Drafts in Action

How do practices of artistic intervention engage with conceptual frameworks, in particular when it comes to location, institutional context, as well as human and non-human relations? How is the tension between concepts and actions, between programmatic ideas and practices addressed in historical and theoretical debates around performative, participative, and intervening arts? And in what ways do these debates provide possible tools for the analysis of artistic intervention today?

This volume addresses the potentials and challenges of different forms of intervention at the intersection of activism and artistic fields and practices. The contributions, written by scholars from art history, sociology, literary and performative studies as well as art practitioners, present case studies that shed light on artistic practices that respond to geopolitical, socio-cultural, and ecological crises, as well as on curatorial projects, the organization of collectives and the role of institutions within the art field and academia. Individual contributions are accompanied by short interviews that give room to dialogues among the authors.

Taking a multidirectional approach that accounts for the positionality of perspectives and highlights the non-directional formation of the interventions at hand, the anthology presents and discusses current tools, methods, and analytical frameworks to address artistic interventions.

With contributions by Raphael Daibert, Agata Jakubowska, Amelia Jones, Anna Kipke, Iryna Kovalenko, Premesh Lalu, Natalia Moussienko, Alia Rayyan, Laura Rogalski, María Laura Rosa, Franka Schäfer, Paula Serafini, Valeria Schulte-Fischedick, Simon Teune, and Mimmi Woisnitza.