Examining the thinking of artists as citizens and change-makers, this series of commissioned opinion pieces features provocative reactions to the headlines by contributors including Ron Athey, James Bridle, Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Ana Tijoux, Dread Scott, and others. Taking inspiration from artistic and political leafletting throughout history, each op-ed is also available as a print-on-demand pamphlet. As with any forum for urgent conversation, the views reflected here are those of the artists and do not necessarily represent those of the Walker Art Center.
Surviving Tiempo Muerto: On Bungkalan and Peasant Resistance in the Philippines
The island of Negros is known as “the sugar bowl of the Philippines.” But this romantic turn of phrase obscures a dark reality: during tiempo muerto—the months of “dead time” between sowing and harvesting cane—farm laborers go without wages and food. “It is death built into the clockwork mandate of the sugar plantation,” write artists Amy Lien and Enzo Camacho. In their Artist Op-Ed, the duo looks to bungkalan, a movement that offers a means of survival and militant political resistance for farmer-activists who cultivate unused plots of plantation land to grow both food and community. Bungkalan, they write, “embodies an insistence on preserving life in the face of an impossible structure.”
Touching a Third Sound: Trans-Sensing in a World of Deepfakes
In this world of cheap visual proliferation, we're forced to make quick binary judgments—i.e. real/fake, good/bad, man/woman—which often leave us feeling disempowered and reduced to slotting. In the 13th installment of the Artist Op-Eds series, composer and visual artist Jules Gimbrone proposes what they term Trans-Sensing as a model for a more nuanced way of experiencing the world, one that transcends the quantitative binary of real/fake and doesn't rely on the categorical flattening of complexity that comes with merely seeing.
“A difference between learning and knowing is little more than asking questions without the entitlement of an answer, and honoring the vulnerability in saying and hearing, ‘I don’t know.’” In his Artist Op-Ed, experimental filmmaker Sky Hopinka ruminates on power, privilege, and identity—including his own—as he responds to the burden of representation and authority placed on groups of traditionally oppressed people.
Why does the term “native” lose meaning south of the border? And why are some white people calling themselves “nativists”? In this Artist Op-Ed, the indigenous collective Postcommodity melds poetry and prose in a powerful reflection on native self-determination, identity, and the year 2043—when whites are expected to become a minority in the US.
Flood a gallery, embalm an animal, smash an object—critics hail such gestures as having the power to "shape worlds." But when artists demand fair conditions for workers building western museums in Abu Dhabi—as the Gulf Labor Coalition has done—this work becomes illegible to the same museum.
A raft filled with passive world leaders. An online mashup combining a photo-op of western politicos at the Charlie Hebdo march with the deaths of hundreds of migrants in the Mediterranean, it’s an apt metaphor for an EU refugee policy that’s hopelessly adrift.
"Illegitimate" Dread Scott on the Killing of Michael Brown
“If you’re the head of an empire and see that an unarmed youth is gunned down by the police and your advice is for people to be calm,” writes Dread Scott in his essay on Michael Brown’s death, “your rule is illegitimate.”
