Culture Now: Renzo Martens

Artist Renzo Martens discusses The Institute for Human Activities (IHA), of which he is Artistic Director. The IHA began its operations,  ‘A Gentrification Programme’, in 2012 on a former Unilever plantation located on a tributary of the Congo River. In the Summer of 2013 the IHA was forced to leave its buildings and the communities with whom it had been working in close collaboration, and has since resettled to an undisclosed location in the Democratic Republic of Congo. It is here that the IHA continues to explore how art that is fully engaged with the globalised conditions of its own functioning can make more profound claims on reality.

Artist and filmmaker Renzo Martens (b.1973, The Netherlands) has exhibited internationally, including presentations at Tate Modern, London, 2013; Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, 2013; Centre Pompidou, Paris, 2009; and Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, 2008. Martens is a Researcher at KASK, University College Ghent and World Fellows Program at Yale University.

The Institute for Human Activities is a research project at KASK – University College Ghent.