Images: Benjamin Hoffman.
“PUBLIC PLATFORM is a conversation, and an invitation to come together as audiences, contributors, critics, distributors and advocates, focused on acts of making public.”
Public Platform responds to Platform Arts’ call for provocation, interruption, and intervention as core to the production of contemporary art. It is a research initiative that works through expanded modes of publishing and temporary public art, to interrupt, imagine, extend and document. Equally, as a live archiving project it takes public space and publication as simultaneous sites for intervention and speculation, creating its own public in the invisible collisions of the readers it collects.
Led by Curator Sarah Jones, Public Platform will publish new artistic research and commission new temporary public works that are relevant and impactful for our place on Wadawurrung Country in Geelong/Djilang. Expanding on Platform Arts’ in-house programming, these activities make the institution permeable to the city and the city a place for intervention and artistic agency.
“Public Platform’s pilot publication ‘Feasibility Study: Civic Imaginaries’ was conceived as a text-based resource of creative provocations for positioning artists and audiences within the creation of civic space. We wanted to explore how artists and arts institutions deliberately and meaningfully collect and shape audiences and publics, and how artists and arts workers understand concepts of civic participation, responsibility and belonging; what we feel we contribute, shape, and make use of. We believe in the transformation of public space and the responsibility of the artist to participate in and challenge civic processes, in the making of culture.”
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Image: The Contemporary, Expanded Field text, photo by Sarah Walker.