Abstract: Over the past decade much discussion has, by necessity due to the positioning of creative writing practice within academia, focused on strategising the creative arts product – e.g. the poem or short story – into the paradigm of research value as non-traditional research output. Meanwhile, the form of the journal article – in all its monolithic history – has also undergone shifts and challenges, the fictocritical mode arguably making the most incisive impact. Nevertheless, the science-rhetoric form of the scholarly paper is still taken as granted (even as hallowed). But as the packaging of knowledge undergoes a technological transition in the 21st century, is the radical journal article already in the making? And is creative writing the discipline in the box seat for exploring and exploiting new, flexible and dynamic knowledge forms? This paper aims to invigorate discussion around the possibilities of how a scholarly paper could and should one day be written and read.

Abstract: Post-revolutionary Iranian cinema has been praised for its emotional immediacy and compositional simplicity. The work of Asghar Farhadi stands as an exception to this canon. His films focus on domestic conflicts and cultural contradictions in urban life and are marked by emotional complexity and intricate narrative structures. Focusing on these characteristics, critics have stressed his proximity to mainstream American cinema. The article analyses this proximity by discussing the thematic parallels that Farhadi's work enjoys with classical Hollywood films, as conceptualised by philosopher Stanley Cavell. The article explores the limit of this approach by connecting Farhadi's films to pre-revolutionary Iranian cinema, a body of work that, despite the little attention it has received, can nonetheless provide significant insights into Farhadi's oeuvre to date, whilst bringing to the fore the heterogeneous tradition of Iranian cinema.

Abstract: The award-winning Johan Vilde comic series deals with what has been referred to as a concealed part of Swedish history – namely Sweden’s involvement in the slave trade during the seventeenth centur ...

Abstract: This article proposes the term ‘site-situational’ art or performance as a meaningful shift beyond ‘site-specificity’ and as a way to develop forward-moving and relational understandings of place. While place falls prey to Western, modernist stereotypes of closed, territorial geographic systems, site-situational readings, radical forms of ‘recognition’ and ambulatory hermeneutics enable an understanding of place as a wandering signifier, a trickster figure, and an in-the-moment conversation between environments and living beings. Through an analysis of the 2009 Infecting the City performing arts festival in South Africa, the article links site-situational performance to situational understandings of identification in the context of migration and xenophobia. It connects the participatory creative resistance aspired to by the Situationists that transforms situations rather than just recognises them, to the potential mutuality that can be experienced when one recognises oneself in the face of a ‘forei...

Abstract: Writing has long played an important role in the progression of architecture and the built environment. Histories of architecture are written, manifestoes that form the basis for a designer’s work are written and most importantly, the built environment advances itself through the act of critical writing. Not unlike the visual arts, literature and poetry, the tradition of written criticism has been crucial to the progression of architecture and its allied professions (Franz 2003). This article contributes to architecture and the built environment through the act of a written essay that critiques the problem of bodily diversity to architecture. In particular, the article explores the implications of body-space politics and abstracted body thinking on diverse bodies and their spatial justice. Using Soja’s Spatial Justice theory (2008), we seek to point out the underlying conceptions and power differentials assigned to different bodies spatially and how this leads to spatial injustices and contested spaces. The article also critically analyses the historical emergence of ‘the standardised body’ in architecture and its application in design theory and practice , and looks at how bodies often found on the outside of architecture highlight how such thinking creates in justices. Different theories are drawn on to help point to how design through the use of the upright, forward facing, male bod willingly and unwillingly denies access to resources and spatialities of everyday life. We also suggest ways to re-conceptualise the body in design practice and teaching.

Abstract: The practice of Thai artist Rirkrit Tiravanija is perhaps the best-known exemplar of relational aesthetics, a distinction first made by Nicholas Bourriaud and affirmed in the writings of many subsequent art critics; but the critical focus on the interactive aspect of his works has tended to rely on utopian modes of community engagement, which ignore Tiravanija's strategic deployment of relational, interactive structures to implicate the viewer, publicly, in problematic political positions. Tiravanija commonly uses appropriation in his artworks as a way of exposing viewer's biases and this paper focuses specifically on his use of appropriated text to explore divided subjectivities in a globalised world. In Tiravanija's work with text, his longstanding engagement with appropriation is made plain, not only because found language has for so long served as a cornerstone of his practice, but also because the way he uses appropriated language underscores the broader political operations of his work that ...

Abstract: Social networking sites are now reportedly flooded with millions of selfies, the purportedly narcissistic tendency to reproduce with webcams and smartphones self-images intended for widespread onli...

Abstract: The Indian Evidence Act of 1872 defined a fact according to interior as well as exterior experience, which – from then through to the present – has made the identity of self and nation difficult to prove in India. From a 1912 trial for a ‘princely impostor’ to two for sedition in 1908 and 2016, and from colonial histories to those of contemporary politics, this article weaves together the media constructions of journalists and politicians with recent works by contemporary artists Zuleikha Chaudhari, Dayanita Singh, Sudarshan Shetty and Rina Banerjee. These figures mine archives to turn five types of evidence central to identity formation into the materials of their art: the body, speech, paper, architecture and objects. Thus, in spite of the state’s attempt to pin down identity with evidence, the author tracks how such evidence is as fluid now as it was in the past, from exterior juridical facts to those of interior concern.

Abstract: This article aims to conceptualise the Gezi revolt as an eventual intervention into history. Based on the participatory observation of the author as well as primary and secondary sources, it addresses the Gezi revolt from a Deleuzean perspective. Firstly, it briefly discusses the chain of events that triggered Gezi. It then turns to the relation between the virtual and the actual. In this respect, Gezi as a revolutionary event is approached via the concept of kairos, establishing a link between the actual conditions and the virtual possibilities. Finally, the article explores the alternative political possibilities of Gezi as a revolutionary process.

Abstract: Emily Jacir’s Material for a Film (2005 – ongoing), an installation about the Palestinian intellectual Wael Zuaiter, was criticised by The New York Times art critic Ken Johnson for demonstrating politically correct sentiments but lacking aesthetic originality. Through an analysis of this and other artworks by Jacir, this article aims to account for the significance of the artist’s work by looking beyond art theory and towards questions of ideology. The paradox of performing critical memory through archival work is addressed in terms of the contradictions of publicity within what Jodi Dean refers to as communicative capitalism. Whereas scholar Susan Buck-Morss calls for ethical witnessing in the context of a global public sphere, the author proposes that leftist solidarity requires the avoidance of ideologies that emerge unwittingly from social constructionism and discourse theory.

Abstract: With over four hundred produced between 1969 and 1998, the thriller was the most popular fictional form of representing the Northern Ireland Troubles. Critics, however, were highly dismissive of the genre, claiming it offered little more than clichés and stereotypes, and that it marked the enthronement and reiteration of a problematically reductive take on the conflict. The Belfast Agreement (1998) signalled the official end of the Troubles and the beginning of what many hoped would be a new era in Northern Irish history. The decades since the Agreement era have witnessed a remarkable resurgence of interest, both critically and creatively, in crime fiction, and in the ways in which the hermeneutic codes of the genre might be brought to bear on the various legacies of the Troubles. For a new generation of Northern Irish crime writers, academic critics and literary novelists the possibilities and limitations of genre fiction have provided an arena in which key issues might be theorised and thought through; these include the challenge of dealing with the past, questions about truth recovery and transitional justice, and the need within the region to achieve some form of closure on the traumatic events of recent years. Far from continuing a process of ideological reductionism, post-Agreement crime fiction has exemplary value. Drawing inspiration from the police procedural, the comic thriller and the noir-ish Weltanschauung of hardboiled detective fiction, it contains a series of idiosyncratic and sophisticated responses to the aftermath of political conflict.

Abstract: This article is concerned with narratives of ethno-religious conflict depicted in a genre I term ‘conflict cinema’. The two films under discussion, ’71 and Paradise Now, are largely set, respectively, in the cities of Belfast in Northern Ireland and Nablus in Palestine and represent the divisions and violent tension between enemy factions there. The intersection of the landscape of the conflicts and the bodies of the male protagonists who must negotiate them emphasizes the centrality of physically being ‘in place’ or ‘out of place’ to ‘conflict cinema’. The soldier/colonizer Gary Hook in ’71 and the freedom fighters/terrorists Said and Khaled in Paradise Now travel through the enduring battlegrounds of their divided and politically unstable societies. Against the backdrop of ethno-religious conflict, both films focus on the ideal militant body that must be a machine or an automaton. I argue that through the screenwriters’ and filmmakers’ depiction of these bodies’ negotiations of conflict space, or in other words, the interface between the body and the unstable, urban conflict zone, ‘conflict cinema’ upsets overdetermined notions of the male militant body, thus manifesting the paradox of the dehumanised body that is also innately human.

Abstract: This article interrogates the active audience happening at the Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ interactive sweet pile work in Seoul, South Korea in 2012. In the happening, audience members aggressively responded to the installation, and right after the gallery asked the audience to return the sweets; this process was discussed widely through social media. The happening can also be read as a single snapshot of how the new active audience, transformed by social media, has arrived in the contemporary artworld. Examining the audience’s ethics, claimed by Bourriaud and Kwon’s argument for the public that Gonzalez-Torres hoped to embrace, the authors argue that the new active audience in this social media era reacts and reinvents to/within interactive and participatory work, by re-interpreting and re-contextualising the artwork similarly to the way game players do in their game play. As a central link of the value creation process in the art experience, this audience adds new meanings, values and experiences to ...

Abstract: At dOCUMENTA 13 The Pixelated Revolution by Rabih Mroue (2012) and the Alter Bahnhof Video Walk by Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller (2012) were shown, both of which explore processes and risks of mediation through video cameras. Mroue’s work provides an analysis of amateur videos of the Syrian war in which the camera operator films a sharpshooter and continues filming until the sharpshooter shoots; what motivates the camera operator to keep on filming in the face of life-threatening danger? Cardiff and Bures Miller allow the audience to experience the alienating effect of conflating virtual and actual reality, by leading the participant through Kassel's Alter Bahnhof with an iPod video walk. This article explores the mechanisms at play within and the interaction between these two artworks, using Bolter and Grusin's hypermediacy, immediacy and remediation as well as Baudrillard's hyperreality.

Abstract: This article moves toward a materialist photography in response to a recent photographic exhibition by Giles Duley. Duley's work is made under the auspices of a ‘humanitarian project’, a notion problematised by its display in the context of the art gallery, and by the photograph as the final product in a process that is also the property of the photographer. I use this work as a starting point for moving photographic discourse beyond consideration of the final image and author to explore the materiality of the photographic apparatus and its event. Key to this task is the work of Ariella Azoulay (2015) and Judith Butler (2010) who have approached photography as, respectively, an event and as extended materiality. It also borrows on some definitions of matter and materiality from Karen Barad (2012). Barad moves the question of materiality into a field of political interaction, taking account of all participatory elements.

Abstract: The metaphor of transition has produced one of the most powerful images that captured the global historical momentum of the late twentieth century. Even though its teleological implications have been critiqued, we still live in the shadow of transition, or rather its incipient failures, as the global media represent countries that embarked on processes of transformation as relapsing and returning to primordial states. This article inquiries into the ways in which artists from two global peripheries – William Kentridge (South Africa) and Dmitry Gutov (Russia) – resist these homogenising discourses by critically engaging with failures of the transitions. A comparative reading of the artists' works from the past decade suggests that they develop a poetics which, drawing on the legacies of absurdism, treats failure as productive opportunity. Approaching the problems of transformation by remembering earlier revolutionary projects and inquiring into their politics of time, these works unravel creative p...

Abstract: This article investigates how Kerry James Marshall's polymorphous and art historically conscious practice can be positioned within the discourse on blackness in contemporary art. It examines how his work, which is steeped in black history and black popular culture, embraces blackness as a signifier of difference to critically address the marginalisation of blacks in the visual sphere. The sidelining of black artists, especially in large museum collections, has been the norm and a manifestation of the absence of black art and artists from the Western canon of art. Only within the last two decades have art historians, in an interdisciplinary effort with other scholars, drawn attention to this deficit through such anti-Eurocentric investigations as Postcolonialism or Afro-Modernism. Kerry James Marshall's artistic activism has successfully contributed its part by insisting that an identity-based, specifically black aesthetic be made visible and brought into the fold of the grand narrative of art.

Abstract: Henri Matisse and Hilda Rix left Paris in early February 1912 for the Moroccan city of Tangier. They stayed in the Grand Hotel Villa de France for most of February and March. Matisse visited again in October of that year while Rix returned in 1914 accompanied by her sister. Rix's painting style took a new turn, developing a post-impressionist style in oils that incorporated abstraction, a primary palette and a flattened picture plain. Both artists executed portraits, working with the same models, in an unused room provided by the owner of the hotel, that became a temporary studio space. Matisse complained that his radical compositions met with derision from the hotel's guests. Their art and letters produced in Tangier reveal the challenges they experienced in finding models and painting in public and in private. They were both representatives of European colonising cultures and committed advocates of modernism and of Morocco. Rix adopted a counter-orientalist position in lectures and articles upon...

Abstract: In 1995 Moustapha Dime began creating a novel series of sculptural installations around the theme of ‘The Dance’. Instead of being exclusively hand-carved as were his works from the 1980s, ...

Abstract: This paper examines two novels, both published in 2004 and later translated into English: 2666 by Chilean writer Roberto Bolano and Senselessness by Honduran-Salvadoran writer Horacio Castellanos Moya. Both novels approach death and dying as a global concern and place readers in the global North at the centre of events that happened, or are happening, in the South. This paper argues that both novels express the human potential in desire for, and to create, excess, universalising guilt against a tendency to contextualise or localise events of mass murder in Central and South America. Both 2666 and Senselessness represent death and dying while expressing an uncanny excess of life at the level of form and content. Reading them, we are bombarded with the details of crimes and harrowing witness testimonies, but neither novel results in closure or allows us to mourn the dead. Instead, the excess of life traces a void that, according to French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan and others, is at the centre of the subject of desire. It is at the level of desire that we can locate ourselves in both novels and understand our part in the events of mass murder they narrate.

Abstract: Chinese art historical writings from as early as the medieval period present descriptions of the practice of artists who worked in manners similar to those of contemporary performance artists. Such early works are, however, only accounted for in the form of written texts. Similarly, certain performance works by Chinese artists of the 1980s and 1990s are often preserved only in documentary photographs or textual (or even oral) accounts. In both cases, the genre of performance art, a form of artistic creation composed of undeniable visuality, spatiality and duration, is instantiated by frozen stills and written texts that have a limited degree of temporality and materiality. Scrutinising the ambivalent relationship between the absence of visual coordinates and the presence of textual narratives, this article will question the (im)possibility of achieving an exact reconstruction of such performance works, and thus explore the possibility of textual archeology in the discipline of art history.