Twenty years after its 1997 handover back to China, Hong Kong remains a unique place on the world’s stage. British colonialism has left many enduring marks on Hong Kong identity as well as on its physical landscape. One of the most peculiar, and controversial, is the legacy of the Small House Policy of the New Territories; an agreement reached between the British and the village leaders after it leased the New Territories in 1898. In a city of severe land scarcity, this unusual law grants decedents of ‘original villager’s’ families (mainly Hakka people), upon their 18 birthday, rights to build a maximum three-story house of no more than 2100 sqft. With skyrocketing housing prices downtown, this has created a boom of these ‘village houses’ being build and sold, mainly to ‘new villagers’ migrating from the city, on lands that once were Hong Kong’s farms and rice paddies. This has led to rapid changes in the visuality of these once traditional villages. Most notable is the disappearance of the traditional Hakka ancestral family homes. This visually driven study employs multimodal methods to seek a more in-depth picture of current village life in North Eastern New Territories, Hong Kong by observing, documenting, collaboratively creating, and jointly analysing the multimedia data captured. This study documents the derelict, intact, restored, in ruin structures, attempting to trace revitalized elements of traditional Hakka villages via their design, layouts and relationship with the natural environment. The study looks at how the making and sharing of imagery can foster dialogue and analysis of the current state of flux of these villages, its land and reconsider the ‘place’ they occupy and how these changes may affect visual cultural identity.

Even though the Chornobyl exclusion zone (CEZ) is a well-photographed and visually documented site, little is known about the evolution of its visual representations from the point of view of participatory culture. This study investigates how the CEZ is represented on the open photo-sharing platform Flickr and focuses on visual heritage framing from the point of view of participatory culture. Flickr, a social networking site founded in 2004, has a large portfolio of photographs that have been classified and categorised. Thus, it provides a prime container of visual information in the form of user-uploaded digital photographs with an almost 20-year time frame. The data of the study consist of participant-generated images and qualitative interviews from the visitors who visited the site at three different points in time – 2008, 2013, and 2018 – revealing the emerging photographic activities of visitors to the CEZ. During the chosen 10-year timeframe, the exclusion zone was also transformed by the intentional marketing of the site for touristic purposes, and the exponential flow of visitors transformed its landscape into a dynamically developing tourismscape. The longitudinal approach of the study, supplemented by a social semiotic data analysis, elaborates on evolving entanglements of materiality, embodiment, and digital devices as captured from the participants’ pictures. With this approach, the study sheds light on the visitors’ practices of visual engagement with the heritage resources in CEZ and the altering affordances of materiality, sensory experiences, and digital technology devices. The analysis of visitors’ visual engagements with the zone's heritage artefacts reveals visitors’ evolving engagements and pictorial interests in the context of participatory digital visual culture. Moreover, this study provides insights into participatory culture as an agent that changes how heritage is viewed, perceived, and experienced.

This visual essay shares a collaborative creative project spearheaded by the first author in Brixton, Johannesburg, South Africa. Titled Waste Not Want Not, the project, borrowing the well-known aphorism as a title, created a library of waste items sourced from self-organised recyclers, known as reclaimers. This library was then offered as a resource for invited residency artists and a community youth art programme to create new works. The visual essay is structured chronologically, to show how the Waste Not Want Not project took shape. It archives the project for visual studies, while the accompanying texts place it into context and dialogue with relevant literature about Johannesburg, recycling labour, and waste art.

This article explores a way of combining visual arts and urban studies, based on the use of photography as ‘representation’ and ‘evocation’ of the urban. The demonstration draws on a landscape photographic documentation of two logistics parks located on the outskirts of the cities of Frankfurt am Main and Kassel in Germany, conducted in 2016–2017. The article first presents the theoretical framework from which the spatial knowledge embedded in both photographing and walking practices is envisaged, and then describes how the documentation methods combine both practices. It then analyses two series of photographs and shows how they create ‘counter-landscapes’, i.e. images that lead to a theoretical and cultural reappraisal of the landscapes of logistics parks, usually seen as ‘non-places’.

Among the newly emerging design solutions in the field of interior and exterior is one that is both unusual and provocative, as well as extremely creative and artistic, namely, the use of concrete in the design of lighting fixtures. This became possible thanks to a better understanding of the potentials of this material. Concrete lighting fixtures have gained popularity due to their unique aesthetic appeal, durability, and customization options. They have a distinct industrial and minimalist design that adds a modern and contemporary touch to any space.

The aim of this article is to investigate the potential relationships between the manifestations of Old Testament prophets and contemporary actionism, using the case study method, the hermeneutics of the artistic act and the performantive criticism method. The starting hypothesis is that the actions performed by biblical prophets can be described as performative acts, through the use of their own bodies, language, gestures, objects with symbolic functions, a specific scenography of the prophetic act, and even the ritualistic aspect of the manifestation, all intended to convey a supernatural message. The research results may indicate that by assigning a precise purpose to the action, using a well-defined scenography, and integrating gestures and language with symbolic-ritual characteristics, a correlation can be established between the biblical prophet and the actionist artist. The prophet could be attributed the qualities of a performer, and his manifestation could be defined as a performative act.

Observing the fingers and palm in the paintings of Leonardo da Vinci and Albrecht Dürer, we come to inspiring discoveries that express the innermost human soul.

Sinking Sculptures is a project by Professor Konstantin Denev realized through an exhibition on June 21,2012 in Resonance Gallery in Plovdiv. The project represents parts of his sculptures made of wood and personal belongings, which he cuts symbolically, transforming them into new plastic objects, placing them in another space. This is an act of short-term immersion through which Professor Denev makes us empathize with his feelings about the instability of space and time in which we live and the constant fluidity of values, ideals and cultural stereotypes.

The article considers the art of Yavor Tsanev as personal, clothed in silence, even aristocratic. He has a very clean, laconic, synthetic language in his painting. He is a minimalist who achieves a very strong and deep spiritual stillness and drama in his art. His works visually leave an impression of hypnotic and metaphysical impact, with accumulated spiritual experience. In them, freedom was achieved in the thematic-mythological interpretation of the soul and spiritualization of the material. The paintings of Yavor Tsanev are conceived as fascinating narratives, filled with fantasy in the combination of symbols, signs, images and their semantic meaning.

The starting point for the paper is the Art-Eco Symposium, organised by the Visual Arts Department of the Faculty of Educational Studies and the Arts, Sofia University “St Kliment Ohridski”, and in particular its last edition, held in Kiten in August-September 2023. It was attended by academics from Sofia University, the Academy of Arts “Vl. Strzemiński, Lodz, Magdalena Abakanowicz University, Poznan, Poland, Academy of Arts, Vilnius, Lithuania, etc. The symposium is part of an ongoing focus on ecology, which is expressed not only in the individual work of the participants, but also in exhibitions and international collaborations on the theme, organized by or with the participation of Visual Arts Department’s professors and students since 2021. In the historical context of symposia in nature, where some of the first manifestations of contemporary (unconventional) art took place in Bulgaria (and in most Eastern European countries), I will present the thesis that events like Art-Eco reflect a new engagement with ecology in art institutions. This is an attitude that does not claim to be radical, but is systematic, efficient and honest in terms of possibilities – a trend I call “soft ecology”. “Soft ecology”, as a kind of commentary on the term “soft sciences”, helps us to view ecology as a social science of nature. In the field of art, it allows us to talk about ecology through existing artistic formats, as an element not only of the artistic process and the artwork, but also legitimizing the theme of nature in a institutional and professional environment that is culturally and urban structured.