The Bureau for the Validation of Art (2018—)

The Women’s Art Activation System

The Bureau for the Validation of Art carried out a Validation process with Hilary Powell and Dan Edelstyn at the Hoe Street Central Bank for their artwork 'Bank Job'. The BFTVOA is a performance artwork devised by Sarah Dixon and Sharon Bennett. In it, the artists perform a bureacratic Validation process using a series of questionnaires and a docket with a stamp. The work is intended to provoke uncertainty and questions around who gets to validate art, what makes art art, and how it feels to be judged, amongst other things. It simultaneously acts on another level - the inner mind which doesn't distinguish between performance and reality - as a meaningful and important ritual, allowing artists to psychologically experience validation. http://thewaas.org

The Officials from The Bureau for the Validation of Art offer artists the opportunity to submit work for validation.

Using a preset series of questionnaires aimed at The Artist, and An Audience, along with the Officials’ own assessment, and using abundant quantities of paperwork, the officials make a decision on whether the proposed work is Valid as Art.

The Officials validate validated work with a VALIDATED stamp, and a docket is presented to the artist recording the process and outcome.

The Bureau for the Validation of Art provokes conversation around who gets to decide what is valid and what isn’t, the importance of validation processes, and the socio-psychological importance of bureaucratic and other forms of ritual in defining who we are, and what we are and are not able to do.

In the Validation process we offer the chance to playfully experience an alternative infrastructure in which artists become adjudicators, simultaneously parodying and embodying the possibility of being the authors of our own validation.

More information:

http://thewaas.org

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The Women's Art Activation System

The Women’s Art Activation System (WAAS) is an artist collective that aims to activate women’s art. Principal artists Sharon Bennett and Sarah Dixon collaborate to make live art, performance and socially engaged works.

The WAAS makes artworks that question established structures that inhibit and marginalise people, particularly female-identified people and those experiencing pregnancy, childbirth and mothering. Working with humour to address serious issues The WAAS makes rituals and processes that enquire into, and shift, widely-established social power dynamics.

Sharon and Sarah are representatives for Pregnancy and Mothering on the Disconnected Bodies Arts Advisory Board and most recently worked with Axisweb, Social Art Network and Manchester Metropolitan University on a commission called Social Art for Equity Diversity and Inclusion (SAFEDI) funded by Arts and Humanities Research Council. Other works include interactive performance A Visit by the Bureau for the Validation of Art performed at the Grace Exhibition Space in New York via Zoom in 2020, Offbeat Performance Art Festival 2021, Social Works?:LIVE in Manchester, and Art Licks London and The Baby Makers, a series of facilitated workshops for women in pregnancy and post-birth currently funded by a grant from the National Lottery Community Fund.

http://thewaas.org