Alice Fox - including the excluded

Alice Fox has worked for many years using performance and visual arts alongside some of the world’s most socially excluded groups to provide platforms for voicing opinions, concerns, dreams and ambitions, to expose prejudice and combat isolation. 

Alice founded the University of Brighton’s pioneering MA in Inclusive Arts Practice, which creates radically new forms of collaboration between students and excluded community groups from around the world.

 

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Alice Fox

In 2015, Alice co-authored Inclusive Arts Research and Practice: a critical manifesto that was launched at Tate Modern in London. This book defines and explores the emerging field of Inclusive Arts through practical and theoretically informed discussion, interview and image-based contributions from leaders in the field (visual, performance and music), art-based research and key curators and commissioners in the wider field of socially engaged art.

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Inspiring others

As course leader of the new MA, Alice brings this wide-ranging international experience to her work at Brighton. Yet along with its highly innovative content, the course also breaks new ground in pedagogy, since artists with learning disabilities teach alongside academics as a way of expanding the boundaries of inclusion and challenging conventional notions of who holds knowledge.

As Director of the Rocket Artists group, Alice has collaborated for many years with learning disabled artists to make the case for diversity through performances, symposia, and exhibitions.

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Measures of Bodies
Louella Forrest and Alice Fox

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Walking with Milk - Ashmina Ranjit, Monali Meher, Alice Fox, Ryan Elisabeth ReidMarie, Julia Bollansée. 

Kathmandu Triennial, 1 April, 2017

Five international women performers walked through Basantapur Durbar Square carrying bowls filled to the brim with milk. Over 60 onlookers decided to pick up bowls and join them on their journey. Together they slowly progressed forward through the ancient, bustling cityscape taking care not to spill the milk. Using the practice of ‘expanded listening’ in combination with knowledge and respect for each other they silently navigate obstacles and threats from police, hawkers, dogs and traffic. Through their joint determination to care for the milk, they built a moving, impenetrable wall of strength, vulnerability and love.

Student volunteers posed the following questions to interested passers by:

  • In a political climate of increasing fear and hate with talk of erecting walls and strengthening borders is the notion of a ‘wall’ always that which separates and divides us?
  • Can group actions of care within vulnerability be synonymous with strength and self-empowerment?
  • Can this dynamic, listening, moving strength provide a useful counterpoint to a static, rigid, solid mono-perspective?