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December 6, 2024 – Feature
Iola Lenzi’s Power, Politics and the Street
Max Crosbie-Jones
In December 2013, visitors to the Bangkok iteration of “Concept Context Contestation: art and the collective in Southeast Asia,” a traveling show curated by Iola Lenzi, took pictures against a hand-painted photo studio backdrop inspired by old Saigon, played ping-pong on a circular table, photocopied pages of politically charged Indonesian comics, and wrote down in a notepad what they would do if the handgun-shaped pink rice crackers piled on the gallery floor were real firearms. Coinciding with sit-ins by an anti-government pressure group on the streets outside, the show felt like living proof of the proposition fleshed out in Lenzi’s new book. The “aesthetics of agency” engendered by such works is, she argues, a coded and often covert response to historical contexts and real-world conditions in illiberal locales: a subtle form of empowerment. As a result, the western modes it is tempting to label them with (social sculpture, relational aesthetics, and so on) are a poor fit. “Art of this book,” Lenzi states near its beginning, “has a disrupting effect, priming independent thinking.”
Over the course of seven illustrated chapters, she authoritatively (if somewhat wordily) positions this hallmark within a wider reconnaissance of Southeast Asian contemporary art’s piecemeal evolution between …