Appropriation art has largely been theorised through semiotic and postmodern frameworks that privilege sign-based readings and institutional critique. This article proposes mutualist appropriation art as a practice-driven framework that reframes appropriation as a reciprocal process between artist and source. Mutualism is defined here as a materially and embodied mode of working, in which the physical conditions of the appropriated object actively shape artistic decisions, so that meaning emerges through co-production rather than being imposed upon an inert sign. Building on and extending insights from theorists including Isabelle Graw and Jan Verwoert, and artists such as R. H. Quaytman, Rebecca Fortnum and Melissa Gordon, the article differentiates mutualist appropriation art from the Pictures Generation theorisation by specifying how reciprocity is enacted through studio procedures. Andrew Bracey's practice-based research is drawn upon to demonstrate how tacit knowledge, durational looking and speculative thinking operate as methodological conditions through which artists generate interpretive knowledge. The article argues that attending to material reciprocity has significant implications for art historiography, practice-based research and debates on authorship and originality. Without such a reframing, appropriation discourse risks overlooking how artists actively generate knowledge through making.
This paper explores transhistorical curation as a methodological and conceptual framework through a case study of The Omnipotence of Dream, exhibited at the Salford Museum and Gallery (2024-2025). Focusing on British Surrealism, the exhibition paired six historic works from the museum's collection with newly commissioned contemporary responses engaging directly with the originals. Drawing on curatorial theory, feminist critique, and posthumanist discourse, the research examines how this strategy challenges historical hierarchies and reanimates heritage collections within contemporary cultural debates. Using a practice-based approach combining curatorial planning, artistic production, and academic analysis, the study evaluates the project's outcomes. A case study of Eileen Agar's Room with a View of the Moon (1981) and four contemporary reinterpretations demonstrates the potential of transhistorical curation to foster intergenerational dialogue. The paper concludes that commissioning contemporary responses to historic works creates reciprocal relationships that deepen interpretive engagement, foreground overlooked narratives, and activate museums as sites of cultural critique. It argues that transhistorical curation is a vital tool for reframing art history, expanding museum relevance, and engaging audiences with intersections of gender, feminist and new animist ecology, identity, and materiality.
This paper theorises vernacular aesthetics as a situated and alternate epistemology that signifies political performances embedded in the textures of ordinary life, transcending institutional categories of art and politics. Using an interdisciplinary lens of political philosophy, performance studies, and art theory, the paper examines prominent cases like the Shaheen Bagh (2019-2020) and the Farmers' Protests (2020-2021, 2024-2025) to demonstrate how mundane acts such as serving tea, maintaining langaars (community kitchens), or repurposing protest spaces into self-sustaining villages become potent political strategies through sustained repetition and care. Engaging with the shift from aesthetic autonomy and disinterested contemplation to participatory and performative paradigms of art, the paper argues for a reorientation of political aesthetics through the lens of the everyday.
This study examines the influence of Chinese calligraphy traditions on selected practices within contemporary Western calligraphy through a focused analysis of the works of Niels 'Shoe' Meulman. After outlining the key characteristics of Chinese calligraphy in relation to its writing system, aesthetic principles, and embodied modes of practice, this study places these features in dialogue with the dominant historical orientations of Western writing traditions. Drawing on documentary research and secondary sources, this study adopts a case-based approach to explore how certain aspects of Chinese calligraphic thinking - particularly those concerning gesture, process, rhythm and performativity - resonate within Meulman's practice. Through a close examination of his calligraphic and performative works, this paper suggests that contemporary Western calligraphy can move beyond a purely functional or product-oriented framework toward an understanding of writing as an embodied and expressive action in which words operate as visual images. Beyond semantic transmission, these practices foreground vivid expressions, individuality, and material engagement with tools and surfaces. By grounding its analysis in a specific artistic practice, this paper contributes a nuanced perspective on how Chinese calligraphic concepts are selectively engaged within contemporary Western calligraphy, while acknowledging the historical and semiotic complexity of Western writing systems.
This article does not attempt to set down guidelines to visual essay writing - this would be impossible due to the complexities of the form. Instead, it provides observations on some of the ways that the visual essay can support different ways thinking with text and image - altering perspectives, creating arguments and building narratives through the sequencing of images and the spatial relationships between image and text - as well as considering the role of image captions. At the same time, and not unconnected, it acknowledges the difficulties inherent in working with non-standard layouts within the parameters of academic publishing. By providing an exchange of ideas (both abstract and practical) that may seem marginal or even contradictory, it is hoped that looking at different aspects of the unique form will help to identify some of the paths that a visual essay might take and that writers might be encouraged to develop their essays in ambitious and experimental ways, considering the diversity of image behaviours and how they interact with text forms. In the longer term, the visual essay form itself and the dialogue around it might be advanced.
This article uses an autoethnographic approach to explore a researcher's experience with the topic being investigated - human-water relationships in Australia. Specifically, the aim of this article is to map the different processes at stake and argue for combining architecture and art to potentially create a new way of seeing and understanding the manifestation of biased legacies as a mode of rationality in the context of water ownership. The study intersects the disciplines of architecture and art through the mixed methodology of walking and drawing. This approach aims to actively reimagine places in the landscape where human-water narratives intersect. Mapping these intersections re-engages contested histories through a lived experience with place. While the injustice of biased legacies and their operation can be felt tangibly, these legacies are abstract in nature and can be hard to detect. The study contributes specifically to the emerging field of cultural mapping as a creative methodology with strong potential for addressing the complex and multifaceted issues of water policy.
Focusing on creative work produced primarily in Guangdong over the past decade, this paper examines socially engaged practices that emphasize inter-class collaboration, often involving NGOs, visual artists, volunteers, and migrant families. Such practices not only foster aesthetic development, but also promote education and alliances across social classes by embracing conflicts arising from ideological differences in the collaborative process. Recent practices by Sweat! Stop! Rewrite! and the Flying Object Alliance have created a model different from previous socially engaged art discourses, which tend to prioritize antagonism over aesthetic output and apply assessment criteria more associated with political discourse in democratic societies. This article contributes to current literature on socially engaged art by suggesting that while the hierarchy between artists and the underclass cannot be fully eliminated, this need not lead to spectacle. In particular, some artists who advocate interclass communication have presented an alternative model of practice that is more sustainable in post-COVID China, where workers' engagement in visual practices help diversify the language of contemporary art to engage wider audiences and bolster the autonomy of individuals through creative collaboration.
In 1942, a group of Surrealist artists led by Andr & eacute; Breton-then living in exile following the Nazi occupation of Western Europe-organised the first Surrealist exhibition in the United States. Entitled First Papers of Surrealism, the exhibition presented works by more than thirty artists, including objects then categorised as 'primitive art'. Marcel Duchamp's installation was one of the most daring exhibitions of the early 20th century, installing the entire gallery space with his so-called 'Mile of String'. This web-like structure by Duchamp not only gave Breton and the Surrealists a scandalous success that exceeded their expectations but also almost completely wiped out the visibility of some of their works that should have attracted attention. The string in this exhibition has often been discussed as a barrier, as T.J. Demo called it 'the greatest obstacle between the painting and the viewing space'. This essay aims to reassess prevailing interpretations by examining 'Mile of String' as a transparent medium that reconfigured the dynamics of spectatorship. In this light, the discussion situates Duchamp's installation within broader Surrealist exhibition strategies, demonstrating how it invited spectators to engage critically and imaginatively with art beyond conventional dualisms.
This interview (2024-2025) with Pramodha Weerasekera examines and records various important developments in Sri Lanka's contemporary art landscape (after the end of the long civil war, 1983-2009) as seen and experienced by the writer and curator. The conversation attempts to unpack the thought process, ways of working, themes in the work of contemporary art practitioners, creation of new spaces and initiatives and challenges faced by contemporary art practitioners working in a country dealing with economic crises amidst a host of other pressing issues. From avenues of art education to the impact of Aragalaya (2022 Sri Lankan protests) to the election of a new Leftist President, Weerasekera discusses various important landmarks and their possible consequences on the production and dissemination of art in contemporary Sri Lanka. While there's a lot of interest in Sri Lankan contemporary art, global art publishing seems to have paid it scanty attention. This interview attempts to highlight and document the work of important stakeholders in the contemporary art scene in Sri Lanka and hopefully facilitate future research networks and artistic collaborations based on the information available here.
This article presents an extended dialogue with Drew Hemment, a curator-researcher whose four-decade track record co-creating new research territories, from locative media to interpretive AI, reveals a distinctive and transferable approach to shaping technological futures. Through developing 'anticipatory research methodology' - a rigorous approach to sensing emergence through 'artistic intelligence', a mode of knowing that works through making and interpretation - Hemment has participated in successive sociotechnical transitions, from electronic arts through open data and IoT to contemporary AI, in each wave both applying and refining the approach. His current work, at The Alan Turing Institute and through the global Doing AI Differently initiative, pioneers fundamentally new approaches to critical challenges in AI, enabling advances through 'experiential AI' and 'interpretive technologies' - AI systems designed to enhance rather than replace human interpretive capacities, and handle cultural nuance, contextual ambiguity, and multiple perspectives as core capabilities. The dialogue traces how early experiences of cultural emergence in 1980s electronic music culture evolved into replicable methodologies for anticipating technological futures. His work - establishing locative media, developing digital festivals as epistemic laboratories, creating continental-scale citizens' observatories, and reshaping AI development through artistic practice - generated crucial insights about computational engagement with collective sense-making, now foundational to interpretive AI design. This trajectory extends to creating AI futures that serve human and planetary flourishing over narrow optimisation.
Artificial intelligence is increasingly interwoven with our creative, institutional, and everyday lives. Yet dominant discourses often obscure its social, ethical, and cultural dimensions. The arts, by contrast, offer a critical and imaginative countercurrent, attentive to nuance, relationality, and care. This editorial introduction is for a special issue, AI & Arts: People-Centred Practice, which gathers diverse perspectives, reframing AI not as a detached tool but as a set of techniques and mediations in creative and social practice. The issue explores how co-design, community participation, and institutional reflection can reshape the conditions under which AI is conceived and deployed. The various contributors examine how people-centred approaches can foster listening, access, and co-creation. Collectively, the papers trace notable 'vectors' in contemporary AI-arts research: relational co-design, institutional reflexivity, and ethical-material attentiveness. Foregrounding embodied and plural knowledges, the papers outline practices of critical experimentation; describing an emergent field in which the arts play a vital role in shaping the imagination and production of social AI practices.
This article focuses on the Magazine Actions by the British artist, Cosey Fanni Tutti, comprised of framed pages from pornographic magazines in which she had appeared as a model between 1974 and 1976. As one of the first instances in which an artist made an artwork documenting their own labour in the sex industry, the work was pioneering. It set an important precedent for contemporary artworks made by sex workers and those that examine sex work as a form of gendered labour. Despite foreshadowing recent debates around sex work and many issues that are central to feminism, the Magazine Actions were under-recognised within art history until the late 2000s. In the following article, I analyse the series as a document of the reproductive labour involved in working in the porn industry. Drawing on Marxist feminist scholars such as Heather Berg, I argue that by appropriating the images created during her work as a porn model, Tutti inverted the extraction of surplus value that took place as she laboured on the production of pornographic magazines, thereby resisting the gendered labour of sex work.
This paper examines how competing 'publics' emerge through visual art practices in Kochi, India, where the interplay of gaze, urban space, and art institutions transforms local narratives into contested sites of representation. It investigates how intimate narratives of Kochi's marginalized communities are visually mediated within the city's postcolonial art economy, revealing how art institutions transform local lived experience into objects of voyeuristic consumption. The study identifies two competing art publics in Kochi: 'intimate publics', shaped by community-embedded visual narratives, and 'strange publics', formed by global art tourism. The paper argues that the interaction between these two publics perpetuates a voyeuristic gaze, even in well-intentioned community art. Employing ethnographic analysis, the study focuses on Riyas Komu's exhibition Mattancherry as a critical case of community-oriented curation and artworks from the Kochi-Muziris Biennale. Archives include brochures, photographs, and field notes, analyzed through content and formal analysis.
Surrealism gained a foothold in Shanghai's former French concession during the early 1930s through Chinese artists who encountered the movement whilst studying abroad in France and Japan. Extant literature argues for Surrealism's tenuous, short-lived presence in the city confined to 'liberal' eras of the 1930s and 1980s. Conversely, I demonstrate that, over the course of a century, Surrealism's dialectical reconciliation of opposing forces (Breton 1929) has been projected onto visual representations of Shanghai. Here, Communism and Capitalism, East and West, traditional and modern create a marvellous form of reality, piercing the banality of everyday existence. Through mixed methods incorporating artist interviews, periodicals, archival research and secondary literature, this paper couches Shanghai as a 'Surrealist city' throughout the vicissitudes of semi- colonialism, occupation, Maoism, and present day neo-liberal economics. This article argues that the raison d'& ecirc;tre of Shanghainese Surrealism, from the culturally hybrid Republican era works of Pang Xunqin (1906-1985) to the present-day parodies of Zhou Tiehai (b.1966), has been to instrumentalise an internationalist anti-colonial movement to both critique and subsume western influence in Shanghai. Rather than 'copy from the west', Surrealism's penchant for incongruous juxtapositions enabled Chinese artists to exert ownership over western cultural impositions amidst an idiosyncratically Shanghainese context.
Humour in visual art may be commonplace, but it is rarely foregrounded in any analysis. To sideline the humour in the video art of British artist Rebecca Moss, however, is to ignore the centrality of slapstick to her work. Slapstick often sees a performer transformed into an object, and this 'thingness' is central to Moss's investigation into gendered embodiment, as she develops a form of 'neutral' objectification which allows her to critique and to counter the disciplinary regimes that govern femininity. Meanwhile, animating the inanimate is crucial to another facet of Moss's practice, her engagement with the Romantic sublime. Instead of the punishing idealism and elevated register of the sublime, Moss uses the ridiculous (conceived by Jean Paul Richter as an 'inverted sublime') to pursue a model that privileges participation rather than dominance.
When we make images using text-to-image AI systems like Midjourney, what precisely are we making? In the context of cultural, political and legal uncertainty about the status of AI-generated imagery, this paper reports on a practical experiment in rephotography. The authors attempted to recreate four notable American photographs in Midjourney: Vivian Maier's Untitled self-portrait, Gregory Crewdson's Untitled (Twilight), Dorothea Lange's Migrant Mother, and Joe Rosenthal's Flag Raising on Iwo Jima. The practice of rephotography, which seeks on one hand to faithfully reproduce and on the other hand to reveal difference, enables comparison of human and AI-generated photography as practice. We find that the AI system exhibits bias in its default perspective, likely an artefact of training data scraped from the open Internet. Specifically, we find: (1) AI images give prominence to main subjects in a way that reflects a late capitalist, consumer gaze; (2) AI images 'hallucinate' details that reduce human intentionality and control; (3) AI images are detached from the social and historical context that gives human photographs meaning. Despite these striking differences, we consider the emancipatory and critical potential of AI imagery. Creative possibilities present themselves in surfacing probabilistic links between datasets, user prompts and outputs.
This article focuses on common negotiations in the research of artists and draws upon a study of thirty-two PhDs completed by artists in the UK, and interviews with six of those artists. Historically, tacit studio pedagogy allows for the continuity of an ontology of art in art education, however its contact with research acts as a break that offers artists the opportunity to consider the ontology of art anew. In response to this break, some artists resort to an intrinsic defence of art, while others engage in axiology as research and question the way in which art is contrasted to science. Anxiety around the incompatibility of art and research is a perennial issue for artists conducting PhDs, and this article proposes that attention to the contest around value that occurs allows for artists' ownership of research on fair terms.
This paper examines an artistic paradigm that reinvigorates embodied labor and spontaneous mark-making in human interactions with algorithmic systems. It focuses on the curve as a central method in Sougwen Chung's collaborative paintings with her five generations of Drawing Operations Units. Using techniques such as supervised learning, computer vision, biofeedback, and full-body tracking, Chung transforms neural activity, physical gestures, and archival drawings into data inputs that guide robotic systems to paint on canvas. Departing from the algorithmic principles of early computer art, Chung's varying curves improvise fluid forms rather than fixed ones to accompany robotic painting gestures in real-time. The resulting abstract, textured, and spontaneous brushstrokes merge human and machine traces, challenging the assumption that computational aesthetics must appear calculated. Drawing on posthumanism concepts of 'technosymbiosis' and 'cognitive assemblage,' this paper argues that Chung reconfigures the human-algorithm relationship not as a question of control, but as a dialogic process and embodied communion.
This article examines Electronic Life, a collaborative programme at Tate Britain that explored artificial intelligence (AI) as a tool for institutional reflection, participatory learning, and creative experimentation. The project positioned AI technologies not as neutral tools but as collaborators in collective learning, co-creation, and institutional inquiry. Developed in response to Tate Britain's 2023 rehang, the programme engaged marginalised youth and community groups in both dialogues and hands-on experience with AI, foregrounding questions of voice, representation, and institutional authority. Drawing on practice-led reflection and research interviews - including a conversation with Ruchika Gurung (Curator of Community & Partnerships, Tate Britain) - the article contextualises and examines how AI can function as an active participant within what is termed social AI practice, disrupting hierarchies, amplifying marginalised voices, and enabling creative, reflexive practice. Situated within Tate's wider commitment to social engagement, the article offers a critical framework for participatory AI in museums, highlighting how care-centred approaches to technology can reshape learning, authorship, and community relationships in cultural institutions.
This article examines AI as an artistic medium through people-centred, practice-based research with student practitioners at OP Jindal Global University, who developed speculative responses to the archives and context of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale. Through a seven-week collaborative programme led by the Electronic Life Research Studio, three groups created experimental prototypes responding to provocations around affective data, spatial mapping, and unofficial knowledge. Rather than implementing finished systems, participants used speculative prototyping to interrogate how authority, accessibility, and voice operate within cultural documentation. Drawing on participatory art practice and collaborative research, the article centres student practitioners' reflections, positioning them as co-researchers whose making generates knowledge about AI's possibilities and limitations. Their work reveals approaches that are distributed rather than hierarchical, conversational rather than authoritative, and grounded in embodied experience. The first group explored capturing ephemeral encounters through alternative documentation; the second mapped connections between the Biennale and Kochi's broader histories; the third examined boundaries between official and unofficial knowledge through concept notes and translation. Together, these projects show how people-centred approaches to AI can foreground place, participation, and marginal voices, offering insights for cultural institutions seeking more democratic engagement and contributing to discourse on participatory practice and AI as artistic material.
