Beyond the “NGO Aesthetic”

This article examines two projects by artists living and working in Nairobi. It asks questions about how these artists are visualizing or otherwise materializing in their work the specificity of their contemporary geopolitical and geocultural situation in relation to capitalism. How might this specificity allow these artists to elucidate aspects of contemporary capitalism’s cultural logic that are all too often invisible to people living in other parts of the world? How might it allow them to reframe or gain new traction on what Fredric Jameson once called a “radical cultural politics,” an operation that presupposes, in much Marxist and post-Marxist analysis, an ability to represent one’s location within the system of contemporary capitalism?