The Glasgow School of Art

Claire Doherty
'The Event of Situation: Contemporary Art, Place and Time' watch video

In 2007, the term 'situation-specific' emerged in critical appraisals of international scattered-site commissions such as Sculpture Project Münster, Germany, and in consideration of works such as Pawel Althamer's Real Time Movie, a performative intervention dispersed across different localities and times. Drawing on trans-disciplinary notions of place, time and locality, Claire Doherty will consider how our understanding of situation has developed from the Situationist intervention to dispersed events and interventions in public space, to offer a new interpretation of situation-specificity and the artwork as event.

Claire Doherty is a curator and writer and Director of Situations, a research and commissioning programme at the University of the West of England, Bristol. Over the past 13 years, she has investigated new forms of curatorial practice beyond conventional exhibition models at institutions such as Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, Spike Island, Bristol and FACT, Liverpool. Situations has expanded since its inception in 2003 to include a range of publishing projects, international lectures, events, and off-site commissions by artists including Phil Collins, Nathan Coley, Susan Hiller, Roman Ondak, Joao Penalva and Ivan & Heather Morison. Doherty is also Curatorial Director of the year-long One Day Sculpture series, New Zealand's first nationwide series of temporary public art commissions 2008-9. Doherty lectures and publishes widely and is editor of Contemporary Art: From Studio to Situation (Black Dog Publishing, 2004); Documents of Contemporary Art: Situation (Whitechapel/MIT Press, 2009); and is co-editor of the forthcoming One Day Sculpture (Kerber, 2009); and Ivan and Heather Morison: The Shape of Things to Come (Book Works, 2009).

Hosted by The School of Fine Art, The Friday Event Lecture Series is The Glasgow School of Art's flagship public lecture series, and brings major international speakers (including artists, architects, designers, historians and cultural theorists) to the city of Glasgow.