Dani Admiss

Photo: Dani Admiss

From zero-hours contracts or 8-week international exhibition runs, today, much professional art practice in the UK functions in a largely extractive and colonial manner, predicated on the exploitation of labour, mobility and resources and denying culpability in a world of ecocide, violence and contradiction. Transitioning from toxic high-energy and wasteful systems to low-carbon and circular practices in the arts could disrupt these patterns, creating lighter and more equitable circuits of exhibition, prestige, and funding but this is far from guaranteed; and as the UK continues to experience austere spending cuts, volatility and uncertainty, historic divisions in power and opportunity are likely to deepen – in the arts and elsewhere. During the Making Time period, Dani Admiss will spend time with the available departments at King’s College London, Loughborough University and University of Brighton to develop a collaboratively authored and intersectional ‘roadmap’ towards a just and circular world for art workers in the UK and beyond. Drawing on research in abolition, open-ended pedagogy, palliative care and pyschoaffective and relational practices, she will co-create a public declaration and direction for future livability.   

Bio

Dr Dani Admiss (she/her) is a British-Iranian independent curator and researcher based in Edinburgh. She uses social practices to develop projects, investigations and networks that bring together in-world experts with everyday people to voice their stories, and unlearn and reimagine narratives of science, technology and colonialism. Since 2020, she has worked on Sunlight Doesn’t Need a Pipeline, a project exploring and enacting just transition in the arts. Across 2022, a coalition of art workers, agitators, dream weavers, makers, and caregivers, co-created a bottom-up and open-source decarbonisation plan for art workers. As an outcome of this project she is currently working on the Sunlight Liberation Network, an honest, humble and humourful support and education group for climate justice and art workers. Admiss has curated projects across the UK, Europe and internationally including at the Barbican Centre, Somerset House, MAAT, Lisbon and Lisbon Architecture Triennale. She was a Stanley Picker Fellow (2020) with Stanley Picker Gallery and Kingston University. She wrote her PhD in Curatorial Practice and World- Making with an AHRC grant and is a visiting tutor at National College of Art and Design, Dublin.