Danny Butt

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Australia (residence) °1971
research interests: research methods, artistic research, Settler Colonialism, Platforms, Neoliberal Aesthetics, History of Universities, methodology
affiliation: Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne
en

Dr. Danny Butt is Associate Director (Research) at Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne, where he also coordinates programmes in Social Practice and Community Engagement. His book Artistic Research in the Future Academy was published by Intellect/University of Chicago Press in 2017.

He is the editor of PLACE: Local Knowledge and New Media Practice (with Jon Bywater and Nova Paul) (Cambridge Scholars Press 2008) and Internet Governance: Asia Pacific Perspectives (Elsevier 2006). He works with the Auckland-based collective Local Time, whose work engages the dynamics of visitor and host in the context of mana whenua and discourses of indigenous self-determination. Recent sites for Local Time projects have included Tikapa (2020), Waitangi (2017), Mangere maunga (2014) and the Waitemata Harbour (2013) in Aotearoa New Zealand; Footscray, Australia (2014); Delhi, India (2013); and Rarotonga, Cook Islands (2015).

http://www.dannybutt.net

http://www.local-time.net

research

research expositions

  • Colonial hospitality: rethinking curatorial and artistic responsibility (2016) author(s): Danny Butt, Local Time published in: Journal for Artistic Research
    The recent enthusiasm for gestures of hospitality in contemporary art promises relief from the individualising forces of neoliberal capitalism and the professionalised hierarchies of the art world. Yet, Jacques Derrida describes the gesture of hospitality as paradoxically asserting a kind of sovereignty that underwrites the 'right to host', returning hospitality to the conditionality of the authorising institution. In settler-colonial territories, these institutionally underwritten gestures always sit uneasily atop indigenous sovereignties that have not been ceded, requiring the positive gestures of hospitality to remain open to their structuring fissures. This paper considers figurations of hospitality and responsibility in works by Derrida, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and Raqs Media Collective in reading the art collective Local Time’s research-driven practice that seeks to reconcile indigenous self-determination and settler gestures of hospitality.
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