Inhabiting/living practice: an emergent collaborative arts-based exhibition

Abstract

This article presents a collaborative exhibition at the 2019 World Congress of the International Society for Education through Art (InSEA) at The University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. Inhabiting/Living Practice presented the arts-based research of 18 doctoral students from around the world. We came together in the Hatch Gallery throughout the InSEA congress to collaborate, discuss and make together. We shared our arts-based educational research through this emergent process while allowing it to evolve in relation to our ongoing dialogues, artistic interventions, and provocations. We imagined the gallery as a living body: an emerging embodied space that we inhabited for the week with material, affect and relationality. In this chapter, through photograph documentation and examination of our experiences, we present the unfolding of this emergent exhibition. Through follow-up reflections, participants discuss how the exhibition allowed for a re-viewing of their doctoral research, a re-imagining of the possibilities of arts-based educational research and the ways connections developed through making together over the course of the week. Through this work, we propose that more time spent making together is needed within the context of academic art education conferences.