“The way we organize the arts in the West needs to be rebuilt from the ground up” 

Hassan Mahamdallie in conversation with Anita Moser and Ielizaveta Oliinyk

“The arts are a very class-ridden subsector of society.”

What do you think is the role of class and social background in the terms of diversity? Maybe you can say something also about your own experience as a person who comes from a working-class environment? What obstacles did you have on your way? 

I’m so glad you asked me that because I believe that social class is the one thing that underpins all these inequalities. Politicians and commentators tend to separate class from race, disability, gender, sex and other categories of diversity. But they’re absolutely linked. If you’re disabled, you’re more likely to be working class or poor because of discrimination in society. If you’re a person of colour like myself, you’re more likely to be working class than your white counterparts. People of colour disproportionately make up greater numbers of the working class. Therefore, for them, exclusion is not just a question of race but also of their class background. So we have to be a bit more sophisticated in how we talk about these relations, the intersections between these different groups.

When people talk about class, they tend to talk about white working-class men who hold traditional manual-labour jobs. But clearly the nature of the working class has changed in Europe, partly because of immigration, principally the post-World War II immigration from Asia, Africa and the Middle East. The modern working class is very mixed. I find, for example, youth culture extremely interesting, as well as grassroots multicultural life, which youth culture reflects.

I don’t know whether this has happened in Austria, but there has been a lot of research taking place in the UK analysing the very narrow social origin of the arts leadership. The arts are not just a middle-class profession, as they have been historically. Now it’s the top 1% of society who run the arts and who therefore dictate tastes and trends and define artistic value. They are part of the UK’s upper middle-class population. That extreme class concentration is pretty unusual, other than in occupations such as international banking and the armed forces officer class. The arts are a very class-ridden subsector of society.

In contrast, if you’re working class, you’re less likely to go into the arts than you ever were. When I went into the arts in the mid-1980s, there was a boom of working-class kids like myself who managed to get into the arts, and actually at that time in the UK, there were more working-class kids coming to the arts than there were middle-class kids. And that was quite hopeful. But over the last 15, 20 years, the whole thing has turned around. Now the amount of working-class people going into the arts has really shrunk to a very, very low figure.

Maybe it’s also connected with this social movement of 1968?

Without a doubt, that was the case. Strangely enough, one of the reasons why I got into the arts was the class nature of the British education system. When I was eleven, I was sent to a grammar school, which was a selective school for the more academically minded kids. Grammar schools were set up to educate middle-class kids, but as a result of social pressures the grammar schools were forced to offer places to a few working-class children.

I was one of the first generation of working-class kids to go to these very academic grammar schools. I went on to university to study English. I was the first in my family ever to go into higher education. Later, I decided that I loved theatre more, so I did theatre as a second degree. When I was growing up, it was often the case that someone with an immigrant background like me was discouraged from a career the arts. My older brother is an accountant. He was extremely creative at school, but decided (correctly) accountancy was a safer choice. I was a bit of a rebel. I didn’t want to earn money; I wanted to change the world and so went into the arts.

On March 31, 2022, Hassan Mahamdallie was the keynote speaker for the D/Arts event in Vienna, ‘D/Transformation – Diversity in Decision-Making Positions in the Cultural Sector’ (see the text based on the keynote speech in the link https://www.p-art-icipate.net/why-diversity-in-arts-cannot-be-ignored/). He also took part in the panel discussion.

Hassan Mahamdallie, Anita Moser, Ielizaveta Oliinyk ( 2022): “The way we organize the arts in the West needs to be rebuilt from the ground up” . Hassan Mahamdallie in conversation with Anita Moser and Ielizaveta Oliinyk. In: p/art/icipate – Kultur aktiv gestalten # 13 , https://www.p-art-icipate.net/the-way-we-organize-the-arts/