Critical Artscapes / Resilient Artists
Session convenors:
Jason Luger (Geography, King’s College London)
Viktoria Vona (Geography, King’s College London)
“Art and activism are united under a sign of the mobilisation of creative energies” (Berardi 2010) and as such art and non-party political resistance sometimes serve as different approaches to the same problem. This session aims to explore the creative, complex, and sometimes counter-intuitive ways that the arts becomes involved in resistance, and resistance utilizes the arts, in varying urban contexts around the world. From Brooklyn, where gentrification both threatens and unifies the bohemian milieu, to Singapore, where art becomes a voice to challenge and question authoritarianism, the arts act as a lens through which to interrogate broader political and cultural processes and paradoxes. It is hoped this session will stimulate a lively discussion, and provoke questions, on the different ways the arts are utilized, appropriated, co-opted and sometimes corrupted by the state and various other actors. We invite submissions from research in diverse settings (including the global south and north), with a particular focus on atypical and lesser-studied cases of cultural activism: “the use of cultural resources to affect social change” (Wallis 2010).
Some indicative areas of interest include (but are not limited to):
· Art as opposition; ‘creative resistance’
· Artistic movements in non-democratic or hybrid-democracy regimes
· Cultural responses to neoliberal urbanism
· Appropriation and co-option of the arts by the state and the private sector
· Coalitions and alliances within, across and against artistic movements
· Art’s unifying and dividing power over societal groups and around particular causes or agendas
· Representations of and resistance to gentrification and other social/economic problems
· The use of humour in art related resistance vs. ‘traditional’ forms of political activism
· Direct action through art; the use of cultural resources to induce social change
· Artists as peacemakers (and art as a tool in the process)
Please send abstracts of no more than 250 words to [log in to unmask] or [log in to unmask] by Monday, October 14th.
Jason Luger and Viktoria Vona
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