Scott William Raby

Trajectory

Artist Scott William Raby was invited by Caveat for a three-week artist residency in Brussels in collaboration with No New Enemies, in their Penthouse Art Residency in the NH Bloom Hotel.

His contribution to the research programme crystalized in context of Artist Placement a Caveat programme that aimed to address the current search for new organisational models, production schemes, and hybrid forms of organization in the art world. The programme took as a starting point the Artist Placement Group, a milestone in Conceptual Art in Britain, to address the resurgent interest in reinventing the means of making and disseminating art.

Scott William Raby interviewed the founder of Diakron, David Hilmer Rex (http://davidhilmerrex.nu/). He described the practices of the Copenhagen-based artistic research platform and their key project Primer – which is currently located within Aquaporin – a water purification company headquartered in suburban Copenhagen. Primer is an experiment in artistic organization that conducts a number of transdisciplinary research activities, collaborations, events, and thematic exhibitions alongside the developing technology firm. Raby conducted the interview and introduced it to the audience.

Raby also presented [tag: other places | [f.eks.] ] an artist-initiated, non-profit organization. Located in Aalborg, Denmark, it focuses on inviting talented and innovative international and Danish artists. The programme’s concept is based upon engaging locations in various unused, underutilized, and underserved architectural, infrastructural, commercial, industrial, and municipal sites and spaces within the waterfront city of Aalborg. In these spaces, the artists (or artist groups) are invited to make live, event-based, and pop-up contemporary artworks (such as social installations, performances, talks, discussions, readings, relational events, screenings, and workshops, among others) while interfacing between multiple publics at these locations.

Biography

Scott William Raby is an artist, writer, teacher, and researcher who currently lives in Aalborg, Denmark and works on art projects in a multitude of international contexts. He is currently researching the relationship between art and law under the specter of neoliberalism, primarily examining contracts in art. More specifically, his research is exploring artist-authored contracts, their radical history, present status, and future potential as a site of production for and within art as both written research and as artworks in and of themselves. His broader artistic practice consists of on-site hybrid discursive installations, pedagogical projects that seek critical, aware, and self-reflexive outcomes, and site and context specific discussions, writings, and readings, among other forms of art making. These projects often work between the (im)material intersections of art, architecture, infrastructure, and public spaces, and often seek to reframe, repurpose, and reconfigure socio-economic and geopolitical frameworks toward a multitude of exploratory, ameliorative, and aesthetic outcomes. He was a PhD researcher in the Art department at Goldsmiths in London and previously earned an MFA from Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles in 2012. Currently, Raby is involved in f.eks. an artist-initiated, non-profit organization.