an Author?” Art in Theory 1900-2000. Charles Harrison & Paul Wood
Eds. Blackwell Pub, 2003. 923-928.
Fried, Michel. “Art & Objecthood.” Art in Theory 1900-2000. Charles Harrison & Paul Wood Eds.
Blackwell Pub, 2003. 835-846.
Gibson, Beatrice. The Future is Getting Old Like the Rest of Us 16mm film, 45 min. 2009.
Gibson, Beatrice. “Beatrice Gibson on her new film.” (interview) Lux.org.uk. n.d. 7 March 2010.
http://www.lux.org.uk/media/podcast/beatrice_gibson.mp3
Gillick, Liam. “Maybe it would be better if we worked in groups of three? Part 1 of 2: The
Discursive.” e-flux #2 (01/2009). 30 Jan. 2011. http://e-flux.com/journal/view/35
Groys, Boris. “Self-Design and Aesthetic Responsibility.” e-flux #7 (06/2009). 23 Feb. 2011.
http://e-flux.com/journal/view/68
Haraway, Donna J. “Chapter Nine, Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and
the Privilege of Partial Perspective.” Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of
Nature (New York; Routledge, 1991).
Honigman, Ana Finel, and Kutlug Ataman. “What the Structure Defines: An Interview with Kutlug
Ataman.” Art Journal 63.1 (2004): 79-86.
Horrigan, Bill “Küba, Si!” Küba. Kutluğ Ataman. London: Artangel, 2004. N. pag.
Instant Coffee Collective.“Instant Coffee: no better than you.” 20 Dec. 2010.
http://www.instantcoffee.org/home.html
Irish, Sharon. Suzanne Lacy: Spaces Between. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010.
Jacob, Mary Jane, Michael Brenson, and Arts Festival of Atlanta. Conversations at the Castle:
Changing Audiences and Contemporary Art. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1998.

32

Kester, Grant H. Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art. Berkeley: U
of C P, 2004.
Kester, Grant H. Untitled conference paper. Monogahela Conference on Post-Industrial
Community Development, STUDIO for Creative Inquiry, Carnegie Mellon University,
October 2004. 24 March 2011. http://moncon.greenmuseum.org/
Kiaer, Christina. Imagine No Possessions: The Socialist Objects of Russian Constructivism.
Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2005.
Kristeva, Julia. The Sense and Non-Sense of Revolt. Columbia U P, 2001.
Larsen, Lars Bang. “The Jury Stays Out: Art, Activism & Art’s New Normativity.” Art Activsim &
Recuperation. Concept Store Journal #3. Bristol, UK: Arnolfini Gallery, 2010. 26-33.
Le, Julia. “AGM opens mother of all shows.” Mississauga.com. 6 Nov 2009. 2 Dec 2010.
O’Donnell, Darren. “Dueling Engagements Vancouver vs Regina” Willard, Tania ed. Access all
areas: conversations on engaged. Vancouver, BC: Visible Arts Society, 2008. 50-8.
O’Donnell, Darren. Social Accupuncture: A Guide to Suicide, Performance and Utopia. Coach TO:
House Books, 2006.
Purves, Ted Ed. What we Want is Free: generosity and exchange in recent art. Albany: State U NY
P: 2005.
Rancière, Jacques. “The Emancipated Spectator.” Artforum International 45.7 (2007): 270-81.
Rogoff, Irit. “De-Regulation: With the Work of Kutlug Ataman.” Third Text 23.2 (2009): 165-179.
Stadler, Matthew. “Just Here to Help: Global Art Production and Local Meanings.” Fillip 8. 3.2.
(2008), Vancouver. 8, 19.
Stimson, Blake and Gregory Sholette Eds. Collectivism After Modernism: The Art of Social
Imagination After 1945. Minneapolis: U Minnesota P, 2007.
Sutherland, Jessie. Finding Home™ Dialogues display at Regional Knowledge Exchange event.
Vancouver. 8 February 2011.
Szewczyk, Monika. “Art of Conversation, Part I.” e-flux #3 (02/2009). 27 Jan. 2011 http://eflux.com/journal/view/72
---. “Art of Conversation, Part II.” e-flux #7 (06/2009). 27 Jan. 2011 http://eflux.com/journal/view/37
TED Ideas Worth Spreading, 8 March 2010. http://www.ted.com/

33

Willard, Tania. “Access All Areas” Tania Willard ed. Access all areas: conversations on engaged.
Vancouver, BC: Visible Arts Society, 2008. 4-8.
Wilson, M. “Autonomy, Agonism, and Activist Art: An Interview with Grant Kester.” Art Journal.
66.3 (Fall 2007): 106-18.
Wright, Karen. “Kutlug Ataman Turkish Delights.” (Interview) Phillips de Pury & Company FILM.
20 Dec. 2010. http://www.saatleriayarlamaenstitusu.com/site/artworks/criticalEssays/26

34

Appendix A
Texts describing the methods and goals of the Finding Home™ dialogue process as printed on
display materials at Regional Knowledge Exchange event.

During Dialogues Together We
- Encourage new connections, relationships and strategies
- Examine present day contexts, deriving new strategies
- Value diversity and foster cross-cultural understanding
- Strengthen values-based problem solving skills
- Identify workable next steps for individual action

Our Goal
To equip seniors with skills to end isolation, build networks, and learn a valuesbased approach to resolving everyday problems.

35

Appendix B
“How to Spot a Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing” flyer and poster generated from the second session of
the Elder Abuse Awareness Dialogue Project, Finding Home™, John Braithwaite Community
Centre and North Shore Neighbourhood House, North Vancouver, 2010.

36