This course is for activists, artists, and thinkers who wish to better understand and participate in social change. We will focus on the prolific and exciting overlap between socially engaged art and cultural practices generated by recent social movements around the world. Rather than assess the political efficacy of activities like mourning, listening, organizing, dancing, or partying, the lectures examine such cultural activities next to, and within, contemporary art practice. Included in the course are guest presentations by key artists, activists, and scholars, like: Rebecca Gomperts, Chido Govera, Gulf Labor, Hans Haacke, Sharon Hayes, Jolene Rickard, Gregory Sholette, Joshua Wong, and many more. Designed by artist and Duke professor, Pedro Lasch and co-taught by Creative Time artistic director, Nato Thompson, the course challenges learners to treat the MOOC itself as a social and artistic form. This happens mostly through the practical components, local project productions, global exchanges, and critical feedback. While no prior art making or activist experience is required, projects also offer challenging options for advanced learners. For other course offerings or language versions in this series, just search 'ART of the MOOC' inside the Coursera course catalogue.
Naeem Mohaiemen
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ART of the MOOC: Activism and Social Movements
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Activism and Social Movements: Lectures, Guest Presentations, and Quiz
This opening segment is dedicated to the prolific and exciting overlap between socially engaged art and cultural practices generated by recent social movements around the world. Environmentalism, AIDS activism, Queer movements, Zapatismo, immigrant rallies, alter-globalization, the World Social Forum, Occupy, the Hong Kong Umbrella Movement, museum boycotts, and democratic uprisings in the Middle East will be seen in dialogue with cultural producers who participate in these movements or are inspired by them. Rather than assess the political efficacy of such cultural activities, we will examine their place within contemporary art practices. Based on Listening, Organizing, Dancing, or Partying, each student’s contribution will respond to a particular social movement of their choosing.
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Nato ThompsonChief Curator
Creative Time
Pedro LaschVisual Artist and Associate Research Professor
Duke Art, Art History & Visual Studies
Thanks so much for being with us.
>> Thank you for having me.
>> It's really exciting, your work has, for many years,
engaged with not just social movements.
But actually a historical awareness of how they evolve,
what's at stake in them, both locally, but also globally.
Can you talk to us about how you arrived in this place between history and
the urgency of present activism?
>> Sure, I mean when I talk about it,
it will sound more like a design than I had when I started out.
What if it had been?
One of the things that I was trying to understand is that I was either involved
in movements, both in the U.S. and in Bangladesh or I was documenting them.
So my friends might be involved, I would go and record their speeches, I would
take photographs and then I would publish photographs and a little photo essays.
And I will always be involved in these movements,
all generally left of center political movements, that, in the moment,
would seem tremendously exciting, a lot of energy.
And I feel there was even the politics of this is finally the lost moment
coming back.
And I would always have this thing of this is going to succeed because there's so
much energy, so much passion, so much velocity.
And then multiple times, movements didn't work out, the most recent ones we,
of course, know about, Occupy Wall Street, in Bangladesh, and then Arab Spring.
>> Right. >> Didn't work out the way they were
supposed to, so
I became even obsessed with understanding why they weren't working out.
Not necessarily to solve, but just to understand and
the closest analogue that I could find is movements of the 1970s.
Which seemed to be a moment of tremendous energy for the left, and
then a long decline, and so that's how I started looking at that kind of history.
I was particularly looking at histories that are connected between countries,
here in Venice, recently, Emily Jasir talked about the Biennale,
and its response to Chile in 1973.
And that's a really important moment because after Allende's assassination,
a lot of people thought this will be the end, everything will change,
the imperialists would be in the back foot.
But the opposite happened, Chile dominance of the military government, so
I became interested to look at those things.
>> And when you say, for example, the 1970s, you mean, just to clarify,
cuz often people still to this date speak of only Europe or the U.S.
But you mean the 1970s in the world?
>> In the world, right. >> The social movements from around
the world, and so as an artist who does research,
how do you go about when you begin a project?
Do you do the research first and then make the artwork, or
do you do them at the same time?
>> Definitely the research is first, and
often the research is something as simple as a dinner conversation.
And somebody says you know I met this very interesting person and he has this,
sort of, story and I go I've never heard that before.
And one interesting thing about how I find these stories,
often, is there are transnational circuits at play.
So for example, for the South Asian community there is, of course,
south Asian migrants everywhere in the world.
And sometimes you run into someone who has an interesting story, and
they're also in exile because of the political situation.
So I've heard stories at dinners, for example, in Berlin, and
I've heard there's this Bangladeshi man who moved there in the 70s.
There's actually a really famous Bangladeshi writer who went into exile
into Germany in the 70s that would hide there.
And he's a famous case, for example, of the first person to be persecuted for
saying things against religion in his art, and he's in exile in Germany.
So you're more likely to run into that person in German
cafe networks that are also immigrant networks, and
you might be the first person he's having a chance to talk with.
Tell this story in years, so often it starts like that and
then you think this could be a film or often a focal based project.
So let me first talk about that essay that you mentioned,
it's called Fear of a Muslim Planet, Islamic Roots of Hip Hop.
That one is a very specific project, it came out of a very particular
context after 2001, where we were working as Visible Collective.
And were looking for ways to also talk back to the environment of security panic,
and one of the aspects of security panic after 9/11 is the othering of Muslims.
Which in some way intersected with the long idea of African Americans as always
being on the edge and being pushed out of the American experience.
And the historic experiences being denied, and one of the ways these two streams
met is that African American Muslims were invisible in this discourse.
As if they didn't exist, even though they're actually the largest community
of Muslims in America, and I think they were not convenient for fear discourse.
Because then you'd actually have to talk about racially profiling
African Americans, already historically racially profiled.
And so it was more convenient to focus it on migrants, "who don't belong",
and then I found out through conversations with a few people,
including Michael Muhammad Knight.
This author, and a few other's who have written about this, that there is
actually a long tradition of black Muslim hip hoppers in the very early days.
So that's how the project came about, it was documentary, partially,
because to be frank, the material was new to me, I mean I listen and enjoy hip hop.
But I'm not a hardcore hip hop head like let's say,
Michael is, he's been with this his whole life, he can really parse everything.
So, I felt that I was more comfortable doing a research essay,
stopping there, but some of the other projects,
when it goes into more imaginative, speculative and fact fiction blends.
It's material that I know much better, my family history often comes into it and
there I'm more comfortable in blending because I know the material inside out.
And I feel comfortable adding in a fictional touch, of late,
last couple of years, I've been making more films and
less photo, object combined projects.
And that has partially been a decision, possibly temporary, but right now,
what I wanted the word to travel easily and perhaps even without me.
And when you do mixed media objects, you are required to go and
install the project, which means that first of all,
it becomes a more complicated project.
You have to raise funds to go, you have to physically go,
and you have to be with it for a long time, it can't travel as easily.
It definitely can't travel as easily to centers of the global south,
which may not have the same funding network access, let's say.
So I wanted the word to travel easy and without me, and very recently i've been
invested in this idea also of having the protagonist go without me.
So the Visible Collective Project was a collective of artists,
activists educators and lawyers, about 12 of us at the peak,
six of us at the low point in terms of people's busyness.
Started around 2002, 2003, came out of a series of South Asian activists networks,
Blue Triangle Network, Youth Solidarity Summer, or YSS.
Later South Asia Solidarity Initiative, which came later,
these were all things we were involved in, and it would be conversations, rallies.
Projects that were out in the street, public interventions, and
eventually we found this visible collective in response to an invitation
to show in a museum, Queens Museum, right?
So that's how it happened. >> I think that's when we met.
>> That's when we met, and it was a project, Disappeared in America, and
it brought us into different circuit, because suddenly we're being asked to go.
Not suddenly, but soon after that show, we were being asked to go to various places,
especially in Europe.
And so here's where this actually works and doesn't work,
there were people in our group who are self-identified as organizers.
They either have a full time job as organizers,
some people were with the Triangle Network, it not in our name.
All of these groups are sort of now retired or have sort of closed.
>> Transformed into something else.
>> Yeah, transformed to something else, and so they felt, first of all, not in our
name, their mandate was to be working in the U.S. against the war effort.
They were very much organized against the war effort and as a secondary thing,
against racial profiling.
And then there were lawyers in our group who were working on rights cases,
the just beginning of this, as the invitations starting taking us to Europe.
And especially, we got a few invitations to Scandinavian countries, there was,
inside the group, a real challenge,
even debate about what is this going to accomplish?
And we had a conversation about one of the invitations, I think it was Finland,
or somewhere in the Nordic countries.
And literally,
one of the people said what's the point of telling them about this?
We need to be having the conversation in the United States, so
having the conversation, let's say, in Ohio would be more relevant than,
let's say, in Scandinavia.
But it's also true that because of the way art circulates,
the invitations were coming from Europe,
there may even have been a European possibility to look at this.
Because it was seen as an American problem, at that point the London bombing
hadn't happened, Paris, the whole veil debate had not yet fully percolated.
So I think there was even a sort of- >> And
Europeans can be generally in denial about this.
[LAUGH] >> Right, and
I actually even think it was very interesting that sometimes we'd
get invited and we would say but this must also be happening in Germany.
We just don't know the context yet, and
we would almost become an alibi to only talk with the United States.
>> Yes. >> And not see this global phenomenon, so
that's the moment when the group felt, well this is not activism anymore, or
in the way we want.
So we started doing less, because we weren't in agreement, and if you look
at the arc of the members of Visible Collective, three of them are now lawyers.
One, Aziz Hawk, is actually a professor at University of Chicago,
and is a lawyer, clinical law person in New York.
And the third person, Amal Lin, is I think, just finishing a bar exam, so
they went into what was considered a way to have direct impact, because so
much of the debate was about law.
And also after 2001 there was, I think, a small but visible surge of South Asian and
Middle East-origin Americans who went into law, as a way to fight.
So I think, there was a concrete decision made,
that I'm going to work on bigger cases, and it wasn't a direct binary, but
those members decided not to give time to the projects.
And I continued, and it, of course, yeah, went in different forms, so we,
who were invested in having the conversations in the art context, and
we're also not lawyers.
>> Right.
>> So that avenue, even if we thought it was more effective, isn't our part,
there was a real divergence.
And, I think, to come back to your question, in indirect way, nobody doubted,
necessarily, that this was another form of organizing and activism.
And now social practice is a sort of larger world for that, like a face for
that, but they felt that the results weren't tangible.
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