Community and Activism in the Global South
Art functions as a locus for exchange and organisation, where a sense of community is formed. Here, community is often characterised by tensions and contradictions as individuals unite to achieve a common dream or an activist goal, driven by a feeling of incompleteness (Chan, 2010). Examples include Ruangrupa’s artistic direction of documenta fifteen (2022), which drew on the Indonesian agricultural practice of the ‘lumbang’ or ‘rice barn’ to reimagine collectivity, collaboration, and sustainability. Nil Yalter’s performance at Halkevi Community Centre in London (2024), organised with curator Övül Durmuşoğlu, aimed to ignite greater interest in solidarity within the art world through exposure to Kurdish music and culture.
This session features papers that explore how artistic and curatorial practices can contribute to research on community and activism in the Global South, focusing on both connections and disconnections as key to building collectivity (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017). We seek to examine how existing social infrastructures are remade through practices which engage, for example, networks, space, data, embodiment, and affect to serve future life.
Contributions address the following questions: How do artists and curators create communities defined by ideas of ‘being-in-common’ (Nancy, 1991)? How do they engender alternative models of self-organisation? How can art and exhibitions prompt acts of generosity and sustainable resource sharing? How do spatial dynamics impact the formation and expression of communities in artworks and curating? How do embodied artistic experiences and performances shape community interactions and dissent?
Session Convenors:
Ceren Özpınar, University of Brighton
Eliza Tan, University of Brighton
Speakers:
Nicola Ashmore and Carolyn Watt, University of Brighton
Art activism and collaboration in South Africa: kindness, connection, play
This paper discusses the longstanding relationship with the Keiskamma Art Project located in the rural villages of Hamburg and Bodiam in the Eastern Cape of South Africa. The Keiskamma Art Project is known internationally for its large-scale textile activist artworks. This working relationship has developed over 10 years, 4 projects, and the following outputs: 16 documentary films (2015, 2017 and 2022), a small-scale textile of the Keiskamma Guernica (2017) and a large-scale painted canvas (2022) created in collaboration with Kids’ Guernica. Over this period there has been a shift in research focus from the art historical study of the large-scale textile Keiskamma Guernica (2010) to attending to the recording of the creative process and elevation of the lived experiences of the artists – evolving to future facing creative development with young people, in this rural location in South Africa. The legacy of this collaboration is community commitment.
Ashmore and Watt will explore the impact of embodied artistic and curatorial practices utilised in 2022, working with Kids’ Guernica and the Keiskamma Art Project to facilitate an intergenerational peace painting workshop, a Learning Lab and pop-up exhibition. These activities cultivated creative play and connection, developed through a kindness pedagogy (Grant & Pittaway, 2024). Michaela Howse, Manager of the Keiskamma Art Project reflected on the activities: “something’s woken up in me again as to how transformative art is. The potential, the political impact, the sort of strengths of having an imagination because it generates possibilities and that politically is very important” (2022).
Kanwal Syed, American University in Dubai
Archiving Queer Bodies Through Art and Activism: Revisiting Public Mural “Hum Hain Tahleeq-e-Khuda (We are a Creation of Allah) (2014)
This paper explores the intersection of art, identity, and activism within the Khawaja Sara community of Pakistan, focusing on the public mural Hum Hain Tahleeq-e-Khuda (I am a Creation of Allah), an interregional project created by a group of artists from National College of Arts (Rawalpindi) and activist Shio Shiv Suleman’s Fearless team from Mumbai (India). Painted in 2014, the mural depicts Trans-activist Malik riding a yellow bike, embodying joy and freedom while challenging societal expectations through her representation. Despite being conceived for a prominent urban location to amplify the visibility of Pakistan’s marginalized trans community known as Khawaja Saras, the mural ultimately found its place in a quiet neighbourhood. The difficulties in securing a visible location, faced with resistance from religious and institutional authorities, reflect broader societal prejudices and underscore the systemic silencing of non-normative identities. The analysis situates the mural in a historical and cultural framework, discussing how colonial and postcolonial influences have shaped local discourses around gender and sexuality. Ultimately, this paper advocates for self-representation within regional contexts, showing how culturally specific art challenges dominant religious-nationalist and neo-colonial narratives by asserting autonomous, layered identities in an otherwise restrictive social landscape. These case studies reveal that, despite external constraints, nonconforming feminine identities have persisted and thrived within subcultures and hidden spaces in Pakistan, asserting nuanced forms of autonomy and identity in defiance of homogenized religious nationalist and colonial narratives.
Kimberley K Lamm, Duke University
Writing Imaginary Maps: Feminist Art Beyond the Centre
This paper focuses on the artwork of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Mona Hatoum, and Lorna Simpson and illuminates the methods they offer for imagining feminism and feminist collectivities beyond global hierarchies that divide the planet—and therefore women—by north and south. I begin with Marsha Meskimmon’s ‘Chronology through Cartography: Mapping 1970s Art Globally’ (2007) and its call to shift the paradigms for studying feminist art from linear time, and all its associations with development and progress, to a ‘spatial frame’ and a ‘global cartography.’ ‘Thinking spatially’, Meskimmon argues, ‘[w]e can admit the co-existence in time of locationally distinct narratives and connect disjointed temporalities, thus asking vital questions concerning networks of relations, processes of exchange, and affinities of meaning.’ Meskimmon’s emphasis on the ‘co-existence’ of ‘distinct narratives’ and ‘affinities of meaning’ demonstrates how thinking about feminist art in spatial terms can reveal its ability to hold the similarities and differences among women together. After demonstrating how the image of writing in the work of Cha, Hatoum, and Simpson is key to their spatial thinking, the paper then turns to Mahasweta Devi’s triptych of novellas Imaginary Maps (1995) and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s ‘Translator’s Preface’ (1995), both of which explore the links between mapping and writing. These texts inform my reading of the spatial thinking in the artwork and illuminate what I see as their ability to create ‘affinities of meaning’ but still leave room for ‘distinct narratives.’
Deniz Sözen, University of Birmingham
Transcending the walls of the museum: the question of community in decolonial art practice
Drawing on the troubled histories of ethnographic collections and recent scholarship on ‘decolonising’ the museum, this paper will interrogate the meaning, purpose, and potential of non-European cultural assets in Western museums for diaspora and source communities. The cultural assets dispersed in (ethnographic) museum collections across the ‘Global North’ were never intended to be displayed behind glass vitrines in the imperial metropolis. ‘Transposed into an alien aesthetic system’ (Anzaldua, 1987), these ‘objects’ were part of different communities, central to their cosmologies and ritualistic practices.
However, as Wayne Modest (2017) rightly asserts, one should not limit their meaning to a past moment or ritualistic function, “but also engage with their histories, (…) and with the unequal power under which they moved.” Considering the colonial legacy of looting and the objectification of ‘non-European’ cultural assets in Western museum collections in conjunction with the xenophobic rhetoric in the discourse around refugees and immigration, the paper will draw on recent scholarship that argues for ethnographic ‘objects’ in the museum to be considered as diasporic or ‘migrants’ in their own right (Azoulay, 2019; Basu, 2011; Modest, Ndikung, von Oswald, 2017). What implications does this have for artists’ conception of ‘community’ and ‘activism’ in this context?
Proposing to read the work of Jean-Luc Nancy through the lens of French-Martinican poet and philosopher Édouard Glissant and taking concrete practices of artists, curators and activists as vantage points for analysis, this paper seeks to interrogate the potential of non-Western forms of knowledge to transform the way we think about decolonising the museum and (re-) imagine it otherwise.
Brianne Cohen, University of Colorado Boulder
Vietnamese Immigrating Garden as Pandemic Landscape
In 2020, Tuấn Mami began his performative-installation series, Vietnamese Immigrating Garden. He was stuck in Taiwan during Covid-19, so he connected with local Vietnamese people—who had arrived there as refugees from the Sino-Vietnamese War of 1979, or as imported brides, labourers, and students. Home for them meant the smells and tastes of Vietnamese vegetables and herbs, as well as traditional medical treatment from such plants. They cultivated their new “homeland” through guerrilla gardens composed of illegally transported seeds, plants, and fruit from Vietnam. With this community’s collaboration, Mami began a ten-year project in Taipei, Vietnamese Immigrating Garden. Since then, he has transplanted and nurtured this garden with other diasporic Vietnamese communities in art venues around the world, including most recently for Ruangrupa’s Documenta 15 and in New Orleans for Prospect 6.
I argue that the spatially, temporally expanding Vietnamese Immigrating Garden acts as a “pandemic landscape”—an original term I employ to signify artworks that entwine matters of human and environmental health, disease, and wellness. The piece centres Global South communities displaced in the Global North, so-to-speak, to materially and symbolically care for “illegal” (or “invasive”) plants and peoples in new terrains and climates, to strengthen networks among isolated or alienated Vietnamese groups through meals and events, and to construct sustainable “libraries” of seed banks. Vietnamese Immigrating Garden attempts to highlight a more invisible, global “epidemiology” connecting the health or unhealth of such dispersed Vietnamese communities, and to offer these communities more salutary environments for their future growth.
Tom Vickery, University of Leeds
Nature, Archive and Community: Exploring generative kinship and solidarity within and beyond Luta Ca Caba Inda (The Struggle is Not Over Yet) and Mediateca Onshore
This paper is interested in the relations of ecology and community within the Luta Ca Caba
Inda (LCCI) contemporary archival arts project. LCCI began in 2012 as an experimental digitisation of filmic material housed at the Bissau-Guinean Institute for Film produced in the late colonial and early postcolonial period. Ostensibly guided by artist Filipa César, operating as a global cinecollective, the project has snowballed into many collaborative re-animations by filmmakers, artists and researchers. This paper will look specifically at Mediateca Onshore, a Media library built in Malafo, Oio, that works with the programme to run workshops and community gatherings aiming to develop South-South knowledge networks surrounding ecology, solidarity and art.
Approached as an eco-critical art history, this paper will frame LCCI’s archival engagement as a sympoietic web of relations (Haraway, 2016). By recognising the process of drawing together diverse human and non-human actors, aesthetic forms, and critical imaginaries across time and space to involve them in a productive matrix of horizontal kinships, this project seeks to determine LCCI’s potentiality in provoking future facing possibilities in the face of dominant, arborescent knowledge formations. It will engage with the alternative potentials imagined by the previously submerged perspectives weaved into contemporary discourse by the Mediateca platform through its various community outputs across performance, visual media and agroecology. In turn, this will guide broader discussions around the purchase of Mediateca Onshore as an environmentally conscious arts project operating at the intersection of community and ecology in and beyond contemporary Guinea-Bissau.
Jessica Zi Chen, School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Un-Master Aesthetics: Reimagine A Common in Marwa Arsanios and Naomi Rincón-Gallardo’s Experimental Videos
The concept of un-master aesthetic critiques the drive for technological perfection, advocating instead for a low-carbon, imperfect, and intuitive artistic approach—one often absent in mainstream productions, yet crucial for addressing urgent realities, especially those outside dominant Western narrative. This paper adopts a cross-regional and transtemporal perspective, concerning land, community, and indigeneity through a comparative and interdisciplinary lens. By engaging with the experimental film and video installations of Lebanese artist Marwa Arsanios (b.1978, Washington D.C., US) and Mexican artist Naomi Rincón-Gallardo (b.1979, North Carolina, US), the research probes their artistic responses to contemporary ecological oppression and indigenous marginalization. Drawing from Cuban filmmaker Julio García Espinosa’s imperfect cinema and African scholar Cajetan Iheka’s imperfect media, this paper argues that both Arsanios and Rincón-Gallardo employ an un-master aesthetic in their cinematic, performative, and material languages as a form of resistance against systematic dispossession and linear historical narratives. This aesthetic actively reimagines a common where human and nonhuman entities coexist with autonomy and dignity. By positioning the un-master as speculative process, as affective making, and as unthinking mastery, this research investigates Arsanios’s Who Is Afraid of Ideology? (2018-2022) and Rincón-Gallardo’s Resiliencia Tlacuache (2019), which reveal the under-addressed violences exerted by international and domestic extractive powers on indigenous communities and their environments in the Global South. Aligned with the conference theme of community, this paper considers how these works not only critique existing systems of exploitation but also propose new forms of collective survival and resistance.
Katie Hill, Sotheby’s Institute
Negotiating artistic activism in the 21st century. Artist-led activism and mediation in the Chinese diaspora since 1999
This paper explores the shifts in activism in the past 25 years, focusing on direct body action in public spaces by Mad For Real (Cai Yuan and JJ Xi, 1999-2000s), and recent works by Yi Que, a recent RCA graduate whose collective text work, East London Socialist Core Values on Brick Lane, caused a media furore on all sides of the political spectrum. The backdrop to this exploration is the politics of activism on climate change with recent Just Stop Oil protests in museums, the geo-political environment in Hong Kong and new modes of activism that arguably have shifted from confrontational to fluid and negotiable. Set against the politics of the 21st century, activism in the artistic field has systematically been suppressed but the mediation of such activism via various channels of communication such as social media and mainstream journalism has been crucial to amplifying its significance and impact drawing out complex cross- or inter-cultural contexts. By focusing on a period of time during which the media has become rapidly more intense and continuous through the exponential and overwhelming impact of new technologies, the paper intends to reflect on artistic activism as a challenging form of cultural engagement requiring ever more sophisticated strategies of intervention to remain effective and relevant.