23-May-2022
In our neoliberal society, there is a huge emphasis on expressing oneself. Listening is underestimated and considered a 'soft' quality. But what if true listening is what is needed, especially in times of shifts and crises? What would change for the better if we practised true listening? What would the potential impact on art and art education be? Would it be possible to build a different (art) world together?
24-Feb-2022
This contribution addresses the question of translation in art and art education. Every artist and teacher concerned with social and planetary justice, no matter what genre or art form, must find a mode of ‘translating’ the lives of those at the margins of society into a story, a performance, a piece of music, an artful encounter. Used in this sense, translation is never only or simply a matter of finding the right equivalences. That search for equivalences between life forms and lived realities that are radically different from each other is itself far from simple or a neutral process. Who is entitled to ‘translate’ others, to represent their voices and viewpoints and on what terms? What makes a good translator? Good intentions are not enough; in fact, they can often do more harm than good. Translation is as much a deeply artistic as well as a deeply political issue. This contribution offers reflections on the work of translation as a core task of the artist and art educator. Keywords: artists as translators, asymmetrical relations, necessary misapplication, repair
17-Feb-2022
This article proposes transgression as a helpful concept to analyse the cultural practice of boundary crossing, focussing on the field of comedy. Taking the work of Dutch comedian Hans Teeuwen as a case study, I examine the contested politics of transgressive comedy and question the strong-hold belief that transgression is necessarily liberating. By comparing Teeuwen’s early comedy to his recent work, I demonstrate that the political implications of transgression largely depend on context. I argue that Teeuwen’s work has become more politicised and that its meaning has shifted from a postmodern play with limits to a manifestation of conservative counterculture. Theories by Georges Bataille and Michel Foucault help me to theorise transgression as an act of crossing and drawing the limit and to criticise the carnivalesque model of humour inspired by the work of Mikhail Bakhtin. Keywords: humour, comedy, transgression, carnival, Hans Teeuwen, Dutch cabaret
10-Feb-2022
Participatory art (also called socially engaged art or community-based art) uses artistic tactics to work towards the creation of participation within a community. As a theatre practitioner and researcher, I have worked with prison theatre projects, both in prison and especially outside with formally incarcerated people on probation and/or in post-release. This experience made me question the critical role that we—artists, artist educators, and workshop facilitators—play when embarking on these journeys. How do we position ourselves in the group work? How does the dynamic between us and them function? Does this binary division actually exist? And how do we evaluate our work in terms of benefits for the specific group of people we engage with? By reflecting on my personal artistic and research experience in Italy, I highlight some criticalities of participatory art and suggest some practice-based reflections on the possibility of contributing to building empowering tools through the use of critical tactics. Critical because they incorporate the needs and specificities of the accompanying artistic tasks; yet, at the same time, daring to question and problematise the very field in which they operate. In doing so, critical tactics can represent a radical perspective on participatory art, fostering the encompassing of theories, reflections, and experiences that do not come directly from the field of art but can enrich it nonetheless. I refer to these tactics as the three A’s: accessibility, to look into how we can make participatory art projects accessible and open to everyone; agency, to highlight the need for ownership from the participants’ point-of-view; and articulation, to insist on the need for co-creation to avoid falling into the trap of representation. Keywords: Participatory art; critical tactics; artist educator; prison theatre; accessibility; agency; articulation.
03-Feb-2022
This text traces the multi-faceted meanings of the Šejla Kamerić’s artwork Bosnian Girl by asking how a stereotype can be taken up and turned on itself. I explain how Orientalism and Balkanism are ideological discourses that are coded into the work’s original graffiti text. I subsequently demonstrate how the piece performs an intervention into these dominant meanings by showing how trans-coding, mimesis, embodiment and the strategy of ‘the eternal return’ is used to disavow the charged meaning in the original message. Keywords: representation, mimesis, feminist art, Orientalism, Balkanism, cultural studies
27-Jan-2022
This essay attempts to consider more responsive and responsible forms of perception, which help reflect on artworks and ourselves through the shared experience of embodied vulnerability. I argue that transforming one’s practice of looking by engaging in disability art and vulnerability will be a potentially radical tool in one’s art-making practices and in what such art-making can provoke. Technological and media developments in the use of artistic tools have reordered our relationship between visual perception and spatial and bodily experience. By introducing ‘tools’ such as vulnerability and disability aesthetics to our art making and visual practices, we will allow ourselves to reorder more critically the artistic impact on the meaning-making of ‘disability’ and other forms of culturally excluded forms of diverse and variant embodiment. keywords; visual thinking, vulnerability, disability aesthetics, art-making, embodied reflection, ableism, variation vs deviance, unlearning artistic and visual practices
20-Jan-2022
When it comes to equality, diversity and inclusion, my students at the ArtEZ Academy of Theatre and Dance in the Netherlands often know more than we, their teachers, do. The debates about diversity and inclusion within ArtEZ are regularly started and driven by students. We, their teachers, sometimes find ourselves struggling to keep up. Students […]
20-Jan-2022
This essay looks into critical mimesis as an artistic strategy, discussing how artists imitate or copy non-theatre systems or formats while subtly subverting them, thus critiquing these existing systems and ideologies ‘from within.’ After providing a brief example—Julian Hetzel’s Schuldfabrik—the essay further introduces the concept of subversive affirmation and the closely related notion of over-identification, referring to scholars Inke Arns and Sylvia Sasse, Slavoj Žižek and the BAVO research collective. The concept of subversive affirmation is then used to analyse the large-scale project Unified Estonia by Theatre NO99 (2010), in which the Estonian theatre company created a fictious political party to investigate the performance of populist politics. Zooming in on (moral) ambiguity and ethical dilemmas as key characteristics of the strategy, the essay closes with a brief discussion of Samira Elagoz’s solo Cock, Cock … Who’s There? (2016), in which she cleverly plays with the logics of online dating platforms in order to re-appropriate the male gaze. keywords; camouflage acts, imitation as critical practice, mimesis, over-identification, performance and politics, subversive affirmation
20-Jan-2022
Welcome to Powertools, an online publication about art and diversity. The essays you find here examine the relationship between art and socio-political matters of power, as well as between inclusion and exclusion. From January until April 2022, we will publish one new essay weekly. The complete online essay collection and accompanying resources and materials will […]
