The Pinky Show and the Pedagogy of Dissent
Between 2005 and 2017, a small stuffed cat named Pinky — gray, handmade, button-eyed — delivered some of the most incisive political…
Index
Essays
Precarious Monuments: Thomas Hirschhorn and the Ethics of Public Art
Thomas Hirschhorn builds monuments that are designed to fall apart. Made from cardboard, packing tape, aluminum foil, and plastic sheeting — the…
Real Politics and the Aesthetic Regime
The term “real politics” — or, in its more familiar German form, Realpolitik — has traditionally designated a mode of political reasoning…
Borders, Bodies, Passports: Performance Art and the Politics of Migration
In 2002, the Serbian-born artist Tanja Ostojić placed a personal ad in a European newspaper. She was looking for a husband —…
The Graphic Project: Visual Communication as Political Practice
The graphic project — the mobilization of visual communication for political ends — is as old as the printed image itself. From…
The Artist as Organiser: From Beuys to BLM
The figure of the artist-as-organiser — the practitioner who moves between the studio and the street, between aesthetic production and political mobilisation…
Useful Art, Useless Institutions: The Contradictions of Socially Engaged Practice
In 2011, the Cuban-American artist Tania Bruguera founded the Asociación de Arte Útil — the Association of Useful Art — and with…
Between Spectacle and Participation: Art After Occupy
When Occupy Wall Street established its encampment in Zuccotti Park in September 2011, it did not merely inaugurate a political movement. It…
The Distribution of the Sensible: Why Rancière Still Matters for Political Art
In the landscape of contemporary art theory, few conceptual frameworks have proven as durable or as generative as Jacques Rancière’s notion of…
Documentary Turns: Photography, Evidence, and Political Truth
The relationship between photography and political truth has never been stable. From the earliest war photographs — Roger Fenton’s carefully staged Crimean…