Cai Guo-Qiang (1957-), the hugely successful Chinese-born contemporary artist, has developed a career that traverses both established and emergent globalised artworlds. Since he left China to study in Japan in 1986, and migrated from Japan to the US in 1995, Cai has strategically transgressed the limits of established art-historical periodisations, national genealogy, and twentieth-century institutional norms while astutely navigating various geopolitical locales. This article traces the arc of Cai's career and his self-conscious efforts to forge it, focusing on the period of the early to mid 1990s that stands as the foundation for his ascendancy. In so doing, I recognise that Cai, like other successful global contemporary artists, finds himself in tension with the critical valorisation of the 'good artist' as oppositional, given his inevitable entanglements in the machinations of value production that artists are conventionally meant to oppose.
I outline Dino Estevao's journey from a nine-year-old 'orphan' dislocated from Angola, subsequently raised by a South African Defence Force military community, to reuniting with his family in 1995 to frame his archival practice. Reunification forced him to 're-live' the atrocity, leading him to recognise its absence and the exclusion of ordinary Black Angolan experiences and perspectives in South African Border War literature and the South African Defence Archive. I suggest his multimodal archival practice (inclusive of photography by him and others alongside oral history recordings), stretches towards a wider regional history, offering a counter-knowledge to dominant literature on the conflict found in military memoirs and hegemonic archives. Rooted in and driven by his experience, I examine two images to situate him as a vernacular 'survivor historian' who, outside the academy, makes vital historical and archival innovations. Following his biography, I argue his practice challenges the national logic of the international refugee regime and southern African decolonisation.
The title of my article is adapted from Adrian Piper's What Will Become of Me (1985-ongoing), an unfinished artwork consisting of glass jars filled with Piper's hair, fingernails, and dead skin, which she has been collecting since 1 December 1985. My article takes Piper's project as a prompt to investigate how biology is valued by art, natural history, and medical law. I look to Achille Mbembe's notion of 'biostock' as the primary theoretical locus of the project. Defined as a process of transformation - from the 'brow sweat of slaves' into an 'active value' - Mbembe uses biostock to argue for remediation as a restorative ontological practice. The article offers a speculative visuality for the notion of biostock through an analysis of three artworks: Piper's What Will Become of Me, Kara Walker's A Subtlety (2017) and Cameron Rowland's park benches in Seward Park (2021).
Since China's reform era began in 1978, millions of rural-urban migrant workers, known as nongmingong (sic)(sic)(sic), have moved to cities for better wages. However, they remain marginalised in the very urban spaces they sustain. This article examines how these workers challenge China's distribution of the sensible - the system of what is perceptible, shaped by the urban-rural divide - through their performances. Specifically, I analyse Wang Wei's Temporary Space (2003), Song Dong's Potted Landscape (2002), and the 2014 Yue Yuen shoe factory protest. Forms of dissensus include how the nongmingong assert recognition in spaces where they are rendered invisible, challenge control structures like the hukou system and labour policies, and disrupt exploitative urban-rural relationships. These acts enable the nongmingong to contest dominant representations and forge new subjectivities that exceed how they are currently perceived in post-Mao China.
Although Guy Ben-Ner created numerous video works with his children, his position is actually that of a son. His videos raise the question of inheritance, or, in other words, what world he has been bequeathed, and what possibilities of creation still remain. The world he inherits belongs to the post-natural age, the Anthropocene. Man has influenced the earth in an unprecedent way and there are no more untouched raw materials or unknown lands to discover. In the videos, assembly instructions replace the last will, outlining obligations in the absence of the testator, ordering: 'Do it yourself'. Who is that self, and how does he manifest himself through the products of his work? The article explores how Ben-Ner weaves together themes of masculinity, fatherhood, wilderness, domesticity, and value, addressing a core question of the Anthropocene: Can creation persist in a world without raw materials?
This article examines three essay films that address refugee standstill at EU borders. It sheds light on the relationship between the formal experimentations in these films and their attempts to resist dominant representations of migrant im/mobilities. Through case studies of Flotel Europa (Vladimir Tomic, 2015), Havarie (Philip Scheffer, 2016), and Purple Sea (Amel Alzakout and Khaled Abdulwahed, 2020), we argue that experimentations with the intermedial character of the essay film can constitute strategies to deconstruct hegemonic tropes in migration narratives. We delve into video art practices that combine critical messages with distinctive forms to effectively showcase the dynamic interaction between aesthetics and politics within the realm of contemporary migration art and culture.Through these case studies, this article establishes a politics of intermediality in films engaging with displacement and border crossings, illustrating how intermediality can be operationalised to challenge conventional portrayals of the border spectacle. The findings highlight how the essay films employ different cinematic resources - such as the use of poor images, insistence on extended durations, and the creation of audiovisual dissonances - to establish original intermedial relations and criticise exclusionary border regimes. Ultimately, we discuss how such artistic explorations produce hybrid media objects with an original 'aesthetics of standby' in which intermedial manipulations are implemented to accentuate a dissensual experience of the refugee standby.
From the 1960s through the early 1980s, the Iraqi architect Rifat Chadirji (1926-2020) assembled a significant collection of his own photographs depicting everyday life in Iraq. These images capture the interaction of the Iraqi public with the built environment during a period of rapid social change and uneven modernisation in the country. While focusing on the traditional lifeworld of Iraqi society, Chadirji's street photography is neither a preservationist project nor an attempt to highlight privations of traditional living. His photographs show people repurposing built spaces through their daily practices, revealing how space is inseparable from the human and social relations that generate it. I term Chadirji's images 'diagnostic', as they go beyond documentation to foreground the role of common Iraqi people as on-site commentators on the project of spatial modernisation and its challenges. I argue Chadirji's photographs create a site of exchange and dialogue between the architect/photographer and the people.
This academic inquiry addresses a noted gap within feminist art discourse theory through a scrutinisation of visual artworks that employ language and writing as central and pivotal means by which to critically confront the issue of violence against women. Specifically focusing on the Palestinian national minority's existence within the State of Israel, the article delves into an artwork that unpacks the oppressive socialisation endured by Palestinian women. It analyses a visual glossary of hate speech that perpetuates women's subjugation to patriarchal norms, particularly encapsulated in the concept of 'family honour'.
This conversation between Serdar Arat and Vas & imath;f Kortun explores the complexities of exhibiting art, particularly within the context of Western museums. Arat, an artist of Turkish origin, reflects on the impact of recent exhibitions such as 'Calligraphic Abstraction' at MoMA and 'Dialogues: Modern Artists and The Ottoman Past' at the MET, critiquing their tendency to perpetuate stereotypes about Turkish art while celebrating its inclusion. Kortun, an art historian, introduces the concept of a 'gap' between looking and reading, arguing that traditional exhibition models fail to fully acknowledge this distinction. He emphasises the importance of reimagining exhibition practices to better reflect the cultural and historical contexts of the artworks on display, suggesting alternative models that prioritise critical engagement and encourage viewers to question their own perspectives. The conversation delves into the challenges of navigating cultural heritage, the impact of colonialism on museum collections, and the role of the museum in shaping our understanding of art and history.
The question of how to meaningfully intervene in human rights atrocities and prevent their future occurrence is a pressing global challenge, one made more complicated by the pervasive, yet slippery nature of neoliberalism, which seems almost designed to engineer a sort of hopelessness or uncertainty about where, or how, to meaningfully intervene. This article focuses on 'Triple Chaser', the ten and a half minute-long creative investigative video that comprised Forensic Architecture's contribution to the 2019 Whitney Biennial. Through analysis of how Triple Chaser methodically builds a case for individual culpability and institutional accountability for neoliberal mass atrocity, the article explores the role of 'creative interference', museal complicity in transnational war profiteering, and the broader politics of neoliberal culpability and accountability.
Alfonso Ossorio (1916-1990) was born in the Philippines, later becoming a citizen of the United States. This article considers an intense breakthrough period of 1950 to 1951, during which he created a very large number of works on paper, while working across three continents. During that period Ossorio returned to the Philippines for an extended trip (where he painted an important mural) and he also spent a large amount of time in France (where he developed a close friendship with Jean Dubuffet). Dubuffet wrote a book about Ossorio's art in 1951, and the same year he himself was to write the catalogue essay for a key New York exhibition of his friend Jackson Pollock. Like many modernists of non-Western origin, Ossorio remains underrated as an artist. This article attempts to help remedy that situation, drawing upon material from the author's interview with the artist conducted in 1979.
