politics

GUEST BLOG: Archives of a Country Lost – A review of Cry, the Beloved Country by Gil-Mualem Doron by Ghazaleh Zogheib

This is a guest blog by curator and researcher Ghazaleh Zogheib. It’s a review of Gil Mualem-Doron’s exhibition Cry, the Beloved Country. Dr. Gil Mualem-Doron (1970) is an Arab-Jewish artist, born and based in the UK. His work is research-based, often collaborative and focuses on issues such as identity politics, nationalism, placemaking and histories of place, social justice, and transcultural aesthetics. His work has been exhibited in places such as the Turner Contemporary, Tate Modern, the South Bank Centre, People’s History Museum (Manchester), the Jewish Museum (London), and Haifa Museum of Art. His work is in several private collections and he has won commissions from organisations such as Counterpoints Arts, Brighton Pride, the Mayor of London and Ben & Jerry’s.

I’m pleased to be able to share this review of Mualem-Doron’s challenging and political exhibition in the week that marks the 72nd anniversary of the Nakba.

Kick up the Arts: Arts and Culture during and after Coronavirus. My contribution to The World Transformed Zoom conversation

Last Tuesday evening (5th May), I took part in a discussion about arts and culture during and after Coronavirus. The event was organised by The World Transformed. I’m a strong supporter of this movement. For this session, it asked: “How can arts and cultural workers across the sector find new forms of solidarity during the Coronavirus crisis? How can we strengthen localised organising culture in the creative industries? What economic demands should arts and cultural workers be making in this current moment?”

Duty Now for the Future 2.0

This is a revised version of Duty Now for the Future - an article commissioned by Collecteurs NY to help launch its SUBSTANCE 100 initiative. The original article was written before the COVID-19 pandemic swept through the UK , Europe and the USA. Duty Now for the Future 2.0 is a call for everyone in the art world to finally wake up to our responsibilities in a world where there can be no going back to the crass inequity of our lives before Corona virus.

It asks: Is the time coming when art will finally embrace self-organised alternatives rooted in ethical practice, equitable living, commoning, fair pay, openness and hope? Can art help rebuild our lives and our communities? Can it reimagine ways of being and living together after a global pandemic that surely changes everything?

A Charter For Renewed Cooperation?

This is my take on why only cooperation and federalism and democratic, participatory community development can begin to heal the divisions that exist in our communities. For me, the Labour party have lost any connection to its roots, so we need to radically renew the idea of working-class movements by ending the elite electoral machines that never listen and that reproduce the very conditions of our oppression that they claim to oppose.

Selvedge: Disobedience, Self-Organising and Working-Class Cultures

This is a transcript of my keynote at the British Textile Biennial which took place on 1st November 2019. I performed the keynote to a film. I’ve included some of the videos featured. The Doves’ songs were played in full, the others only extracts. I’ve also included an audio recording that you can listen to here. It includes the question and answer session which followed my keynote.

Low Culture: Neoliberalism, Conservative Social Practice and the Universal Marginality of Everyday Life

This is the text version of my keynote paper I gave at the Culture and the Periphery conference at Gray’s School of Art, Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen on 4th October 2019.

The Hyper-Market Strikes Back! – Text from my talk for Market Forces at Swap Market, Govanhill…

This is the text from my talk for the Market Forces event at the Swap Market Govanhill in Glasgow on 18th July 2019. It looks at the role artists play in the game of neoliberal planned gentrification.

“Our Boat”: Zombie Art Biennale Turns Venice Into The Island of the Living Dead

This is my attempt to explain the horror I feel witnessing the crass appropriation of a boat on which over 800 people (lumped together under the universally belittling term “migrants”) died when it sank in 2015 as an art object at this year’s Venice Biennale. I’m REALLY angry!

Home is where we start from: Cultural Democracy and Working-Class Struggle

The struggle for cultural democracy is part of our fight back against those who have always sought to keep us down – who have always told us: “KNOW YOUR PLACE!”

I know my place: it’s called HOME. We all have homes of one sort or another. And home is where we start from. Not art galleries or spectacles or museums or whatever else we are told are “cultured” places. HOME. This is the place where we build our own cultures, our way.

No Breathing Space: V&A, Artwashing & the Theft of Robin Hood Gardens (a reblog of an article I wrote for Bella Caledonia)

I am reposting this article which was originally published by Bella Caledonia here because it formed the basis for my keynote speech at Lancashire Arts Exchange along with the film A Cacophony of Crows which you can see here. It deals with the artwashing of Robin Hood Gardens by state agent, the V&A.

A Cacophony of Crows – Film about how V&A’s theft of a piece of Robin Hood Gardens is artwashing as creative destruction and class redomination

This is a film about V&A’s crass exploitation of council housing following its “acquisition” if some pieces of Robin Hood Gardens in the Labour controlled London borough of Tower Hamlets - a once iconic council housing estate that is being demolished to make way for luxury apartments. It was part of my keynote given as part of Lancashire Arts Exchange on 8th November 2018. I explored how this example of state-led artwashing relates to David Harvey’s arguments around how neoliberalism uses creative destruction and arts/culture/media as a means of re-enforcing class domination.

In my beginning is my end – a film about the impact of neoliberalism on our cultures, the instrumentalisation of art, & cultural democracy

This is a film with narrative from a performance I gave in Belfast earlier this year about neoliberalism, instrumentalism and cultural democracy.

“We must trust in our individual and collective selves.  We must remember our struggles.  We must remember that official arts and culture and, for that matter, the creative industries, reflects only one rather small part of our arts and culture.  We do not live in a cultural democracy.  The cuts to state-sanctioned arts and cultural production makes this assertion starker as each day passes… And cultural policy, like fortune, has always favoured the rich and powerful.”

In my beginning is my end – transcript of my prose poem and film performed at Cathedral Quarter Arts Festival, Belfast

I was really privileged to be invited to take part in What Next for the Arts? - an afternoon symposium which was part of the Cathedral Quarter Arts Festival - on 12th May 2018. As I like to do whenever I get the chance nowadays, I performed the piece with accompanying film and audio. This is the transcript... A test recording of the film will be uploaded soon...