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Jason Bowman

Senior Lecturer

The Crafts and Fine Art Unit
Telephone
+46 31-786 51 28
+46 766-18 51 28
Mail
jason.bowman@akademinvaland.gu.se
Visiting address
Kristinelundsgatan 6-8
41137 Göteborg
Postal address
Box 131
40530 Göteborg

About Jason Bowman

I am an artist from a working-class background with a curatorial practice, who teaches and conducts research.

I have an expanded practice, working across diverse context and media. I have been practising for over 30 years. I teach because I believe in education as a shared, societal force for critical thought and action. I make art because I want to critique and contribute to the world we make. I research because I want to contribute other ideas that can nuance how we understand art and its potentials. I curate because it brings me - through proximity to the thoughts and works of others, including artists - a further arena in which we consider how we may organize the potentia and discontents of art.

I am especially engaged in questions relating to artist-organisation, collective and collaborative practices; performance and performativity; curating, art institutions and non-institutional practices; site and context-oriented art; and social practices, participation and the production and coercion of publics, and counter-publics.

I have produced performances, installations, films, video works, text works, photographs, drawings and sculptures. Solo iterations of commissioned projects have taken place with: the ICA (London); Situations (Bristol); Franklin Furnace (New York); Raven Row (London); BALTIC Contemporary Art (Gateshead/Newcastle); Tramway (Glasgow); de Beweeging (Antwerp); the Whitworth Art (Manchester) and the Gallery of Modern Art (Glasgow). Recent exhibitions include at Lokale (Copenhagen) and Cora Hillebrand Gallery (Gothenburg). Curatorial work has included the first major survey in Europe of the works and practices of Yvonne Rainer and the official presentation of contemporary art from Scotland at the Venice Biennale (co-curated with Rachel Bradley). Work as a film producer led to a BAFTA nomination.

In 2025, I am working on an edited volume that departs from previous research funded by the Swedish Research Council, entitled Stretched: Expanded Notions of Artistic Practice via Artist-led Cultures. This will interrogate the less-known intercessions between artists-as-organisers as expanded artistic practices and curating towards a consideration of 'organising' as a means to identify and consider the implications of curatorial methods, especially when applied by artists.

I am currently questioning the production of participative methods in socially-engaged art practice. Human Resources: Remediating Art's Socially Engaged Participants is a proposal to interrogate how to re/mediate the under-researched contributions of citizen-participants to the development of participative-methods in socially-engaged art projects (SEAP). The methodology intends to frustrate artistic action research by introducing the ventriloquial. Citizen-participants recruited from previous SEAP projects will be facilitated to develop methods that foreground and mediate their conceptualisation of participation and performed through a reversal of power by which artistic practitioners of SEAP are re-positioned as citizen-participants’ ventriloquised instruments. and concerned by the lack of emphasis on how citizen-participants may drive the development of those methods.

In 2018, I was trained as a future research leader by the University 91̽»¨. I have conducted peer reviews for journals such as PARSE Journal, the Journal of Visual Culture in Britain, the Journal of Visual Arts Practice, and the Journal of Art and the Public Sphere. I am on the editorial board of the newly founded (2025) Journal of Feminist Art Practices and Research: Cosmos. Pre-publication manuscript reviews for imprints have included The Manchester University Press and Palgrave Macmillan. I have also reviewed for funders, including the Leverhulme Trust and assessed career progressions for institutions such as New York University and the Glasgow School of Art.

Previous research secondments include with the EU-funded project, NEARCH interrogating relations between contemporary art and archaeology. I was a co-researcher during - and sole-editor of the culminating publication - of the Swedish Research Council funded project, 'Esther Shalev-Gerz: Trust and the Unfolding of Dialogue'. This included commissioning and editing texts by Georges Didi-Huberman, Andrea Phillips, Jacques Ranciere, Jacqueline Rose and James E. Young. I am currently developing:

As a visual art consultant I have written strategies and policies for organisations such as: Arts Council England (Head Office); Optima Housing Association; Arts Council (West Midlands) and Creative Scotland, the latter to which I was an advisor for over 5 years. Other consultancy clients have included the National Galleries, British Council, Tate Britain, SPACE Studios, Castlemilk Environment Trust, a-n: The Artists Information Company; the Banff Centre for the Arts and the Olympic Legacy Company. I was responsible for writing the intellectual framework for the Exhibition Road Festival for London's Cultural Olympiad: a partnership between the Natural History Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum and Serpentine Galleries.

I am an elected fellow of the Royal Society of the Arts (UK); an external examiner for the MA in Intercultural Practice at Central St. Martins (London); a previous member of the steering group of PARADOX: The European Forum for Fine Art Education and of an international research group interrogating issues relating to the collecting of performance works by museums. Between 2019-2024, I was an external examiner for the BA strand of Visual Cultures at Edinburgh College of Art, for the MA in Contemporary Art Theory and remain as a PhD supervisor at the same institution. In 2021, I was an external examiner for the MFA in Visual Arts Study Programme at The Eugeniusz Geppert Academy of Art and Design in Warsaw, Poland.