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AllOfUs who have considered the problem of enjoying contemporary art are aware that the most serious barriers to it are the reluctance on the part of many painters and sculptors to put aside the notion that a work of art must mirror the physical world about us and their unwillingness to accept the fact that all true art must go "through the looking glass" — that is beyond the mirror.

The article examines multisensority as a different approach to experiencing art. Contemporary art expands the range of conventional means of expression and turns to the non-visual for greater impact. Inspired by the interrelationship of science – technology – art, multisensory art is a challenge to all the senses. Some of its manifestations are explored, which could shed light on its nature. Discussion questions are raised, both about the aesthetic value of this type of art, and about the possibilities it provides for education.

This body of research focuses on the investigation of hybrid spatial practices in politically engaged art, through combining multiple exhibition locations (physical and online) with a range of communication strategies. In its main stage (January–March 2013) the research materialized as a series of international events that saw my artworks and interventions develop between London and Istanbul: London, the traditional and historical site of financial markets, and Istanbul, the financial centre of an emerging market, which is rising rapidly in the global economic landscape. Those events included my intervention on the façade of the Royal College of Art in London, which was covered by a 23-metre-high banner featuring the phrase 'The market will save us'; my solo site-specific exhibition The Market Will Save the World in Kasa Gallery in Istanbul, situated in the former vault of an old bank; and my online exhibition The Vision of the Market on the Museum of Contemporary Cuts (MoCC) online platform, which featured images, videos and texts drawn from both cities. This material was also disseminated on the Internet through social media (the Facebook and Twitter pages/accounts of MoCC). The Vision of the Market inaugurated the online exhibitions programme of the Museum of Contemporary Cuts, which is an interdisciplinary curatorial initiative that aims to highlight the impact of the global economic crisis on the arts and education. The theoretical work supporting this body of research has been presented at the March Meeting (2013) of the 11th Sharjah Biennial (United Arab Emirates) and at the conference Radical Gestures: designing protest, resistance and refusal, which was hosted by Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design.

Video art, how it became a category. Video art is the first form of art that was given a history even before it actually had one. This paper counts the story of cultural institutions engaged in building a category based on technical devices, as if these devices were the only criterion to gather works that had little in common. Thus, it shows how technology has taken precedence over the most subversive messages, and, how, as a result, artistic experiences are currently being reshaped by this history. Since history defines the contemporary art field, we are confronted with works plainly reduced to their formal characteristics – the latter being supposed to continue a so-called tradition, or to be in a break with it, according to this idea that art has always kept in touch with the most recent technology. What is at stake is to understand how, while the field closes on its own logic, historic thinking will eventually classify videos according to criterions that separate them from other fields, such as independent cinema, literature, philosophy… Although it may seem obvious that video art is, in itself, interdisciplinary, this word calls for close reconsideration, since the latest developments of the arts made it a decisive factor of recognition. ; L'art vidéo est la première forme artistique à avoir eu une histoire avant même d'en avoir eu une. Cet article retrace l'histoire de la fabrication d'une catégorie par des institutions culturelles qui firent de l'outil le seul critère pour rassembler des travaux parfois sans rapport quant à leur nature. Il montre ainsi comment la raison de l'outil a progressivement pris le pas sur celle des intentions les plus subversives et comment les pratiques actuelles se trouvent fondamentalement redéfinies par cette histoire. Refermant le raisonnement historique sur la logique interne du champ de l'art contemporain, il est ici montré que les oeuvres se trouvent alors présentées comme appartenant à un enchaînement de ruptures et de continuités formelles, avec cette idée en ...

This essay is a contribution to the book discussion of Timed Out: Art and the Transnational Caribbean (2011) by Leon Wainwright. Kempadoo offers an exploration and commentary on the way Wainwright's publication has been structured and conceived, exploring the rationale for the range of artists as the subjects of the book. She discusses "timing" and temporality as the central narrative for Wainwright in researching Caribbean art as transnational and comments on the implications and limitations of the publication in addressing the complexity of contemporary Caribbean visual art within the context of global art practices and set against more radical postcolonial art critique.

Analyses the postmodern concepts of "transgression" and "bricolage" in relation to contemporary art. Addressing the street art and the social art the author shows how the model of bricolage with the elements of transgression­profanity works in the modern culture. The mass audio­visual culture dictates a new way of perceiving art works, and all of them are the reflections of the media culture, or its bricolage "bounce." The media culture and the society of globalisation in general produce a syncretic or bricolage environment with a "soft ban" system anticipating transgression; it is the erosion of boundaries which creates the illusion of transgression steps that can turn an artistic activity into a political action or make it balance on the verge of breaking the law. However, in such a type of culture, a transgression step is not opposed by a ban but by another transgression state which is a part of the system of market relations already

The Muslim veil is a heavily charged site in mainstream Western culture and media. However, its continued use as a visual shorthand for the oppressed Muslim woman, and by extension for the misogyny and violence of Islam, stands in sharp contrast to the numerous depictions of the veil present in contemporary artistic practice. This article analyzes mainstream representations of the veil and their various subtexts, before charting three alternative narratives of the veil found in contemporary art produced by artists of Muslim descent who now exhibit, and often live, in Europe and North America. The specific works examined and the new narratives of the veil they bring forward reorient the gaze. By displacing the veil, a site of cross-cultural mistranslation, they remap the world and uncover the possible spaces of transnational literacy and communication.

"In this book, Claire Reddleman introduces her theoretical innovation "cartographic abstraction"--a material modality of thought and experience that is produced through cartographic techniques of depiction. Reddleman closely engages with selected artworks (by contemporary artists such as Joyce Kozloff, Layla Curtis, and Bill Fontana) and theories in each chapter. Reconfiguring the Foucauldian underpinning of critical cartography towards a materialist theory of abstraction, cartographic viewpoints are theorised as concrete abstractions. This research is positioned at the intersection of art theory, critical cartography and materialist philosophy."--Provided by publisher.

Throughout Canadian history, conflict has been a catalyst of change and a destroyer of worlds. War Art in Canada explores the universal theme of war through the country's visual and cultural past. Weaving together artworks and stories to inform and enlighten us, author Laura Brandon navigates both peaceful and brutal subject matter. By presenting the dynamic and, at times, surprising visual legacies of conflict, she encourages readers to question assumptions about our country's military past. The art created from conflict is exceptional in its diversity, and Brandon has assembled an arsenal of conflict-related cultural media, including posters, sketches, photographs, films, and sculptures. This comprehensive study showcases a stunning range of creators, such as A.Y. Jackson, Alex Colville, and Rebecca Belmore, and ventures far beyond the familiar narratives of Western battle painting by including Indigenous war art practices, passed down through generations in what we now call Canada

This dissertation examines how contemporaneity is variously encoded, embedded, and embodied in different medial combinations across the works of four artists and performers living and producing work in the National Capital Region of Delhi in India today. Experimental kathakali performer Maya Krishna Rao (b. 1953) 'deterritorializes' traditional kathakali gesture, breath, costume, and props to embody expansive ways of being, becoming, and relating alongside quotidian, middleclass, urban New Delhi frames. Filmmaker Amar Kanwar (b. 1964) mobilizes the microentities of dust, light particles, and ambient sound to blur and reformulate macro-categories of 'center,' 'periphery,' 'rural,' 'urban,' 'underdeveloped,' and 'developed.' Visual artist and sculptor Jagannath Panda (b. 1972) shapes, sculpts, molds, paints, and collages sewage pipes, glass, upholstery, bricks, and other urban materials in the satellite city of Gurgaon into 'immanent' (or emergent but as yet un-actualized) urban spatio-temporalities, revealing that human, animal, plant, thing, in the urban realm are always already partial expressions of each other. The artists' workshop Khoj's (1997) emergent community art practices offer 'rhizomatic mapping' as method to conduct a contemporary inquiry into this booming urban agglomerate's spaces, publics, and infrastructure. Finally, my epilogue comments on Inder Salim's (b. 1964) extreme performance art that violates the boundaries between his own dermis and the skin or surfaces of the city of Delhi to enact new modes of fluid and affective urban belonging. Using a framework from the "artist's philosopher" Gilles Deleuze, I posit that all these works "performatively enable," (Rogoff 2006) shake or stir the modernist and still-pervasive binary distinctions between local/global, state/market, development/underdevelopment, tradition/modernity, and East/West, and bring into proximity these and other such grand divisions and categories. Underlying the boundaries between these categories is a stultifying spatio-temporal politics. Aesthetic forms that unsettle these divisions, then, also propel a necessary unsettling around linear notions of temporality and spatiality. Contemporary aesthetics might be the name for such a destabilizing and enabling force or, as in art historian and cultural theorist Simon O'Sullivan's description, contemporaneity is that which produces "new combinations in and of the world, which would suggest new ways and times of being and acting in that world" (O' Sullivan 2010). In my discussions of separate artworks I turn to the microlevels of aesthetic practice to trace the "how" of the particular contemporaneity of the arts and performance milieu in Delhi of this moment. As such, I engage a Deleuzian framework to offer what he might term a "molecular" reading of contemporary art and performance in Delhi. If the "molar" relates to the well-defined wholes or masses, of modernist cultural discourse, and is the realm of representational thinking, then the molecular relates to that which destabilizes perception, and produce "encounters," in the place of representation. Within the realm of artistic creation, the concept of molecular replaces hierarchies of matter and form, with the study of the interaction between matter and aesthetic forces. An understanding of contemporary aesthetics as molecular therefore pays attention to those practices that might release fixed and molar ways of being.From India's independence through to the 1980s, modernist playwrights, directors, dancers, performers, and visual artists were largely measured by the standards of a 'molar' center in Delhi. Art historians, cultural critics and socio-political observers mark the late 1980s and early 1990s as a decisive shift in Indian political economy, coinciding with economic liberalization reforms and the fundamentalization of politics at the national level. These forces played out as a binary polarization of subjectivities, temporalities and spatiality. From within these binds and impasses, the artists and performers I examine in this dissertation enact "contemporaneity" variously, articulating the possibilities of other more generative economies of sensing and knowing.

Although Chinese contemporary artists are often criticized for creating superficial works that parody Chairman Mao without any deeper meaning, the employment of parody is a far more complex phenomenon. Instead of being representatives of Jamesonian pastiche, many artists employ varying methods of trans-contextual parody to express their mixed and even controversial intentions and notions. With a detailed structural analysis of the art works, and taking into account the socio-cultural context and the artists' own intentions, I will show that the common assumptions—that parodying Mao is equivalent to political pop or that political pop represents pastiche—are oversimplifications of this complex phenomenon, especially when caricaturing is used as a method to violate the visual norms.

This book enhances critical perspectives on human rights through the lens of performance studies and argues that contemporary artistic interventions can contribute to our understanding of human rights as a critical and embodied doing. This study is situated in the contemporary discourse of asylum and political art practices. It argues for the need to reimagine human rights as performative and embodied forms of recognition and practical honouring of our shared vulnerability and co-dependency. It contributes to the debate of theatre and migration, by understanding that contemporary asylum issues are complex and context specific, and that they do not only pertain to the refugee, migrant, asylum seeker or stateless person but also to privileged constituencies, institutional structures, forms of organisation and assembly. The book presents a unique mixed-methods approach that focuses equally on performance analyses and on political philosophy, critical legal studies and art history - and thus speaks to a range of politically interested scholars in all four fields.

This article discusses the changing nature of art history when it comes to black British artists and suggests that such history has perhaps moved away from existing to instead correcting or addressing the systemic absences of such artists from British art. This is typified by Rasheed Araeen's 1989 exhibition The Other Story, the first major attempt to create a broad black British art history, and several other not dissimilar, exhibitions. The article also considers what changes to the fortunes of a small number of black British artists might be deduced from the awarding of honors by the queen and the extension of membership in the Royal Academy to a handful. The article draws attention to the ways in which major London galleries such as the Institute of Contemporary Arts, the Serpentine, and the Whitechapel have, over the course of the past two decades, hosted the first main-space solo shows of black British artists' work. With so much having happened to limited numbers of black British artists, this introduction suggests that burgeoning scholarship on these and other artists is timely, and that the articles assembled for this issue of Nka are a reflection of this increased attention. Among its concluding considerations are the ways in which much of this new scholarship emanates from US rather than from British universities. Finally, the article urges a "rescuing from obscurity" of important pioneering texts on black British artists.