"Helguera has produced a highly readable book that absolutely needs to be in the back pocket of anyone interested in teaching or learning about socially engaged art"--Tom Finkelpearl, Director of the Queens Museum, New York, and author of "Dialogues in Public Art."

Does art have the potential to stimulate and sustain political participation? On behalf of the Galerie fur Zeitgenossische Kunst, Joanna Warsza invited the artists Alexandra Pirici, Pablo Helguera, and Ulf Aminde to Leipzig to try out three projects in public and semi-public spaces: Pirici staged a choreographic intervention at the Monument to the Battle of the Nations, Helguera an improvised speaking choir, and Aminde the dress rehearsal for an art strike. All the works were shown as part of the Performative Democracy series, whose title is taken from the book of the same name by...