Search Results (878)

A number of foreign artists received the earliest commissions to represent Napoleon’s Russian Campaign of 1812 for Russian emperors. My paper is a case study of a German artist who served the Russian Imperial court. Peter von Hess trained at the Academy in Munich and served both King Ludwig I of Bavaria and Otto I of Greece. In 1839, Emperor Nicholas I commissioned the artist to complete 12 monumental canvases for the Winter Palace representing key battles that followed Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in 1812. While earlier battle paintings and portraits commissioned by Alexander I dealt only with elite officers and the emperor, Hess’s paintings elevated the common Russian as the bearers of a great sacrifice and as the true defenders of Russia. This representational shift is the product of changing ideas concerning Russia’s involvement in several alliances from 1803 to 1815 that included Austria, England, Sweden, and Prussia. In addition, over the course of Nicholas I’s reign, the concepts of “autocracy, orthodoxy, nationality” crept into representations of the Russian experience of the Napoleonic wars. Full article

This article is an introductory essay to the Special Issue “A Comparative Study of Media in Contemporary Visual Art”. It starts with a short overview of the terminological discussion about intermediality as a concept and its relationship with medialities with other prefixes—such as mixed, intra-, multi-, and transmedialities. So far, intermediality has been discussed less by art historians than by literary scholars. This introductory essay argues that critical analysis of intermediality in contemporary artworks may offer additional insights for investigation of the issues addressed in these artworks. The case studies in this Special Issue underscore this view. As a kind of kick-off, the second part of this essay includes a short case study that focuses on two artworks by the Lebanese artist Rabih Mroué in order to provide insight into how intermedial relations can act as metaphors for the sociopolitical relations addressed in his artworks. Applying philosopher Manuel DeLanda’s “assemblage theory”, philosopher Edward S. Casey’s concept of “absorptive mapping”, and anthropologist Tim Ingold’s view of living beings as consisting of a bundle of lines facilitates the highlighting of the sociopolitical aspects of intermediality in Mroué’s artworks. Full article

This article provides an overview of the recent flourishing of research and pedagogy in higher education that seeks a greater rapprochement between criticism and creativity, bringing together diverse media, disciplines, and modes of knowledge production and expression. It focuses on transformations in film and screen studies and on the ethical and aesthetic possibilities of conducting creative, intermedial research through filmmaking, drawing on the author’s recent, first-hand experiences of conducting such research through her making of two films about the African women filmmakers Judy Kibinge (from Kenya) and Bongiwe Selane (from South Africa). The author gives specific examples from her filmmaking process to show how she has attempted to unsettle the generic space between documentary filmmaking, curatorial practice, and video-essay making to engage in a collaborative research practice with Kibinge, Selane, and their communities, as well as her research teams. Grounding itself in a decolonial feminist framework, this article draws on the perspectives of a wide range of thinkers and filmmaker scholars to explore ways in which the colonial, patriarchal values that have haunted many academic institutions can be reformed to allow for the envisioning of new futures that will lead to a more self-reflexive, socially just higher education environment. Full article

Tacita Dean’s art relies on the perception of liminalities, of moving in-between, of one medium unfolding into another through dispersed, “molecular” sensations, either subverting or augmenting impressions of art forms perceived on the level of larger, structural wholes. Arguing against the wide-angle perspective employed by media studies approaches and for a close-up analysis of an “affective intermediality” in Tacita Dean’s art, the author looks at the landmark exhibitions at the National Gallery, the National Portrait Gallery, and the Royal Academy in London organised in 2018. The article singles out some of the individual works in the context of the exhibition as a work of art, and focuses on questions like the cross-media phenomenon of the “cinematic”, the affective performativity of the various dispositifs employed in her installations of celluloid films, the affordances of Dean’s signature aperture-gate masking technique, as well as the relation between narrative cinema experienced in a theatrical space and film as the medium of a visual artist. The essay concludes with a brief analysis of her gallery film, Antigone (2018), unravelling an allegorical journey through cosmic time and atmospheric landscapes, viewed as an ode to the “blind vision” of photochemical film and as a synthesis of key features of her intermediality conceived as a strategy for the re-sensitization of mediums by approaching one art from the point of view of another. Full article

The colonial visual archive has occupied in recent decades the work of scholars and artists from indigenous and racial minority communities, who revealed it as a major apparatus of historical meta-narratives. This article aims at pushing forward this preoccupation by revealing an additional scene: the art of Mizrahi women, descendants of Jewish communities of Arab and Muslim countries. Relying on a visual culture approach and focusing on an analysis of artworks by Mizrahi artist Vered Nissim, as well as on photographs of Mizrahi women, fund in Zionist archives, I demonstrate how Nissim’s work challenges the racial category of Mizrahi women as “natural workers”, constructed in the Zionist historical meta-narrative. Nissim does so by re-enacting the category’s paradigmatic visual image—the Mizrahi women cleaning worker—in a different way, visually and discursively. Body, voice, and visual image, three instances of the subjectivity of Mizrahi women cleaning workers that were separated, shaped, and mediated through Zionist colonial visual archives unite in Nissim’s work when embodied by a real Mizrahi woman cleaning worker: her mother, Esther Nissim. By casting her mother to play herself over the past twenty years, Nissim creates political conditions for the appearance of her mother as the author of her own history as she orally, bodily, and visually writes it in front of her daughter’s camera. Thus, Nissim joins a transnational phenomenon of global south artists who create political conditions enabling the self-imaging of colonized peoples, empowering the reading of colonial imagery and the historical meta-narratives attached to it through their situated knowledge and lived experience and, thus, constructing a counter history communicated visually. Full article

Glass is made from sand—a finite resource. Hence, there is a need to maintain glass in the industrial cycle as described in the Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s circular-economy diagram. This research project examines the reallocation of material resources in the form of waste glass fines from the industrial recycling process for soda-lime glass. According to the plant manager of Reiling Glasrecycling Danmark ApS, the fines are currently sold to be used for insulation. Although this process prolongs the lifespan of the fines before they become landfill waste, a closed-loop circular option would be preferable. In order to establish a closed-loop circular model for waste glass fines, this research investigates their material and aesthetic qualities and proposes a strategy for maintaining the fines in the closed loop cycle together with the soda-lime glass. The fines are manipulated through robotic deposition and formed into 3D geometries. To expand the aesthetic applications for the material, an investigation is conducted by combining 3D geometries with the traditional glassmaking techniques of glassblowing and casting. The research contributes knowledge of the materials’ technical qualities including printability, durability and workability of the 3D prints combined with cast or blown recycled container glass as well as with blown waste glass fines. Technical obstacles are revealed and alternative routes for further explorations are suggested. Finally, the performative and aesthetic qualities of the results are discussed, while artistic applications for recycled soda-lime glass fines remain to be explored in future research. Full article

This essay shares the various ways in which my socio-political context and health background has impacted my journey as an artist and culture worker through my work with the Aniccha Arts collaborative in the Twin Cities. I would like to share how my (un/re)learnings have materialized into different movement textures of togetherness over the years. I describe how I arrived at creating the current movement-based project, Prairie|Concrete, and the questions that I am asking as a path forward. Full article

This article focuses on the formation of identity as a stratified discourse between the singular and the collective, and how that exchange is expressed as a visual palimpsest by the artists Annette Cords, G Farrell Kellum, and Njideka Akunyili Crosby. Through their artworks, each artist explores their own identity formation, but also identity formation of those living amid the Postmodern condition of the Western world in the late stages of capitalism. All three artists explore how the collective is manifested in their singular identities by weaving in the personal, intimate, and everyday vernacular into their artworks while also including remnants of wider cultural influences. In the contemporary moment, the dynamic process of identity formation remains betwixt any sort of settled or concretized state. This unresolved status is also reflected in the conceptualization and construction of the artworks by Cords, Kellum, and Akunyili Crosby. The messy interplay between the singular and collective is presented in their artworks as unexpected juxtapositions of diverse information, images, materials, and mark-making. Full article

This essay, which reframes elements of my 2015 book, Daguerreotypes: Fugitive Subjects, Contemporary Objects, returns to the lacuna at the heart of Roland Barthes’s reflections on photo-graphy: the so-called “Winter Garden” photograph of his mother as a little girl. An image that is lovingly conjured but forever withheld, this photograph is the fulcrum of a theory of photography that emerged from the conjunction of mourning and desire. For Barthes, and all those working in his wake, the absent photograph is something of photography’s primal scene. With attention to the work of Eve Sussman and Simon Lee, their 2011 three-channel HD video Wintergarden and her 2018 NFT 89 Seconds Atomized in particular, this essay takes readers “back to the garden” to think about the time of early photography. To do so, this essay considers a range of contemporary videos that mine and mime the conventions of photography to produce static, durational encounters with stillness in a medium that is anything but, ultimately, revealing the truths and fictions of photography’s founding moment and fundamental logic. Full article

The Castillejo de Monteagudo, which has been well known since excavations began in 1924, is a palatial residence built on a promontory. However, the fact that it was part of an extensive agricultural estate, known as Ḥiṣn al-Faraj, which included dry-farming, orchards, gardens, woodland, hunting areas, and marshes, as well as important hydraulic infrastructures, has not been sufficiently emphasised to date. Archaeological research on the irrigated plain during 2018 and 2019 has brought to light part of the palatine area, which was organised around a large garden presided by a residential complex with a porticoed pavilion and a pool at the centre. All known buildings date to the reign of Emir Ibn Mardanīš (1147–1171), although the possibility that the estate was created earlier cannot be ruled out. It was destroyed twice by the Almohads (1165 and 1171) and reused by the Castilian King Alfonso X, perhaps after being restored by Ibn Hūd al-Mutawakkil (1228–1238). Full article

The main goal of this article is to summarize and present the most important facts concerning the use of the pink color in the built environment of the 20th and 21st centuries, considering its symbolic, functional, and decorative aspects, with particular emphasis on Western cultures. This monograph of color is aimed to contribute to a better understanding of the place and meaning of pink in the contemporary architectural space and to allow architects to use this color with greater awareness of its characteristic features. The results of the analysis of over 100 pink buildings and spaces, collected by the authors since 2016, are grouped into seven main thematic sections, which express different ways of applying pink in the built environment: as a traditional color, a stereotypic feminine and girlish color, a contrast color in public spaces, an extravagant color, a symbol of peace, hope, tolerance, and solidarity, a trendy color, and finally an “Instagramable” and fictional color. The main conclusion is that the pink color usage in contemporary architecture is very diverse and reflects the various associations and symbolisms of the color itself, which can only be understood in its socio-cultural contexts. Currently, two opposing tendencies are especially compelling—the first related to the kitschy and plastic aesthetic of “Barbie pink”, and the second associated with more neutral and universal “Millennial pink”. Full article

Knickers, big, small, plain, sensual, provocative, or practical, can be an unremarkable part of everyday life or an object of feminist protest. Women’s clothing, like the experience of womanhood itself, can often have multiple contradictory narratives. In this essay, the author discusses the history of women’s underwear and its links with socio-political revolution and feminist art. Against this contextual background, she discusses the development of the body of sculptures entitled Let’s Hook Up, a series of life-size, paper-thin drawings of lingerie in pâte de verre glass. The author details the artistic processes involved in making the works as well as the conceptual development and exploration of material and meaning. She demonstrates how artwork can act as a gateway to begin conversations about challenging topics like sexual assault whilst also providing a platform for creative expression and connection. Full article

The present article examines Anglo–Soviet architectural relations during the Second World War, the peculiarities of the perception of foreign experience, and the mutual professional interests. This paper aims to find evidence of multilateral and immensely diverse contacts and examine the reasons for and routes of such collaborations and the actors and institutions involved in the processes. This research attempts to construct new criteria for evaluating professional architectural relationships in the context of ideological and non-ideological obstacles. For this reason, this paper draws data from a wide range of sources, including the State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF) and the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art (RGALI), the Schusev State Museum of Architecture (GNIMA), and research from the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) Berthold Lubetkin and Erno Goldfinger archives. Full article

Photography evidences presence, but what does it present? This article explores the notion of magic in photography through Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of ‘haecceity’, Jacques Derrida’s logic of the ‘supplement’ and Jean-François Lyotard’s ‘inhuman’. The sections ‘The Zone of Photography’, ‘Ghosts in/of the Machine’, ‘The Crypt and Encryption’, ‘Affect-Event-Haecceity’ and ‘Magic, Consumerism, Desire’ consider how photography provides a ‘zone’ that encrypts the desires of its photographer and viewer. A photograph, in its various forms and appearances, from scientific instrument to personal documentation, bears our need and desire to be affected. The photographic zone can connect with the anxiety, fear, grief, and ha ppiness that are latent within the irrationality of its viewer. The photography is never past as it continually unfolds into, and is entangled with, the fabric of the present. Through consideration of photography we will consider how magic does not happen to people but people happen to magic. We desire magic to appear. Full article