Feminist and Queer Arts Activism

2020 ◽  
pp. 223-238
Author(s):  
Clare Johnson
Keyword(s):  
Arts Activism

Sufi Springs: Air on an Oud String

CounterText ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 38-58 ◽  
Author(s):  
Caroline Rooney
Keyword(s):  
Free Market ◽  
Alternative Form ◽  
Collective Consciousness ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
Initial Part ◽  
Egyptian Revolution ◽  
Mimetic Desire ◽  
Arab Uprisings ◽  
The Will ◽  
Arts Activism

The initial part of Caroline Rooney's essay offers an incisive account of the author's experience of Cairo in the years leading up to the 2011 uprisings that led to the end of Hosni Mubarak's rule. Rooney's narrative evinces an active Downtown cosmopolitan spirit characterised by a burgeoning sense of ‘audacity’ in forms of arts activism, and its attendant collective spirit of perseverance that increasingly rendered ineffective the repressive manoeuvres of Egypt's disciplinary State. Criticising the impulse to construe the Egyptian revolution in terms of a mimetic desire for a secular democracy on Western lines, Rooney insists that the Arab uprisings consisted, in many respects, of a revolution against Western-style free market neoliberalism. Countering the perpetual cynicism attendant to the latter, Rooney argues, requires a form of politicisation that maintains ‘the ongoing presence of the real as a matter of collective spirit’ – one that can outlast the colonial interlude by resisting the absolutist self-assertion of market fundamentalism and its collusions with ‘diplo-economic cosmopolitanism’ as a mode of class-discriminatory privilege, as well as the compromising nature of right-wing Islam. Rooney moves on to locate a counter-movement based on an alternative form of consciousness that manifests itself ‘as solidarity, as resoluteness, as genuine comradeship, as collective consciousness, as revolutionary faith and [as] festiveness.’ In the last part of her essay, Rooney raises the intriguing case of Sufism, and specifically its mulid rituals and its important role in the Egyptian revolutionary effort, as a relational cultural mode that can survive the will-to-dominance as a persistent and liberatory collective gesture.

Latinidadand Vernacular Discourse: Arts Activism in Toledo's Old South End

2014 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 50-64 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alberto González ◽  
Jorge M. Chávez ◽  
Christine M. Englebrecht
Keyword(s):  
Old South ◽  
Vernacular Discourse ◽  
Arts Activism

Ethnic Envy and Other Aggressions in the Contemporary “Global” Art Complex

2021 ◽  
Vol 2021 (48) ◽  
pp. 96-110
Author(s):  
Amelia Jones
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
Arts Activism ◽  
Hybrid Art ◽  
Global Art

This article looks at Okui Enwezor’s theory of countering the art world’s “Westernisms” and his actualization of this theory in his organization of Documenta11 to mount an argument against the universalizing and Eurocentric conception of “global” art. It offers two examples of recent hybrid art/curatorial work in Los Angeles—the 2019 David Hammons show at Hauser and Wirth and the Crenshaw Dairy Mart’s arts activism—to argue for an extension of Enwezor’s model via activist and aesthetic interventions into specific sites and art spaces.

Arts, activism and human rights

2016 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-6
Author(s):  
Michael Balfour
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Arts Activism

The Memory Box-Initiative: Nonextractivist Research Methodologies and the Struggle for an Architecture of Remembrance in Kabul, Afghanistan

2019 ◽  
Vol 20 (4) ◽  
pp. 358-373
Author(s):  
Hjalmar Jorge Joffre-Eichhorn
Keyword(s):  
Transitional Justice ◽  
The South ◽  
Urban Centers ◽  
Public Monuments ◽  
Cognitive Justice ◽  
Justice Process ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Culture Of Impunity ◽  
Arts Activism ◽  
War Victims

Over the past 10 years, the Afghanistan Human Rights and Democracy Organization (AHRDO), a Kabul-based civil society organization and arts-activism platform, together with various self-organized, local war victims associations, has fought an uphill battle to challenge Afghanistan’s entrenched culture of impunity and make a contribution to a more just, democratic and peaceful country from the bottom-up. The current article critically describes, theorizes, and poeticizes one particular aspect of this decade-long struggle, the so-called Memory Box-Initiative, inspired by Augusto Boal’s Aesthetics of the Oppressed. Challenging the fact that in many urban centers of Afghanistan, and in particular in the capital Kabul, a great number of public monuments and buildings are dedicated to war criminals, a veritable architecture of impunity, the aim of the initiative is the creation of a counter-hegemonic, victims-centered architecture of remembrance, taking place in a context of a highly contested Transitional Justice process. The main sections of the article address the following three issues: (a) the attempt by Afghanistan’s political, religious, and military elites to undermine the efforts of the country’s war victims to challenge the current culture of impunity by promoting a cityscape in the image of what they consider to be war heroes; (b) the response by the Afghan community of war victims in the form of the Memory Boxes and subsequent advocacy efforts in the public sphere; and (c) the embedding of the Memory Boxes within the larger framework of what is currently being theorized as “nonextractivist methodologies” as part of what is known as the Epistemologies of the South, as proposed by Boaventura de Sousa Santos. The article will conclude with a call for increased epistemological and methodological insubordination and the need for further research and, above all, experimentation in combining the Memory Boxes and the Epistemologies of the South in the global struggle for social and cognitive justice.

Pranks in Contentious Politics

Contention ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 81-100
Author(s):  
Ben Hightower ◽  
Scott East ◽  
Simon Hunt
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Contentious Politics ◽  
Scholarly Publication ◽  
Arts Activism

There is often a division between scholarly publication and activist knowledge—something that Sarah Maddison and Sean Scalmer (2005) suggest may be countered by taking the knowledge produced by activists seriously. In this interview, Simon Hunt reflects on the genesis of Pauline Pantsdown, a drag persona that he developed in the late 1990s in reaction to Australian Conservative politician Pauline Hanson, who generated controversy for her racist and divisive views. The introduction briefly considers the importance of activist accounts and contextualizes Hunt’s practice in relation to arts activism and networked societies. From there, Hunt discusses a range of significant considerations for activism, notably the significance of using persona as a means for activism, the affordances and challenges of using social media, and methods for activating participation in a changing media landscape.

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