The introduction of dialogue into art practices mark an emergence of creative engagement that reconsiders the relationship between the artist, art works, the viewer, and the exhibition. Dialogue as a creative form of creative encourages participation, dialogue, involvement, and offer unique informal learning experiences and the potential for individual transformation of consciousness through the incorporation of new ways of thinking. The voices of others, their discourses, take a principal place in the theory of how people develop their ideologies. As we form our own ideas, we meet the discourses of others, and those discourses enter our consciousness much as authoritative discourse does. We need to see beyond our own perspectives to understand and empathize with another person’s consciousness.
Palmyre Pierroux (2007) suggests that by “analyzing the dialogical function of narratives in national museums, we can make sense of these narratives and make them relevant to our communities” (p. 221). Pierroux (2007) further asserts “contemporary museology needs to develop a concept of interiority grounded in a sociocultural concern with the connections visitors make with objects, stories and experiences in museums and how these experiences interest [people] outside of the museum” (p. 223)
Collaborative dialogue-based curation is a creative process that focuses on encouraging multiple voices to help facilitate community-based artistic ways of knowing. The curatorial premise challenges the dominant cultural narrative of neoliberalism and alternatively reveals the voices of those who have been excluded, marginalized, and who are outside of these dominant discourses. These art practices have the potential to offer marginalized communities’ opportunities to explore community-based ways of knowing that embrace inclusion as well as individual and societal change. The process of incorporating dialogue in art practices is an alternative process that is meant to disrupt the traditional presentation of dominate art historical and contemporary narratives. This process has the potential to encourage visitors to actively construct their own interpretation based on their own community knowledge and life experiences. This process attempts to help situate the viewer as an active participant in an on-going narrative, grounded in the creative process of the artist and community participants within an art project.
Dialogue-based arts programming offers alternative ways to develop creative processes in a new engagement with the visual arts, cultural, social historical narratives. These art practices explore the incorporation of the artist’s vision, participant voices and visitor’s subjective experiences and perspectives that are in a constant state of change. Dialogue-based projects that utilize artistic co-creation with communities, creative forms of empathy, ethical art practices and participatory meaning-making processes offer communities opportunities to explore issues of inequality, disempowerment, isolation, intolerance that seem insurmountable challenges within our communities.
One of the objectives of dialogue-based engagement is to build a living legacy that reflects the diversity of knowledge, histories, and stories of our communities. These practices investigate how meaning-making is constructed during the viewing process and is made up of the experiences, knowledge, attitudes, and values of the viewer and is both a reciprocal and continual learning process. At the heart of these practices is the fundamental principle that artmaking is a social contract that consists of participatory and collaborative processes. It is not merely a means of self-expression or reflection but a form of communication and way of articulating commonalities and differences within our communities.
Dialogue-based exhibitions are creative forms of critical inquiry, artistic co-creation with communities, models of collaboration and participation, creative forms of empathy, ethical art practices and participatory meaning-making processes. Within the concept of answerability artists must be answerable to contemporary society. Dialogue-based art practice is radically different from the conventional arts practice in which the validation of artworks is mediated through art markets, the academy, or peer recognition. These artistic practices have emerged into socially based practices that promote alternative forms of artistic engagement inside and outside of art galleries, museums with non-art communities offering new ways of exploring critical dialogue within our local communities.