Uncommitted Crimes

The Defiance of the Artistic Imagi/nation

Theodor Adorno once remarked that, “…every work of art is an uncommitted crime.” This book is a tribute to political artists who deviate from the mainstream and create art that engages with questions of societal oppression, survival, and resistance. It draws on interviews with transnational artists whose work is representative of emerging trends in art, visual culture, and political aesthetics. These are a new generation of transnational artists whose creative praxis, sensibilities, influences, and frames of reference derive from multiple national, religious, and cultural genealogies, and an ambivalent relationship to Western and European nationalisms. Courageously, these racialized, Indigenous, and migrant artists straddle the divides of many categories of identity in regards to gender, sexuality, and ‘race,’ and challenge the silently imbibed worship of whiteness, heteronormative patriarchies, and colonial settler ideologies of “home.” These exceptional artists enter into uncomfortable dialogues, creatively. Inspired by their visionary praxis, this book is an uncommitted crime, attempting to smuggle the ideas of inspiring artists into a site of intellectual imagi/nation. Artists whose works are explored in this book include: Andil Gosine, Syrus Marcus Ware, Elisha Lim; Amita Zamaan and Helen Lee; Shirin Fathi; Kara Springer; Rajni Perera; Joshua Vettivelu; Brendan Fernandes; Kerry Potts and Rebecca Belmore.