Cultural Hijack

Rethinking Intervention

Cultural Hijack presents a survey of provocative interventions which have inserted themselves into the world, demanding our attention, interrupting everyday life, hijacking, trespassing, agitating and teasing. Often unannounced and usually anonymous, these works have appropriated media channels, hacked into live TV and radio broadcasts, detourned billboards, re-appropriated street furniture, subverted signs, monuments and civic architectures, exposed corporations and tax loopholes, and revealed the absurdities of bureaucratic behaviours.

The exhibition positions itself at the intersection between art, politics and social justice in an historical moment, as we witness a rising tide of global resistance to neoliberal capitalism through an expanding ‘movement of movements’, from Zapatismo to the Arab Spring, from alternative G8 summits to Occupy Wall Street. In the shadows of this moment, artists are joining in the writing of alternative histories, the reclamation of our rights to the city and the unfinished project of the revolution of everyday life.

I was drawn to the video 'Ascending Descending' by Tatzu Nishi, in which a rota of men took turns to dig dirt from a deep hole, shovelling it on to a series of conveyor belts that return the material to the same hole.

From early morning to late at night the scene continues.

This work reminded me of the performance I did called Helter Skelter in which a performer and I would pile up boxes, only for the other performer to destroy the pile.