Institute for Human Activities

A research project founded in 2012 by Dutch artist Renzo Martens at the KASK-School of Arts in Ghent, the Institute for Human Activities (IHA) aims to prove economic inequality can be redressed through artistic critique — not only on a symbolic level, but in reality. 

Operations of the IHA began in Lusanga, a small settlement outside of Kinshasa in the D.R. Congo. In what is considered one of the most “disadvantaged” regions of the world, IHA initiated a five-year “Gentrification Program” in hopes to both recalibrate art’s mundane, as well as engender economic growth in the region. Through traveling exhibitions, presentations, and instigating critical reflection, the IHA works to move beyond their research in the Congo and disseminate artworks of the Cercle d’Art des Travailleurs de Plantation Congolaise (CATPC) and return profits directly to the makers, their families, and community projects in Lusanga.

Exhibitions and Projects

On April 21–22, a quintessential White Cube, designed by OMA as a cornerstone of the Lusanga International Research Centre for Art and Economic inequality (LIRCAEI), has been repatriated on the site of Unilever’s first ever plantation of the D.R. Congo, in Lusanga, 650 km southeast of Kinshasa.

The White Cube was created as a response to the monoculture of an exploitative plantation system and hopes to attract both capital and visibility in order to invent both a new ecological and economic model--the post plantation.

BREAD AND ROSES: ARTISTS AND THE CLASS DIVIDE: The exhibition formulates a question about the way artists define their status and position in the realm of an ever-widening economic gap: the possibility to reconcile dreams of social justice with the need of artistic freedom and autonomy. At the same time, the show highlights the tension between an artists’ rather ambivalent affiliation with the intellectual or financial elite and their responsibility for the rest of the society. For artists occupy a paradoxical position among social classes.

Co-produced with the Institute for Human Activities, The Cercle d’Art des Travailleurs de Plantation Congolaise (CATPC) is a group based in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in Africa. It brings together plantation workers who engage in art making at settlements of the Institute for Human Activities in the country’s rainforest.

Institute for Human Activities website: http://www.humanactivities.org/en/