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Gentrification After Institutional Critique: On Renzo Martens’s Institute for Human Activities

Launch of the Institute for Human Activities’ ‘Critical Curriculum’ at an undisclosed location in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, 2014, video still. Courtesy the artist; KOW, Berlin; Galerie Fons Welters, Amsterdam; and The Box, Los Angeles

Essay Publish date: 22 aug 2015

Written by T.J. Demos

This text is part of Afterall Journal Issue 40

Francesca Recchia sees the incursion of dOCUMENTA (13) into Kabul as symptomatic of a wider fascination with the elsewhere in curatorial practice. The Institute for Human Activities (IHA), founded and directed by Dutch artist Renzo Martens, represents an ambitious five-year project based in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) that is as ethically provocative as it is conceptually complex.

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