Visual art exhibitions and events with a platform for critical writing
Contemporary Art and Ideas in and Era of Globalisation
Published by inIVA
Reviewed by: Edith Marie Pasquier
“inIVA is interested in a notion of a culture that goes beyond art and the limitations of race and at the same times addresses the difficulties for people who make work who are not from the dominant ideology.” Gilane Tawadros, editor Changing States.
In the preface to Changing States, Stuart Hall observes that inIVA’s driving principle has been to create a site of exchange, ‘a sense of place’ for artists and critics alike whose works holds to an ethos of ‘vigorous dialogue and debate’. Hall alludes, also, to the ‘conscripts of modernity’ and inIVA’s history within the fault line of ‘that deeply contradictory process of ‘globalisation’, which is transforming the world – and thus, inevitably, also the artwork and the art world’.
Hall’s comments delineate the frame and context of this ambitious, intense and diversely satisfying publication. Given the ongoing debates around postmodernism as witnessed in theoretical reviews of political and economic power structures, from global capital to east-west dynamics, as well as aesthetical stock-taking of the euphoria that laced postmodern descriptions, it seems the twenty-first century heralds its own perspective by either fulfilling or skirting the eradication of all the forms of what used to be called idealism. Regardless of whether postmodernism has lived up to such pronouncements, some mark needs to be made to define the new century.
InIVA’s anthology Changing States, published to mark ten years of inIVA’s programme from 1994 to 2004, seems to point in this direction. This sample retrospective alludes to the vision of an organisation geared towards defining and dissecting the dominant ideologies that can be transgressed and crossed within an era of globalisation. The publication is ambitious primarily as it charts multiple journeys: the programming of exhibitions, discussions, publications, education, multi-media, performance, architecture, research and debate. Changing States provides a creative and critical insight to the increasing volatile and pressing field of globalisation – as a locus for the intersection of art, media, architecture, language and critical discourse.
To forefront the artists, critics and themes that have animated the last ten years from Britain and across the world, without forgetting the key legacy of earlier cultural theorists and artists who have informed current contemporary arts practice, adds a rewarding depth to reading. Tawadros has deftly presented the radical upheaval of global capitals and artistic and cultural practice across wider terrains of political economic space, repositioning the individual and the artist within ever-shifting localities, and made explicit in a publication that allows for new intersections or interventions to occur.
It includes articles, interviews, projects and artists’ pages by leading cultural theorists and writers such as Jean Fisher, Cocu Fosco, Deborah Levy, Stuart Hall, Eddie Chambers, David A Bailey, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Gavin Jantjes. Incidentally, the writing here is good: Fisher’s sardonic, incisive ‘Vampire in the Text’, and Levy’s witty fictional text are two of the many inclusions that open rather than close debate. Artists hold pages of their own including, amongst others, Yinka Shonibare, Alia Syed, Johannes Phokela, Simon Tegala, Chris Ofili, Sonia Boyce, David Medalla, and Shen Yuan. It begins to read like a Who’s Who and let’s not forget the artists who are presented by work and written texts such as Keith Piper, Zineb Sedira and Nasreen Mohamedi.
Changing States creates a poignant weave of eclectic and diverse thought, which is easy to navigate through and can be returned to when wanting. As a publication it responds to the uncertain dynamic of global movements and local identities by setting aside a space for rethinking the cultural practices we inhabit and redrawing the relationship of power and culture. Perhaps, Tawadros’ underlying success with Changing States is allowing the reader to let art offer an adventure into the unknown, or an engagement with the unfamiliar, in order to discover and disseminate the different and the new.
For a chance to win a copy of Changing States: Contemporary Art and Ideas in and Era of Globalisation, published by inIVA see Subscriber prize
Writer detail:
Edith-Marie Pasquier is an artist and writer.
Venue detail:
Institute of International Visual Arts (inIVA)
Rivington Place, London EC2A 3BE
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