Selected Literature
In this section, the FEINART members present recommendations of articles, journals and books related to topics of Socially Engaged Art
Fiocco Fabiola; Journal of Cultural Management and Cultural Policy / Zeitschrift für Kulturmanagement und Kulturpolitik: Transparent (Support) Structures: On Visibility and Social Reproduction in Socially Engaged Art vol. 9, n. 1, 2023
Drawing on materialist feminist theory, this article discusses Recleaning the Rietveld Pavilion (2017) by Alina Lupu and its relation to Job Koelewijn’s Cleaning of the Rietveld Pavilion (1992) and other important antecedents. In considering the ways in which maintenance work is articulated in the projects, and the people engaged in the realisation, I contend that it is possible to develop a critical analysis of how visibility is deployed in socially engaged art contexts. The argument focuses on art as a site of gendered labour and the subjectivities as well as forms of (social) work that it produces. Furthermore, the analysis explores the regime of hyper-visibility of contemporary art in contrast to the vast array of unrecorded economic activities, of which maintenance is an essential, yet not exclusive component, that ultimately contributes to reproducing an unsustainable system of work relations based on (self-)exploitation, reputational value and financial dependence.
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Marteinn Sindri Jónsson. “Á LungA heima í íslenskri listasögu?” Skírnir 196 (Fall 2022)
The article “Á LungA heima í íslenskri listasögu?” introduces the term socially engaged art for the first time in Icelandic academic discourse and suggests its translation as ‘félagsleg afstöðulist’. By way of a long-standing participatory art festival in East Iceland called LungA, as well as debates on and reception of participatory art, relational aesthetics, and social sculpture in Iceland, the article offers a critical assessment of the potentials and limits of the field of socially engaged art in Iceland. My case study of the festival was carried out through extended involvement between 2013 and 2020 and published in length in an anniversary publication of the festival Here is LungA (2021).
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Bill Balaskas / Carolina Rito (Eds.); Contributions by: Bill Balaskas / Michael Birchall / Mélanie Bouteloup / Carolina Cerón / Anthony Downey / Pujita Guha and Abhijan Toto for the Forest Curriculum / Joasia Krysa / Vali Mahlouji / Je Yun Moon / Andrea Phillips / Emily Pringle / Carolina Rito / ruangrupa (farid rakun and Leonhard Bartolomeus) / Nora Sternfeld / Sian Vaughan; Sternberg Press (2017): Institution as Praxis—New Curatorial Directions for Collaborative Research
Institution as Praxis—New Curatorial Directions for Collaborative Research explores new curatorial and artistic practices that contribute to the expansion of institutional, practice-based, and collaborative research methods. This publication offers an overview of how creative practices are modifying the ways we think about both knowledge production and research in the cultural sector and in academia.
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Karen van den Berg; FIELD Journal of Socially-Engaged Art and Criticism (2019): From Protest to the Production of Social Relations: Socially Engaged Art and Activism in Germany since 2015
Even before a severe crisis of liberalism was diagnosed following the Brexit referendum and the US elections in 2016, Germany had been in a state of political emergency. Equally, there had already been a decisive turning point in the development of activist art in Germany before this international political development was widely recognized. A look into 2014 will help to understand these changes.
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Angela Dimitrakaki & Kirsten Lloyd; Taylor & Francis Online (2017): Social Reproduction Struggles and Art History
The article explores social reproduction as a key term in expanding the purview of art history in relation to the social urgencies of the early twenty-first century and feminist struggles. Providing a context for the approaches to social reproduction and art in the specific journal issue, the analysis makes a case for a methodological shift that would see feminist art history coming closer to a history of labour. But this, the authors argue, implies interrogating what enters the category ‘labour’ as such. The article opens with an examination of capitalism in relation to crisis and goes on to look at a) social reproduction in an expanded (art) field; b) the violence of reproduction; c) the feminist commons/the social reproduction commons.
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Kuba Szreder; L’Internationale Online (2020): Independence Always Proceeds from Interdependence: A Reflection on the Conditions of the Artistic Precariat and the Art Institution in Times of Covid-19
This report from Warsaw is a just-on-time response to the disruption caused by Covid-19, including some initial thoughts on its political implications and, more specifically, its impact on the economy of contemporary art.
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