The Routledge Companion to Art in the Public Realm

Generally, we associate the word ‘school’ to the idea of a very specific space. Instead, Visible program’s #On Pedagogy underlined a shift of this perception, inviting artists who enacted new pedagogical models intended as nomadic types of initiatives.

Situated in downtown Bangkok, one climbs up three flights of stairs before discovering a room filled with books. These are stacked in piles on a large wooden table located at the center, lined neatly on a large rack close to the entrance, stuffed into wooden niches along the walls. The books range from critical theory to art and design, social sciences to literature, film to philosophy. The selection is eclectic as well as idiosyncratic, often centered on the taste and discernment of its founder and owner, Narawan Pathomwat. But it also in many ways rejects her politics.

As the political situation in Russia now dictates instability for all the projects supported by any kind of foreign NGO’s (see the foreign agent- and undesired organizations - recently applied laws) - the School of Engaged Art’s future is more than uncertain. This award would help us to create a more stable and sustainable ground and buy us some more precious time to co-create a visible community of activists, artists, thinkers and doers in our town and beyond.

In the current discourse around the efficacy of social process art, the presumption is made that the artist concludes the investigation and withdraws from the community. Often that terminus occurs at the precise moment aesthetic processes of reflection arrive at the terms of critical analysis — an analysis demanding political action. What happens, however, when

This publication is the exhibition catalogue of the 8th Shenzhen Sculpture Biennale: We Have Never Participated, that took place at OCAT Shenzhen in 2014. This exhibition coined the term ‘post–participation’ in the wake of the increased salience and focus on notions of process and participation as key to understanding contemporary art in the West. However, as suggested by the title of the Biennale, the artistic context in China is defined by the absence of historical traditions of participatory art. The significance of this catalogue lies not only in its documentation of the works featured in the exhibition but also in its inclusion of key essays by international scholars, such as Boris Groys and Shannon Jackson; essays by Zheng Bo and Su Wei that introduced recent artistic development in China; and Lu Pei–yi’s essay entitle ‘We are Participating: Taiwan Context’, which directly addressed the Sunflower Student Movement that took place in Taiwan in the Spring 2014. 

Traditionally the neighborhood between Grande Rue and Rue du Magasin de L’Etat was a place where artisanal craftwork for the Marché en Fer (Iron Market) in Port-au-Prince was produced. Today the neighborhood mainly produces craftwork for wider Caribbean tourist economies in Panama, the Dominican Republic, Jamaica, or Puerto Rico. Many families began to settle between these workshops and small warehouses, renting small houses made out of corrugated metal. In the last sixteen years, the inhabitants of this neighborhood re-invented the area as a destination for adventurous art tourists and adapted to its new visitors with an affinity for contemporary art. This development occurred parallel to the interest of Haitian and traveling curators in the assemblages and sculptures of the group Atis Rezistans.