Domesticated Wilderness: On the Poetics of Impact in Avner Pinchover's Works

This chapter discusses practices of Institutional Critique in contemporary German theatre by showing how the feminist concept of glitch is used as an aesthetic strategy. For this purpose, two examples will be the focus of comparative analysis: Swoosh Lieu's theatre movie A Room of Our Own (Mousonturm Frankfurt am Main 2021) and Anta Helena Recke's second solo production Die Kränkungen der Menschheit (Münchner Kammerspiele 2019). The aim is to highlight how both productions glitch the institution of theatre and disrupt as well as breach the affective arrangement of the institution. The starting point of the analysis is the assumption that the institution of theatre is a historically developed, patriarchally structured organisation shaped by colonial ways of thinking, and is characterised by a phenomenology of whiteness. As such, theatre produces affective attachments for subjects and thereby deploys a dynamic of belonging in which some subjects feel more comfortable than others. Negating this order of belonging, both productions call for a reinvention of the institution of theatre.

Revealing Revelation: Hans Haacke’s “All Connected”

An unusual violent clash between religious, Christian and Muslim demonstrators and the Haifa Museum of Art took place on Thursday, January 9, 2019. The protesters amassed the entrance of the museum to express their distress against the exhibition Shop It! A handheld firebomb thrown towards the museum was but the first round for the violent reactions of the next several days. These included attacking police forces and attempts to break into the museum featuring works of art considered sacrilegious by the demonstrators. The protest developed into a multi-participant debate in the art scene, involving ordinary citizens, artists and art curators, local church leaders, the city mayor, the minister of culture and other politicians, civil rights organizations and the court, as each part sought to exercise civic, moral, ethical or practical authority to censor the position or the work of the other. The article seeks to analyze the different ways in which mechanisms of regularization, supervision and punishment, which have always been part of the world of art, are used not only by those perceived as apparatuses of the state or as ideological mechanisms of abstract political or institutional entity, but as standard practices in the discourse of creating, trading, curating and presenting art – a discourse which, in the Israeli-Palestinian context, is imbued with the notion of national conflict.

Cutting Edge of the Contemporary: KNUST, Accra, and the Ghanaian Contemporary Art Movement

This chapter offers a sustained investigation of the contemporary Delhi‐based artist Vivan Sundaram's site‐specific work of 1997, titledHistory Project, which was commissioned in part to mark the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of Indian independence. The project, a multisensory installation inside the vast domed space of the Victoria Memorial Museum in Calcutta, a grand monument from the colonial era, presented a far‐reaching examination of several key categories inaugurated by the site: “memorial,” “history,” “museum,” and “memory.” The chapter considers Sundaram's intervention in relation to the aesthetic strategy known as “institutional critique,” and through the theoretical insights of discussions within Indian historiography, and subaltern studies in particular. It further asks: What is the role of contemporary art in relation to the legacy of museums in South Asia? And how can “history” or the “past” find regeneration through the strategies deployed by a visual arts practice?

“Global”: A View from the Margin

Abstract: Originating in the context of the Civil Rights Movements and political activities addressing issues of race, gender and sexuality, the Women’s Liberation movement and the Chicano Movement became departures for two significant counter art movements in Los Angeles in the 1970s. This article explores some of the various reasons why Anglo American feminist artists and Chicana artists were not able to fully collaborate in the 1970s, provides some possible explanations for their separation, and argues that the Eurocentric imperative in visual fine art was challenged already in the 1970s by Chicana/o artists in Los Angeles. In so doing, the art activism by Anglo American feminists and Chicanas/os is comparatively investigated with Los Angeles as the spatial framework and the 1970s as the time frame. Four main components are discussed: their respective political aims, alternative art spaces, pedagogical frameworks and aesthetic strategies. The study found that the art activisms by Anglo American feminists and Chicanas/os differed. These findings suggest that a task ahead is to open up a dialogue with Chicana/o activist art, making space for more diverse representations of activities and political issues, both on the mainstream art scene and in the history of art.

Text Matters, Volume 6, Number 6, 2016 DOI: 10.1515/texmat-2016-0001Agnieszka Soltysik MonnetUniversity of Lausanne, SwitzerlandOnce considered escapist or closely linked to fantasy, the Gothic genre (or mode, as scholars increasingly call it) has recently begun to be explored for its material concerns and engagement with real-world matters. This issue of Text Matters features essays that develop this line of inquiry, focusing on how the Gothic attempts to matter in concrete and critical ways, and mapping its rhetorical and aesthetic strategies of intervention and narration, affect and inuence. The pun in the title of this volumeGothic Mattersis intended to acknowledge both the material concerns of the Gothic as agenre and the continuing relevance and value of the cultural work performed by the Gothic, i.e. why it matters.The Gothic is the brainchild of the eighteenth century, an eminently modern aesthetic mode, obsessed with the cultural changes that were re-mapping Europe and North America. Born in the wake of the rst global warthe Seven Years War (also known as the French and Indian War) the Gothic quickly became associated with violent and sensational plots, an aesthetics of emotional extremes, graphic depictions of bodily injury, and nally, revolution itself. De Sade famously linked the Gothic to the political violence of the era when he suggested that Gothic novels were the necessary fruits of the revolutionary tremors felt by the whole of Europe. More recent observers and scholars of the Gothic have noted its inherently political and reformist bent, often tackling controversial social issues such as the social control of women, aristocratic privilege and class power relations, as well as traditional institutions including the church, the prison and the family (cf. Ledoux). The body was inevitably at the center of these explorations: its pain, discipline and control at the heart of the Gothics critical concerns.If revolutionary politics were the most obvious cultural context for some observers, the larger tectonic shifts in epistemology and moral judgment were also at stake. Changes in science, in political philosophy, and cultural values all impacted the Gothic, bringing with them afascination with cultural relativism, the complexities of social justice, and anew self-awareness about history. The Gothic staged and interrogated these questions with its narratives of cultural otherness, excessive revenge, and repressed or Gothic Matters: IntroductionAgnieszka Soltysik Monnet buried crimes that reverberated throughout family lines and local legends. Inherently sceptical of the Enlightenment values that nevertheless underpin its critiques of traditional institutions, the Gothic interested itself in alternative epistemologies such as folk culture, family legends, and rumors. Agenre of the forgotten, unspoken and buried, the Gothic gave voice to characters that normally had no voice or weight in society. Although often subversive, the Gothic was not inherently or inevitably so, and more conservative or even paranoid and reactionary formations exist, most notably what critics recently have come to call the Imperial Gothic, which uses the rhetoric of monstrosity to depict racial and colonial others.Nevertheless, the most interesting cultural work of the Gothic is linked to its creative explorations of the non-normative aspects of human life, such as the body in its queer, raced, gendered and physical materiality. It is no coincidence that many of the following essays focus specically on the body and its subversive materiality. The volume opens with two essays that take up the issue of the body specically within the context of the French Revolution. The rst, by Agnieszka owczanin, examines representations of female bodies in Matthew Lewiss The Monk and argues that they serve as interventions in the debates around revolutionary violence taking place in England at the time. …

Playing on a fusion between the aesthetic strategies of the documentary as a genre and the discursive features of the fiction, Il ritorno di Cagliostro (Cipri and Maresco: 2003) should be classified within that filmic category called mockumentary. The following essay will analyse first how the techniques used put the spectator in a continuous oscillation between the feeling of witnessing real-life situations and the suspicion of fiction. The alternation of the two systems, around which the film is structured, thus dynamically characterizes the communication pact. Secondly, we will examine Forgotten Silver by Peter Jackson which is the foreign model that acts behind Cipri and Maresco’s formal choices, highlighting how the most significant difference can be traced on a thematic level. Subject, setting and plot, they all contribute – often in the forms of the grotesque – to a lucid and radical critique of Italian political and religious institutions. Finally, the study thus conducted will allow us to recognise Il ritorno di Cagliostro as an attempt to respond to today's need of the cinema for a return to reality.

This study examines TakeMoreCare, an artist-led feedback platform in Germany’s freelance performing arts scene. Using constructivist grounded theory, it analyses TMC’s role in addressing gaps in post-educational support, economic barriers, and fragmented feedback structures. Situating TMC within broader discussions on artistic discourse, institutional critique, and digital labour, the study explores how artists navigate self-education, peer exchange, and knowledge production. It also examines the impact of digital tools, engaging with contemporary critiques of digital privatisation and reflections on institutional entrapment. The research was presented as a lecture performance, exploring how knowledge is communicated and embodied. This format reinforced the study’s themes of discursivity and digital entanglement while serving as a performative inquiry into how institutional and digital frameworks influence artistic thought and practice. Findings are primarily descriptive, outlining the structure and function of TMC, while also exploratory in investigating how digitality, self-organisation, and collective discourse creation intersect. The study ultimately positions TMC as a rehearsal ground for agency, offering insights into how artists can intervene in and reshape the discursive conditions of their practice beyond institutional confines.

This special issue of EJHR results from the proceedings of an exploratory workshop that took place in September 2013 at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies (NIAS) titled “Humorous Approaches to Art and Activism in Conflict”.[i] While not all contributors to the workshop are part of this issue, and not all contributors to this issue were part of the workshop, the exploratory gathering of scholars, artists, and activists served as a point of departure for an ongoing research project, the initial findings of which are presented in this volume. Interestingly, none of the contributors would strictly classify themselves as “humour researchers”, and the disciplinary divergences between the essays certainly do not end there. Yet it seemed fitting to position these varying interpretations of humour in relation to art and activism, particularly in sites of conflict, in a journal dedicated to the study of a field that already boasts of several decades of research. The issue addresses the intersection of art and activism by investigating humorous interventions in socio-political conflict situations. Most research related to the arts in conflict zones, both from a social science perspective, as well as from a community arts perspective, tends to emphasize the emancipatory, therapeutic, or reconciliatory attributes of art in conflict, paying attention to how art contributes to conflict resolution, bridges social inequalities, or serves to ease tensions between communities in conflict and overcome trauma. The contributions in this volume discuss the more neglected, “non-serious” aesthetic strategies, such as those employing ironic, grotesque, absurd, frivolous, carnivalesque, and humorous forms of cultural and artistic intervention in conflict settings. [i] We thank the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies (NIAS), Amsterdam Centre for Globalisation Studies (ACGS), Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis (ASCA), and the Netherlands Institute for Cultural Analysis (NICA) for their institutional and financial support.

The film El escarabajo de oro o Victorias Hämnd (2014), directed by the Argentinean-Swedish duo Alejo Moguillansky and Fia-Stina Sandlund, presents clashing storylines, histories, merged film genres and conflicting aspirations within a transnational film production set in Argentina. It stages a performance founded on real circumstances, where two filmmakers (Moguillansky and Sandlund) begin working on a biopic based on the life of Victoria Benedictsson, a 19th-century Swedish feminist writer, but then, partly in secrecy, the main character changes to her contemporary, Leandro N. Alem, an Argentinean revolutionary politician, while all gets tangled up in a fictional story of a treasure hunt. The film crosses boundaries between documentary and fiction with its maze of rogues, tricksters, and unreliable narrators, opening up stories within stories. In the performance of the documentary filmmaking process, there is a constant struggle over memory: whose (hi)story gets to be told and from what angle. In this article, cinematic memory in El escarabajo de oro o Victorias Hämnd is delineated through the performative gestures of reenactment and voice-over narration as aesthetic strategies that promote a non-linear, multidirectional perception of remembering. I suggest that the film offers an alternative way to approach cinematic memory, not attaching the act of remembering to an individual, a group or a nation, but to the film form itself. The film engenders cinematic memory as a living constellation, where diverse historical temporalities exist simultaneously and interact freely. In the film, cinematic memory is constantly being created and recreated in the here and now.

Between 1974 and 1975, Zoran Popović, a conceptual artist from Belgrade, Yugoslavia, and his wife Jasna Tijardović, an art historian, spent a year in New York. During that time they engaged closely with the New York Art and Language group. This friendship and collaboration resulted in a rare instance of East-West exchange in Conceptual art: Popović and Tijardović published both co-authored and individual articles in the US journal The Fox, and members of Art and Language (Mel Ramsden, Michael Corris, and Jill Breakstone) gave a seminar in Belgrade's Student Cultural Center in the fall of 1975. One of the most important outcomes of this exchange is Zoran Popović's film Struggle in New York—Борба у Њујорку, which he made on his return visit to New York in the fall of 1976, and which features the members of New York Art and Language and other artists and activists from the downtown Manhattan art scene of the mid-1970s. This essay argues that in this film, Popović uses documentary techniques to establish a space for the display of radical artistic practices that engaged in a vigorous critique of art institutions. In so doing this film marks a limit position of institutional critique that approaches the idea of the abolishment and abandonment of art practice altogether. Further, the essay explores some differences between Conceptual art practice in Yugoslavia and the United States, arguing that Popović uses the crisis that tore the New York Art and Language group apart to address the unraveling of politicized Conceptual art practice in Belgrade's Student Cultural Center.

This article focuses on the emergence of graffiti in Beijing and Shanghai as an intriguing part of the contemporary art scene. Approaching graffiti through the framework of visual culture and analyzing both the visual and social aspects of creating graffiti images, I argue that contemporary graffiti in these cities can be regarded primarily as creative self-expression emphasizing aesthetic intention and a renaming process, not as vandalism. Deriving primarily from information gathered during my fieldwork in Beijing and Shanghai, I also discuss the development of graffiti in China and its characteristics. In the Euro-American context, graffiti is still commonly regarded as criminal activity that destroys public property. This allegation, however, fails to take into account how the international graffiti culture has become an enduring genre of art with strong emphasis on style and aesthetic evaluation. Although creating graffiti is a controversial issue in China also, graffiti nevertheless exists, especially in the so-called art areas (districts known for their numerous art galleries, artist studios, art-related activities and, occasionally, art museums), or in the surrounding neighbourhoods.

Despite the late consolidation of improvisation theatre in the country, the Portuguese artistic scene has seen the emergence in the last two decades of several impro companies with different approaches – many of them acquiring significant recognition among the public. However, the mapping of this practice and its relationship with the historical‑cultural Framework with which it is necessarily linked was never done before. This article contributes to fill this gap, not only tracing its genealogy in the context of contemporary history of the performing arts in Portugal, but also in the wider context of Portuguese socio‑cultural development since the Revolution of April 25, 1974. More specifically, the research in which this article is based upon allowed us to identify a significant correlation between the process of theatrical renovation initiated by the generation of the 1990s and the precursors of this genre in Portugal. In this context, it stands out the role of Companhia do Chapito, which inspired and provided the technical bases for many of the actors who later would dedicate themselves to the development of impro theatre. Following the genealogy review of this genre in Portugal, this article also contributes to the reflection on the nature of the dialogue that is established between the practice of impro and the cultural and political framework in which it manifests itself. IMPROV THEATER / IMPROVISATION / BODY / PORTUGUESE “GENERATION WITHOUT BORDERS ” / 1990S GENERATION