Joon Lynn Goh is a cultural organiser and producer, working at the intersection of art, wilful citizenship and diverse economies.
Through a practice of organising and producing, I am interested in bringing together lived experience and collective imagination to ask how do we survive well together.
I am influenced by experiment-oriented art practices which enable us to research and rehearse; acts of wilful citizenship which demonstrate how we can organise, reclaim and self-determine our futures; and diverse economies which shifts our understanding of economic practices towards enriching rather than extracting from our relationships and neighbourhoods.
Projects I instigate or collaborate on utilise diverse skills-sets, tactics, muses and business models, and can take the form of performative events, creative enterprises, institutional interventions, campaigns or long-term research.
Several instigated projects centre on the lived experience of migrants and what can be learnt from migrant resistance as a body of knowledge, which demands and describes new forms of political subjectivity and social relations. Projects include an alternative citizenship curriculum written by migrant activists for students without, waiting for or being denied citizenship status; Migrants in Culture, a campaign led by migrant cultural workers against the British government’s Hostile Environment Policy; and Making Time, a collective research project unearthing the histories of South/East/Asian diasporic art and activism in the UK.
Other projects explore alternative structures for sustaining and connecting creative practice, including artist-led enterprises. Two projects I am collaborating on are Art Bed & Breakfast, a community-interest company hotel and art centre in Blackpool that aims to circulate surplus profits back into Blackpool’s creative community, and Sex With Cancer, a social enterprise and educational
sex shop designed by cancer patients for cancer patients, with the artist Brian Lobel.
I am inspired by and part of an ecology of artists, activists, educators and change-makers, including Migrants in Culture, Asia Art Activism, Feral Business Research Network, NEON Movement Builders, ReShape European Network, the collective residents at Raven Row, and the Global Municipalities Movement.
I previously acted as Senior Producer for In Between Time and co-curated Bristol International Festival from 2012-2017. I have curated, produced and consulted for live and visual arts organisations including Arnolfini, Situations, Battersea Arts Centre, Punchdrunk, London International Festival of Theatre and Arts Council England over the last 12 years. From 2014-2017, I acted as a lead organiser for Citizens UK Bristol and established a Syrian refugee resettlement programme in partnership with Bristol City Council. In 2017, I received a Diverse Actions Leadership Bursary from Live Art UK.
In 2019, I declined an MBE for Services to Equality in Bristol for these reasons.