Intervention, Patronage and Performance

Abstract

The question of the arts’ potential to intervene is a topical one. Art seems to be ubiquitous in forms of recent political protest and interventions morph into artistic practices—so that the boundary between art and political engagement becomes porous. The face of Khalid Said tortured to death by the Egyptian police appeared as graffiti on walls all over Alexandria and Cairo as well as facebook pages in 2010 and 2011 spurring hugemass protests againstMubarak’s regime; later a mural received a permanent space in the Goethe Institute of Cairo.1 In 2006, the Kenyan artist Sam Hopkins founded Slum TV, enabling the inhabitants of Mathare, one of the largest slums in Nairobi, to film their own news and stories and screen them in the slum.2 Considering the arts as a primary political tool meant to liberate the human being from all obstacles on the way to self-fulfillment has a longer tradition in many African contexts. Rather than pitting the essential embeddedness of all art in social contexts in traditional African contexts and arguing against a stereotypically evokedWestern art for art’s sake, as it has often been done, I would like to put emphasis on the fact that it is a notion deeply entrenched in projects of modernity, which also comes out in the contributions to this special issue. It was first of all the imagination of the nation state with its promises of unity, prosperity, progress and participation of all, founded on the essential myth of leaving behind a dark period of colonial oppression and exploitation, which inspired so many African artists particularly in the 1960s to give form to a bright future yet to be defined. In reflecting upon aspects of the “modern time regime”, which essentially breaks with previous notions of present, past