Peter Burke
Artist, Lecturer
Sidenotes on the Street
The emergence of numerous art forms that employ participation, conversation and interaction has prompted us to reflect on how we engage with one another. These artworks often operate between art and everyday life, offering provocative, whimsical or poetic insights into the human condition. In this presentation artist Peter Burke will discuss his recent projects that bring attention to unnoticed and revealing social narratives.
Dr Peter Burke is an artist and lecturer situated in Melbourne, Australia. He employs marketing strategies, and fictional personae to generate social interactions in public space. He does this in order to examine topical issues and to question the general condition of contemporary society. His cross-disciplinary approach embraces performance, painting, drawing, video and the mass media. Burke creates ‘pop-up’ interventions at highly regulated commercial and civic sites, including international art fairs, biennales, galleries, shopping precincts and streets. He manipulates the conditions of these sites by combining fiction and humour to ‘perform’ surprise and benign disruption. His aim is to open up an understanding of art as social space and to examine how the blended relationship between artworld, commerce and the public may be negotiated. In 2017, Burke completed his PhD research project 'Pop-Up Art: Performing creative disruption in social space'. Through a series of performative and participatory projects he investigated how artistic interventions in the street and commercial or artworld marketplaces can critique power relations. Burke currently lectures in the School of Design and the School of Art at the Victorian College of Arts at the University of Melbourne.