Artivism in the Digital Age

In the article “Rebels without regret: documentary artivism in the digital age,” Selmin Kara looks at one documentaries China’s film Ali Weiwei: Never Sorry (2012) and Kara also looks at the Gezi protests in Turkey and how it was documented through the internet. Kara looks to explore the implications of the blurring of art and politics through different concepts of documentary artivism. One is through the film medium and gene that explore a Chinese artist and activist and the other is using the internet as a medium in which documents protests in Turkey. “Drawing parallels between the self-proclaimed hooliganism of Ai Weiwei and the Turkish protesters, who co-opted the hooligan label that the government used to incriminate them and turned it into a tool for resistance, the article argues that hooliganism is just another incarnation of unruly documentary artivism, which has become prevalent in an era of digitally mediated, global social justice movement” (pg. 42). This argument is interesting to me because Kara is saying how unruly behavior relates to artivism and how it is turned into a tool for resistance. What I think is interesting about Kara’s argument is that she discusses there is a spectrum in for artivist documentary practices. While this article is complex (and is sometimes difficult to understand) what drew me to this article was the concept of documentary artivism. The last article I discussed was about digital artivism, so it is interesting to think about another way in which artivism works and how it is defined. Much like the argument that Kara Makes, I am finding that there is no one example of what artivism is and what it means.

Kara, S. (2015). Rebels without regret: documentary artivism in the digital age. Studies in Documentary Film, 9(1), 42–54. https://doi.org/10.1080/17503280.2014.1002250

• 

I did some exploring of Ai Weiwei”s art on the web, and I can see why is art is making a political statement to the Chinese government, even if it is not direct. It is fascinating to me that this is a sculpture of surveillance camera, yet is saying so much more than that.