Examining Legal and Illegal Articulations of Protest through Tatyana Fazlalizadeh’s Stop Telling Women to Smile Project (original) (raw)

"Immigrant Protest and the Courts of Women" in Immigrant Protest: Politics, Aesthetics, and Everyday Dissent ed. Marciniak and Tyler

This essay explores a paradigm of transnational human rights activism that originated in the Global South. The "Courts of Women," a project begun in the early l990s, were created to circumvent statist logic and the ways it does and does not bring into visibility the manifold forms of violence against women. This series of public hearings and the years of planning they entail exemplify a decolonial process of producing and circulating knowledge. Partnering with more than 500 other organizations, including the World Social Forum, more than forty Courts of Women have been convened since l992. I argue that the practices and strategies these Courts implement create spaces in which different "Souths," including those in the "North," put the violence of sovereignty and the logic of citizenship on trial.

Art and the Re-Invention of Protest

The involvement of artists in social movements that can be witnessed today is just one aspect of the interconnection of arts and political activism. This paper traces the inspiration social movements have gained from artist practices. In western post-war societies the trends developed in the realm of arts have deeply influenced the repertoire of action, social movements have adopted. In a broader sense it was the altered kind of expression visible in new forms of staging, performance art and alike that inspired protesters to develop forms of action they considered to be more effective and appropriate to a modified understanding of politics. In the western world, happenings, street theatre, fakes and other disruptive forms of action have been incorporated in the repertoire of protest by anti-authoritarian movements of the 1960s. Today, these modes of contention are deployed by any social movement actor ranging from faith communities to right-wing organizations. The bearing central to this enhancement of protest is a quasi-artistic relation to social reality. The cultural stock of shared symbols and meanings is regarded as material, disposable to re-invent common interpretations of reality. The global justice movements challenging neo-liberal hegemony have been enforced by many artists. By the means of arts they have illustrated the movements' framing of reality and made their contribution to colourful and diverse protest events. But neither has the connection between artists and movements reached a new quality -as suggested by some observers -nor did artists enrich the action repertoire of global justice activism contributing new forms of contention.

Power of paint: Political street art confronts the authorities

In the context of Spain’s economic crisis, waves of protests have transformed the streets of Spanish cities into sites of place- austerity years, street art has become an important part of political participation. Based on artists’ interviews and on my visual ethnographic research in the Spanish cities of Madrid (2013–2016) and Valencia (2016), this paper seeks to illuminate how political street art forms a part of social expression toward the authorities. Street art is a media through which artists can question decision-makers and challenge policies made by statesmen. The examples of political street art highlight how creative contestations become barometers of dissatisfaction and how street art confronts institutional power. Ultimately, political street art is argued in Spicca and Perdue’s (2014) term as ‘spatial citizenship’ producing more polyphonic space. Keywords: Political Street Art, Protest, Political Participation, Visual Ethnography, Spain

PROVOCATION—PROTEST—ART. A Ménage-à-Trois

Protest. The Aesthetics of Resistance, 2018

Protest. presents and reflects on present and past forms of protest and looks at marginalized communities’ practices of resistance from a wide variety of perspectives. The publication shows how protest draws on irony, subversion and provocation from a position of powerlessness, for pricking small but palpable pinholes into the controlling system of rule. “Make Love Not War,” “Soyez réalistes, demandez l’impossible,” “Keine Macht für Niemanden,” “We are the 99%”: The last decades have been accompanied by a constant flow of resistant statements and methods in view of the prevailing conditions. When something is able to reach from the margins of society into its very center, it forges ahead in the form of a protest. It masterfully and creatively draws on contemporary signs and symbols, subverting and transforming them to engender new aesthetics and meanings, thereby opening up a space that eludes control. Illustrated with expressive photographs and posters, Protest. considers social, culture-historical, sociological and politological perspectives as well as approaches that draw on visual theory, popular culture and cultural studies. In the process, the book takes into account in particular such contemporary developments as the virtualization of protest, how it has been turned into the fictional and its exploitation in politics by power holders of all shades.

How to see Violence: Artistic Activism and the Radicalization of Human Rights

Through an analysis of protest art produced within the Argentine human rights movement from 1998-2000, this paper shows how artists take up and transform aesthetic forms, discourses, and tactics produced by social movements and, in so doing, contribute to these movements’ aesthetic repertoires and political narratives. The groups Grupo de Arte Callejero (GAC) and Etcétera… participate in the Argentine human rights movement through their interventionist art practices that are also forms of direct action. Their work pushes for a radicalization of the movement by mobilizing its social condemnation of state terrorism under the past dictatorship towards a critique of the multiform violence of capital and the ongoing violence of the postdictatorial neoliberal state. Through an analysis of their work, this essay also theorizes struggles over historical narratives and the ways these enable or occlude apprehensions of violence and recognition of its agents, uses, and effects. The counter-hegemonic historical narratives I track in this essay refute state narratives and liberal ideologies to enable alternate apprehensions of violence and justice, while elucidating the historical constitution of the present social order.