Dialogue-based art practices utilize a creative process of dialogue based on the co-curation of artistic project that focus on collaboration and participation in working with diverse communities. Dialogue-based art practices help to reveal the voices of those who have been excluded, marginalized and who are outside of the many discourses that currently dominate contemporary society. In these practices, artists frequently immerse themselves in working with non-art communities. These art practices focus on collaboration within specific communities and institutions and how artists co-create their work with a specific social group or audience through dialogue, collaboration, and participation.
Dialogue used as a critical form of creative inquiry explore alternative ways of knowing that offer innovative learning experience as well as a means for community reflection and individual transformation. Dialogical aesthetics involves the public in a dialogic process that explores participation, dialogue, and the construction of community. Within this cultural context, we need to see beyond our own perspectives to understand and empathize with another person’s consciousness. Freire (1970) states that dialogue is essential to communication: “without dialogue there is no communication, and without communication there can be no true education.” (p. 81) “Dialogue is something that characterizes authentic human beings and their relationships as they strive to become, as they engage in their ontological vocation of being human. Dialogism is a requirement of human nature.” (Freire, 2000, p. 92)
The dialogical process describes how our consciousness is constructed and how our own subjectivity is formed through acquiring the words and ways of thinking from others. Everyone is constituted by internal voices—various subject positions—that can be incorporated as inner thoughts. This allows for the possibility of resisting dominant narratives and opens the door to other positions. Current research into the dialogic process of the art gallery or museum visit is essential to the improvement of accessibility and inclusion, but also in developing a broader understanding of how we acquire knowledge (Coffee, 2007).
Dialogue-based practices re-contextualize artistic practice as a legitimate form of cultural inquiry that challenges, questions assumptions, unravels social, and political structures, and provokes the viewer to re-think personal assumptions. Artists that utilize dialogue in their curatorial practices can reveal diverse ways of seeing the world and have the potential for telling multiple versions of history. My curatorial investigation examines the nature of the public sphere in which galleries and museums operate and investigates how the authority of the gallery/museum as a contested site plays a simultaneous role as a voice of dominate culture and a public space for alternatives ways of knowing and meaning making.