Art in Permacrisis #4: Yazan Khalili and the Crisis Economy

This is the fourth episode of Art in Permacrisis, a podcast on the organization of art workers in the face of the ever-growing stack of crises. How can artists make a living without selling their souls? Can we imagine and practice a sustainable art economy beyond precarity? How should we transform the circulation of artworks, the curriculum of art and design academies, the exhibition programs of museums, and the organization of collectives and unions? We invite speakers with combined backgrounds in art, theory, and organizing to share their insights.

At the Shadia Abu Ghazaleh Campus of the People’s Free University in Amsterdam, we talked to Yazan Khalili. Yazan is an artist, architect, and cultural activist living in and out of Palestine. Some of Yazan’s many roles are: PhD candidate at the Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis, co-founder of Radio Alhara (since 2020), and co-founder of The Question of Funding-collective (since 2019). Our conversation focuses on crisis and the crisis economy as a defining force in the arts. We also discuss the practice of infrastructural critique, or how to build alternative art institutions from the bottom up. And, of course, we talk about Palestine.