Art and Activism

The visual arts can play a significant role in pushing against dominant “China-Africa” narratives that are more often than not driven by Big Men and serve the interests of those in power. In this essay I consider various strategies that artists such as Ronald Muchatuta, Bright Ackwerh and Myriam Dao employ to register resistance through their work, such as 1) using one loud narrative to push against another, 2) exploring potential forms of solidarity or resonance, or 3) drawing from personal experience to inform relatively quiet yet powerful narratives.

The Making Way (2012-2013) exhibition, which brought together the works of artists based in South Africa and China, aimed to push against typical “China-Africa” stories about rapacious consumption and globalization and focused instead on the slow, grounded movement of individuals that is often accompanied by xenophobia.

With the steep rise of government-driven cultural diplomacy exhibitions that tend to flatten lived experiences, it is critical that exhibitions that explore African and Chinese encounters make room for complex and even contradictory experiences and resistances. I argue that artists such as Hua Jiming, Lebogang Rasethaba, Stary Mwaba, Myriam Dao, Kristin NG-Yang and Caryn Scrimgeour who draw from small, personal stories, play a significant role in challenging sweeping statements of the "Big Man rhetoric" of government and business.

In English and Vietnamese. Study of the use of sound and music in the conceptually-underpinned visual practice of Hanoi contemporary artist Vu Dan Tan. The essay argues  the key role of cross-disciplinarity in Vu Dan Tan's development of innovating methodologies driving the contemporary turn in Vietnamese modern art.

This paper applied an ecocritical perspective on street art to expand on the notion that street art can have an impact on how we relate to urban public space. In doing so, it argued that street art is particularly well positioned to affect the way we think and act with regard to the environment.

Recent years have witnessed the remarkable development of the cultural and creative industries (CCIs) in Asia, from the global popularity of the Japanese games and anime industries, to Korea’s film and pop music successes. While CCIs in these Asian cultural powerhouses aspire to become key players in the global cultural economy, Southeast Asian countries such as Malaysia and Thailand are eager to make a strong mark in the region’s cultural landscape.

As the first handbook on CCIs in Asia, this book provides readers with a contextualized understanding of the conditions and operation of Asian CCIs. Both internationalising and de-Westernising our knowledge of CCIs, it offers a comprehensive contribution to the field from academics, practitioners and activists alike. Covering 12 different societies in Asia from Japan and China to Thailand, Indonesia and India, the themes include:

State policy in shaping CCIs
Cultural production inside and outside of institutional frameworks
Circulation of CCIs products and consumer culture
Cultural activism and independent culture
Cultural heritage as an industry.

Presenting a detailed set of case studies, this book will be an essential companion for researchers and students in the field of cultural policy, cultural and creative industries, media and cultural studies, and Asian studies in general.

Im Begriff der Posse begegnen einander Theater, Performance und Politik, nicht zuletzt als Spielräume emanzipatorischer Kämpfe gegen Körper- und Grenzregime. Poststrukturalis­tische, postdramatische und feministische Diskurse bilden die Basis für Gin/i Müllers Tour de Force durch die vielfältigen Welten jener Aktionsformen, die politische Konflikträume und Bühnen mit performativer Subversion bespielen. "Posse" verweist dabei nicht zuletzt auf minoritäres (Theater-)Vermögen zur Artikulation politischen Widerstands. Das Spektrum der im Buch verhandelten Praxen reicht von theatral-politischem Aktivismus im globalisierungs­kritischen Feld (Zapatistas, Tute Bianche, Rebel Clown Army, VolxTheaterKarawane) über antirassistische Kämpfe (Sans Papiers, kein mensch ist illegal, kanak attak) zu feminis­tischen und queeren Politiken (Riot Grrrls, Pink-Block, Transgender-Aktivismus) und deren Strategien zur "Verqueerung" des normierenden Geschlechtertheaters.

As imagens têm papel essencial na construção de estratégias de engajamento e mobilização no contemporâneo, pois é por meio delas que as causas conseguem projetar-se local e globalmente pelas redes de comunicação digital. Fotografias e vídeos podem ter características estéticas particulares que fundem elementos de impacto sensorial, tais como o uso da violência, o senso de imediatismo e a utilização do corpo, com aspectos ligados à circulação nas mídias e à mobilidade dos aparelhos de gravação, reprodução e divulgação.
A intensidade com que algumas dessas imagens foram repercutidas nos coloca questões como: que aspectos estético políticos carregam as imagens produzidas em manifestações contemporâneas? Que impacto elas têm sobre a audiência imersa em ambientes midiáticos híbridos e móveis? O que há de particular na experiência política proporcionada por essas imagens?
Estas e outras questões são abordadas no decorrer deste livro, que faz uso de exemplos de ações ativistas com grande repercussão afim de contribuir para a reflexão do papel da imagem nas práticas políticas contemporâneas.

http://www.pacolivros.com.br/Ativismo_Digital_e_Imagem/prod-4597415/

This essay is an attempt to locate women artists in India within the cultural politics of today, and problematize the relationship between their political intent and their cultural interventions. In this, the domain of visual culture assumes significance as an important site for alternative visuality, a possible meeting ground for the private and public spheres, an alternative visuality that goes beyond the postmodernist celebration of visual culture so as to reclaim the public sphere at an experiential level away from the dominant visual regime. However, alternative visuality raises certain theoretical concerns about locating the space of activism vis-à-vis institutions of high art, and countering the binary logic of artistic praxis and aesthetic autonomy. How current notions of public sphere get inflected ifattention is given to the practices of contemporary women artists in India is one of the major concerns of this essay. This inevitably leads us to the relationship between public sphere and the visual arts. In the context of public sphere, are the visual arts totally subsumed by popular culture? Is it possible to grasp the dynamics of public sphere solely in terms of popular culture?

Deriving its insights from methodological moves made in the fields of art history/criticism, culture studies, and visual culture, the book foregrounds the links between the practice of art and the urgencies of the public world trying to bridge, in the process, the space that reaches across the academy and all that is known as activism in our time. The different sections in the book explore the complex relationship between art-producing practices and frameworks of viewing that seek alignment with the various struggles around caste, community, gender, and sexuality.

The ultimate outcome of ultranationalism is the disappearance of the state altogether, and its replacement by power structures that do not recognize any form of democratic control by the very people these structures affect. Nor do these structures restrict themselves to what used to be known as national borders. This reality of globalism after the annihilation of the nation-state forms a dark and perverted version of that other dream of decentralized powers that reaches beyond the nation-state: the progressive project of stateless internationalism. I will introduce here a number of examples of the infrastructures proposed by groups advocating for different practices of stateless internationalism. These examples are gathered from my work as founder of the New World Summit—an artistic and political organization that develops parliaments for stateless and blacklisted organizations—and as cofounder (with BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht) of the New World Academy, where stateless political groups have developed collaborative projects with artists and students, exploring the role of art in political struggles for representation. The aim of the New World Academy is to investigate artistic practice in relation to the stateless state, with the concept of “state” referring as much to a condition as to an administrative structure.

This article aims to explore the notion of activist-art, identifying it as a distinct tendency in Modern art through a re-examination of historical and theoretical approaches to the radical avant-garde, drawing on autonomist Marxist and materialist post-structural perspectives.

First, through a critique of Peter Bürger's Theory of the Avant-Garde, I attempt to place the use of the idea of ‘autonomy’ by the avant-garde in its critical historical context not only in the negative sense of separation, but in the positive sense of freedom from restraint. I argue that for the avant-garde this took the particular form of a thematic engagement with the refusal of work. Secondly, I examine one particular form of this refusal: the engagement with social movements amongst Dadaists in Berlin. I set out a theoretical frame of ‘affective composition', in order to place avant-garde artistic production in relation to the art of social movements, whose production operates outside the institutions of art. I argue that not only is the avant-garde at crucial points influenced by the art of social movements, but that the Dadaists in Berlin attempt to imagine new forms of ‘activist-art’ which synthesise avant-garde and social movement performance and object-art in disobedient performances and performative disobedient objects.

Pengantar editor untuk buku Unjuk Rasa, Seni - Performativitas - Aktivisme. Buku ini diterbitkan oleh Yayasan Kelola dan tersusun atas kontribusi dari Alia Swastika, Asri Saraswati, Cholil Mahmud, Dede Pramayoza, Diah Kusumaningrum , Egbert Wits, Erni Aladjai, Hikmat Darmawan, Ismal Muntaha & Bunga Siagian, Joned Suryatmoko , Manuel Alberto Maia, Muchammad Cora, Muhammad Sibawaihi, Morika Tetelepta, Rachmi Diyah Larasati, Yuli Andari Merdikaningtyas.

Challenging ideas about class, debt, and labor as set forth by such arts and culture writers as Dave Beech, Ben Davis, Coco Fusco, Kerstin Stakemeier, Marina Vishmidt and Hans Abbing among others, this essay proposes that "there are exactly as many artists as the system requires for reproducing itself." It was written for the book Delirium and Resistance: Activist Art and the Crisis of Capitalism (Pluto Press 2017).

There is already an extensive comprehension of literature theorizing the work of Gordon Matta-Clark. Through this research an underlying theme within his oeuvre is revealed. That of expanding or rupturing the perceived boundaries of architecture. This paper examines the issues raised by Rosalind Krauss in her highly influential essay, ‘Sculpture and the expanded field’ (1979). Its usefulness for architecture was that of amplifying the perception of its limits, as it addresses the prohibited terms of Architecture and landscape. This paper will examine how far Matta-Clark’s work expresses the ideas Krauss’s essay raised and how his work fits into this context leading towards an expanded field in which art and architecture are not separate fields, but rather two ends of a connected spectrum of disciplines which can intermingle, connect and critique each other.
This essay will also explore Gordon Matta-Clark’s architectural education at Cornell (1962-1968), in order to grasp his initial responses towards the field of architecture, and the influences that led to him becoming the rebellious artist he is seen as today. During his tenure at Cornell he was made aware of Both Colin Rowe and Peter Eisenman. This essay will question the importance of their viewpoints in relation to Matta-Clark’s attitude towards the architectural climate in the 1970’s.
From this information this dissertation will go on to critically analyze Matta-Clark’s interventions in space, in conjunction with Henri Lefebvre’s 1974 work, ‘Production of space’. Matta-Clark’s oeuvre can then be discussed based on the theories set forth by Lefebvre. Highlighting how Gordon Matta-Clark explored the possibilities that emerge when boundaries are considered to be porous and why this is important . Concluding that the relationships that exist across the various disciplines should be explored further in order to continue to discover ideas surrounding the possibility of spatial experience.

The art of today cannot be static, cannot seek permanence and must catch the eye or it will be dismissed quickly by the jaded modern viewer. The transient, striking nature of Street Art makes it a modern art for a contemporary audience. Yet the movement is more than simply a form of art, Street Art is very much a movement with profound social and political value. This is the facet of Street Art which I wish to explore in this essay.
Street Art has the capacity of being a very strong platform for socio-political activists, the most infamous and skilled of these Street Art activists I will be discussing in this paper- Banksy. He is more than simply a Street Artist however, rather a political activist operating through the medium of art. Famously encouraging other artists to 'Speak softly but carry a big can of paint', Banksy is something of a pioneer for incorporating his political messages into his artwork.  I wish to gain an insight into the mind of Banksy and to explain why he uses Street Art to project his principles and beliefs.
In this essay, I hope to examine Banksy as an activist, looking primarily at his Guantanamo project at Disneyland in 2006 and his work on the West Bank barrier between Israel and Palestine in 2005. I would like to view his work in Palestine looking at its wider context and at the impact his artwork has had on the Western World. By discussing Street Art by other Palestinian artists, I wish to highlight the significance and necessity of a strong political message in the art of the West Bank.

This research project is a first-person, practice-led endeavour which contributes to the fields of both medical humanities and the sonic arts. Through a reflexive, auto-ethnographic process, employing a wide range of audio-visual methods, I set out to explore a range of possible creative strategies that might be available to the ‘artist in extremis’ – i.e. the artist working under conditions of illness, confinement, restriction or limited energy. This process was distilled down, over five years, to three conceptual vehicles in the form of vinyl records which sought to offer openings, strategies and responses to conditions of extreme limitation. 

From 2009-2014, the three vinyl record projects were developed by myself, an ex-broadcast filmmaker continuing to navigate a life under Chronic Fatigue Syndrome / Myalgic Encephalomyelitis (CFS-ME) since 1998. Each vinyl record project contains strategies across a given stratum of life of the ‘exhausted artist’. The project created a body of both methodological and practical outputs, aiming to bypass the exhaustion, poor cognition and pain associated with CFS-ME.

Through ‘triangulating’ a series of sonic projects, each of which was created in a ‘modular’ or ‘bricolage’ process, the resultant trilogy of interrelated 12” vinyl records created a kind of ‘cinema for the ears’. The recordings (with their sleevenotes and graphics) were subsequently published by both external record labels and also self-released via the University of the West of Scotland.

The Idioholism Vinyl Trilogy became an appropriate autoethnographic framework containing exercises towards a personal, ‘idio-holistic’ existence for a filmmaker who could no longer produce intensive film work. The expansive and attractive format of the 12” record, under the doctoral praxis, allowed for a more ‘modular’ approach and format than in formal filmmaking. As an ex-filmmaker who is now an exhausted artist, I postulate that a trilogy of vinyl records could hone and home the divergent media (i.e. soundtracks, spoken word, music, text, photography) – which, taken together, might have previously resulted in a complete film in my ‘past’ life.

This book develops and encourages you to inhabit — through narratives or spatialized experiences — Deep Maps of places you want to understand in a robust, inclusive, and expansive ways, which is not possible with traditional mapping. Maps tell you more about yourself, the narratives you construct, and the values you explicitly or implicitly hold, than they do about an actual place. To get an understanding of an actual place, one must inhabit its multiple overlapping contradictory stories simultaneously. To this end, we began to construct Deep Maps. We were inspired by the American author, William Least Heat-Moon’s book PrairyErth, and the way that he envisions a written or narrative Deep Map of a place.

Southeast Asian artists, from the 1970s onwards, developed conceptual strategies that, combined with siting and physical involvement, engaged viewers in critical conversations about society and politics. Installations and performances, designed for collective zones,  were often structured in a way reminiscent of games. This paper argues the linkage between methodologies of play,  critical interrogations, and conceptual strategies as characterising trait of Southeast Asian contemporary art.

This article examines Henri Lefebvre's concept of revolution-as-festival, its textual sources and its relationship to contemporary notions developed by Georges Bataille and the Situationist International. It is a companion-piece to the examination of Bataille's revolution-as-festival in Third Text 104, vol 24, no 3, May 2010. The author argues that Lefebvre's revolution-as-festival embodies the multiple methodological ambiguities of his ‘open’ dialectical approach, and his attempt to transplant Surrealist and Dadaist concerns into a Marxian framework. It is, paradoxically, these ambiguities that allow his revolution-as-festival to become a useful concept: firstly as a discursive making-visible and valorization of the art and culture of social movements; and secondly as a term through which to critically re-imagine this art and culture's limits and possibilities. This potential is borne out, not least, in the influence of Lefebvre's essay ‘Revolutionary Romanticism’ on the founding debates of the Situationist International.

The present volume intends to show the move from theory to activism: from Marx’s reflections on Shakespeare to the ways certain narratives have an impact on social movements such as BLM, to the critique of institutions such as universities through the discussion of politically-engaged plays and fictions, to the impulse that arises among many colleagues in academia working to raise awareness in places as inhospitable as prisons, or as fundamental as their own classrooms, to those who organise forums with activists or try to become active in the fight for freedom and equality.

This article explores how the radical work of women performance artists and collectives in Mexico challenge and transform the injustices that shape everyday life. It particularly looks at the work and career of Lorena Wolffer, a Mexico-city based feminist performance artist who, for over twenty years, created interventions in order to intersect political activism with performance. Furthermore, it investigates how Wolffer’s particular artivism and radical feminist performance create feministic performance praxis in Mexico that centers on solidarity, listening, and a collective consciousness rather than on the victimized body. These activist performance interventions, especially those staged within heavily traversed public
city-spaces, also hold the power of engaging the public by turning the passive passersby into an active witness who can recognize and begin understanding violence against women as a systemic, national problem.

В книге на материале русскоязычных поэтических текстов рассматривается вопрос об анархистских основаниях поэтического творчества. Раскрываются наиболее существенные моменты в истории взаимоотношений между анархизмом и поэтическим авангардом. С различных теоретических позиций показывается, каким образом принципы и ценности анархистского мировоззрения соприкасаются с принципами организации поэтического языка. Исследуются особенности поэтического акционизма. Отдельные главы посвящены изучению творчества Егора Летова и группировки «Ленинград», а также анализу поэтического блэкаута (blackout poetry), в практиках которого актуализируется протестная семантика черного цвета, являющегося одним из важнейших анархистских символов.

https://www.peterlang.com/document/1137178

This work draws upon Hiphop feminism, studies of Black girlhood, and Black women and girls' literacies to illuminate the layered and violent narratives that shape society's treatment of Black women and girls, what these narratives look like in everyday life, how they are taken up and negotiated in different social spheres, such as an after school club for Black middle school girls and the platforms and artistry of women Hiphop artists and creatives. Richardson considers what activism is possible through juxtaposing Black girls as emerging creatives, celebrity corporate artist activists Nicki Minaj and Cardi B, independent activist artists such as Noname and dream hampton. Given the far-reaching representations of Black women and girls in popular culture, the art, lives and platforms of women in Hiphop are critical sites to understanding complexities, strategies and possibilities for social change.

Drill rap is a Chicago-based, originally underground, subgenre of gangsta rap. The gritty and aggressive subgenre deals with violence and bravado, and urban street life. The "activist resurgence" references the current movement of grassroots activism primarily led by young black, brown, and/or politically left individuals organizing primarily around race, policing, poverty, economic equality, criminal justice, and LGBTQ rights. This study seeks to understand the creation, meaning, perspectives, and potential connections between drill rap music and the activist resurgence in Chicago over the past five years. It focuses on contemporary Chicago as an intentional place for the resurgence of these two formations of cultural and political resistance during relatively the same time period. The qualitative research—semi-structured in-depth interviews with drill rappers, underground music professionals, and activists—examines how authenticity, community, and other values the subjects deem important are impacted and promoted via technology and social media. Though differences exist between the groups, the participants present a strong sense of identity in authentic, grassroots narratives, which they propel to the mainstream via uncompromised self-production of commodified stigma, inequality, and cultural pride. Hage’s (1998) inclusion/exclusion dialectic serves as a relational framework for the formations’ function as resistance with respect to time, place, and meaning. This situates drill rap and the activist resurgence in a social, cultural, and economic matrix that pushes the creators to barter authentic social capital (Bourdieu 1986) often by way of social media and mobile technology in the advanced attention economy (Tufekci 2013).

Pojava alternativnog umetničkog izraza u kulturi i umetnosti, šezdesetih godina XX stoleća, predstavlja svakako jedan od najznačajnijih, ali i najmanje proučavanih fenomena. Alternativni umetnički izraz nastaje iz nezadovoljstva postojećim dominantnim modelima kulturnog života, te „modernim”, aktuelnim i od kritike i institucionalne kulture prihvaćenim „trendovima”. Značajne rezultate ostvaruje u pojedinim umetničkim granama, pre svega na filmu, u likovnim umetnostima, pozorištu. Tako postaje danas ona pokretačka umetnička snaga kao što je to bila „avangardna umetnost” početkom XX veka.
Alternativni umetnički izraz suprotstavljen je kako dominantnim umetničkim pravcima i shvatanjima, tako i masovnoj kulturi (iako preuzima neke njene elemente da bi se distancirao od elitne kulture). Polazeći od protesta prema vladajućoj „umetničkoj normi”, estetskom kanonu, alternativni umetnički izraz uspostavlja odnos i sa odgovarajućim društvenim pokretima – okrećući se prema stvarnosti, društvenom biću sredine u kojoj deluje. Istovremeno sa umetničkim ostvarenjima zasniva se i odgovarajuća teorijska misao, kao i novi oblici komunikacijske prakse, recepcije i vrednovanja. Iako je nastao na marginama kulturnih i društvenih dešavanja, ovaj pokret napravio je ogroman pomak kroz medije i ustanove, postajući značajan u kolektivnoj svesti današnjice kao pokret osporavanja, otpora i novih vrednosti. Tako samo značenje pojma „alternativno” podrazumeva suprotstavljanje, tj. odricanje etabliranom kulturnom i umetničkom kodu, kao i svim ostalim dominantnim (masovnim, populističkim) kodovima, što bi trebalo da mu onemogući da sam ikada postane deo tog koda. Naravno, istorija umetnosti iako zna za povremene „impasse” estetika koje se nisu dalje razvijale, koje nisu ukazivale na pravac ili put, a predstavljale su u svom vremenu nesumnjivu alternativu (Gaudi, na primer) većim svojim delom pruža dokaze o preuzimanju, inkorporaciji „alternativnog” u glavni kulturni tok, glavnu kulturnu tendenciju (Džojs, sa Uliksom i Fineganovim bdenjem).