Arts and Politics: Resistance and/or Complicity to Past and Present Injustices

Abstract

This panel addresses the multifarious dimensions of the relationship between art and politics in the wake historical, social and economic injustices. It focuses on how – and to what ends – artistic production constitutes both resistance and complicity (or/and critical complicity) to injustices and hegemony. We attempt to kick-start a dialogue about the need to consider artistic production as a powerful and illuminating form of intervention in complex political processes, especially with regards to justice, fairness and the right to memory in the wake of political violence. The exploration of the mixture between arts and politics would enable us to understand how the soft power of culture interacts with the hard power of authoritarian, totalitarian and other hegemonic regimes. At the same time, the papers reveal how art can set forth an ambivalent position between complicity and resistance to hegemony and violence within often antagonistic horizons of time, imagination and hope. Art’s power to intervene politically is also reflected in its ability to use a “double language” and insert itself in a “grey zone” of collaboration with/resistance to hegemony. Its ability to stimulate cognitive faculties such as imagination and memory, its capacity to engage with temporality/spatiality and to fuel – or extinguish – political emotions, are scrutinised as significant aspects of its political relevance. Thus, this panel’s first objective is to disentangle the convoluted relationships between art and politics, resistance and complicity, hegemony and counter-hegemonic struggles. The second objective is to extricate the various nuances of what complicity and resistance can entail, ranging from complicit silence, complicit submission to authority, euphemized submission, resistance as antagonism, resistance as endurance and so on. This conceptual exploration facilitates a clearer perspective on how artistic production illuminates both collaboration (complicity) with power and resistance to it. At the same time, these conceptual delimitations can facilitate contrasting interpretations of the political past events, overcoming certain conflations of what “resistance” and “complicity” entail. Thus, art can disclose contrasting interpretations of both “resistance” and “complicity” and this operation is crucial for practices of redress. These thorny issues will be at the heart of all papers in this panel. The hope is that these contributions will begin to unpack the political potential of arts to disclose and repair the troubled pasts in light of present and future goals.