Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla's collaborative installations, photographs, sculptures, videos, and public projects contest the seemingly incontestable power of official norms and values. Their work puts forth an understanding of protest in a broader context of what artist Krzysztof Wodiczko has termed proactive testing. As they have articulated, For us the political dimension in a work of art lies in its endless propulsion of given norms and terminologies into a space of crisis. This happens through a state of permanent questioning. [A]rt has much to offer to this task, in its potential to create a space of individual questioning about a particular subject, about preconceived notions of truth, about forms of representation, participation, identification, etc. At that point it is up to each individual to decide how this self-questioning will play itself out: at a political level, at a union level, at an aesthetic level, cultural level, and so on.

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Hope Hippo, 2005 (installation view, Venice Biennale, 2005). Mud, whistle, daily newspaper, and live person, dimensions variable. Collection of the artist; courtesy Lisson Gallery, London

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