Performing crisis: the COBRA Committee and the aesthetics of governmental response

ABSTRACT

This paper details the oscillation between the aesthetic and political response to the refugee crisis as seen through the eyes of the UK’s emergency response committee COBRA (Cabinet Office Briefing Room A) and its alternative COBRA RES. Firstly, it examines the interjection of the official COBRA Committee within the image-economy of crisis, attempting to impose itself as a sovereign-image via an interpretation of the emergency as image-event. Secondly, it details the COBRA RES project’s creative response to the COBRA Committee and the aesthetics of the refugee crisis in the summer of 2015, while detailing notions of institutional critique and the issues faced when art responds to an ongoing humanitarian crisis.

KEYWORDS:

• COBRA Committee
• emergency
• political aesthetics
• COBRA RES
• refugee crisis

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Note on contributor

Theodore Price is an artist, curator and researcher, an AHRC/CHASE funded PhD candidate at The Centre for Curatorial Studies – University of Essex, an Associate Lecturer in Media, Culture and Language at University of Roehampton and Visiting Lecturer in Art and Politics at Goldsmiths University, London.