Politics of Artistic Activism and Patterns of Influence in Illiberal Settings

Can art play a role in politics? Can artistic activism generate a threat to the survival of a regime? Can arts and artists genuinely challenge and pressure illiberal regimes for change? Can such pressures automatically promote the elements, practices and institutions of the democratization toolkit? Or are we stretching the concepts too far, and expecting too much? In line with this concern, this paper focuses on the issue of artistic activism and questions to what extent it can shape politics and policies of a political system. The paper limits its scope to the comparative analysis of the relationship between art, politics and activism in three countries – i.e. China, Turkey and Iran. The first part of the paper includes discussions on what artistic activism constitute and provide a working definition of concepts such as power, influence and democratization. The second part focuses on how art is imagined, shaped and reproduced by the artists as a political act and how regimes respond to it. The concluding section of the paper reviews the three cases and discusses how contemporary visual arts, art exhibits, and artists themselves (along with streets and other venues) are used to generate 'boomerang patterns' of influence by the activists to challenge the status quo, but also by the governing elites to reproduce and maintain illiberal regimes.