Today, the British Museum’s Trustees argue that the Parthenon sculptures are “integral to the Museum’s purpose as a world museum telling the story of human cultural achievement.” But what does history tell us?
Critical issues of domination, discrimination and gender find powerful articulation in the expressionist imagination of dalit artist, Savindra Sawakar. His work traces the dense contradictions and acute sensuousness of social worlds, past and present.
For the Kenyan novelist, playwright and essayist, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, power through cultural subjugation was the principal tool of colonialism. The monuments of Nairobi can be read as a history of cultural artefacts used by the coloniser to dominate and subjugate the colonised.
Can atlases serve to empower those at the bottom of the pyramid, permitting an understanding of historical change, social developments and a more critical awareness of regional, national traditions and resources?
Two types of spectacle – procession and tableau vivant – in the Judges Service at London’s Westminster Abbey, allow us to explore a ‘live’ performance of judicial authority outside the usual stage setting for its performances.
The tapestry and the murals are part of the complex and multi-layered ‘archi-texture’ of the parliamentary buildings, which continue to echo with older articulations of power and what the nation is and should be.
The artpolitics of May Stevens, as ‘the invention of sensible forms and material structures for a life to come’ – identified by Jacques Rancière as a kind of ‘aesthetic anticipation of the future’.
The political debate around the techno-movement accompanied efforts by the French state to bring raves under state control. The aesthetic effect of these musical events remains a political challenge.
For politics not to be a dirty word that reflected the failing political class’s capacity for endless debates and conservative behaviour, it had to play a role much more active and daring; politics was supposed to change a society’s whole way of living and thinking.
