Manifesto for art: the public sphere and the work of the Freee art collective

Freee art collective discuss their practice based on three principles: 1. Our participants don’t agree with us (or, let’s say, we don’t assume their agreement and we actively seek to produce disagreement among the participants and between them and us) 2. We are not activist artists, we experiment with formats of politicization 3.We do not realize the political potential of art by becoming managers In addition to the presentation Freee include conference delegates in a spoken choir of their new manifesto, the second edition 'Manifesto for Art' for Beyond Art Activism, IMMA, October 2016. Beyond Art Activism: Rewriting Arts Neoliberal Value System: As a result of the internalization of a number of values and practices that can be defined as neoliberal, the European public art landscape has been gradually depoliticized in recent years. Questioning how artists and artists’ collectives can best navigate the passage from our current neoliberalized art landscape to a radically democratic one, this seminar brings together the Dutch artist Jonas Staal with UK collectives Liberate Tate, Freee and the Irish artist Kerry Guinan, all of whom experiment with the establishment of alternative, bottom-up art, pedagogic and political institutions that offer viable and much needed alternatives to their neoliberalized top-down counterparts. With these quasi- or para-institutions, they make propositions for how things could be, how public art institutions might otherwise operate if they could be liberated from their neoliberal value systems. Contributors will consider what a post-neoliberal art system might look like and the alternative methodologies and values that could help shape it. Beyond Art Activism: Rewriting Art’s Neoliberal Value System Seminar at IMMA, is organized in collaboration with Dr Emma Mahony, Lecturer in Visual Culture at NCAD. Speakers: Jonas Staal, Dave Beech, Andy Hewitt and Mel Jordan/ Freee Art Collective, Mel Evans/ Liberate Tate, Kerry Guinan.