ABSTRACT
Over the past eight years or so, what I term ‘art as NGO’ has emerged as consistent impulse in the field of contemporary art. It is predominantly characterised by collaborations between artists (from or living in the Global North) with subjects from the Global South, including migrants. Such practice is itinerant, appearing in spaces of the North – London, Copenhagen, Hamburg – as well of the South – Tanzania, the Congo, Athens. There are multiple examples of such practices, some of the most prominent of which are: The Silent University (2012–, initiated by Ahmet Ögüt) and the Institute for Human Activities (2012–, initiated by Renzo Martens). As the artists who initiated these projects (and the curators and cultural workers who support them) repeatedly state, their common aim is to work in solidarity with subjects from the South and offer otherwise unavailable infrastructures for both self-representation/self-determination and access to collective goods. For critics, such works retool and redirect the (human and economic) resources of contemporary (European) art institutions in order to refuse the cuts and social dystopias that capital insists are the new normal and, in turn, develop experimental infrastructures that allow for social experiments of the commons, post-capitalist economies and/or decolonial knowledge. With this in mind, it isn’t such a great stretch of the imagination to think, or indeed hypothesise, that para-infrastructures, or as I term it ‘art as NGO’, may represent a kind of postdevelopmental practice – attuned to the ethos and energies of, for example, Lampedusa in Hamburg or any other number of social movements. While a tempting hypothesis, after spending time at my key case study for this chapter, The Silent University, I want to argue that such a hypothesis cannot be critically engaged or tested without taking into account the political economy of contemporary art (e.g., its entanglement with global capital and normalised reliance on unpaid reproductive labour). In adopting such a historical materialist, dialectical approach, I seek to resist the temptation to locate the radical and emancipatory potential of art (after the avant-garde), as is the usual modus operandi of art history, and instead stay with the tensions of ‘art as NGO’ to understand what such practice can reveal about the (negative) dialectics of development/postdevelopment.
