NiTRO + Creative Matters

Perspectives on creative arts in higher education

REHEARSING THE INSTITUTION: ARTISTIC LABOUR AND PEDAGOGICAL TRACE

  • BENJAMIN WATERS
'The past inside the present' (2023) begins with surfaces: inscribed, weathered, and imbued with pedagogical significance. The research involves reconsidering reclaimed art school studio tabletops as artefacts of accumulated gestures. It focuses on investigating how artistic labour and the relational custodianship of educational practices become systematically blurred within contemporary institutional frameworks of higher education.

Embedded with mirrored text and shrink wrapped into stasis, the work performs a para-institutional critique: one that emerges not from outside, but from within. As technician, academic, and researcher, my practice is entangled in the unnoticed labour that scaffolds creativity – what Ahmed names the ‘affective labour’ of institutions. Drawing from Fraser, Rogoff, Freire, and Rancière, this practice-led inquiry repositions ‘making’ as a mode of critical pedagogy, where the studio is not a passive site of production, but a discursive space in which knowledge is negotiated materially and critique is not spoken but actioned through the ‘making’.

Keywords Institutional critique, Pedagogical turn, Critical pedagogy, Affective labour, Material thinking, creative practice research 

DOI 10.65289/creativematters.2025.10.4

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Ben Waters is a WA based artist, educator and a pre-candidacy PhD at Edith Cowan University, Perth. With over 20 years working across tertiary visual arts and artist-run initiatives, his praxis explores institutional critique and para-pedagogy. It almost inevitably operates at the friction point where education, labour and artistic production collide.

Main image: Benjamin Waters. The past inside the present (2023). Photo: Paul Godfrey (Studio Shot)

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