Renzo Martens

Stills Gallery: Social Documents The Ethics of Encounter Part 1

Episode III (2009) 6^th November – 12^th November

Four Stars

Contemporary art and third world poverty have long been engaged in a painfully awkward conversation. Underdeveloped countries have historically been misrepresented and patronised by art exhibitions; often eagerly adopted by artists in search of a veneer of serious political engagement to endorse their careers.

As a result, finding an artistic media which succeeds in engaging with these issues in an intelligent, thoughtful, and non-egocentric manner has been a perplexing endeavour for contemporary art of recent years. Amidst this earnest search, documentary film has emerged as a powerful force. It pertains to offer a dispassionate objective with which to survey a situation whilst minimising the narcissistic imposition of the artist’s own agenda.

Renzo Martens adopts precisely this format to create his 90 minute long Episode III. The film document’s the artists two-year sojourn in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The first half bears resemblance to a fairly conventional documentary, he interviews local labourers and juxtaposes their hardships with the presence of Western plantation owners and journalists who are, arguably, benefiting from their poverty.

However, Martens’s harbours far more renegade intentions than creating a conventional portrait of a beleaguered country. His real objective is to reveal to us the hypocrisy of Western media consumption.

In doing so, he proceeds to implement a shamelessly insolent emancipatory project in a local village. After interviewing parents of children recently deceased from starvation, he instructs them that their poverty is, in fact, a commodity, which they should attempt to exploit and retail. This involves such tactics as coaching local photographers on the lucrative possibilities of photographing rape victims and dying children, as well as installing a glaring neon sign reading Enjoy Poverty Please in a local village.

Needless to say, these actions make for squirmingly uncomfortable viewing. However, the obnoxious insensitivity of this piece does not blindly court controversy for its own sake, indeed, it is a deeply self-reflexive comment on the paradox of art as a social device. Does art truly have the capacity to be beneficial in such a wretchedly convoluted war-zone? And can it ever be socially committed without presenting the Western interlocutor as a vainly Messianic figure?

Ultimately, it is Martens’s flagrant insurrection against the norms of social etiquette which jolts us into attention. By mercilessly profiling the helplessness of the Congolese situation, he forces us into myopic confrontation with the ethics of documenting poverty.

 Originally published 16th November 2010