Arika

Arika is a political arts organisation concerned with supporting connections between artistic production and social change.

We’ve organised over 1,100 events attended by around 134,000 people and featuring about 1,200 artists, filmmakers, performers, dancers, musicians, philosophers, activists, community organisers, academics, and writers. Partner institutions have included The Arches (Glasgow), DCA (Dundee), Whitney Museum of American Art (New York), MoMA PS1 (New York), Tramway (Glasgow), Sage Gateshead, ICA (London), British Film Institute and PAN.

Events we’ve programmed in the past include the festivals INSTAL, Kill Your Timid Notion and Music Lover’s Field Companion, and the Shadowed Spaces and Resonant Spaces tours. We’ve worked on long term community projects and presented a week long programme of events as part of the 2012 Whitney Biennial.

We think of art as a relationship that constantly unfolds in the realm of the common, a process and a continuum. We see our role in this unfolding relationship as celebrating and supporting connections between art and social change. We currently do this through a programme of public events called Episodes comprising performances, discussions, screenings and collective learning. Developing iteratively, each informing the next, they often involve watching, listening, talking or dancing together.

We also work on a smaller scale to produce events that support specific struggles in allyship with UK based activists and political groups. We co-operate closely with specific groups who are pushing back against the violence of racist borders, poverty and criminalisation of sex work; taking their lead on projects they want to see happen.

Since 2011 we’ve been working to bring documentation of our past work into the public domain through our website. On this site you can access an extensive archive of video and audio recordings of experimental music, art work, discussions, films and performances.