About Intervening Arts (English)

The arts are currently subject to increasing demands to be socially impactful. Across the globe, they are striving to change social processes, intervene in political conflicts, and create new public spheres. The arts involve themselves in conflicts over global power relations and human rights, address crises such as climate change and global pandemics, and devise new ways of living and working. Intervening arts are productive, developing new forms of activity, and not infrequently recurring to the tools of the activist. These tendencies call for a fundamental redefinition of art as an interventionist practice. The generative and stimulating dimensions of the arts create new forms and formats for social impact. They have the potential to produce new social relations and to generate political debate by establishing altered orders of artistic perception. What is the scope of interventionist art? What are its boundaries? What are its possibilities and pitfalls? How can artistic form develop a dynamic not merely for the representation of the social but for its generation? How can artistic practices oppose being co-opted politically, neutralized socially, and being institutionalized in ways that absorb and threaten their potential for intervention? And is interventionist art characterized by a self-reflection so enveloping that it does not draw the line at an examination of the term of »art« itself?

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