Barclays Capital’s Skyscraper Index—an annual report that traces the curious correlation between contenders for the title of “world’s tallest building” and fluctuations in the Dow Jones—holds that when markets go down, skyscrapers go up. This index serves as a fitting point of departure for “Monument to Capital,” the two-part project that anchors “Art After Democratism,” Jonas Staal’s first solo exhibition in Dubai, a city whose most improbable architecture—including the current recordholder for the highest building, the Burj Khalifa—appeared in a moment of crisis within the global economy. The artist visualizes this inverse relationship in the video The World Without Author: Trauma as Currency, 2013, before suggesting a reversal of the trend in the accompanying light box, Historicizing the Future: A Proposal, 2013; the narrator tallies a roll call of previous tallest titleholders before urging an effort to build down, “against history,” freeing capital rather than monumentalizing it. Quixotic though it may be, the idea speaks to Staal’s conviction that there is something to be gained by repackaging economic data as art.

The artist takes his politics beyond proposals in the second part of the exhibition, which focuses on the ongoing New World Summit, 2012–. Originally commissioned for the 2012 Berlin Biennale, this alternative parliament brings together legal representatives from international organizations currently classified as “terrorist” (a label applied to such wide-ranging initiatives as the Tamil Tigers, the Kurdish women’s movement, and the Basque Peace Process). The reasons for this blacklisting often have less to do with an organization’s activities than with an ideological noncompliance with what Staal calls “Democratism”—policies that fly the banner of freedom and equality for everyone but in practice exclude those who hold “inconvenient” political views.

“To imagine a different politics,” Staal continues, “you need to imagine a different space.” New World Summit ventures precisely such a space. Each meeting is set within a unique architectural structure, with conference tables flanked by panels bearing flags of participating institutions. The first occurred in May 2012, in Berlin; the second was held last December in Leiden, the Netherlands, a site selected to accommodate Professor Jose Maria Sison, cofounder of the Communist Party of the Philippines and its military wing, the New People’s Army, who, despite his court-ordered clearance from official terrorist lists, is still denied a passport (and thus the opportunity to travel) from the country where he has resided for the past twenty-four years. A third camp was constructed in Kochi, India, with the summit scheduled for March 2013, but shortly after the inauguration of the pavilion in December 2012, government officials moved to censor the conference, literally painting black the flags of those organizations they thought active in India. Subsequent safety concerns for the speakers meant that the congress never convened, but the empty conference floor remained open to the public for the duration of the biennale.

In this exhibition, New World Summit was presented through tabletop models of the three meeting places (with targeted flags in Kochi painted white instead of black, abstracting the act of aggression) and monitors playing video documenting the conference on loop. Each segment ends with the credits NEW WORLD SUMMIT, JONAS STAAL, 2012—a reminder that these conversations are taking place as an artwork. Staal’s wager is that contemporary art’s exemption from the regulation placed on other types of public address allows it to be “more political than politics itself” and to speak not for “Democratism” but for a true democracy. What remains unclear in both “Monument to Capital” and New World Summit, however, is who is listening.

—Kate Sutton