The ARt of Inequality: A Youth Social Justice Exhibition in Augmented Reality

The substantive development in the role of augmented reality (AR) technologies in public spaces provides new opportunities for digital arts and arts activism as a means of increasing awareness of critical social issues. However, because of the digital divide and dominant narratives in the museum, there is an existing racial and socioeconomic gap in (digital) art, activism education, and museum curation. In this paper we present a curriculum that aims to empower high-school-aged youth from minoritized backgrounds through art activism in museum spaces via the development and exhibition of augmented reality art pieces that address social justice issues relevant to youth interests and experiences.

Ethnic Envy and Other Aggressions in the Contemporary “Global” Art Complex

This article looks at Okui Enwezor’s theory of countering the art world’s “Westernisms” and his actualization of this theory in his organization of Documenta11 to mount an argument against the universalizing and Eurocentric conception of “global” art. It offers two examples of recent hybrid art/curatorial work in Los Angeles—the 2019 David Hammons show at Hauser and Wirth and the Crenshaw Dairy Mart’s arts activism—to argue for an extension of Enwezor’s model via activist and aesthetic interventions into specific sites and art spaces.

The Art of Emergency

Across Africa, artists increasingly turn to NGO sponsorship in pursuit of greater influence and funding, while simultaneously NGOs—both international and local—commission arts projects to buttress their interventions and achieve greater reach and marketability. As a result, the key values of artistic expression become “healing” and “sensitization” measured in turn by “impact” and “effectiveness.” Such rubrics obscure the aesthetic complexities of the artworks and the power dynamics that inform their production. Clashes arise as foreign NGOs import foreign aesthetic models and preconceptions about their efficacy, alongside foreign interpretations of politics, medicine, psychology, trauma, memorialization, and so on. Meanwhile, each community embraces its own aesthetic precedents, often at odds with the intentions of humanitarian agencies. The arts are a sphere in which different worldviews enter into conflict and conversation. To tackle the consequences of aid agency arts deployment, the volume assembles ten case studies from across the African continent employing multiple media including music, sculpture, photography, drama, storytelling, ritual, and protest marches. Organized under three widespread yet underanalyzed objectives for arts in emergency—demonstration, distribution, and remediation—each case offers a different disciplinary and methodological perspective on a common complication in NGO-sponsored creativity. The Art of Emergency shifts the discourse on arts activism away from fixations on message and toward diverse investigations of aesthetics and power negotiations. In doing so, this volume brings into focus the conscious and unconscious configurations of humanitarian activism, the social lives it attempts to engage, and the often fraught interactions between the two.

The Memory Box-Initiative: Nonextractivist Research Methodologies and the Struggle for an Architecture of Remembrance in Kabul, Afghanistan

Over the past 10 years, the Afghanistan Human Rights and Democracy Organization (AHRDO), a Kabul-based civil society organization and arts-activism platform, together with various self-organized, local war victims associations, has fought an uphill battle to challenge Afghanistan’s entrenched culture of impunity and make a contribution to a more just, democratic and peaceful country from the bottom-up. The current article critically describes, theorizes, and poeticizes one particular aspect of this decade-long struggle, the so-called Memory Box-Initiative, inspired by Augusto Boal’s Aesthetics of the Oppressed. Challenging the fact that in many urban centers of Afghanistan, and in particular in the capital Kabul, a great number of public monuments and buildings are dedicated to war criminals, a veritable architecture of impunity, the aim of the initiative is the creation of a counter-hegemonic, victims-centered architecture of remembrance, taking place in a context of a highly contested Transitional Justice process. The main sections of the article address the following three issues: (a) the attempt by Afghanistan’s political, religious, and military elites to undermine the efforts of the country’s war victims to challenge the current culture of impunity by promoting a cityscape in the image of what they consider to be war heroes; (b) the response by the Afghan community of war victims in the form of the Memory Boxes and subsequent advocacy efforts in the public sphere; and (c) the embedding of the Memory Boxes within the larger framework of what is currently being theorized as “nonextractivist methodologies” as part of what is known as the Epistemologies of the South, as proposed by Boaventura de Sousa Santos. The article will conclude with a call for increased epistemological and methodological insubordination and the need for further research and, above all, experimentation in combining the Memory Boxes and the Epistemologies of the South in the global struggle for social and cognitive justice.

Pranks in Contentious Politics

There is often a division between scholarly publication and activist knowledge—something that Sarah Maddison and Sean Scalmer (2005) suggest may be countered by taking the knowledge produced by activists seriously. In this interview, Simon Hunt reflects on the genesis of Pauline Pantsdown, a drag persona that he developed in the late 1990s in reaction to Australian Conservative politician Pauline Hanson, who generated controversy for her racist and divisive views. The introduction briefly considers the importance of activist accounts and contextualizes Hunt’s practice in relation to arts activism and networked societies. From there, Hunt discusses a range of significant considerations for activism, notably the significance of using persona as a means for activism, the affordances and challenges of using social media, and methods for activating participation in a changing media landscape.