185 The Inertia of Change: A Review of Nato Thompson’s Seeing Power: Art and Activism in the 21st Century Hammam Aldouri In Seeing Power: Art and Activism in the 21st Century (Brooklyn and London: Melville House, 2015), Nato Thompson, chief curator of the non-proft arts organization Creative Time, chronicles his direct involvement with, and retrospective refections on, recent artistic initiatives that are increasingly becoming identifed under the rubric of “socially engaged art.” At its most basic level, the book operates on two interconnected levels. First, it functions as an attempt to theoretically consolidate Thompson’s experiences as a curator, activist and collaborator in art projects over the course of the last twenty years. Second, the book is a contribution to the rapidly expanding feld of literature on socially engaged art practice. At a more refned level, Seeing Power can be said to present a distinct conception of socially engaged art, a conception that concerns practices that “self-consciously operate at the intersection of art and politics” (16). Thompson’s conception of socially engaged art rests, more precisely, on the unifcation of the conjunction “art and politics” in “the wild place we call art activism” (vii). Art activism is understood by Thompson in terms of modes of artistic strategies that transform our understanding of politics and ourselves in the very texture of the power dynamics that structure our everyday existence, that is, within the substance of the infrastructures of