Performing like an asylum seeker : paradoxes of hyper-authenticity

This essay investigates performance events that feature actual refugees, asylum seekers and immigrants, but in instances where presence and embodiment are mediated and made ambiguous. My focus is a fashion show by Catalan designer Antonio Miro, who uses refugees from Senegal as models, and Christoph Schlingensief's public art project Foreigners Out!. In different ways and to varying degrees, these case studies exemplify the phenomenon that I call the hyper-authentic - where the authenticity of the subject is partly constructed through the gaze of the beholder. Although the projects in question use real refugees and asylum seekers as performers, exilic voices and bodies are often subordinated to the creative and/or entrepreneurial concepts of the established Western artists. Nevertheless, I would argue that the relationship between performance ethics and efficacy remains ambiguous, making these case studies difficult to dismiss as merely gratuitous

Just art for a just city: Public art and social inclusion in urban regeneration

Summary. In this article, it is shown how cultural policy, and in particular public art, intersects with the processes of urban restructuring and how it is a contributor, but also antidote, to the conflict that typically surrounds the restructuring of urban space. The particular focus of the paper is on investigating how public art can be inclusionary/exclusionary as part of the wider project of urban regeneration. The first part of the paper examines examples in which public art intervention has attempted to generate inclusion. Subsequently, attention focuses more on examples in which the public art has been perceived as an aspect of cultural domination and has thus provoked resistance. Throughout, it is argued that the processes through which artworks become installed into the urban fabric are critical to the successful development of inclusion