Arts & International Affairs Volume 5, Number 1, Summer 2020 | Page 6

EDITORIAL: DEMOCRATIZING THE ARTS AND THE ARTS SECTOR
Alex Tam, co-founder of Play Dot, refers to another important aspect raised during the
Annual Gathering: democratizing the arts practice in order to involve more and diverse
people in the artistic process and while doing so gaining more societal as well as social
relevance (Henze 2017). What Alex as practitioner tries to achieve through public practice
and activities�that particularly but not exclusively involve children�is even more
relevant given the fact that he is working in Hong Kong. His idea of creating a ‘safe space’
has become a new and urgent notion throughout the last months of political turmoil.
Zainab Mussa Shallangwa is equally referring to societal relevance. In contrast to Alex,
who co-founded a new, private organisation, Zainab is referring to museums in Borneo
State, Nigeria. This text is central because it explains the educational as well as societal
functions of an institution that has a colonial legacy. Some of the challenges Zainab is
reporting, like a lack of financial resources and declining understanding of the social
relevance in the political realm, sound vaguely familiar to “Western” curators but running
a museum close to a Boko Haram headquarter, adds complexities most might be
unfamiliar with.
Qinhan Chen’s contribution on intercultural learning of musicians fits well into the
network’s research questions that centre on the role of intercultural education, which I
consider underrepresented in academic discourses. My own contribution on Empowerment
and Digitization hints in the same direction. I explain what I consider is missing in
arts and cultural management education in order to empower aspiring cultural managers
to set agenda instead of merely reacting to unforeseen challenges.
Finally yet importantly, I am happy to have Khaled Barakeh as a contributor to this special
volume. An artists and cultural activist whom I admire for a long time. Khaled has
founded CoCulture (https://coculture.de) in 2017 as a response to the challenges faced
by displaced cultural producers in the Middle East, Europe and beyond. His work will
speak for itself.
I would also like to thank J.P. Singh, who has been a fierce supporter of the Brokering Intercultural
Exchange Network from the very start, for the opportunity to edit this special
volume. It is a great pleasure and an honour. I am deeply convinced that we need more of
these high-quality open source publications in order to reach out to as many colleagues
in academia and practice as possible. I also thank all the authors, who have gathered last
year at Heilbronn University and will hopefully return to this year’s Annual Gathering in
November, for their valuable and insightful contributions. I have learned a lot working
with you.
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