In August 1972, a Turkish landlord evicted a Dutch woman living in the Afrikaanderwijk neighborhood of Rotterdam. This event became the trigger for riots which saw people from all over the country pour into the Afrikaanderwijk to watch as anti-immigration protesters destroyed homes in the majority-immigrant neighborhood. Ten years ago, the Turkish artist Cihad Caner moved to Afrikaanderwijk. Having happened upon the story of this riot, he attempted to reconstruct a collective understanding of its history.
A childhood fan of Star Trek and Stargate, as well as a subscriber to educational magazine Techno Quest, Dennis graduated to speculative fiction as an adult—their reading list encompasses Octavia Butler, Samuel R. Delany, Ursula Le Guin, Doris Lessing, and Masande Ntshanga. For Dennis, science fiction provides a language for articulating the hidden structures of oppression and imagining collaborative paths toward liberation. “In science fiction, the idea of hidden structures is uncontroversial,” Dennis notes. “It’s no use trusting what you see or what you know; you need to find another device, another piece of knowledge, another community of knowers, or make one.”
A Haacke expert might tell you that of course there is a peculiar, logically imperative connection between those earlier experiments in form, system, and process and the later work that would become the paradigmatic form, system, and process of institutional critique. This expert would have a point. But the desire to always explain that connection as a logically inevitable and linear one is also a bit suspicious and needs to be probed—for which this retrospective is a welcome occasion.
Hegemony places literature, paintings, films, dance, television, music, and so on at the center of how a dominant culture rules or how a ruling class dominates. This is not to assert that art is propaganda for capitalism (although sometimes it is). Nor is it to revert to theories of “art for art’s sake” and the normative metaphysics of liberal cultural criticism (Art’s social value is its independence from politics. What about “beauty”? etc.). According to Williams’s theory of hegemony, art is one way of enlisting our desire in the “making and remaking” our own domination. But desire is unstable and, as an important part of maintaining a dominant culture, art is also, potentially, a means of its unmaking.
Many museum exhibitions—and re-hangings of permanent collections—have in recent years aimed to address legacies of colonialism, as well as outdated and oppressive gender and sexual “norms.” Sometimes these shows incorporate contemporary art in response to historical work now viewed as pejorative or oppressive. Too often forgotten in these re-visions of art/history is the stereotypically dehumanizing representation of disability and disabled persons.
Robert Hazen outlined the theory that the mineralogy of planets and moons evolves as a direct result of interactions with life. While only a dozen mineral species are known to have existed when our solar system formed 4.6 billion years ago, today Earth plays host to more than 4,400, an indication that the chemical and biological processes enacted by organisms engender their formation. On a planetary geology scale, then, our interactions with rocks stimulate their development as much as they buttress ours.
