Enjoy Poverty 2008

Call it a kamikaze attack on the Society of the Spectacle. As purposefully offensive as its title promises, Enjoy Poverty investigates the trade-offs surrounding what its perpetrator, artist Renzo Martens, describes as ‘Africa's most lucrative export: filmed poverty’. He spent three years in the Democratic Republic of the Congo talking with poor labourers, plantation owners, aid workers and foreign journalists. He riles some and baffles others in testing his thesis that poverty is a national asset because it attracts foreign aid. Such NGOs as Médecins sans Frontières stage-manage the imagery for Western eyes, he suggests, and are complicit in creating a cover for exploitation by Western corporations which in turn offer them and the media military protection. In his most excruciating intervention he encourages impoverished village people to try selling photographs of their own suffering to Western media. Martens has the incisiveness to not portray himself as akin to a poor African, and throws his own artist's vanity into the bonfire too. — BG