FASS Academics use Art for a Better World

OU academic Dr Precious Chatterje-Doody stands alongside the visual foreword to Art for a Better World

From November 6^th-15^th FASS Academics Dr Precious Chatterje-Doody (POLIS) and Dr Paul-François Tremlett (Religious Studies) co-curated an exhibition, Art for a Better World, at The Foundry Social Justice and Human Right Centre in Vauxhall, London as part of the ESRC’s Festival of Social Sciences.

Exhibits included a suite of six cartoons produced collaboratively by academics and artists to illustrate recent research about social challenges in a range of societies across Europe, the Middle East, Asia, the Caribbean and Africa.

The exhibition is an output of OSC73: Democracy, Disinformation and Religion, and was organised in collaboration with the arts and education charity Equalities Work, Dr Victoria Hudson of King’s College London, and the award-winning art collective, Face in the Hole.

The exhibition featured Face in the Hole’s Words above All, a video installation raising awareness of the political impact of divisive political discourse. Also on display were a range of mixed media works produced by NGO workers and ECRs in a workshop on Art and Social Challenges that was organised alongside the exhibition and facilitated by Joanna Mamede of Face in the Hole.

The public opening of the event drew attendees from local politics, NGOs, and the arts community, as well the cartoon creators and workshop participants who were seeing their works on physical display for the first time.

This is not the first public exhibition of Art for a Better World. Since the beginning of the summer, it has been on display at Kirkleatham Museum and Gallery in Redcar, and a travelling version of the exhibition has appeared at conferences and events in Birmingham, Leeds, Milton Keynes and Helsinki.

Some of the works featured in Art for a Better World are available to view in this online gallery and video virtual exhibition. The exhibition’s next public appearance is scheduled to be in Cambridge in early 2025. If you’d like to be kept in touch about the initiative, you can join the project’s mailing list.