The gestures of participatory art

<p><b>Winner of the 2019 ASCA Book Award </b><br><br>Participation is the utopian sweet dream that has turned into a nightmare in contemporary neoliberal societies. Yet can the participatory ideal be discarded or merely replaced with another term just because it has become disemboweled into a tool of pacification? <i>The gestures of participatory art </i>insists that the concept of participation must be re-imagined and shifted onto other registers. Moving from reflections on institutional critique and impact to concrete analyses of moments of unsolicited delicate participation and refusal the book examines a range of artistic practices from India Sudan Guatemala and El Salvador the Lebanon the Netherlands and Germany. It proposes the concept of the gesture as a way of theorising participatory art situating it between the visual and the performing arts as both individual and collective both internal attitude and social habitude.</p>