Working Images: The Art History Workshop

This project builds on a decade of collaboration with a group of oversees domestic workers [ODWs]. Brought to the UK by their employers on temporary domestic worker visas many are trapped in abusive employment with no route to escape except via the National Referral Mechanism which renders them victims of modern slavery. Voices of Domestic Workers [VoDW], now a registered charity, is a support group for these workers. Arts education is central to their provision, representation, and identification as workers in the UK economy. Indeed, members of the VoDW have exhibited as part of the Turner Prize (2014). This project draws on my research into political filmmaking, its intersections with the 20th century modernist avant-gardes and social justice movements. We will develop how VoDW use contemporary visual art to drive change in public attitudes and policy to improve the rights, working and living conditions of the sixteen thousand ODWs living in the UK. Our collaborative film They Call Us Maids (2015) has been used by VoDW in the Houses of Parliament and won the UK Film on Modern Slavery at the ‘Unchosen Modern Slavery Film Competition’ (2016). Project participants will assess how the prevailing representations of migrant work in the UK produce public attitudes and policy approaches which are often discriminatory, limited and divisive. By using the arts-based campaigns work of VoDW to date as an exemplar, we will investigate and develop the way in which art can be a tool to communicate the individual lived experiences and systemic picture of migrant work in the UK. An important art-historical dimension of this work will be to contextualise the artwork produced by VoDW, in collaboration with various artists and institutions, in relation to histories of feminist art practice attending to questions of domestic and migrant labour. Drawing on the strategies of the Oxford History Workshop movement we will centralise the importance of gaining skills in visual literacy for securing solidarity across difference collaborating on a new artist commission, an exhibition at IKON, Birmingham, and a visual analysis toolkit.