Evaluate This!

Evaluating socially engaged practice can be a sensitive issue. This wide-ranging term describes a variety of artworks and projects, and so, how best to evaluate socially engaged practice evokes competing opinions about its character and value. Through a series of provocations about the purposes and nature of evaluation, Gráinne Coughlan will unpick some of the assumptions around evaluation to highlight processed-based evaluation as a helpful tool for learning. In conversation with artist Susanne Bosch, she will explore how thinking about evaluation in this way can allow us to better understand processes of solidarity and sustainability that often characterise socially engaged practice.

This event is co-hosted by Create and TU Dublin with funding through the Irish Research Council’s Enterprise Partnership Scheme Postdoctoral Fellowship.

Biographies

Dr Gráinne Coughlan
Dr Gráinne Coughlan is an academic researcher of socially engaged practice. She is a recipient of the Irish Research Council’s Enterprise Partnership Postdoctoral scheme supported by Technological University Dublin and Create. Her postdoctoral research explores and develops a lexicon for evaluating socially engaged practice.  Gráinne completed her PhD at TU Dublin in 2021 and has presented her work internationally. Her article “The Politics of Fairness in A Fair Land” (2016) will be published as part of the Irish Museum of Modern Art’s inaugural IMMA Texts publication. She has contributed reviews to the VAI Newssheet and Create News and coordinated the  Public Art Now conference (2021), hosted by TU Dublin and supported by the Grangegorman Development Agency.

Susanne Bosch
For me, art is a practice for entering into dialogue about social, political and historical events as well as an interface where, through/with aesthetic forms, a different way of dealing with given conditions can be tested. As an “interface activist” I work on long-term questions that deal with concepts of democracy and sustainable futures. This includes work on social visions and models of participation (e.g. Cities Exhibition, Birzeit University Museum, Palestine 2012-13; This is Tomorrow, Osnabrück, 2015; Subcontracted Nations, Qattan Foundation, Palestine 2018, and Solidarity Crunch Zones, Villa Massimo, Rome, 2020-21, come and go | linger, 2018-2020, AROSA_interactives roleplay, since 2019, ‚FiFis flat. THE WHOLE WORLD AT HOME, 2021, Time for the future, 2022), money (e.g. Left-over Penny Action/Restpfennigaktion, Germany, 1998- 2002; Naples, Italy, 2008-2009; Madrid, 2010-2011, Liechtenstein, 2017,) and migration (including the border, 2020 Berlin; Cartographies (of) a Landscape, 2020 DA Gravenhorst; The Prehistory of Crisis II, Belfast and Dublin, 2009).