Can Artistic Practices Negotiate the Demands of Cultural Institutions, Public Space, and Civil Society?

Since the 25th of January 2011, a traditional arts programming model has become functionally irrelevant in Egypt. In this context of conflict and change, diverse publics have asked to use Townhouse's spaces in ways that extend far beyond the scope of visual arts exhibitions. Consequently, over the past year, we have focused on initiating and supporting projects that respond to these calls for a critical space for reflection, discussion, and engagement with contemporary social issues.

We remain committed to our mandate of supporting local and regional contemporary arts, but have adopted a flexible, highly responsive curatorial programme that lets us respond to current events. In terms of exhibitions, this has meant opening our spaces to often participatory experiments that do not centre around art objects but rather invite discussion on topical issues – as with The Politics of Representation, an attempt to create a living archive of printed ephemera from Egypt's parliamentary elections that was housed in our first-floor gallery space. Townhouse has also launched initiatives like 'The Workshop Series', a programme of four nine-month long seminars that focus on human rights and social justice, while asking how arts and culture can positively engage in contemporary socio-political issues.

'The young conservatives embrace the fundamental experience of aesthetic modernity – the disclosure of a de-centered subjectivity, freed from all constraints of rational cognition and purposiveness, from all imperatives of labour and utility – and in this way break out of the modern world. They transpose the spontaneous power of imagination, the experience of the self and affectivity into the remote and the archaic; and in Manichean fashion, they counter-pose to instrumental reason a principle only accessible via "evocation": be it the will to power or sovereignty, Being or the Dionysian power of the poetic'.

Jürgen Habermas

The question implies a view on artistic practice informed by a liberal framework of reception and interpretation: artistic practices are expected to politely negotiate within and with the larger sphere of culture; they are expected to expose, reveal, unmask, reform and finally find a place within various institutional configurations. The question proposes cultural politics wherein the formal, conceptual and sensorial impact of art works is reduced to being instrumentalised either for institutional critique or political contestation in the name of democracy and civil society. In its stead, I would like to reverse and paraphrase the question: ‘Can cultural institutions, public spaces and various ideals of civil society negotiate the demands of artistic practices in the MENA region?’