art and activism

The Book as Agora

How should art institutions respond to the current political climate? Michal B. Ron reviews Paper Monument’s recent book, in which various art professionals offer their propositions to six perceptive questions.

Available in Audio

Tohu Podcast: A Conversation with Mierle Laderman Ukeles

In this Tohu Podcast, David Duvshani meets performance and social practice art pioneer Mierle Laderman Ukeles in Jerusalem for a conversation following her move to Jerusalem and her latest retrospective exhibition at the Queens Museum in New York. They talk about manifestos, authenticity, collaboration, art education, women artists, labor organization, life in Jerusalem, and the state of the political Left in the US and in Israel/Palestine.

The Need for a New Revolution

The 6th Athens Biennale expressed the need for an urgent new self-identification of the confused contemporary community, either in local or in international terms - an urgent need of a new “revolution” that would define the 21st century. Christos Paridis writes about the exhibition, which he describes as an adult playground for those who are seeking questions or answers to present and future nightmares.

Other than Whom?

“There is no curatorial passivism, any more than there is a passivist war.” Michal B. Ron reviews Maura Reilly’s book Curatorial Activism: Towards an Ethics of Curating and adds a note about the heroless politeness of the recent Berlin Biennial.

 

Relinquishing Freedom (Willingly) to the White Man

A mother screams as her baby is wrenched from her arms; a sex fest featuring Canada's founding fathers and various forest animals; and Miss Chief – a powerful, sexy, transgender indigenous figure in traditional attire, beads, and feathers. Liora Belford visits "Shame and Prejudice: A Story of Resilience," the travelling exhibition of the work of artist Kent Monkman, who wonders where are the painters who have documented the hunger, the poverty, the pain, and the annihilation of a whole culture.

In Search of Critical Curating

In light of the recent criticism of documenta 14 and the Venice Biennial, Noah Simblist returns to the book/magazine issue “Curating Critique,” to comment on whether and where curating and criticality might meet today.

Mobilizing Stills

 “The work of the photojournalists’ collective Activestills does not settle for reflecting the grim reality by providing representations of it, but offers a more active mode of photography that joins the protests of the struggling communities being photographed.” Nadeem Karkabi reviews the recently published book that covers a decade of Activestills’ collective photo-activism.