Global Perspectives on Protest

Abstract

Acts: Chronicles of Marginal Utility Philadelphia, Pennsylvania January 6-March 18, 2012 The timing of an exhibition that focused on acts of protest and global conflict in the months following the dissolution of Occupy Wall Street encampments across the United States was undoubtedly fortuitous, if coincidental. With the memory of those recent protests, in addition to the ongoing uprisings inspired by the Arab Spring of 2011, the show at the Marginal Utility gallery in Philadelphia provided an opportunity to reflect on the current state of global protest and demonstration in the context of aesthetic responses to unrest throughout the past decade. Curated by Yaelle Amir, Five Acts: Chronicles of Dissent featured the work of five international artists who address themes of protest and demonstration in their work, Video, audio, and photographic works by Yacl Banana, Andrea Bowers, Sharon Hayes, Naeem Mohaiemen, and Mark Tribe were displayed in the somewhat close quarters of the Marginal Utility space. Amir, however, made the best use of the limited space to ensure that each piece had sufficient room to carry its own message. Upon entering the gallery, the visitor was confronted with Banana's video installation Wild Seeds (2005). The video showed a group of teenagers rolling around in a field, alternately forming groups and pulling apart. Initially, it was difficult to tell whether these young people are lighting or playing with one another. The soundtrack, which was both audible and shown as text in a separate projection, was equally ambiguous. It required further research to learn that Banana, an Israeli artist, created the video in response to the 2002 evacuation of the Gilad Colony, an Israeli settlement. The actions of the protagonists in the video were left intentionally ambiguous in order to reflect the conflicting responses to this event in Israeli society. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] From Banana's installation, the viewer moved to Hayes's March In The Parade of Liberty, But As Long As I Love You I'm Not Free (2007-08), an audio and text installation in which the dominant component was a recording of a woman narrating what at first sounded like a combination of an individual love story and commentary on contemporary political events. This disjunction was reinforced when the viewer read the text included in the installation: a poster with the work's title printed in the cheap, block style often used to announce an upcoming march or demonstration. And, indeed, the text itself, with its references to marching, liberty, and love, continued the confusion engendered by the audio narrative playing in the background. The narrator in the audio was, in fact, Hayes herself, recorded reading a text incorporating both protest slogans and the language of a love letter, including quotes from Oscar Wilde's love letter to Lord Alfred Douglas as well as chants from the gay liberation movement of the 1970s. The reading took place on the streets of Manhattan and knowledge of the setting added another layer to the dialogue between personal and political--in creating the work, Hayes literally occupied a public space in a manner more generally associated with the protest elements in her piece, and yet used that platform to also address themes of love and betrayal typically kept to private realms. In so doing, she invited viewers to consider the boundaries between public and private, and the oft-repeated notion that the personal is political. The final room in the gallery contained works by Bowers, Mohaiemen, and Tribe. Bowers's video, Nonviolent Civil Disobedience Training--Tree Sitting Forest Defense (2009), was displayed on a monitor mounted on a platform near the ceiling of the gallery. This device created a separate zone for the work, allowing the viewer to focus attention on it and to form an apt Connection with the work's subject, which shows the artist receiving instruction about how to occupy a tree in protest fits pending destruction. …