ABSTRACT The present study engages comparatively with William Shakespeare’s play The Winter’s Tale (1611) and Jeanette Winterson’s novel The Gap of Time (2015) and focuses on the major conceit of both texts – the gap of time. The vague “gap” in Shakespeare’s play inspires Jeanette Winterson, who opens in The Gap of Time a space for the reflection on the poetics of “gaps” in the artistic representation. This paper has a 2-fold purpose. The first is to examine Winterson’s work through the lens of Agamben’s concept of “messianic time,” in which the artist, aware of the temporal gap between the creation and eschaton, attempts to depict in art the experience of “the time that is left,” “the time which takes to come to an end, to accomplish itself.” The second aim of this study is to reveal how Winterson’s The Gap of Time, an adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, functions as a caesura, a meta-linguistic opening of indeterminate plasticity and mobility, a work which, like an unsettled interval, assumes the form of a “cover” and of a literary manifesto that expresses the tensions caused by transformation of structure, mode, and genre, but mostly the conflict between past and present, lost and found, original and adaptation.

This research, titled Methods of Expression in Modern Kurdish Sculpture, undertakes an intellectual and analytical exploration of expressive works within the domain of modern Kurdish sculpture. Adhering to a rigorous scientific methodology, the study is structured into four interconnected chapters as follows: Chapter One delineates the research problem, significance, objectives, scope, and operational definitions of key terms. The research problem is framed through the question: To what extent have Kurdish sculptors succeeded in manifesting their expressive styles in their artistic creations? The chapter further outlines the principal objective of the study, which is to identify and critically analyze the expressive styles evident in modern Kurdish sculpture. Chapter Two establishes the theoretical framework, organized around three central themes: The conceptual foundations of expression Defining characteristics of expressive style The role of expressiveness in plastic arts The chapter concludes by synthesizing insights from the theoretical framework and presenting a set of indicators to guide the analysis of the research sample. Chapter Three elaborates on the research methodology, encompassing the research population, sample selection, and analytical approach. The sample, consisting of three distinct models, is examined in detail to explore how expressive styles manifest in the sculptural works. Chapter Four presents the research findings and conclusions, summarized as follows: -In general, most of the sculptures exhibit a style that aligns with expressive realism, particularly in samples No. 1–3, each of which conveys symbolic meaning through distinct forms of expression. -The majority of the sculptures (samples No. 1–3) adopt a simplified stylistic approach, facilitating the viewer's ability to easily comprehend and absorb their meanings and thematic content. -Kurdish sculptors have, overall, achieved exceptional levels of aesthetic sophistication, formal expression, and implicit meaning, employing modern techniques that reflect their intellectual engagement and understanding of their expressive value. -Shape emerges as a dynamic and influential element in modern sculptural practices in Iraqi Kurdistan. Due to the stylistic diversity among sculptors, the ways in which forms are utilized differ across artists, particularly in terms of compositional arrangements, as demonstrated in samples (1–2–3). -The stylistic diversity in expression achieved by Kurdish sculptors represents a critical aspect of the contemporary artistic landscape in Iraqi Kurdistan, contributing a multifaceted approach to modern artistic representation.

ABSTRACT A discussion of the definition of Arctic art has begun to identify the concept as a separate phenomenon from all regional art of the Circumpolar Arctic and from the Nordic style as an aesthetic. However, its narratives are still absent from the global discourse – within the institutional artworld and within cultural-political decision-making alike. This article examines whether institutional actors who dominate cultural politics and curatorial processes identify the need to review art more in relation to the context in which it was created. Four expert interviews were conducted to determine whether the institutional artworld recognises new genre Arctic art either as a possible representation of contemporary art within institutional concepts or as a phenomenon independent of the institutional definition of art. The research data revealed curatorial experiences that both support the inclusion and maintain the exclusion of characteristics of new genre Arctic art in the context of the institutional artworld. As the current geopolitical situation creates a multi-agenda interest in the region, local artists can be prominent operators when building more sustainable futures, promoting cultural continuity, Northern pride and the revitalisation of Northern knowledge. Enabling the activity of Arctic artists in the region should be considered a cultural policy issue.

In her essay The Blame of Portraits (1904), Franco-English writer and philosopher of aesthetics Vernon Lee levels a fundamental criticism against the art of portraiture, which, according to her, only exists through comparison – an imperfect, impossible comparison – with a living model that exceeds the mimetic power of art. This observation echoes Honoré de Balzac’s own thinking in The Unknown Masterpiece, in which the artist Frenhofer searches for an impossible aesthetic ideal that leads only to his self-destruction and the obliteration of aesthetic codes. Balzac’s story thus reveals a fundamental conflict within the European artistic project, which Lee reworks in her Gothic short stories Oke of Okehurst and Dionea. Like Frenhofer, Lee’s artists are confronted with the impossibility to compare the feminine ideal with the portrait they are powerless to create. In turn, this incapacity questions the very possibility of artistic transcendence that motivates European art. This essay analyses Lee’s Gothic rewriting of this Balzacian crisis of artistic representation and reflects on the sociopoetical significance of transforming Frenhofer’s apparent madness into an aesthetic form of haunting that implicitly threatens every artist.

The aim of the study is to expand the understanding of musical timbre and to examine one of its most important artistic and semiotic functions, which determines the ability of music to serve as a means of artistic communication. The paper analyzes in detail the essential properties of timbre, which allow it to activate the mechanisms of acoustic information perception and sound image formation that are common to everyday and music perception. Timbre has been isolated from the system of expressive means of the musical language and considered as a sign endowed with communicative meanings. The author’s semiotic approach to the study of individual linguistic means of music determines the scientific novelty of the article. The study revealed that the basic essential properties of timbre activate universal processes of human perception and processing of sound information, which determine the objectivity and integrity of one’s perception of both the acoustic picture of the surrounding world and music as its artistic representation. The psychoacoustic materiality, integrality of timbre, and its ability to evoke related inmodal sensations, as well as to activate the key mechanism of formation, consolidation, and actualization of sound semantics – associativity – have a complex “controlling effect” (V. V. Medushevsky) on the perception of music’s sonic scale-time layer. This gives us reason to consider timbre an important multifunctional sign in the system of musical language, which actively participates in the realization of the communicative artistic-semiotic function of music.

Low back pain remains a pervasive global health challenge, with significant disability and socio-economic burden. While contemporary biomechanical and occupational factors are well-studied, the role of human spinal evolution and its divergence from modern postural behaviors is less frequently examined. This study aims to visually explore and illustrate the historical evolution of human spinal posture through artistic representations, conceptually highlighting the potential biomechanical mismatch between our spine's evolutionary adaptations and current lifestyle-driven postures. We conducted a qualitative visual analysis of human figures depicted in selected artworks from three distinct historical periods: the hunter-gatherer era, the agricultural transition, and the post-industrial age. Observed spinal postures were qualitatively compared to established biomechanical data on intradiscal pressure levels, derived from previous in-vivo studies. This comparison was used to illustrate potential physiological or pathological loading on the spine across different historical contexts. Our visual observations suggest a noticeable shift in depicted human postures over time. Figures from the hunter-gatherer period primarily exhibit upright, dynamic positions with an apparent absence of prolonged sitting or significant forward flexion. In contrast, artworks from agricultural and post-industrial societies frequently portray individuals in more flexed, static, and often ergonomically suboptimal postures, including prolonged sitting, bending, and heavy lifting with improper form. These observed postural trends visually align with positions independently associated with increased intradiscal pressures and greater spinal strain in biomechanical literature. This study visually traces the evolution of human spinal posture from the hunter-gatherer era to modern industrial life, highlighting a shift from dynamic, biomechanically healthy positions to static and suboptimal postures. These changes, reflected in historical art and linked to lifestyle transitions such as agriculture and industrialization, may underlie the rising prevalence of spinal disorders. The findings suggest that aligning modern practices with the spine's evolutionary design could help prevent and manage spinal pathologies.

Background and objectiveLow back pain remains a pervasive global health challenge, with significant disability and socio-economic burden. While contemporary biomechanical and occupational factors are well-studied, the role of human spinal evolution and its divergence from modern postural behaviors is less frequently examined. This study aims to visually explore and illustrate the historical evolution of human spinal posture through artistic representations, conceptually highlighting the potential biomechanical mismatch between our spine’s evolutionary adaptations and current lifestyle-driven postures.MethodsWe conducted a qualitative visual analysis of human figures depicted in selected artworks from three distinct historical periods: the hunter-gatherer era, the agricultural transition, and the post-industrial age. Observed spinal postures were qualitatively compared to established biomechanical data on intradiscal pressure levels, derived from previous in-vivo studies. This comparison was used to illustrate potential physiological or pathological loading on the spine across different historical contexts.ResultsOur visual observations suggest a noticeable shift in depicted human postures over time. Figures from the hunter-gatherer period primarily exhibit upright, dynamic positions with an apparent absence of prolonged sitting or significant forward flexion. In contrast, artworks from agricultural and post-industrial societies frequently portray individuals in more flexed, static, and often ergonomically suboptimal postures, including prolonged sitting, bending, and heavy lifting with improper form. These observed postural trends visually align with positions independently associated with increased intradiscal pressures and greater spinal strain in biomechanical literature.ConclusionThis study visually traces the evolution of human spinal posture from the hunter-gatherer era to modern industrial life, highlighting a shift from dynamic, biomechanically healthy positions to static and suboptimal postures. These changes, reflected in historical art and linked to lifestyle transitions such as agriculture and industrialization, may underlie the rising prevalence of spinal disorders. The findings suggest that aligning modern practices with the spine’s evolutionary design could help prevent and manage spinal pathologies.

In this essay, I build on a theory of tragedy (that tragedy involves the inhospitality of the world to what matters) to explore how tragedy’s beauty can be understood more robustly than through the traditional functional conceptions of tragedy from Aristotle, Hume, and others. Part of tragedy’s beauty is the unique frame it places on its constituent values lost. It is only because something matters that its loss due to the world’s inhospitality can be registered as tragic. This makes tragedy an indirect window into what matters. Artistic representations of tragedy can be appreciated along this measure: the unique and creative ways they represent their values lost, providing through this representation a novel and enriching perspective on what matters. How does this view of the beauty of tragedy have consequences outside the realm of aesthetics? Specifically, how do we understand the role of the tragic emotions in real-life tragedies?

The Ecuadorian indigenous movement has played a central role in the political sphere of the last century, its main demand revolves around the construction of a plurinational state, and for this purpose it uses different platforms for visibility, collective action repertoires and political advocacy disseminated by its own media. Since 2009, a new regulatory framework opened the way for the allocation of radio and television frequencies for indigenous peoples, nationalities and organizations, the indigenous media, in addition to building participatory audiences and news consumers, broadcast artistic representations of nationalities, and become legitimate spokespersons while reaffirming community, identity and organizational values. The research presented here studies the case of Radio La Voz de la Confederación de las Nacionalidades Indígenas de la Amazonía Ecuatoriana as a mediator of communal commitment. In its pilot phase, it identified and analyzed the audiences through a survey applied in the Unión Base Community located in the Province of Pastaza, where the radio station is based, as well as interviews with its actors. The main results explain the relationship of La Voz’s audiences with the contents, programming grid, level of two-way participation, and the social role of the media in the community life of the organization.

This article explores how art and augmented reality can be harnessed as innovative didactic tools in teaching the history of medicine, with particular attention to the intertwined educational and legal challenges that emerge in contemporary academic and clinical contexts. As augmented reality technologies gain traction within higher education, evidence suggests they enhance engagement, spatial understanding, and experiential learning especially in complex domains such as medical anatomy and historical narrative reconstruction by overlaying virtual elements onto real-world environments for enriched learning experiences. However, while the integration of such immersive tools demonstrates considerable promise for didactic innovation and the presentation of historical medical artifacts and artistic representations, it also raises important questions pertaining to curriculum design, pedagogical efficacy, intellectual property rights, and data governance within educational institutions. Drawing upon interdisciplinary literature from educational technology, medical education, and legal scholarship, this study articulates both the pedagogical potential and the regulatory constraints of deploying art-infused augmented reality frameworks in medical history education. By advancing a nuanced understanding of these opportunities and challenges, the article provides guidance for educators, policymakers, and legal theorists seeking to responsibly integrate emerging digital modalities into the teaching of medicine’s historical narratives.

The aim of the study is to identify the universal and author-specific parameters of the artistic conceptualization of death that underlie the thanatological concepts of A. P. Chekhov and I. A. Bunin. The article examines the artistic representation of the theme of death through diachronic and comparative lenses. Within the framework of the research, two basic thanatological models were identified and analyzed: Chekhov’s “quiet departure”, characterized by desacralization and the mundanity of passing, and Bunin’s “sacred end”, based on the ontologization and aestheticization of dying. The scientific novelty lies in the fact that, for the first time, the world-modeling role of thanatological concepts in the works of Chekhov and Bunin has been defined; the evolution of death images in the prose of both writers has been established; and the forms and methods of the artistic embodiment of the “quiet departure” in Chekhov’s works and the “sacred end” in Bunin’s writings have been identified. As a result of the study, it was established that both writers form coherent and evolving thanatological concepts. Moreover, toward the end of his creative path, Chekhov conceptualizes death as a form of liberation from the conventions of existing reality. For Bunin, death symbolizes a sacred transcendent transition into eternal life. The writer views non-existence as an act of divine revelation and judgment, standing in opposition to irreversible decay.

The concept of "Kazakhstani text" in modern humanities is gradually emerging as an independent analytical category, reflecting the totality of artistic, cultural, and historical-memorial representations of Kazakhstan in the literature of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. In the context of globalization, transnational mobility, and post-Soviet transformations, Kazakhstani literature is becoming a space for complex dialogue between national tradition and a multilingual, multicultural context, which highlights the need for a theoretical understanding of the specifics of this textual formation. The aim of this article is to identify the structural, semantic, and poetic characteristics of the Kazakhstani text as a special type of culturally marked hypertext. The study establishes that the Kazakhstani text is not reducible to a geographical or ethnographic description of a territory, but rather represents a complex model of the artistic exploration of space, in which national history, traumatic experience, and the memory of nomadic culture and the Soviet past are reinterpreted within the coordinates of modernity. It is concluded that the Kazakhstani text functions as a crucial mechanism for cultural self-identification and the transmission of national experience in a global literary context.

This study investigates how Indonesian women’s fiction constructs and negotiates discourses on gender, power, and resistance across textual, visual, and digital domains. It seeks to demonstrate how literature functions as discourse, not only as artistic representation, but also as an ideological and multimodal site of feminist resistance. Drawing on Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis (MCDA), this study examines a purposive corpus of novels by Ayu Utami, Intan Paramaditha, Leila Chudori, and Djenar Maesa Ayu. The data sources include primary texts, digital reception (Goodreads reviews, TikTok/BookTok content, online media articles), and visual paratexts (book covers, posters, promotional materials). Analytical procedures combine textual critical discourse analysis (CDA), corpus-assisted keyword analysis, and multimodal analysis of visual and digital materials. The analysis reveals a dual movement in Indonesian women’s fiction: the reproduction of patriarchal ideologies through metaphors of purity, obligation, and morality and the articulation of feminist counter-discourses through bodily agency, fragmented narratives, and intertextual mobility. Digital reception amplifies these dynamics, with global readers celebrating empowerment and local audiences expressing moral contestation. Visual and digital paratexts further encode resistance through fragmented typography, empowering slogans, and participatory hashtags, thereby positioning the novels within global feminist networks. This study expands CDA by integrating literary texts, visual paratexts, and digital reception into a hybrid analytical framework. It contributes to Feminist CDA by demonstrating how resistance is constructed multimodally and digitally and updates paratext theory for the platform era. This research highlights Indonesian women’s fiction as a significant contributor to global feminist discourse, situating Global South literature as an epistemic site of discursive transformation.

This article examines the evolving relationship between Vietnamese society and artistic expression amid the transformative Đổi Mới era. It explores how artists have responded to rapid socio-economic and environmental changes, reflecting on issues such as industrial pollution, urbanization, corruption, and social inequality. Through literature review, aesthetic analysis, and interviews, the study investigates why environmental and urban concerns have become central to certain artistic practices and interrogates why many young artists steer clear of socio-political themes. The findings show a divide: while mainstream artists prioritize aesthetic exploration, a socially engaged minority harnesses art to critique and educate, offering moral and communal commentary. These works employ diverse forms—installation, painting, sculpture, mixed media—to render visible hidden crises. This research underscores the dual function of contemporary Vietnamese art as both aesthetic creation and civic instrument, calling for a more socially responsible and engaged artistic generation.

Abstract How does cinema shape our understanding of migration? Although movement across borders has been a central theme in cinema for decades, research on its representation remains fragmented, often focusing on specific national contexts or cinematographic genres. To address this gap, this study introduces an original global dataset of 410 documentaries, films, and television series about migration released between 1940 and 2024. The analysis of the dataset reveals striking disparities: stories set in the Global North far outnumber those from the Global South, a pattern I describe as “North-bound bias” of migration-related movies. The dataset also shows a growing focus on irregular migration and forced displacement, compared to other forms of migration: Through this “spectacle of human mobility,” migration is portrayed as irregular, dangerous, and crisis-driven, obscuring more ordinary and legal forms of mobility. These findings contribute to research on artistic and media representations of migration, highlighting the role of movies in shaping migration imaginaries, or the collective ways in which societies represent human movement across borders.

The object of the presented research is tropes as lexical means of artistic expressiveness, which appear as modes of the subject's existential creativity. The subject of the research is the philosophical foundations of these language means. The research objective is to identify, substantiate and reveal the philosophical basis of language means of artistic expressiveness from an ontological, epistemological, anthropological, ethical and aesthetic perspective. This research is not limited to a linguistic analysis of speech patterns, but rather seeks to detection and structurally represent the philosophical meaning of traditional language means that reflect the implicit correlations between being and cognition and serve as ways of self-creation and life-making for the subject. The research explores how various language means reveal ideas about the hierarchical organization of being, determine the ways in which reality is perceived, illustrate the relationship between human and the world, represent moral principles, serve as means of artistic representation of reality and, in general, reflect the creative essence of language and the language forms of the subject's existential creativity. The scientific novelty of the research lies in the attempt to identify the ultimate foundations of linguistic means of artistic expression, which are revealed not only as techniques for aestheticizing the text and enriching the language semantically, but also as ways of representing and structuring reality in the context of the subject's existential creativity. The main result of the research is the development of specific philosophical foundations for the most important tropes, such as metaphor (ontological, epistemological, anthropological and aesthetic), personification (ontological and epistemological), allegory (ontological, epistemological and ethical), periphrasis (ontological), irony (epistemological), hyperbole and litotes (ontological and epistemological), oxymoron (ontological), synecdoche (ontological) and euphemism (ethical). These foundations reveal the specifics of the existential, cognitive, individual-personal, moral and artistic relations between human and the world.

The aim of the article is to examine the transposition of the aesthetics of the Ukrainian village in the works of Vasyl Kurylyk and Oleksa Bulavytskyi, with particular attention paid to its transformation within the Canadian and broader North American context. The authors analyze how the artists preserve a Ukrainian artistic vector in works depicting an unfamiliar geographical landscape, employing compositional strategies, color systems, symbolic imagery, and ethnographic accuracy as key artistic means. The research methodology is based on an interdisciplinary approach that combines art-historical and semiotic analyses of visual material. The study employs historical-artistic, comparative-stylistic, formal-stylistic, and iconographic methods, as well as a contextual approach aimed at interpreting the sociocultural factors shaping the image of the Ukrainian village. The integrated application of these methods enables the consideration of the Ukrainian village as a visual and aesthetic code in the artistic practices of Vasyl Kurylyk and Oleksa Bulavytskyi. The scientific novelty of the study lies in its analysis of how the artists integrate Ukrainian cultural and aesthetic heritage into works created in conditions of emigration, particularly in representations of Canadian and American landscapes. The research concludes that the aesthetics of the Ukrainian village function as a distinctive «cultural code» that allows the artists to preserve national identity and transmit it to the viewer beyond the boundaries of their historical homeland. Conclusions. The analysis demonstrated that the artistic representations of the Ukrainian village in the works of Kurylyk and Bulavytskyi function as a cultural code, enabling the preservation of national identity and its transmission beyond the historical homeland. The artists integrate traditional aesthetic motifs into new geographic and socio-cultural contexts through composition, color schemes, brushstroke rhythm, and symbolism. Thus, the Ukrainian village becomes not merely a landscape but a means of artistic transformation of cultural experience and the affirmation of cultural memory.

The focus of this article is the artistic representation of the maternal image in K. Atkinson’s short story “Tunnel of Fish”, examined through the lenses of psychological trauma, transgenerational transmission of experience, and the dynamics of mother-child relationships. The aim of the study is to identify the structural and symbolic mechanisms underlying the construction of the maternal figure in a state of emotional liminality, as well as to determine the ways in which guilt, adolescent behavioral patterns, and disrupted parental functions are artistically encoded. The object of research includes an analysis of the interrelation between June’s inner world and the psychological dynamics of her relationship with her son Eddie, the identification of role-reversal mechanisms, and the investigation of how the mother’s emotional immaturity affects the formation of the child’s identity. Thus, the study encompasses a holistic examination of the maternal image as a phenomenon that integrates psychological, social, symbolic, and mythopoetic dimensions, allowing for an in-depth understanding of K. Atkinson’s authorial approach to motherhood in contemporary British literature. The methodological framework combines structural-semiotic and narratological analysis, elements of psychological typology and mythocriticism, as well as the interpretation of symbolic oppositions within the text. The novelty of the study lies in its comprehensive examination of the maternal image in K. Atkinson’s “Tunnel of Fish”, a text that has been relatively rarely analyzed as a standalone object in both domestic and international studies on contemporary British prose. The study’s originality also consists in its exploration of the maternal figure through the lens of the typology of destructive maternal models proposed by H. Cloud and G. Townsend, while simultaneously emphasizing the psychological trauma experienced by the protagonist and its impact on her inner world and maternal practice. The results demonstrate the connection between the protagonist’s early trauma and the development of patterns of emotional immaturity; a role reversal is identified, in which the son assumes adult functions while the mother exhibits infantile behavior. The findings confirm that unprocessed trauma and persistent guilt shape a scripted model of motherhood, leading to recurring conflicts and emotional dysfunction. The birth of the daughter is interpreted by the protagonist as a compensatory strategy, which inhibits genuine attachment and reproduces cycles of emotional vulnerability.

This qualitative study investigates the cultural representation and symbolic significance of yangasha art in Jianhe County, Guizhou Province, China, in the framework of ethnic minority modernization. Researchers utilized Terence Hawkes's symbolic theory and Stuart Hall's notion of cultural representation to examine yangasha art, leveraging data from literature review and field research conducted in Jianhe County. Results indicate that the symbolic significance of Yang'asha art facilitates multifaceted cultural expression across various media. Its symbolic importance illustrates an evolutionary rationale across three dimensions: symbolic construction, narrative reconstruction, and value reconstruction. Yang'asha's cultural representation system went through four stages of change: "explanation of natural phenomena → vehicle of ethical values → marker of ethnic identity → modern cultural capital." This study shows how, in the context of modernization, local traditional culture changes and grows artistically through many different forces, including modern media and mass consumption. This research offers theoretical validation for symbolic studies and cultural representation theory, while also contributing academic significance and inspiration for the transition of national intangible cultural heritage from "preservation and conservation" to "regeneration and development."

The Phenomenon of Resilience in the Context of Artistic Representation and Social Interaction