Artist-Activists' Tensions with "The Art World"

As part of the online event "In Grief, In Solidarity" in June 2021, artist-activists Ikroop Sandhu, Isma Gul Hasan, and Hit Man Gurung discussed the various contexts in which their visual and performance artistic practice evolved with their activism in India, Pakistan, and Nepal, respectively. For each of them, working as part of collective communities and in solidarity with movements was formative.

With editor Kartika Budhwar, they also discussed the "moments" (or lack thereof) that made them turn to art, how they feel about the institutional and other problematic aspects of the rarefied art world, and what makes "art" different from journalism and other forms of expression.

At the core of the discussion was an ambivalence about the centrality of visual and performance art to activism, but also the idea that art does indeed have a certain power that other ways of engaging with the world don't.

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