In August 2017, Alex Moore presented her paper "Art is Art: Dialogue and Dissent in Justine Gaga and Beate Engl’s Echo.” The presentation was part of a panel on the political potentials of conceptual art in Africa, at the triennial Art Council of the African Studies Association (ACASA) Conference.
In her paper, Alex considered the relationship of art and politics in ECHO, a work by Justine Gaga and Beate Engl that grapples with the potentials of conceptual art to create a platform for dialogue and dissent. Using two Cameroonian political cloths that have been redacted with quotes from modern and contemporary art discourse, ECHO imagines the potential for art to circulate political critique in public space. Alex argued that the work does not provide a succinct model of artistic activism, but rather manifests a set of desires and the entanglements in which those desires are formed and constrained.
This presentation was made possible by the Arts Dean’s Fund for Excellence.