Organising for Self-Organisation Workshop with Jason E. Bowman and Dr. Julie Crawshaw.

This workshop led by Jason E. Bowman and Dr. Julie Crawshaw explores the organising practices of artist-led/self-organised initiatives from the inside. The aim is to surface what is particular about the methods of the artist-led as distinct from other organisational practices, and how artwork and art work meld within the artist-led.

The analytic structure informing the workshop arises from Stretched, a curatorial and ethnographic research project on the artist-led led, co-researched by Jason E. Bowman, Dr. Julie Crawshaw and Professor Mick Wilson. It will identify agential levels of self-organising, inter-organising and intra-organising to:

1. Interrogate how to understand the methods of the artist-led as artistic practice,

2. Position how such practices operate in an ecology of visual arts practices, 

3. Propose futures for the development of self-organised visual art practices.

Attendees will ideally be a mix of those working in self-organised artists’ initiatives, institutions, policy and cultural development, artists and curators. The processes and findings of the workshop may be published to support the positioning of the artist-led in arts ecologies and institutional systems. 

Jason E. Bowman is an artist with a curatorial practice and a Senior Lecturer in Fine Art at HDK-Valand Academy - Art and Design. Recent research, Stretched, funded by the Swedish Research Council, addressed self-organised art initiatives as credible forms of expanded artistic practice. It discovered ways to exhibit the activities of the artist-led, as much as the art it produces. This research built upon Jason’s commitment to the development of the artist-led, often in collaboration with Julie Crawshaw.

Dr. Julie Crawshaw is Associate Professor in the School of Design, Arts and Creative Industries at Northumbria University in the UK where she is currently Head of School. Informed by her long-term commitment to artist-led practice she was Co Investigator of ‘Stretched: Expanded Notions of Artistic Practice’ and is currently editing a special issue for Arts (Journal) titled ‘Artist-Led Culture: Bridging Art and Life’ as well as Organising Artists with Jason. Her trans-disciplinary approach to place-based practice-led scholarship is exemplified in her Routledge monograph Art Worlding: Planning Relations (2022). 

Our shared previous work has gathered artist-led initiatives, think-tanks, funders, policy-makers, representatives of institutions and cultural developers. We are now editing a book, Organising Artists, to be published in 2026. It explores the relations between self-organisation in art and curating and will determine the concept of the artist with a curatorial practice.

This workshop builds upon the Centre for Art and the Political Imaginary’s ongoing research into self-organised practices. In Fall 2026, a new online free-standing course, Self-Organisation and Contemporary Art, based on Jason E. Bowman’s and Julie Crawshaw’s research will be launched in association with the CAPIm.

The Organising for Self-Organisation  workshop is one of two workshops that CAPIm is doing in association with the Swedish Art Agency within the framework of the Contemporary Art Days 2025. The other workshop with Jonas Staal  on Propaganda Training. Both of these workshops are part of a strand of research on organisational imaginaries that was initiated in May 2025. If you are interested to know more about this work on organisational imaginaries we invite you to attend a research workshop on 21 November 2025 that looks at  “Cases Studies in Organisational and Institutional Change”, where we will outline this research strand in more detail.

Further information about the full programme and booking for the Contemporary Art Days will be available shortly via the Swedish Art Agency’s Website.