To Change an Opinion
A conference on art and politics: The Showroom inaugural conference of visual culture
April 2004

 

This one-day conference focuses on the intertwinement of art and the political in the light of recent global changes.

Following the post-modern debates of the late 1980s, it has become clear that oppositionality-as-complaint (ACT-UP, for example) can no longer be an effective strategy of resistance and empowerment. The 1990s have emphasised that a political dimension in art cannot rest in subject matter, but in mobilising the paradoxes of language (the work of Yinka Shonibare, for example) in order to question notions of resistance. Today, beyond the symbolic dimension of its funerary representation, the notion of Ground Zero has been calling for a full emergence of what was then perceived as the margins right at the centre of western culture.

Key questions:

How does art address the burning issues raised by radical organisations campaigning against the work of the World Bank, the IMF and the WTO?

How is western art to address the fact that it originates in countries whose foreign policies are only implemented to further national self-interest and where legislative bodies have lost a lot of their credibility?

Have we witnessed the end of the romantic model of the politically engaged artist and what new model has emerged to replace it?

Considering the recurrent use in mass visual culture (advertising for example) of the technique of subversion (Benetton for example), does "subversion" still mean anything at all in art?

Guest speakers (to be confirmed)
Dr. Michael Hirsch (lecturer on Political Philosophy at Frankfurt University)
Louise Neri (independent curator)
John Akomfrah (artist and filmmaker)
Dr. Chantal Mouffe (Quintin Hogg Research Fellow in Politics in The Department of Politics at the University of Westminster)
Subodh Gupta (artist)