Artists on Artists: Tactics of Disquiet
Artists on Artists is an ongoing project that offers space for the critical practice of artists writing, and the ways in which artists are informed by one another’s work, are sharpened by one another’s critique, and stirred by engagement with each other’s ideas.
Artists on Artists brings together a number of artists in South Africa who make up a community of practice, that though engaging in different content, tend to apply similar tactics in their work. Our argument is that a generation of practitioners operating in spaces of the art market, international exhibition circuits and the academy, but working on matters of social justice, reclaim and decolonial approaches, tend to apply similar tactics for survival and for sanity, within the contradictory spaces of our work. These we frame as tactics of disquiet, a few of which we explore in this first edition of a series.
This project brings together a range of artists whose work and ideas we were interested in. When first inviting them there were a range of conceptual interests we had in their work – engagements with the academy, the modelling of everyday Black life and the making and modelling of Black histories in addition to the already existing narratives among others. However, on reflection in a roundtable discussion among a few of the contributors, it became clear that there was another thread that connected the various people with whose work we found kin. Across the projects, theories and ideas were a choice of strategies of practice that were as much about new possibilities as they were about navigating the sites of difficulty, damage, and sometimes even pain, within which we all practice. For many of these artists, there is a need to not only navigate these hostilities, but also to grapple with what it means to become entangled and even implicated within the same epistemic, institutional and market-based structures with which we tussle. It became clear then, that for us and the artists whose work we were interested in were negotiating with a sense of disquiet and that our work in many ways, formulated tactics for how to operate in, but not without recognition of, this sense of disquiet. For this reason, this edition of Artists on Artists focuses on tactics of disquiet.
The idea of disquiet is a question of what it means to practice at this moment and at this time as people who are committed to a new form of political knowledge creation, but who work within the difficult contexts and with the problematic methodologies we have at our disposal. Tactics of disquiet seek new methodologies and new modes of knowledge creation, but never really feel entirely comfortable in completely defining these. Tactics of disquiet cross sites of knowledge making and languages of value. Tactics of disquiet are undisciplined: bringing multiplicities to the tension of what it means to work through artistic research practice, but also to work through this political moment and time as the kinds of people that we all are.
In this edition: writing by Sihle Motsa, Thulile Gamedze, Nashilongweshipwe Mushandja, Nolan Dennis, and Black Studio.
Artists on Artists: Tactics of disquiet is printed by Lumbung Press, documenta fifteen