Out now: Critique in Practice: Renzo Martens’ Episode III (Enjoy Poverty)
June 2020
A volume of essays, edited by Anthony Downey.
Investigating the economic value of one of DR Congo’s most lucrative exports (namely, poverty), Renzo Martens’ provocative film Episode III: Enjoy Poverty (2008) remains a landmark intervention into debates about contemporary art’s relationship to exploitative economies. Throughout Critique in Practice, contributors explore the work’s legacy and how it relates to the politics of representation, uses of the documentary form, art criticism, the deployment of humanitarian aid, the impact of extractive forms of globalized capital, and the neoliberal politics of decolonization. The unconventional representation of acute immiseration throughout Enjoy Poverty generated far-from-resolved disputes about how deprivation is portrayed within Western mainstream media and throughout global cultural institutions. Using a range of approaches, this volume reconsiders that portrayal and how the film’s reception led Martens to found the long-term program Human Activities.
For the occasion of the publication of the book, the film Enjoy Poverty can be watched free of charge here using the promotion code: CritiqueinPractice. This campaign runs until June 1 2020.
To watch the film online now, please click here.