NO Rhetoric(s) : Versions and Subversions of Resistance in Contemporary Global Art

This volume maps some of the territories where points of resistance can be located and where art’s resistant potential becomes relevant once again. "NO Rhetoric(s): Versions and Subversions of Resistance in Contemporary Global Art" focuses on a neuralgic issue which was intensely debated during the last three decades, but has rarely become a topic of its own. It offers an updated way which art presents itself as an agent of resistance, whether in a mere rhetorical stance or as an effective critical strategy. In the face of general discourse of revolt and insurrection that is highly fashionable today, it is necessary to ask whether the gesture of ‘negation’ still yields an emancipatory potential. Struggling between NO rhetoric and NO to rhetoric, the artistic and the political field permanently interfere with each other; sometimes they merely overlap, while at other moments they strongly insist on demarcating themselves. Nonetheless it remains to be seen more precisely of what their respective critical forces and agonality consist. In this sense, the book contributes to a deeper understanding of the different logics of resistance at play between art and the political, as expressed by Jacques Rancière in his distinction between “the politics of the becoming-life of art and the politics of the resistant form.”

 

This volume provides a diverse array of voices and essays from the academic and artistic field that present theoretical approaches as well as study cases. By juxtaposing them, it encompasses both the complexity and diversity of artistic practices within a global instituting framework that seems to capitalize on different political streams. The reader will find contributions on sexual dissidence, ecology and the Anthropocene, geopolitics of the digital age and institutional critique. The authors, artists and scholars from different disciplines share their desire to shed some light on how art approaches these urgent issues.

 

Contributors: Sara Alonso Gómez, Mieke Bal, Zach Blas, Katharina Brandl, Nancy Garín, Kendell Geers, Ben Grosser and Geert Lovink, Gelare Khoshgozaran, Federico Luisetti, Charlotte Matter, Isabel J. Piniella Grillet, Nadia Radwan, Fiona Siegenthaler, David Tenorio, and Jaime Vindel.

Sara Alonso Gómez is associate professor in history and theory of contemporary art at Aix-Marseille University, as well as member of the Laboratoire d’études en Sciences de l’art (LESA) and the Latin American Center Zurich (LZZ). For more than a decade, she has developed interfaces between research, teaching, and curatorial practice, at the crossroads of three continents (the Americas, Europe, Africa). Her research on the heuristic tool of “artistic disobedience” allows for a better understanding of the relationship between art and politics on the threshold of the new millennium. It questions the potential for the insubordinate character of the work of art in the face of the injunctions of globalization. Alonso Gómez is the author of several scientific publications and co-curator for Yango II, Biennale of Contemporary Art in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo.

Isabel J. Piniella Grillet is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institut d'Histoire du Temps Présent du CNRS, Paris 8, under the supervision of Frédérique Langue. Her current research focuses on Latin American Art, Official and Dissident Discourses, Memory and Affect. She previously obtained her doctoral degree at the Institute of History of the University of Bern as member of the Global Studies Program. She works in her dissertation book about political commitment within the cultural production of Venezuelan actors in the 1960s. Piniella studied Humanities with a major in Contemporary History and Philosophy at the Pompeu Fabra University and holds a Master’s degree in Contemporary Philosophy from the Autonomous University of Barcelona. Since 2016 she is member of the Graduate School of the Arts and Humanities at the University of Bern and the Swiss School of Latin American Studies. She has been awarded with a scholarship in 2018 from the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst, and in 2019 from the Dr. Joséphine de Karman Foundation.

Elena Rosauro graduated in Art History and Theory from the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (Spain), where she also completed an MA in Latin American Studies, with focus on Cultural Studies. Her PhD thesis History and Violence in Latin America. Artistic practices, 1992–2012 was published in 2017 by CENDEAC (Murcia, Spain). She has lived and worked in Madrid, Toronto, Munich and Zurich, where she is currently based. She is coordinator of the Latin American Center at the University of Zurich since 2018, and was associate postdoctoral researcher within the SNF-funded project “Contested Amnesia and Dissonant Narratives in the Global South: Post-conflict in Literature, Art, and Emergent Archives” led by Prof. Dr. Liliana Gómez from 2017 to 2021. She was secretary general of the Network on Latin American Visual Studies (ReVLaT, 2014–2020) and an elected council member of the Visual Studies Section of the Latin American Studies Association (LASA, 2017–2019). She has been guest lecturer in several universities both in Europe and Latin America, and published widely on contemporary Latin American art. She was founder and curator (2017–2021) of the independent art space and curatorial project la_cápsula in Zurich, which focuses on building bridges between the emerging Latin American and Swiss art scenes, with a strong emphasis on socially and politically engaged art.

Nadia Radwan Nadia Radwan is Assistant Professor of World Art History at the University of Bern (Institute of Art History/Center for Global Studies). She has been a researcher and teacher at the American University in Cairo, the American University in Dubai and the University of Zurich. Her research focuses on Middle Eastern art and architecture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, non-western modernisms, Arab feminisms, nostalgia and orientalism, and the global museum. Her book, Les modernes d’Egypte was published in 2017 (Peter Lang) and she is currently finishing her second book about the aesthetics of resistance in global abstraction. She is the co-founder of Manazir: Swiss Platform for the Study of Visual Arts, Architecture and Heritage in the Middle East and the editor-in-chief of Manazir Journal: www.manazir.art.