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Future Publics (The Rest Can and Should Be Done by the People): A Critical Reader in Contemporary Art

Annotated by Joanna Warsza
Year

2015

Publisher

Valiz/BAK

Author

Maria Hlavajova
Ranjit Hoskote

Topics
Indigenous Rights Pedagogy & Education Social Design Social Justice
Related

Publisher website

Annotation

Future Publics is a reader nourished by how the Occupy movements influenced the world. It speaks about the re-energised modes of assemblies, the collective organization, constructions of social value and cultural meaning, the strategising of solidarities across class, region, ethnicity and ideological affiliation. Ariella Azoulay, Bassam el Baroni and David Graeber, among others, unpack concepts such as rebel citizenry, orgnets, cultural users, stateless states and devolutionary platforms, expanding on the future publics and counter-publics.

Joanna Warsza

To cultural theorist Edward Said’s formulation of 'imperialism was the theory, colonialism the practice' should be added 'sovereign differential citizenship' as historiography and vantage point when dealing with any political category related to a form of ruling that divides the governed population into groups and rules them differentially.
Related

Publisher website

Related Contents

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Public Intimacy: Art and Other Ordinary Acts in South Africa
Public Intimacy proposes a broad array of manifestations and functions of intimacy as an artistic theme in South Africa. It places intimacies on the human body, on the built environment, and within visual culture as forms of circulation of meaning and values. In the exhibition, intimacy becomes both an instrument of resistance and a coping mechanism in and after an era of extensive political and social repression.
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Public Matters: Debatten & Dokumente aus dem Skulptur Projekte Archiv
It feels like this book weighs approximately five kilos, but it’s worth the effort of carrying it around! It is the first comprehensive take on the archives of Skulptur Projekte Munster, a public art event that has taken place in the West German city of Münster every 10 years since 1977. It has established itself as the barometer of a decade of mostly European and North American public art, and has developed many great projects as well as blind spots. The archive includes sketches, plans, concepts, unrealised proposals, models, protocols, essays, professional studies, statements and interviews amassed over the past forty years and shows the evolution of the European understanding of context-responsive or site-specific art and its relation to participation, democracy and counterpublic.
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Conflictual Aesthetics: Artistic Activism and the Public Sphere
Oliver Marchart, a non-academic academic, employs political theory as opposed to art theory to read contemporary art, public art and the public sphere. Using accessible language, he traces the relations between art and activism, the political and the conflictual, and introduces the notions of ‘biennales of resistance’, ‘counter-hegemonic curator’ and ‘pre-enactment’. The latter is an inspiring inversion of ‘re-enactment’. His favourite example of such a rehearsal of the political is an action by Public Movement, which created a temporary public sphere in 2011 in Tel Aviv by dancing and obstructing the circulation of traffic, ahead of Occupy Movement.
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Agonistics: Thinking the World Politically
When the neutralising consensus hailed by contemporary forms of social democracy has clearly failed in representing the pluralism of society and its demands, Mouffe’s agonism seems more urgent than ever to re-animate politically the public sphere. In this publication she updates her project of returning the political to the heart of democracy by understanding it as an arena for productive conflictuality, in different dimensions (international politics, cosmopolitanism, Europe, etc.).
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Dark Matter: Art and Politics in the Age of Enterprise Culture
Dark Matter is a brilliant exploration of the genealogies of critical art and the political economy of the art world. The author addresses the dependency that exists between marginalised artists and art practices – what he calls the ‘dark matter’– and the mainstream elite art, highlighting the possibilities of alternative and non-commercial creative work to intervene in the public and introduce other ways of think and discussing collectivism, ethics, the market, communication and technology. 
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Public Sphere by Performance
How is ideology moving our collective body? What is the performance of the public sphere? How to think critically about the term ‘public’ as a potential participative democratic audience and how to act politically with our bodies? This book is a well-informed journey through political theory, performance studies, social choreography, the public sphere and its discontents in the neoliberal society with a special focus on the Yugoslavian legacy, a region that the authors stem from. It also comes with a film by a third member of the collective Walking Theory.
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Redefining Publics, Artists, and Urban Spaces: The Case of Made in Musina, South Africa, in: City & Society, vol. 30, no. 1 – Special Issue: Urban Public Art: Geographies of Co-Production
The Made in Musina project was a proposal by the South African artists Thenjiwe Niki Nkosi and Rangoato Hlasane for the programme entitled Reasons to Live in a Small Town initiated by the Network for Visual Arts in South Africa. The goal of the project was to create links between the artists themselves and the local population of Musina. The project was also a means of facilitating social cohesion between the different groups living in the town.
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Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting Publics
sing examples of performance, visual art, activism and public art – from Ukeles, through Rimini Protokoll, to Paul Chan’s staging of plays in New Orleans after hurricane Katrina – Social Works deals with social art practices relating to welfare, urban planning and globalisation, as well as their relation to class, gender, race and labour. 
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The Routledge Companion to Art in the Public Realm
The Routledge Companion to Art in the Public Realm is an upcoming anthology that brings together contributions from across a wide range of disciplines with a view to addressing a significant lacuna in the field of public art and social practice. The book is organised around four distinct topics: activation, social justice, memory and identity and ecology. 
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The Nightmare of Participation (Crossbench Practice as a Mode of Criticality)
For all of us involved with collective practices in pedagogical and cultural settings, the critique of the use and abuse of the term ‘participation’ came as a much-needed caution at a moment of institutional community-philia and co-option fuelled by ‘turns’. Miessen undoes the uncritical mode of consensus and inclusivity underlying this candid and romantic form of participation that has been generalised in the larger cultural and public sphere. Instead, he argues for a responsibility-based conflictual participation of ‘crossbench practitioners’ who enter a field of practice uncalled and uninvited: as unruly vectors shaking the self-indulgence of many collaborative disciplines. 
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