ABSTRACT
How can art have a transformative social impact? How might its impact be affected by its cultural display? This chapter discusses Hannah Arendt’s concept of the ‘space of appearance’ with relation to Hong Kong Intervention – an artwork in which 100 migrant domestic workers photographed a plastic toy grenade in the homes of their employers. Reflecting on texts by Hanna Pitkin and Ernesto Laclau, it suggests that art, as a space of appearance, can be politically powerful, but it must generate an antagonistic mode of engagement that forwards an open, questioning approach to the political. It argues that this approach opens up politically affective spaces within dominant social structures.
