Reading International Symposium: What Can We Learn from Artists?

Reading International Symposium: What Can We Learn from Artists?

Join us in person for an inspiring day at the Reading International Symposium!

University of Reading, London Road Campus: Building L024, Room G06

The event explores how artists contribute to rethinking public life, collective knowledge, and civic imagination. It considers how artistic practice can operate as a form of public pedagogy—reshaping how we work together, learn from each other, and imagine more sustainable and inclusive futures.

Through a series of presentations with guest speakers, including Lea Schleiffenbaum, New Patrons (Berlin); Alona Karavai, Assortymentna Kimnata (Ivano Frankivsk); Cecilie Bernts and Pamela Grombacher, juxtaposed (Aarhus); Paul O’Neill, Publics (Helsinki) and Jessie Robertson, Modern Art Oxford, the symposium will examine how artistic and institutional knowledge can be created and shared through the lens of ecological thinking. It focuses on embedded, collaborative, and long-term approaches that support cultural ecosystems based on reciprocity, care, and co-creation.

Guiding questions include:

•How can artists model ethical and sustainable ways of working across communities and institutions?

•What kinds of infrastructures and publics emerge from artist-led initiatives?

•How can art cultivate forms of relation, co-imagination, and solidarity that challenge dominant narratives?

•What can cultural institutions learn from artist-driven practices?

The symposium also marks the launch of Reading International Press, a new digital publishing platform dedicated to experimental and collaborative forms of writing, documentation, and research exchange. The Press opens up Reading International as a site for ongoing conversation—connecting local and international projects through essays, interviews, and curatorial reflections.

Together, the symposium and the Press inaugurate a new phase for Reading International: one that reimagines the infrastructures of artistic and curatorial practice as spaces for learning, dialogue, and collective imagination.