As we enter the closing weeks of Jacqueline Donachie’s exhibition Deep in the Heart of Your Brain, it is your last chance to see the exhibition and we are delighted to share details of the remaining public events in our exciting engagement programme.

Wednesday 26^th October 2016, 6.30 – 7.45pm GoMA
Jacqueline Donachie in conversation with Professor Tom Shakespeare

This event will examine the role of creative arts in exploring and understanding the challenges that disability and genetics pose to individuals and families.  In particular, the discussion will reference the passage of time that relates to Donachie’s exhibition, and the film Skin Horse (1983), currently in the John Samson exhibition in Gallery 1. Tom Shakespeare recently re-visited eight of the participants in his 1996 book, The Sexual Politics of Disability, who now feel that their disability has become less salient, more akin to the general effects of ageing seen in the wider population. Yet with degenerative conditions, the disability becomes more prominent in the individual’s own biography. Art and social research can both tell these stories, but art captures the imagination and enables reflection, in ways that academic work rarely does.

Tom Shakespeare is professor of disability research at UEA.  He has written extensively on disability rights and bioethics and is author of ‘Disability Rights and Wrongs’ and ‘Genetic Politics: from eugenics to genome’ among other books and articles.  He was formerly a member of Arts Council England, and has curated three different science/ art exhibitions around the social and ethical impacts of the life sciences, as well as making work himself.

4 November 2016, Day Symposium
(10am – 4.30pm, Platform. Transport provided from Glasgow city centre).

This day symposium will provide an opportunity to discuss in depth some of the issues raised by Donachie’s exhibition Deep in the Heart of Your Brain.

By taking the theme of expert culture and participation and examining this through a prism of ethics and academic practice, the symposium will look at lived experience as a model for radical practice to challenge social constructs around scientific and medical research, and knowledge exchange.  Can auto-ethnographic and participative art practice increase our understanding of disability and care in the fields of genetics, inherited disability and ageing? What is the role of lived experience within both creative practice and academic research, and how can the effects on participants be assessed, and valued?

Speakers come from a range of academic and artistic backgrounds, and each has been asked to address in some way the effects of their practice on specific communities of interest.

They include Jacqueline Donachie, Karen Guthrie, Jason E Bowman and Professor Sarah Cunningham-Burley. The day will be chaired by Alison Stirling, with a narrative commentary provided by Moira Jeffrey.

Deep in the Heart of Your Brain: the symposium has been supported by a Wellcome Trust Arts Award, The Marigold Foundation and Glasgow Life.

To book a ticket for the symposium please use this link: The Symposium https://platform-online.ticketsolve.com/#/shows/873563814

Information in PDF format here final-events-pdf