#rwanda project

Alfredo Jaar (Goodman Gallery) and Valie Export (Thaddaeus Ropac). 

What are 2 of the arguments put forth by contemporary globalization activists? What are 2 of the primary tactics used?

  Arguments

a. Geopolitical artists are concerned with producing a culture of the underrepresented through DIY media by exposing the underground, the marginal or the minority through means of high jacked media or production of entirely new routes of communication.

  b. Similar to the concerns of the Dadaist past, who wanted to de-structure the bourgeois ego, geopolitical artists aim to produce systems for “deconditioning and disidentifiction” the corporate “worlds/ideals”. They want to dismantle the corporate hegemony through techniques of subversion and free enterprises.

  Tactics

c. A broader tactic of subversion by geopolitical artists is the production of collectivism/temporary autonomous zones/culture jamming through the formation of politically charged groups that can be more or less permanent. These groups come together to initiate interventions within public spaces that produce these temporary autonomous zones or through the assemblage of different media types to then critique those medias.

  d. A tactic that groups like Bureau d’Etudes uses is the mapping the geographical breadth of the transnational corporate powers or the freeing of information about such formations. This allows general publics to become more informed about globalization topics and concerns through freely distributed media by person not invested for monetary gain.

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The questions and responses are in reference to Brian Holmes' Do-It-Yourself Geopolitics: Cartographies of Art in the World from the text book Collectivism After Modernism, published in 2007 by the University of Minnesota Press.

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Alfredo Jaar can be considered an example of a geopolitical artist, however his work is more often than not displayed within an institutional setting of a museum or Biennial, it still addresses concerns about pollution, corruption, and war. One of his most startling bodies of work, the Rwanda Project, approaches the topic of Hutu and Tutsi genocide that happened in Rwanda in the 1990s.