Immersive installation is often evaluated through the language of spectacle, sensory intensity, and technological sophistication, yet such terms offer only a partial account of how moving images operate within embodied and participatory environments. This article examines performative imaging through the practice-based case study of Rituals for Earthly Survival, an immersive installation combining Butoh-informed performance, projection, sound, responsive technologies, and participatory ecological gestures. It considers how such encounters might create conditions for transformation through shifts in attention, relation, and imagination. Awe is considered one affective register through which such reorientation may occur, particularly where encounters with vastness unsettle existing perceptual or conceptual frames. Analysis of the installation, supported by project documentation, limited post-show audience feedback, and two independently commissioned peer reviews, suggests that performative imaging can operate as an ecological encounter by entangling images with bodies, architecture, technologies, and material processes. The evidence also reveals uneven experiences of participation, legibility, and immersion. The article argues that transformative potential depends not only on what images represent but also on the conditions they help to produce.
The Palace of Galiana in Toledo stands within the former royal suburban estate, or almunia, of al-Maʾmūn, ruler of the taifa of Toledo. Following the Christian conquest of the city in 1085, the estate passed to Alfonso VI and subsequently became known as the Huerta del Rey. The surviving residential hall has been attributed to the eleventh-century taifa period on typological and historical grounds, although this attribution still awaits archaeological and fabric-based analysis. This article examines the Mudéjar plasterwork and mural paintings added to the building under Christian rule in order to clarify their chronology, stylistic context, and visual function. The study combines formal and iconographic analysis, parallels with Andalusi and Mudéjar precedents, available technical evidence, and heraldic and documentary sources. The ground-floor plasterwork can be dated more securely to the late fourteenth century, probably around or shortly after 1397, on the basis of converging stylistic, heraldic, and documentary evidence. The painted dados on the upper floor present a more complex chronological problem: the available technical evidence does not provide an independent absolute date, while stylistic and stratigraphic evidence favors a broad chronology within the Christian period, probably between the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and suggests that the surviving fragments may represent more than one decorative phase. The spatial distribution of the decoration also reveals a close relationship between ornament, views, water, and landscape. Galiana thus offers a significant example of the ways in which Andalusi and Christian artistic traditions were combined and transformed in the Christian-period redecoration of an earlier palatial setting of probable Andalusi origin.
This article focuses on a series of cat photographs taken by Belle Johnson, a photographer from Monroe City, Mo., in the early years of the 20th century. These photographs were included in a project called With Other Photographers, an initiative from 1909–1910 which showcased the studio set-ups and techniques of professional photographers. Through this set of photographs we see not only the finished results but also process shots of Johnson working with the cats in her studio. In this article I explore how these photographs were part of a larger discussion around two very different approaches to photography in the United States at this time while also insisting on seeing these cats as individual subjects with agency who played an active role in the creation of these images.
Britain’s historical spectacles of animal performance, from Victorian circuses and travelling menageries to early visual media, did more than entertain, they shaped how humans imagined, controlled, and valued nonhuman life. Animals were transformed into objects of fascination and domination, while hunting and poaching practices reinforced imperial authority over wildlife. These performances codified visual and moral frameworks that positioned Britain as arbiter of “wildness,” embedding hierarchies of power and ethical order into the cultural imagination. This paper draws on performance studies, postcolonial ecocriticism, and visual anthropology to trace how circus rings, menageries, and early animal films laid aesthetic and ideological foundations that resonate in contemporary British environmental art and regeneration discourse. By historicising these visual legacies, it reveals how dominion, spectacle, and exploitation persist as underlying structures in Britain’s engagement with nature. Yet contemporary environmental arts are not merely reactive, they reinterpret these histories, transforming frameworks of control into imaginative possibilities for ethical, regenerative, and multispecies representation. By linking past and present, this study demonstrates that understanding the visual politics of historical animal performance is essential to imagining sustainable and inclusive futures for human and nonhuman life in Britain.
On 24 February 2022, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine intensified a broader sense of precarity across Eastern Europe, including Romania, and longstanding anxieties related to threat, instability, and loss—rooted in the Cold War past—resurfaced with renewed urgency. This article examines how, since 1989, Romanian contemporary dance has responded to these conditions, functioning as a site for expressing and processing the physical and emotional “edginess” of the body and psyche in the post-socialist present. Drawing on archival research, audiovisual materials, and interviews, the study argues that Romanian contemporary dance operates across multiple temporalities. Looking to the past, it preserves and reactivates the memory of bodies that shaped its history, resisting their erasure amid shifting national and transnational identities. Rooted in the present, dancers and institutions navigate a fragile social terrain marked by regional conflict, migration, economic instability, and ongoing debates surrounding diversity and gender. At the same time, they confront the resurgence of nationalist, xenophobic, and exclusionary discourses within Romanian society. Through performance, pedagogy, institutional initiatives, and collaborative projects, contemporary dance in Romania emerges as a critical space of reflection and intervention, actively engaging social tensions while contributing to the reimagining of political and cultural futures.
Widely associated with third- and fourth-wave feminism, Ani DiFranco’s artistic practice creates and curates queer and feminist musical experiences through the tools of songwriting and spoken-word poetry. Since the release of her eponymous debut album in 1990, DiFranco has carved out a distinctive voice within American folk and popular music and has cultivated communities of affiliation across feminist and queer communities. Drawing on Judith Butler’s theory of performativity and David Halperin’s conception of queerness as a form of non-normative identity, this article offers close, textual readings of a selection of DiFranco’s earlier songs and spoken-word poems, including “The Whole Night”, “In or Out”, “Lost Woman Song”, and “Self Evident”. In doing so, the article demonstrates how DiFranco’s performances extend beyond musical expression to function as sites of queer and feminist cultural production, where audiences are invited to participate in broader conversations about identity, community, and social change.
This paper explores the relationship between John Cage’s seminal work 4′33″ and the philosophies of Zen and Mahāyāna Buddhism, while reflecting on the limitations of Western philosophical frameworks in cross-cultural musical analysis. Existing scholarship has primarily focused on musical structure, performance practice, audience perception, and interpretations through Western theories such as those of Ludwig Wittgenstein and postmodernism, with limited attention to the influence of Eastern philosophy on Cage’s creative thought. Drawing on Mahāyāna concepts including emptiness, dependent origination, and the Two Truths, this study argues that the work’s use of silence encourages contemplation of the impermanence and relational nature of all phenomena. The paper further critiques the tendency to impose Western theoretical models upon Eastern thought, advocating instead for an experience-centred approach to cross-cultural analysis. It contends that 4′33″ is not merely an experimental musical work, but also a practical manifestation of Zen philosophy at the auditory and perceptual levels.
This article examines the contribution of the Multipla Gallery—founded in 1972 by two women, Teresa Nazar and Edla Van Steen—to the introduction of a new artistic modality in Brazil: the multiples. The “motherhood” of this artistic modality was, at the time, attributed to a third woman: the French gallerist Denise René. This case reveals female presence and agency in the Brazilian art market during the 1970s, a period when women played a significant leading role. The feminization of the role of gallery owners is a topic that has yet to be thoroughly explored in Brazil from a historical and sociological perspective. The third part of the article also aims to discuss, based on the case of Teresa Nazar, the extent to which such female agency was not completely immune to gender inequalities.
The appearance and spread of the image of the bicorporate sphinx in Scythia of 4th century BC can be regarded as an example of selective borrowing from ancient iconography. In the Greek world, this type is encountered rarely, but it gained considerable currency among the Scythians of the Northern Black Sea region. Its spread coincides with the period of expansion of the fantastic bestiary among the Scythians and the increasing complexity of the funerary rite of the Scythian elite. The predominance of finds in female burials indicates that this image was part of the circle of signs associated specifically with women’s high social status. The doubling of the body enhanced the image’s visual expressiveness and protective nature. More complex interpretations of the worldview are not supported by the sources and cannot be considered proven.
Bilsk hillfort (or gorodishche in Ukrainian) is the largest fortified settlement of the Early Iron Age in Eastern Europe. Long-term excavations made it possible to determine that it was a powerful industrial, political, religious, and trade center of the forest-steppe populations. Thanks to trade relations with the ancient cities of the Northern Black Sea region, wine in amphorae, ceremonial tableware, and glassware came to the settlement. The latter were mainly represented by beads of various shapes and ornaments. In this article, for the first time, 61 unique (or 135, taking similar ones into account) glass beads found during the excavations at the Bilsk hillfort are analyzed. To establish their chronology and the assortment of receipts in the different periods of the settlement’s existence, only beads from burials and various economic complexes with reliable dating were considered. It was established that glass beads reached the Bilsk settlement through Greek-mediated exchange networks from the last quarter of the 7th century BC. Their arrival continued continuously until the end of the 4th century BC, that is, during the entire Scythian period of the fortified settlement’s existence. The beads most likely reached Bilsk through exchange networks linking the settlement with the Greek cities of the Northern Black Sea region. Three overland routes may have been involved: the Olbian, Muravsky and Chersonesan routes. Evidence from Greek ceramics and other Mediterranean or Olbian imports suggests that the Olbian route was probably the dominant channel.
Depression, anxiety disorders and sleep disorders are becoming increasingly prevalent among college students. While psychotherapy and pharmacotherapy remain important interventions, their practical implementation in university settings may be constrained by factors including limited service accessibility, scheduling constraints, privacy concerns, stigma, and poor long-term adherence. As a low-threshold supportive intervention that can be readily integrated into campus environments, art healing offers a complementary approach to promoting college student mental health. This review includes 20 studies retrieved from the Web of Science and PubMed databases. These studies provide evidence for the mental health benefits of auditory art, visual art, and integrated art healing. The findings indicate that music-based interventions (the primary form of auditory art) have relatively robust supporting evidence for alleviating stress and anxiety; visual art and integrative art healing also yield measurable positive mental health outcomes. However, existing research is limited by heterogeneous intervention delivery protocols, small sample sizes, short follow-up periods, and substantial variation in methodological quality. Current evidence supports art healing as a complementary strategy for mental health promotion in higher education settings, rather than an alternative treatment modality. Future work should test standardized protocols in multi-site student samples. Long-term follow-up designs to further clarify its target populations, underlying mechanisms, and sustained efficacy.
This article discusses an unknown Scythian burial discovered by Serhiy Mazaraki near the village of Velyki Budky (Sumy Oblast, Ukraine) at the end of the 19th century and previously unknown to researchers. An assemblage of gold objects from this burial is identified, including a ring and seven plate appliqués depicting a scene in the Scythian “animal style,” dated to the second or third quarter of the 5th century BCE. The objects have numerous parallels, which help illuminate broader aspects of Scythian culture. The ring belongs to a small group of high-conical-shielded rings, likely crafted by Bosporan jewelers catering to a Scythian clientele; it is suggested that they were common in the northern Black Sea region throughout the 5th century BCE. The image of a curled-up predator on the gold appliqués corresponds, in both compositional and stylistic features, to the artistic tradition of the “animal style” of the 5th century BCE. Unique is the depiction of another image—the head of an antelope with a straight horn on the plaques. The assemblage of artifacts enables us to explore various aspects of the artistic traditions of the northern Black Sea region, the Kuban, the Cis-Urals, and even Western Asia.
In 1864, four French artists—Nathalie Micas, Rosa Bonheur, Isidore Bonheur, and Paul Chardin—gathered at Rosa Bonheur’s château in By-Thomery, a hamlet adjacent to the Fontainebleau forest. At the château’s main studio, the community members—connected through romance, blood, and friendship—crafted the Passy Cravat, or Parody of By’s Inhabitants, an experimental multi-media work in gouache, ink, and black pencil on canvas. In 1860, Rosa Bonheur, a celebrated animal painter, and Nathalie Micas, an amateur painter, engineer, and medical practitioner, moved to By from Paris with Micas’s mother and a menagerie of nonhuman animals used as pets and artist models. Red bands divide the Passy Cravat into rhombuses and triangles, each constituting a space on the estate, which the artists filled with irreverent caricatures of By’s human and nonhuman residents. This paper argues that the Passy Cravat, a work that has thus far been overlooked by art historians, is a prime example of nineteenth-century queer aesthetics because it constitutes a historically specific movement away from institutional classifications of genre and medium by a community that tinkered with the limitations of heteronormative life. The paper contends that queer aesthetics in the Passy Cravat are reliant upon the artists’ approaches to citizenship and human–animal relations. Ultimately, the Passy Cravat reveals By-Thomery to be a messy nexus of human autonomy and nonhuman subjugation bound to conceptions of belonging in the Second Empire (1852–1870).
This article examines the memory landscape of the Bieszczady Mountains and Bieszczady Foothills region in south-eastern Poland, based on an original concept of its structural organization and a comparative analysis of selected sites of memory located in Sanok, Zagórz, Lesko, Baligród, Cisna, and Solina. The aim of the study was to identify the role of individual sites of memory in shaping the regional memory landscape and to explore the relationships between its constituent elements. The research employed an interdisciplinary approach combining memory studies, cultural geography, cultural landscape studies, and conflict heritage research. Case-study analysis, field investigations, historical-interpretative research, and qualitative comparative assessment were applied. The analysis was conducted across five interrelated dimensions: memory types, functions of sites of memory, historical layers, memory narratives, and the significance of sites within the memory landscape structure. The results demonstrate that the regional memory landscape constitutes a multi-layered, polyphonic, and dynamic structure. National, local, traumatic, transnational, landscape-related, and absence-based memories coexist, forming a complex network of narratives and meanings. The findings confirm that the region can be interpreted as a palimpsestic borderland memory landscape in which successive historical and narrative layers do not replace one another but coexist and remain subject to continuous processes of reinterpretation.
The nineteenth century witnessed a significant transnational movement of European musicians and their pedagogical traditions across continents. Among the figures who contributed to this process, the Belgian flutist and composer Mathieu-André Reichert (1830–1880) occupies a distinctive position—trained in the Franco-Belgian tradition, he emigrated to Brazil, where he introduced the Boehm-system flute and produced pedagogical materials that continue to be used in flute education across a range of national traditions. This study examines Reichert’s method, 7 Exercices Journaliers pour la Flûte, Op. 5, from dual perspectives: a structural–pedagogical analysis of the seven exercises and a cultural–historical contextualization of the method’s transnational circulation. Designed as a qualitative research study, this work employed document analysis as the data collection tool and thematic analysis as the method for data analysis and interpretation. The B. Schott’s Söhne (Mainz) edition of the method was examined as the primary source; secondary data was obtained from articles, theses, books, and digital sources. Each exercise was examined in terms of structural characteristics—including meter, metronome speed, melodic patterns, and harmonic structure—and the technical demands and potential pedagogical applications associated with articulation, tongue–finger coordination, lip flexibility, and breath control. The findings reveal that the method possesses a distinctive structural organization that systematically cycles through all keys, employs a different melodic pattern in each exercise, and consistently embeds technical demands within harmonic and melodic contexts. Beyond its pedagogical content, the study traces the method’s cultural trajectory—from its composition in nineteenth-century Brazil through its adoption by French school luminaries, such as Marcel Moyse, Michel Debost, and Trevor Wye, to its current use in music education programs across diverse cultural contexts, including Türkiye. The convergence of structural–pedagogical and cultural–historical analysis suggests that the method’s continued relevance across diverse teaching traditions reflects not only its coherent structural design but also broader processes of cultural transfer, the mobility of musicians and their pedagogical ideas, and the formation of transnational pedagogical networks in instrumental music education.
This article explores the depiction of galloping horses in ancient art, focusing on a Greco-Bactrian gilt bronze finial known as the “Heavenly Horse.” By systematically classifying artistic gallop motifs—rearing gallop, flying gallop, landing gallop, and the anatomically accurate V-gallop—the study traces the evolution of equine imagery across Eurasia. Detailed analysis of the Heavenly Horse finial shows that its pose, musculature, and anatomical features closely correspond to the true suspension phase of a horse’s gallop, a finding supported by modern motion studies. High-resolution 3D scanning, surface diagnostics, and computational modeling indicate that the sculpture’s mass distribution was intentionally designed for dynamic balance and realism. The artifact’s stylistic features, such as the frontal forehead protuberance and S-shaped neck, align with descriptions of elite horse breeds in ancient Chinese and Central Asian sources. Symbolic motifs, including the vine-and-cloud scroll, further connect the object to broader Eurasian traditions of imperial and celestial symbolism. Comparative analysis with Saka and Chinese artifacts highlights both shared conventions and unique technical achievements. The study demonstrates how the Heavenly Horse finial integrates empirical observation, artistic tradition, and symbolic meaning, reflecting the exchange of ideas and technologies along the Silk Road.
Differing perspectives on the ephemerality of performance have led to debates since the 1980s regarding its ontology. Sondra Fraleigh and Peggy Phelan, for example, believe that performance's 'only life is in the present'. Others have disagreed. For example, Rebecca Schneider believes that performance remains in the body of the spectator in a complicated manner and Miranda Joseph, drawing on Marxist theory, argues that performance is in fact material because it produces social relations which have material effects: they affect our thinking and behaviour. In alignment with Joseph, this text begins with the presupposition that performance, and, specific to this text, the object we might call dance performance-the dance performance event and its particular contours, in other words, the performance event as an entity which emerges in the space-time where/when the onlooker and the work meet-is material because it is social. I discuss two dance performance objects, my work Martyro (2011) and J & eacute;r & ocirc;me Bel's (2005) Veronique Doisneau, as (im)material affective objects. I examine each work individually, providing first a thick description of each in order to communicate how they used affect to connect to their spectators and to critique the contexts of their presentation, the worlds in which the Subject in each of these performances worked. Drawing on understandings and theories of affect (from Deleuze and Guattari, Gilbert Simondon, and Brian Massumi to Lauren Berlant) and political economy (including David Harvey, Cedric Robinson, Jeremy Gilbert, Ashok Kumar, and Katerina Paramana), I then argue that both works used affect to remind their audiences, their witnesses, of the power of revealing one own's experience of 'suffering' as Subjects, whilst simultaneously critiquing the wider economies in which these works, these affective objects and their Subjects, are embedded. It is this production of affect, I suggest, that potentiated action for change, by affecting others' perspectives and behaviours.
The pipe organ, unlike many other instruments used in so-called classical music, is inextricably entwined with technology and contemporary improvements throughout its history. The craftsmanship of organ building is closely related to the evolution of organ music, as can be seen in musical literature. These two fields have always propelled each other. This article provides a view of the author's invention and its effect on music. The described project comprises two parts and closely links two supposedly distant fields. The first part is the instrument: a pipe organ equipped with a prototype mechatronic programmable key action. The other is the recording of the interpretations of existing baroque and contemporary literature and original improvisations, which constitutes research material and demonstrates the improved elements of artistic expression enabled by the enhanced capabilities of the prototype. Two methods of research were used: perceptual evaluation of the innovative means of expression and simplified FFT analysis of selected samples. Research results prove that automating the key action in the described manner leads to a significant expansion of the range of means of artistic expression achievable on the pipe organ.
The Singaporean government’s Green Plan 2030 aims to “galvanize a whole-of-nation movement and advance [its] national agenda on sustainable development,” transforming the Garden City into a City in Nature. The state’s #OneMillionTrees campaign, which intends to plant a million trees over a decade, seems less focused on climate adaptation, given Singapore’s unresolved environmental issues such as oil refinement, terraforming, and hyperconsumption. Instead, it appears to superficially address deeper socioenvironmental wounds inflicted on the postcolonial people and land. In this article, I explore the visual culture of Singapore’s ableist-nationalist greening campaigns alongside artworks such as Marvin Tang’s A Guide to Tree Planting and History of 39 Cuttings—Hybrids, and Woong Soak Teng’s Ways to Tie Trees and Rules for Photographing a Scoliotic Patient. I argue that Tang and Woong highlight adaptation issues in the face of eco-ableist sustainability in Singapore, challenging simplistic notions of climate adaptation by attending to vulnerable, sexed and gendered more-than-human bodies. The field of art history has an opportunity to probe ableist visions of ecological sustainability—within an emerging discourse between environmental justice and disability studies—by historicizing and interpreting such art, as it speaks to enduring, more-than-human impairment and climate adaptation.
In this experimental inquiry, I welcome readers into an unfolding undisciplined platform, expanding upon my earlier theorizing of philly soul musicking through insurgent listening to Archie Shepp’s Attica Blues in all of its radical, beautiful, and tragic public memory work of the 1971 Attica Uprising. Philly soul musicking gives regional texture to a transgenerational Black diasporic performance practice that serves to archive the complexity of Black lived experiences and articulate felt collective visions of liberated Black futures. Through these introductory comments, I improvise what I reckon to be essential to the secretive sonic histories of the album, giving shape to a fire music organizing praxis meant to call us into being-with the anticolonial worldmaking project that the men of Attica advanced with their hearts, minds, and bodies on the line. This prelude foreshadows a wider overall project speculating upon how Attica Blues and other related avenues of Black compositional practice attune us to assembling active solidarities with militants/rebels on the frontlines inventing rhythmic zones of autonomy, freedom, and liberation. I ask of the music’s fugitive archive, to draw on the words of James Baldwin, what are the contemporary use(s) of the Attica Blues?
