Articles

Uncle Sam points an accusatory finger directly at the viewer, his expression stern and uncompromising. Behind him, the Statue of Liberty appears damaged, her torch dimmed, and surrounded by text reading ‘Protect Her’ and ‘Restore America’. Another post lists crimes attributed to undocumented migrants alongside the slogan ‘Report Foreign Invaders’.[1] Uncle Sam’s pointing finger does not invite. It demands. The damaged Liberty does not welcome but calls for protection. Nothing

In recent years, many Queer and / or Indigenous, Black, and other racialized artists, writers, and scholars have exposed the relationship between colonialism, climate change, and environmental issues around the world. These discourses point to the need for highlighting and resisting the colonial undertones and structures embedded in climate change policy or future environmental planning. Some artists have even stepped outside of conventional ways of thinking through climate c

Introduction   It is easy to overlook the endurance of British imperial structures in its former colonies, particularly in the legal and moral frameworks that govern gender and sexuality. Despite the formal end of the British Empire in the twentieth century, colonial legislation that criminalises same-sex relationships and / or gender variance continues to serve as the legal foundation for the persecution of LGBTQ+[1] people throughout the former colonies and prolongs their m

In a 1967 interview, Marcel Duchamp, one of the key figures of the early twentieth-century avant-garde and an artist who drew extensively on contemporary science, declared that ‘the public always needs a banner; whether it be Picasso, Einstein, or some other’.[1] In naming these individuals, Duchamp was responding to the emergence during the 1940s-60s of the popular perception of Picasso and Einstein as the archetypal modern artist and scientist of the twentieth century. Pica

Introduction   Western thought can be pervasive. It has spread from Europe outwards, often to the detriment of other ways of knowing, supplanting preexisting bases. Some post-colonial authors have explored these cultural encounters and clashes through literature and critical theory. In his Globalectics , Ngũgĩ explored how, in the period prior to the colonial encounter, autochthonous thought and knowledge existed and thrived.[1] This is in contradiction to the dominant Wester

Both art and science have been cornerstones of western society for millennia, yet their synthesis—artistic research—has yet to achieve widespread acceptance in European […] academies. Samuel Penderbayne[1]   Artistic Research   Artistic research has many faces. [2]  For some it is research ‘about’ art (art as research object : art history [3]  as well as artists’ self-exploration into their own body of work). [4]  For others it is research ‘for’ art (art as research objective

Introduction   Recent scholarship on early photography examines the photograph as primary source material in order to identify and explore ‘veins of influence’ that operate on, through, and from it. The ‘veins of influence’ analysis developed in that research brings us, whether as professional creatives, academics, or other participants, into dialogue with the photograph. Through such engagement, we become active participants in and agents of influence, shaping how these earl

Sarah Dunant is a novelist, broadcaster, and cultural critic whose work blurs the line between historical inquiry and literary imagination. Best known for her fiction set in Renaissance Italy, she gives voice to women whose lives have been obscured by time, deftly merging narrative and historicism. Rendering the past not as backdrop but as pulse, Dunant allows history to unfold with the texture of lived experience. Her acclaimed novels, The Birth of Venus , In the Company of

Art has been part of our being for millions of years—possibly even before the beginning of our genus Homo—without being understood as what we now call art. From the beginning, it was simply another way of knowing, probably our first, of coping with what confronted us in our environment as a necessary way of surviving in it and sharing that knowledge with others. It sprang from an emotional reaction to what existed outside of us and how we translated that feeling to pass it on

Abstract   The authors, faculty members at Northeastern University and Boston University, highlight the shifting values and priorities of...

Blue and white, occasionally with touches of yellow, ceramic tiles adorn not simply the façades and interiors of countless Portuguese buildings, but also the design imaginary of the nation. Spanning abstract and geometric patterns to illustrative figurations in engrossing detail, azulejos tiles are a firm fixture of Portuguese design. Their distinctive palette misleads many into locating the etymology of azulejos in azul , the Portuguese word for blue, which tidily frames the

‘I am staying unsettled and trying not to talk for three years’, the painter Agnes Martin wrote to a friend in the late 1960s, adding, ‘I...

Convince an enemy, convince him that he’s wrong Is to win a bloodless battle where victory is long A simple act of faith, in reason over...

Carved into the stone of the ancient temple of Apollo at Delphi was the injunction to ‘know thyself’. Without such knowledge we are tossed this way and that by forces we neither suspect nor understand. Knowing ourselves helps explain our predicament; and doing so is greatly aided by understanding an aspect of the way in which the brain constructs the world.   I believe we have adopted a limited vision of a very particular type, and precisely because it is limited we cannot se

Soheila Sokhanvari is a British-Iranian artist whose diverse practice delves into the complexities of identity, politics, and social...

When is an artwork finished?   Ann Landi, a contributing Editor of ARTnews , wrote an article that explored the question of when an...

Jay Abdo is a Syrian actor and human rights activist, who has featured in various films and television shows in the Middle East and...

Shona Illingworth is a Danish-Scottish artist and Professor of Art, Film and Media at the University of Kent, UK. Her work examines the impact of accelerating military, industrial, and environmental transformations of airspace and outer space and the implications for human rights. She is co-founder with Nick Grief of the Airspace Tribunal ( https://airspacetribunal.org/ ). Recent solo exhibitions include Topologies of Air at Les Abattoirs, Musée—Frac Occitanie, Toulouse (2022

Edmund Clark uses photography, film, found imagery, and text to explore links between representation and politics. Clark’s work has been exhibited internationally at the Imperial War Museum, London, International Center of Photography Museum, New York, Zephyr, Reiss-Engelhorn-Museen, Mannheim, Huis Marseille Museum, Amsterdam, Houston Center for Photography, Texas, Saatchi Gallery, London, and Imperial War Museum North, Manchester. His work has been acquired for national and

Peter Krausz was born in Romania in 1946. He studied mural painting from 1964 to 1969 at the Bucharest Institute of Fine Arts. Since 1970, he has made Montreal his home. His diverse artistic production includes painting, drawing, installation, and photography. From 1980 to 1990, he was the curator of the Saidye Bronfman Centre Art Gallery and a teacher at Concordia University. In 1991, he joined the faculty at the University of Montreal where he is now a tenured Professor of

In January 2018, veteran actress Caroline Lagerfelt stepped into the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City. She was there to see ‘Ode to the Sea’, an exhibition of artwork by detainees at Guantanamo Bay, which at that point had been open for 16 years, with no end in sight.   Lagerfelt had known about the atrocities committed at Guantanamo for some time. In fact, she had played British human rights lawyer Gareth Peirce in a play about Guantanamo 14 years earlie

KV Duong was born in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, in 1980. He emigrated to Toronto, Canada with his family in 1987 and moved to London, UK on his own in 2010. His art practice spans painting, sculpture, installation, and live performance. In 2022, KV had a solo exhibition titled ‘Too Foreign for Home, Too Foreign for Here’ at the Migration Museum in London, followed by ‘No Place Like Home’ at the Museum of the Home in 2023, a group exhibition of eight artists from the Vietnames

Over his career, Kevin Macdonald has directed a plethora of documentaries and films which have garnered critical acclaim and popular success. Not one to shy away from sensitive and complex subject matter, Kevin’s work depicts unsanitised, thought-provoking stories, from a documentary on antisemitism to a film on a prisoner in Guantanamo. For the former, Kevin was awarded an Academy Award for Best Documentary feature. His latest film, The Mauritanian , explores the real story

Tschabalala Self (b. 1990 Harlem, USA) lives and works in Hudson Valley, New York. Tschabalala is an artist and builds a singular style from the syncretic use of both painting and printmaking to explore ideas about the black body. She constructs depictions of predominantly female bodies using a combination of sewn, printed, and painted materials, traversing different artistic and craft traditions. The formal and conceptual aspects of Self's work seek to expand her critical in