Tackling Tokenism: Movements Towards Inclusivity in Contemporary Art – Yereem Chun (Fall 2021)

Over the past few years, there has been a noticeable push in diversity and inclusion across all sectors, with the art world being one of them. Social media movements such as #BlackLivesMatter, #MeToo, and gender inclusivity have played a role in bringing the spotlight towards a wider range of experiences, and reigniting the push towards decolonization. This has resulted in high demand for works by artists of diverse backgrounds, increasing the number of galleries and exhibitions featuring such works.

Yet one might wonder whether the recent spike in attention is simply a quick fix trend stemming from the art world’s mounting sense of obligation to address issues of longstanding discrimination within the art world, tokenizing artists of diverse backgrounds as a way of avoiding criticism. Specifically with regards to decolonization, tokenism represents institutions’ series of moves to innocence which problematically attempt to reconcile settler guilt and complicity, and rescue settler futurity.¹ By adding token amounts of ‘diversity’, colonialist institutions provide a temporary defense to its practices without having to bring its centralized cannon into question, profiting off the action in the meantime. Thus it can be said that tokenism is one of many ways in which art institutions refuse to decolonize its practices. 

With relation to postcolonial theory, the way marginalized artists and their work are commodified in this context is no different than how people were dealt with in direct relation to their function in the settler colonialist motive.² Just as Native Americans were erased as they compromised the settler colonialist power while Black identity was emphasized as slavery was an asset, the marginalized identity in the present art world has been ignored and erased until their diversity could be commodified, now adding ‘decoloniality’ into the catalog of museum and gallery exhibits.³

Tokenism also leads to a limitation of the artist and the artwork’s potential—rather than being understood as an artist in their full capacity, they are only there to fulfill the role of the diversity requirement, and their work is often framed to only highlight aspects that address their marginalization. As the art world operates on capitalist terms, artists of underrepresented groups may also self tokenize to ride the wave of new interest in work that tackle the ‘diverse’ identity and experience. In addition to how this could limit their artistic capacity and commodify their lived experience, tokenism magnifies these artists’ already unstable position within the art world, relying on institutions’ need for surface level diversity while perpetuating their exclusion.⁴

The increased precarity with which artists of marginalized backgrounds operate was the driving factor behind Thea Tagle’s curatorial practice, one she referred to unofficially as Relational Curation during her conversation with Arts Production students at Brown University. As a queer identifying Fillipinx writer, scholar, teacher, and curator, her work is at the intersection of postcolonial and queer theories as she specializes in curating and writing about contemporary art and performance projects by Black, Indigenous, people of color, queer, and diasporic artists working in installation, socially engaged art, film, and new media.⁵ The two questions she places at the center of her practice are How can socially engaged art and performance move us, collectively and individually, to work towards more just and livable futures that are anti-capitalist, feminist, and queer? and How can art and performance model practices of right relation with other humans and non-human life, that might impact how we choose to live in the day-to-day?.⁶

The concept of Relational Curation is an expansion of the second question’s scope to include the work of the curator, as Tagle defines the term as Curation based on relationships with artists with a focus on prioritizing care for the artist as a whole being, not just as a producer of cultural and economic capital, refusing tokenism through humanizing the artist. Relational curation also focuses less on curator egos and relies on a deeper relationship of mutual understanding between curator and artist of one another’s diverse backgrounds and promotes long term partnership that goes beyond the scope of a single exhibition. This arguably nepotistic practice is in fact a necessity for underrepresented artists that have been historically excluded,⁷ and could even lead to the creation of alternative spaces that aim to decentralize the narrative of the Western artistic canon.

The concept took shape as she was curating After Life (we survived) at the YBCA during the height of the COVID pandemic, where care was a crucial element in the realization of the final exhibition format, one that ​​had been subjected to multiple talks of cancelation, postponement and modifications. Throughout the changing conditions of the project, Tagle mediated between artists and the institution to ensure not only the successful completion of the artwork but also the proper contextualization in the final format. Lack of diversity within the art world often means that the onus of  proper contextualization of the work is on diverse artists themselves, which, in conjunction with increased difficulty they experience in being  represented, contributes to high rates of burnout.⁸ Leading up to the exhibition, Tagle intentionally leveraged her position as curator to push boundaries of the institution’s support beyond what is normally provided. Given Tagle and the artists’ diverse background—and keeping in mind the YBCA as a majority white institution whose grounds of construction was the gentrification and eviction of immigrant communities—her reappropriation of the institution’s resources can also be understood as a form of resistance that calls for equity and reparations.

Tagle’s emphasis on mutual support, care, and inclusivity are echoed by the works of Kader Attia and ruangrupa, both of whom, in addition to their artistic practice, provide curated open spaces designed for resource sharing and creativity with the aim of fostering a sense of collective community and understanding between different groups of people. 

Attia’s La Colonie was created based on the artist’s preoccupation with Repair, a concept he defines as a necessary response to loss and wounds through processes of recuperation and re-appropriation. Having grown up in Paris and Algeria, Attia’s research on Repair involves intercultural and interdisciplinary approaches to study societies that have experienced deprivation, suppression, violence, and loss as a result of colonization.⁹ His works are visual representations of cycles of injury and repair encompassing both material/physical and immaterial and mental trauma. Rather than linking trauma to only memories and the past, Attia is more interested in how it expresses itself in the present, which shapes his stance that decolonization is a present, pressing matter. It was with this sense of urgency that Attia founded La Colonie, a creative space in Paris that aims to decolonize not only people but also knowledge, attitudes and practices. Located in a district where African, Indian and Asian populations mix, La Colonie aims to “bring together––without exclusion and through these formidable forums that artistic and intellectual creation can be––all identities and all histories, in particular those of minorities.” Conversations that happen in this space serve to facilitate repair, returning to the idea that trauma must be acknowledged and shown––in the case of La Colonie, through collective, open discussion––in order for healing to happen for both the individual and the collective. Thus it can be said that the way Attia’s work combats tokenism is through the means of awareness and reconciliation regarding decolonization, and providing a space to heal its effects. If we as a society are able to better understand the effects of colonization as a complex process that varies between cultures, it will not only eliminate the need for tokenism but begin constructive conversations regarding defragmentation.

The need for a creative and collaborative space has also been the driving force behind Indonesian artist collective ruangrupa, who will serve as the Artistic Team for the upcoming Documenta 15 in 2022. There, ruangrupa will introduce the core values of analysis, collaboration, and resource sharing that fueled their two decades as a publicly engaged nonprofit arts organization into the 100 day exhibition. Having hosted arts events that span the range of exhibitions, festivals, art laboratories and workshops to advance artistic ideas, they aim to “highlight different practices that can be considered as contemporary art”.¹⁰

ruangrupa will be building on the previous Documenta’s efforts in expanding what can be considered contemporary art and build a more global perspective. Under the Artistic Director Adam Szymczyk, Documenta 14’s goal was to decentralize and decolonize the Northwestern art canon by displaying work by artists with diverse backgrounds on common prerequisites,¹¹ refusing tokenization and addressing how non-European art and minority artists are often included in large exhibitions on the condition that they address their own marginalization.¹² Yet one can question whether Szymczyk’s curation was designed to dismantle the European canon or simply an additive process to include more forms of art. In fact, it is hard to imagine how the display of the twenty-two masks on identical metal poles on a white backdrop would convey a message other than to say that indigenous art is now ‘allowed in’ to the institution of the contemporary white cube. The ‘equal footing’ only occurs on the grounds of a European art institution, and with the permission of a white European man. While it was an effort, Documenta 14 still falls prey to the Eurocentric definition of collecting and showing art without addressing its deeper-set issues of colonization.

Rather than using the exhibition as supporting material for their critical position, ruangrupa will be questioning the concepts of curation, exhibition, and art making through an approach based on the Indonesian concept of lumbung. Directly translating to ‘rice barn’, it is a communal surplus-grain warehouse intended for shared future use,¹³ and this model of mutual care and resource sharing will be at the heart of the next Documenta. Not only will the concept be on display, it will be the framework with which the upcoming Documenta will be organized––ruangrupa has invited collectives, organizations, and institutions to gather and develop lumbung together. Grouped into “majeli”, or working groups, each of the lumbung-members will contribute to and receive diverse resources such as time, space, money, knowledge, care, and art, in the hopes that the generative process where mutual learning of other concepts and models of regeneration, education, and economy will occur past the completion of the exhibition.¹⁴ 

The collaborative nature of ruangrupa’s Lumbung concept is a refusal of the type of didactic curatorial practice that often leads to tokenism. I believe that in order to initiate true progress in diversity it is through structural changes rather than exhibitions that show curatorial arguments on what is possible. The appointment of ruangrupa for Documenta 15 breaks away from the practice of simple addition into the colonial notion of a cannon, into a much wider, integrated, and engaged conversation on the possibilities and meanings of contemporary art. By creating a platform that gives voice to non-European modes of artistic production, curation, and collaboration, Documenta 15 is on track to showcasing theories and practices not solely borne of the postcolonial effort of the West, but will contribute to the effort of decolonization through decentralization. 

Tokenism stems from the art world’s myopic belief that representation is a simple way of solving the issues of the Eurocentric canon, and from a refusal to address the needs of decolonization on the institutional level. Thea Tagle, Kader Attia, and ruangrupa take on the task of decolonization with their practices, affecting change in the art world at different levels. My hope is that the rest of the art world––and society at large––will also recognize the need for truly diverse perspectives for what they are beyond their metaphoric or commercial value, prioritizing inclusivity and a definition of art that continues to evolve and maintain its relevance to the world today.

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