Department: Research and Interpretation
Hosts: Christopher Griffin, Senior Curator, Research Programme and Publishing, and Elliot Higgs, Assistant Curator, Interpretation
Mandy’s research concerns the wellbeing of people who work in institutions that manifest conditions for structural racism, white supremacy and epistemic injustice.
Her research at Tate involved analysing contractual language, observing workplace environments and holding one-to-one conversations with workers about their experiences of injustice, racism and power. This gathered counter-institutional knowledge in order to validate and prioritise these experiences.
Mandy investigated the gap between the appearance of arts organisations and the working environments within them.
Her research involved developing a new vocabulary and lexicon for these experiences that are often hidden by such organisations, and advocated for integrating anti-racist work within the organisation in an intentional way.
Documentation of a hole in the wall in the Research offices at Tate Britain, 2022.
Biography
Mandy is a London-based artist and writer investigating experiences of epistemic injustice, the systematic undervaluing and exclusion of knowledge based on such markers as race, class, gender and language, in arts and culture organisations.
Through listening, drawing, performance and poetry, she explores the phenomenology of institutions, their neo-liberal values and their concealed experiences of institutional violence. Her current research project explores developing a collaborative lexicon of counter-institutional knowledge making.