Art and Democracy

Immigration will always result in encounters between those who have lived in the area and those who are new to the area. These interactions can be quite positive; they enable both parties to learn from the other and engage in cultural exchange. In 2016, Olafur Eliasson set up an artistic workshop in Vienna for refugees,…

After a presidential campaign season riddled with violent rhetoric and logical fallacies, Yoko Ono uses resorts to her Trump card, her voice. The very thing at risk in a potential facist America. Shortly after the calamitous election of Donald Drumpf,  multimedia art activist Ono responds  by screaming for 19 seconds. Just screaming? Yes, indeed. Her…

If democracy is effective negotiation and discourse, can there be democracy when one group is prevented from joining the debate? There are many institutional prejudices that prevent certain groups’ voices from participating in the ongoing collective discourse of democracy, and semi-isolated counterpublics sometimes are the best way for these groups to begin the process of…

Imagine seeing, stopped at a red light, an art gallery on wheels. The Peripatetic is a mobile gallery that occupies the streets, rather than an institutionalized museum setting. Its director, David Lefkowitz, built the scale model gallery with wheels so that the exhibitions can travel and reach audiences who may not approach a traditional museum….

Do disasters affect us if they take place on the other side of the world? In 2011 the Japanese artist Koki Tanaka was in Los Angeles when a nuclear disaster occurred at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, following a tsunami. Because he was on the other side of the Pacific Ocean, both Japan and…

Many people are reluctant to alter and improve their relationship to society and the natural environment. Many are unaware of the extent to which actions as simple as recycling, voting, carpooling, and taking public transportation can transform the world they live in. Tomás Saraceno, with his piece, In Orbit, creates a space in which each participant…

¡Únete! Join Us! was Jodi Colomer’s project presented in the Spanish Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2017. There is no designated path viewers must take to explore the installation – they are free to move about the space within the pavilion in any direction. In the perimeter rooms, there are projection screens with videos…

Argentinian artist Marta Minujín constructed The Parthenon of Books (2017) from books donated by the public from a shortlist of over 170 titles that are either currently or formerly banned. Constructed on a Nazi book-burning site in Kassel, Germany, the structure is replica of the iconic Parthenon, a temple constructed in the ancient city-state of…

The NSK Pavilion was an exhibition in Venice that took place during the 57th Venice Biennale. Countries represented at the Biennale usually presented their art in “pavilions” specifically set aside for them in either one of the two Biennale sites. The NSK pavilion stood as an independent pavilion, bringing attention to the Biennale’s nationalistic undertones…

In his work “250 cm Line Tattooed on 6 Paid People” (2002), which took place in Havana, Cuba, Santiago Sierra addresses structures of power that often lurk below the surface of society without being brought to light. Due to the need for money, the participants in this work would agree to have a mark on…