EXTRACTIVISM | Solidified Settler Perception
Visual culture allows us to trace the ways Crimean Tatars have pursued land reclamation as a spatial and temporal project that contests settler colonial occupation and its racial regime of ownership.
EXTRACTIVISM | Water-time in İz Öztat’s artistic practice
Artist İz Öztat’s engagement with water, which was central to her work in the mid-2010s, offers different forms of non-linear time and builds relations across time, space, and species to recall a history of genocide.
One day a general concern: All artists, think of the Earth
Reaching back to a statement uttered by curator Scott Watson in the 1980s, “Art is not a general concern,” the recent wave of environmental art actions are examined within a history of art vandalisms, representation in media and popular culture, and their potential for political agency (or lack thereof).
The Power of Abuse Always Comes as a Surprise
In 2020, a combination of the pandemic, the police, and public events allowed me to recover my dissociated experience of being abused via the portal of key photographs. It’s a cautionary tale, not a redemptive one. The power of abuse always comes as a surprise. Trigger warnings for sexual abuse, rape, and violence.
EXTRACTIVISM | Memories of the sea
Mainstream accounts refer to the coastal regions of Kutch as wasteland, as submerged lands, as marginal—words that indicate a lack of human use and value. But these amphibious geographies have been inhabited for centuries by the fishing community and the pastoral Fakirani jat communities, a presence and livelihood that contests this presumed lack.
This is why we can’t have nice things!
Much of the debate around documenta fifteen forgets that political change and cultural change might not work in tandem, that denaturalising power relations might be easier than denaturalising gender relations and entrenched racial prejudices, or that the merits or demerits of political artworks, many of which come laden with harrowing backstories, cannot be measured against the yardstick of semiotic theory.
EXTRACTIVISM | Introduction to the dossier
How are images implicated in the increasingly diversified and expansive ways in which industrial-scale extractive methods and practices operate? To what extent do the ways images are produced, circulated, theorized, and politicized mirror or challenge extractive methods and practices?
EXTRACTIVISM | Notes on processes of unearthing: Wildfires and the entanglements of space on the unceded lands known as California
Thinking with entanglements of the wildfires on the unceded lands known as California and that is dedicated to analysing and locating openings to dismantle the abstraction that is the wildland-urban interface.
EXTRACTIVISM | Ben Asamoah’s Sakawa (2018) and the Problem of e-Waste
Sakawa—a combination of internet fraud, traditionalist African ritual practice, and gender performance—is not a quirky consequence of increasing West African access to digital technologies but rather a response to colonial economic policies that continue to designate Africa as a site for extracting mineral resources and discarding waste.
The democratic sensible: Becoming word in protest recitations
Images of texts from sites of protest against the Citizenship Amendment Act and the National Register of Citizens have been transcribed into embodied performances.
Visual Activism revisited
Co-editors of the 2016 themed issue on Visual Activism reflect back on it in light of recent events.
Thinking in motion
A reflection on the online action Face Mask, Not Muzzle by Tucumán collective La Lola Mora, which responds to a present undergoing multiple crises.
Telepathy without the internet
Is it possible to practice telepathy outside of the oppressive market dynamics that dominate the internet today?
Review of the 2019 Venice Biennale
Themed "May You Live In Interesting Times," the 58th Biennale proceeds from the idea of multivalency, inviting complexity, ambiguity and contradiction, and constituting a point of departure rather than a conclusion.