University of Kent, Canterbury (UK), 27-28 June 2013
Artscapes 2013 is a two-day interdisciplinary conference aims to provide a forum for academic, policy and practitioner engagement with the relationships between the public and urban art.
Artscapes seeks to critically examine the relationship between art and urban places, questioning in what ways urban art can engage with, create and change public spaces.
Particularly “urban spaces are important loci of social contact, their physical and symbolic properties having a profound effect on everyday interactions. These sites are frequently subject to art interventions enacted for a range of aesthetic, social, political and economic purposes. Yet, while urban art can have transformative effects on the cityscape and in the development of urban cultures, the relationships between art and the public sphere represents a contested ground. Art, in such contexts, can be viewed variously as engendering civic participation and challenging the normative uses of public spaces, or as complicit with neoliberal development agendas and cosmopolitan elitism.”