Alternative Futures Working Group is a research project exploring perceptions of the future and conversations as artworks. This project is part of artist Kelly Doley’s creative-led PhD at the University of New South Wales and aims to ask critical questions about performance as a research tool and ways of translating the social, live and embodied experience of conversation into images of social change. The project draws widely from feminist and social engagement theory, including those of Paulo Friere and bell hooks.
Alternative Futures Working Group is part of a larger series of Groups performances the artist will be staging in different locations throughout the next year. The findings from the Groups research process will inform an exhibition of visual prototypes, that picture alternative political structures and social sustainability, in 2016-17.
Creative Team
Kelly Doley is an artist living and working in Sydney. She is currently a PhD Candidate at UNSW Art and Design. Her practice is research led, collaborative by design and informed by a feminist politic. Since 2007 she has been a member of Brown Council, a collaboration making experimental performative projects, along with artists Kate Blackmore, Diana Smith and Frances Barrett. Kelly has exhibited nationally and internationally, with ISCP (New York), Campbelltown Arts Centre, Artspace and the MCA (Sydney), GOMA (Brisbane) and NMOCA (Seoul). She has been an active member of the Sydney ARI scene since 2008 and has initiated several curatorial projects such as Cosmic Battle For Your Heart (2009-2011) with Mitch Cairns and Agatha Gothe Snape; JANIS (2012-2014), focused on promoting women in the arts; and Sunday School (with Diana Smith) an alternative feminist pedagogical art platform. Kelly is currently exhibiting in Performance Presence/Video Time at the Australian Experimental Art Foundation, Adelaide, curated by Anne Marsh, and is an artist in year-long residence at Artspace, Sydney.