Angola and Kenya Pavilions in the 2013 Venice Biennale: African Contemporary Art and Cultural Diplomacy in the “Olympics of Art”

Zaugg, Isabelle A.; Nishimura, Emi K.

doi:10.1080/10632921.2015.1039740

Cited by 20 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 2 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Art commentators described this period as a "renaissance" in Kenya's visual art scene (Ogana 2003, 11;Swigert 2011), while artists called it a "cultural awakening" (Jager 2011, 418). This art "renaissance" largely bypassed government patronage, which remained patchy and often shambolic (Wakanyote 2006, 24-25;Maina, 2006, 37-38;Zaugg and Nishimura 2015).…”

Section: The Rise and Fall Of Kuona Trust (Craig Halliday)mentioning

confidence: 99%

Nairobi Becoming

2024

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Echoing the edgy, disjunctive, ever-emergent city of Nairobi that it explores, Nairobi Becoming: Security, Uncertainty, Contingency strives to be several things-in-the-making. It is a historically and anthropologically minded examination of a shifting cityscape, an experimental, collaborative exercise in curated juxtaposition and assemblage, and an interdisciplinary, subjunctive urban ethnography. It brings together curated interventions by twenty-seven artists, scholars, and writers to trace Nairobi’s becoming. Methodologically experimental and multimodal, it seeks to balance an appreciation of Nairobi’s fragmented character while also recognizing its contingent coherency. Nairobi Becoming curates an eclectic collection of different voices and interventions to evoke something of the city's manifold guises and historicities – an urban mosaic of partial experiences as well as dawning possibilities for future becomings. Assembling scholarship, literature, creative non-fiction, and visual art, the contributions are arranged around particular themes, while resisting the urge to develop a singular coherent voice. Security – in its various guises – is the linking thread, the point of articulation that connects apparently disparate elements of Nairobi life, from sex work to roadbuilding, goat markets to funerals. Security is here an analytical operator: a concept that refracts the seemingly diverse modalities of life in Nairobi, and, with the related domains of uncertainty and contingency, brings the city’s dynamics of fragmentation and coherence to the surface in surprising ways. If confronting Nairobi’s will to coherence amidst the strains of fragmentation is the empirical and analytical challenge of Nairobi Becoming, then it is through collaboration and juxtaposition, curation and contrast, and the messiness of assemblage, that this book chimes with the fraught multiplicities of a city-in-the-making. As such, this book is also an exploration of the inevitable tension that exists between curatorial intent and the possibility of allowing each contribution to stand for itself.

show abstract

Section: The Rise and Fall Of Kuona Trust (Craig Halliday)mentioning

confidence: 99%

Nairobi Becoming

2024

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…This can be attributed to the spatial distribution of the Venice Biennale, one that is, as Emily Putnam notes (2013: 114), a 'heterotopia for the staging of nations' . The Biennale has been characterised as 'the Olympics of the art world' (Crow 2017), in reference to its central organising principle: a festival of national representations appealing to an international public, where countries are in competition to win a prize (the Golden Lion), earning points on the level of soft power and cultural diplomacy (Nye 2004;Tripp 2013;Zaugg and Nishimura 2015). Herein there is a prescribed interplay between local and global art production, between the vision of artists or curators working upon individual pavilions and the image that their commissioning nation-state wants to portray.…”

Section: Here and There: The Temporal Relationship Between Humour Distance And Proximitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Laughing with, Laughing at

Lionis¹,

Efthymiou

2021

The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The autumn of 2019 was characterised by an eruption of global protests, including Lebanon, Iraq, Ecuador, Chile, and Egypt. The velocity with which these protests emerged nurtured a sense that the Global South ‘was on the march’. At the same time as these events were rapidly unfolding, the world’s premier mass art exhibition, the Venice Biennale, was in its final weeks. Harnessing discourse analysis, participant observation, and collaborative auto-ethnography, the authors draw together a comparative study of the Chilean and Egyptian pavilions and assess the impact of ongoing and suspended revolutionary histories of both nations. Approaching art as a form of ‘practical aesthetics’ (Bennett 2012) and focusing on humour as an aesthetic quality enmeshed in complex political temporalities, this article analyses the relationship between humour, contemporary art, and revolution, demonstrating how the laughter facilitated by these two pavilions negotiates understandings of national pasts, and uprisings in the present.

show abstract

“…There is nothing surprising in this in the sense that contemporary art is often examined in relation to its capacity to disrupt and unsettle power relations (e.g., Merson, 2017). At the same time, however, the national pavilions of the Venice Biennale are connected to the agenda of cultural diplomacy, which is expected to strengthen rather than to weaken the state (e.g., Zaugg and Nishimura, 2015). Indeed, Zakharov's oeuvre was expected to gain success.…”

Section: International Relations Of the Venice Biennalementioning

confidence: 99%

“…The ways that states use art have emerged as an important aspect of the aesthetic turn in recent years. Art may be defined as a soft power tool (Nye, 2004: 75; see also Filimonov, 2010), a means to promote domestic or foreign policy goals (Tripp, 2013), or an element of cultural diplomacy (Zaugg and Nishimura, 2015) or of transnational diplomatic relations (Neumann, 2016: 120). Significantly, however, because these approaches locate international relations in the interstate arena, they typically emphasise the role of state actors and state-centric geopolitics -and obscure the role of other significant actors as well as political or political-economic dynamics of the art world.…”

Section: Entanglements Of Art and International Relationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Parties, Pavilions and Protests: The Heteronomous World Politics of the Russian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale

Bethwaite

Kangas

2019

New Perspectives

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This paper focuses on the role of contemporary art in international relations and world politics. In IR, art is often examined within the framework of cultural diplomacy, country branding, and soft power, or approached as a site of resistance. We argue that the concept of heteronomy offers an alternative conceptual framework for analysing contemporary art in world politics. It highlights the interaction of various fields such as art, commerce, the state and media. We concretise this approach with an analysis of the Venice Biennale. We show that the Biennale is heteronomous in the sense of being an arena where actors from various fields struggle for power by accumulating different types of capital. We focus our analysis on the Russian national pavilion in 2011–2015 and show how the efforts of the country's elite to legitimise its position intertwined with the projects of the state, sponsors, artists, curators and art market actors.

show abstract

Angola and Kenya Pavilions in the 2013 Venice Biennale: African Contemporary Art and Cultural Diplomacy in the “Olympics of Art”

Cited by 20 publications

References 2 publications

Nairobi Becoming

Nairobi Becoming

Laughing with, Laughing at

Parties, Pavilions and Protests: The Heteronomous World Politics of the Russian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About