Basquiat’s black-eyed beams
Basquiat’s brushstrokes in UFOs offer a crash course in the history of Black flight, from the Black slave seeking to flee the deadly sugar plantations of the Americas to the minor traffic violator driving his Toyota Camry a little too fast in today's US.
Nothing more than a passport
A personal reflection on how identity, migration, and bureaucracy intersect visually through the seemingly simple object of a passport.
The heart of a giraffe
An interview with the artist and the curator behind the project "The heart of a giraffe in captivity is twelve kilos lighter" (Venice Biennale 2024) on the legacies of colonialism, human-animal relations and the transformative potential of art and education.
Interstellar supremacism
Yael Bartana's Light to the Nations (German Pavilion at the 60th Venice Biennale) is a multimedia work exploring universal salvation in the face of a global catastrophe, but ultimately reinforcing nationalist and supremacist ideologies and echoing current Israeli state policies.
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.
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 | 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.
Revisiting the Philosophy of Horror
Full audio recording of Caetlin Benson-Allott's interview with Noël Carroll in the context of the themed issue on "Design and the Componentry of Horror."