Gentrify Everything: New Forms of Critical Artistic Agency

Pieter Vermeulen

doi:10.5334/mjfar.11

Abstract

Gentrify Everything: New Forms of Critical Artistic Agency

Highlights

This article aims to contextualize and critically evaluate a curatorial project titled BORG, a biennial event for contemporary art in the city of Antwerp, Belgium
Together with a brief account of the sociopolitical context and the chosen curatorial approach, we will look at how biennials operate on both a local and global level, provoking the question of the public: who is it for? This will in turn lead to a question of agency: what is to be done? Which critical strategies can be developed vis-à-vis neoliberal gentrification processes and how do artists enter the picture? From thereon, we will develop a more critical understanding of cynicism and over-identification, and illustrate how these mechanisms are at work in Renzo Martens’ project The Institute of Human Activities as ‘reversed gentrification’
The ambition to develop an art biennial format on a local scale requires a politics of translation that negotiates between the local and the global, between the artistic and the social

Summary

Introduction

This article aims to contextualize and critically evaluate a curatorial project titled BORG, a biennial event for contemporary art in the city of Antwerp, Belgium. The city district of Borgerhout in Antwerp has suffered a rather bad public and media reputation for decades, often pejoratively dubbed Borgerocco due to its large number of inhabitants of Moroccan descent As such it has been an easy target of popular prejudice and right-wing political movements looking to scapegoat particular ethnic communities. In the hitherto discussed case, this would imply standing up for the victims of gentrification and preventing the d isplacement of residents, defending their right to housing, affordable living and so on.11 This was not the curatorial path chosen for the second edition of BORG, out of an unwillingness to function as “‘the idealist in the machine’, patiently and tirelessly ironing out the rough edges of the system” (BAVO 2007a: 28). The focus was rather self-oriented, reflecting on the complicity of contemporary artists and art workers in the process of gentrification

Gentrify everything

Reversed gentrification

Conclusion