G.5.1 Public Art Intervention and the Politics of Participation in the City of Bengaluru

Shramona Maiti, Jawaharlal Nehru University

With the rise of participatory strategies of art-making seen across the globe since the 1990s, social engagement often surfaces as a leitmotif. While it has been lauded for its reconciliatory promise at a time of rising economic inequality, such gestures have also been characterized by their apparent distance from commercialization and, by extension, the institutionalization of art. This paper, however, complicates the idea of participation by discussing three cases from the south Indian city of Bengaluru, seeing how neoliberal appropriations of the concept of participation occasions a dialectic in the ecology of such practice in the global South. Starting with the practice of artist Suresh G. Reddy, and focussing on his role as an art educator working on expressions of "public art intervention," these instances will be read as interruptions in the city's idiom of development; the paper locates in them an agonistic stance towards the rapid urbanization of the city. The next two cases look at: one, urban art projects by Jaaga, an interdisciplinary art space, collaborating with the city's urban planning departments; and two, the Rangoli Art Centre project at the M.G. Road Metro station, pioneered by the government's Namma Metro in conjunction with artist Surekha serving as the curator. Thus, the paper locates a dialectic of participation, where it illustrates how, on the one hand, the first instance bears an oppositional relation with public policies of urbanization in the city, while on the other, urbanization strategies aimed at the city's 'beautification' have also effectuated a partnership between the state and certain artists. It, therefore, does not read participation solely through the lens of its relation to anti-institutional capacities, but takes into account participatory strategies of urban governance that are continually reconstructing the subjectivity of the "citizen" and, in turn, that of the "artist-activist."

G.5.2 Collaborators, Allies, and Accomplices: Mixrice and Post-Minjung in Korean Art

Vicki Sung-yeon Kwon, University of Alberta

In 2002, the South Korean artist collective Mixrice began to work closely with migrant workers from Southeast Asian nations who live in Korea as (in)visible minorities and as the subaltern in post-IMF South Korea. By participating in the migrant workers’ human rights and labour activism and collaborating with them, Mixrice practised community art that addressed South Korean bias against migrant workers. After their return to their hometown, Mixrice visited their collaborators in Butwal, Nepal, the hometown of many migrant workers, and turned their encounter into the multimedia travelogue Return (2006), which was displayed at the Gwangju Biennale. Drawing on Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s critique on European scholars speaking for the subaltern and Anna Tsing’s discussion on subaltern desire and friction generated at heterogeneous and unequal encounters, I examine how Mixrice (re)presented the migrant workers and the Butwal residents and how the artists collaborated with the migrant workers. To situate Mixrice in the South Korean history of socially engaged art, I outline the two main movements of socially engaged art practices in Korea, namely Minjung art in the 1980s and post-Minjung art after the mid-1990s. In addressing the question of how post-Minjung overcomes the problem of Minjung art’s othering of minjung, I argue that the asymmetrical power relationship between the artists and participants appears in Return through the tensions between and contradictory desires of the artists and the migrant workers.

G.5.3 Tintin Wulia and the Neoliberal Gaze

Chari Larsson, Griffith University

This paper will consider Indonesian-born Tintin Wulia's interactive and participatory practice with a particular focus on her interrogation of the neoliberal gaze. In projects such as Trade/Trace/Transit (2014–16), Wulia has investigated the cardboard waste route in Hong Kong, highlighting the plight of Hong Kong's precarious Filipino migrant communities. I will argue that Wulia's solicitation of the neoliberal gaze complicates Eurocentric and northern hemisphere discourses of participatory and socially engaged art. These have traditionally tended to promote active over passive modes of spectatorship, where the audience is reconsidered as a coproducer or participant in the work's meaning. Commentators have observed that participatory art was co-opted by a neoliberal agenda in countries such as the UK as a form of soft social engineering (Bishop). Participatory art was viewed as a form of social inclusion by New Labour's cultural policies. This social inclusion agenda, however, does not necessarily extend to contemporary artistic practices in Asia.

Visuality has long been understood as a force of power: it permits who and what may be seen. With genealogical links reaching back to Michel Foucault's formulation of biopower, the neoliberal gaze, however, remains an undertheorized mode of spectatorship. This paper will make a series of proposals as to what a neoliberal gaze might be. Neoliberalism has created conditions of spectatorship that have led to a series of aporetic blind spots. Extending Thomas Nail's theorization of the border as a process of social division, this paper will argue the neoliberal gaze simultaneously blinds and homogenizes. It is this dual condition of spectatorship that Wulia's practice interrogates, in what can best be described as amounting to a crisis in representation.