CRITICAL ART OR POLITICAL ART often plays a significant role in disrupting the status quo by challenging systems and structures of power. It can revise and counter the dominant histories of the “victors,” engage with and confront socio-political conditions, and foresee a better world. Critical art has the potential, through its various forms and interventions, to connect, inspire, generate debate, and move people to action. Often the formal strategies that political art uses “ensure the production of a double effect: the readability of a political signification and a sensible or perceptual shock caused, conversely, by the uncanny, by that which resists signification.”1 The protection of freedom of expression as a universal right by the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights signifies the place that cultural production occupies in society and the risk that this production could face by authoritarian and oppressive powers. ….
Rehab Nazzal, Rehab (2019). “Critical Art and Censorship: Encounter of a Palestinian-Canadian Artist.” In Other Places: Reflections on Media Arts Practices in Canada. Ed. Deanna Bowen. Toronto: PUBLIC Books, 2019.