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About the Course

There is a long tradition of interaction between questions of politics and questions of art. However, arguably it is in contemporary art that this dialogue between art and politics has become most intense – leading to a fundamental interrogation of the nature of both: What are the limits and the agency of artistic practice? What is the political? How are these terms articulated? What is possible in this intersection?
 
We are seeing today, what seem to be fundamental changes in international political cultures and geopolitics:  ethno-nationalism, Brexit, various separatisms, Erdogan, and Trump; geo-political contestations Ukraine, Central Caucus, the Horn of Africa, the Middel-East, the Latin American “pink tide”, and the South China Sea contestation for hegemony; the changing contexts of climate change and environmental policy; changing formations of political action including occupy, street protest, direct action, Black Lives Matter, Rhodes-must-fall, feminist mobilisations locally and globally and continuing struggles by indigenous peoples.
 
There has been for decades now a massive growth in the diversity and volume of issues arising within different art practices. Issues as diverse as the relationship between art and activism, feminism, queer culture, ecological crisis, postcolonialism, decolonialism, racism, zenophobia, anti-capitalism, the role of the avant-garde, renewed nationalisms, institutional critique, self-organisation, and many other conjunctions of art and politics, ranging across the macro-and the micro-political scale.