Episode 51, ACT 1: Rabab Ghazoul - Name, Listen, Witness

Teaching Artistry with Courtney J. Boddie

Greetings, TA PODience! We are back with an incredible two-part episode. In Episode 51: “Name, Listen, Witness,” Courtney speaks with the inspiring Rabab Ghazoul. This amazing human identifies artistically as a “socially-engaged visual artist whose work explores points of contact between systems of power and individual agency, voices that are yet to speak, spaces of in-between-ness, and the body politic” whose creative practice “is consistently drawn back to spaces of interaction and activation, with a focus largely beyond galleries or exhibiting regimes as final destinations.” In the first part of the episode, Ghazoul discusses her work with the artist-run project gentle/radical, which is laser-focused on addressing the gaps in mainstream cultural practice, provision and thinking. As Ghazoul puts it, it’s an organization that is focused on “people working in the context of people,” and they ground the work through the philosophy of perpetual outreach, which aims not just to draw people in and hook them, but to physically, interpersonally sustain and nurture relationships, while also searching for the intersection of their audiences and mining for the parts of the interpersonal connections made that might just lead to art-making. Just a few of the questions that arise in this episode are: What does decolonizing look like in this work? What shapes might community engagement and connection through the arts take? What does art as a process look like during a worldwide pandemic lockdown? So how were these answered and what other questions came up? Listen to find out!