ABSTRACT This article explores how izintombi (virgins) in the Zulu culture make sense of being young, Zulu and woman in contemporary South Africa; a country where human rights are protected through the Bill of rights within the Constitution, and watched by human rights activists. The resurgence of ubuntombi (virginity) in-between the mid 1980s and the mid 1990s was accompanied by the revival of virginity

ABSTRACT The literature on Intimate Partner Violence (IPV) largely presents a narrative of men as perpetrators and women as victims. This allows little attention to be paid to men as victims of IPV. Much less effort is made to understand how men’s experiences of IPV impact perceptions of their masculine subjectivities and how they respond to victimisation. Through in-depth narrative interviews, this

This article maps out our critical engagement with the Third Theatre community pre- and post-COVID-19, with a focus on both performer training and the concrete material ways in which group theatres connected to this small tradition have responded to the challenges of the global pandemic. To illustrate our arguments, we draw on the Japanese craft of kintsugi—the transformative repair of ceramics—as

ABSTRACT This article discusses four recent, prominent cases of protest over art in South Africa. It reveals that the contemporary art world is a critical space used by engaged artists and social actors to battle out key political, racial, gender and class struggles. In analysing these “art battles,” the importance of interpretive contests over the ideological status of artworks, the organisational

In 2007, a late medieval hoard was found in Wiener Neustadt (Lower Austria), which is extraordinary in many respects: the circumstances of its discovery were curious, its composition extremely inhomogeneous in terms of date and quality, and last but not least, the reconstructable circumstances of its concealment seem to have sprung almost from a Hollywood screenplay. It is due to a memorable coincidence

This essay revisits one of Polish artist Zofia Kulik’s most important ‘photocarpets’, produced in a moment of hope, retrospection yet continuing war in 1993; seen by an international public in 1997. Visually, its composition is dominated by late Soviet sculptures symbolising Mother Russia and military aggression, yet the composition, ‘kilim-like’, with an additional reference to Polish Catholicism

Published in Critical Arts: South-North Cultural and Media Studies (Ahead of Print, 2022)

The article is dedicated to the role of polychrome solutions of the architectonic order in shaping the mode of expression of Baroque façades. The ancient principles of designing architectural structures, inherited from the Renaissance, were subjected to reinterpretations in order to impart different expressive values. Vertical layouts began to dominate in the Baroque. Appropriately selected polychrome

This text emerges from the autotheoretical performance practice of nonstop languaging, developed during my Master Studies at HOME OF PERFORMANCE PRACTICES, ArtEZ University of the Arts. My ongoing artistic research is enacted through this practice and proposes a writing of the self that is not focused on recalling facts or narrating stories, but rather on tracing my thoughts in real time through language

Creativity is a fundamental skill to prepare individuals to work and live in a changing world. Educators have recognised its value and advocate that schools can provide an environment for fostering the creative thinking skills of students. Makerspaces are emerging in school contexts, and they carry great opportunities for engaging students in creative thinking processes. The school makerspace also

Published in Critical Arts: South-North Cultural and Media Studies (Ahead of Print, 2022)

Three female voices with different cultural backgrounds and practices explore the concept and possibilities of the we-narrative. Starting from a position of critical reflection, we dive into the question of how to speak as a female WE. WE is used to differentiate the particular collective dynamic that operates throughout this text from a more general use of the word ‘we’. Our framework is to work with

Created in 1984 by the French artists ORLAN, Frédéric Develay and Frédéric Martin and shown for the first time at the Centre Pompidou during the exhibition Les Immatériaux (28 March to 15 July 1985), the telematic magazine Art Accès has marked the history of the art on Minitel, the French Videotex system in use between 1980 and 2012. For ORLAN and Frédéric Develay, Art Accès was a way both to propose

The article examines the correlation between the stylistic iconography of traditional Ukrainian embroideries and the experiments in modernist painting that led to the emergence of abstraction, Suprematism in particular. The focus is made on the artistic output of the embroidery workshops in the villages of Verbivka and Skoptsi, both located on the territory of present-day Ukraine, in the early 1910s

The collection of the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven comprises works by some 800 modern and contemporary artists, and El Lissitzky is one of the most important among them. This special position for Lissitzky is not due simply to the number of his works in the collection. In addition, his oeuvre, ideas and artistic objectives correspond closely with the museum’s engagement with experimentation, radical

Manar Hasan employs the term “memoricide” to describe the systematic eradication of Palestinian society from modern memory, a process, she points out, that occurred not only through the destruction of its major cities, but also through the erasure from public consciousness the inhabitants of those cities, and specifically the Palestinian women who once played highly visible, integral roles within them

This article addresses a body of works by the video artist Ruth Patir, in which Israeli womanhood in the 2020s is interrogated through Iron Age female statuettes, known as Judean Pillar Figurines. By means of motion capture technology and 3D animation, Patir features contemporary Israeli women uncannily moving and speaking through the bodies of millennium-old female figurines, whose history and function

Similar to the Russian historical avant-garde of the 1910s, which predicted the war and the social revolution of 1917, the late avant-garde of the 1920s anticipated the advent of the totalitarian terror and the Stalinist repressions of the 1930s. In figurative painting, this manifested itself in a specific visual “lexicon” and modality (bodily violence and the fragmented body, frustration, motifs of

Krystyna Miłobędzka (born 1932) is one of the most interesting and unique phenomena of the Polish poetry scene of the 20th and 21st centuries. Two characteristics of her poetry, the visual character of her many poems and her preoccupation with the concept of the garden-world, are worth a closer look. Miłobędzka’s poetry refers to the topoï of the garden-world in single poems and cycles of poetic

In recent years, disability has become a site for knowledge and artistic creation. In this study, local governments, universities, art museums and non-profit organisations collaborated from 2019 to 2022 to implement an online art project for people with disabilities during the Covid-19 era. The project's goal was to enhance the identity of people with disabilities, promote their interest in museums

This article presents an interpretation of the works by the Israeli–Druze photographer Amira Ziyan, focusing on a series of photographs from 2017. These portray reenactments of actions identified with traditional roles of women in Druze society, such as cooking and cleaning. Employing a unique visual language and choice of form and content, the artist depicts a confrontation between a clear set of

GOR stands for Groupe des Objets Revolutionaires, or, in English, the Group of Revolutionary Objects. This group was founded by Filipe Pais, Julie Brugier and Olivain Porry in 2018, in reaction to two major planetary concerns: the climate crisis and techno-solutionism. GOR, in response, opens a fictional design space for debate and aesthetic manifestations, wherein objects and machines are given autonomy

As the gender disparity increases yearly within art—with substantially more girls choosing to continue with the subject into asessed years than boys at secondary school—this essay explores a handful of the influencing factors for this gender imbalance, before exploring the ways in which we might begin to remedy such an unacceptable polarisation in subject preference.

Many have defined the artist-teacher, most notable Alan Thornton (2013), who outlines the artist-teacher as an individual who practices making art and teaching art and is dedicated to both activities as a practitioner. However, this definition does not specifically define the artist-teacher in adult community learning (ACL). This article considers if this definition is applicable to artist-teachers

Published in Critical Arts: South-North Cultural and Media Studies (Ahead of Print, 2022)

The interrelationship among art, intelligence, and machine has important implications for the visual arts as part of a general education. Here, Frederic Fol Leymarie (FFL), a computer scientist and engineer at Goldsmiths College, and Seymour Simmons III (SS3), an artist and art educator from Winthrop University, South Carolina, discuss these issues and the value of sustained cross-disciplinary conversations

Published in Critical Arts: South-North Cultural and Media Studies (Vol. 36, No. 1-2, 2022)

Samuil Alyanski, the owner and founder of the Alkonost publishing house (1918–1923), as early as 1918 had decided to issue a journal called Dreamers’ Notes, meant to bring together the Symbolist writers remaining in Russia after the October Revolution, primarily Aleksandr Blok, Vyacheslav Ivanov, and Andrei Bely. Despite the generally accepted view based on the memoirs of Alyanski, Andrei Bely played

The paper focuses on the structure of an advertising image for a 2010s computer company in the neo-capitalist Moscow, Russia. The analysis looks back to the pioneering studies of advertising as a commercial “applied art” by Sergei Eisenstein, Leo Spitzer and Roland Barthes. The picture’s plot and composition are shown to be a consistent and sophisticated near-artistic design that uses textual puns

One of the characteristic features of the Russian Avant-garde is the close connection between painting and poetry. Futurist poets (Vladimir Maiakovskii, Aleksei Kruchenykh) were educated as artists, their books were illustrated by the famous painters of their time (Mikhail Larionov, Nataliia Goncharova). Some of the Futurists designed their own books and did all kinds of typographical experiments.

ABSTRACT South Africa contends with gender-based violence (GBV) and its societal consequences. This study, therefore, engages with discussions around reflective writing as a participatory methodology to foster free and inclusive expression on issues around GBV in South Africa. My study proffers a diverse response by exploring how participatory research and assessment approaches, through reflective

The way in which platforms curate and assemble the music they present plays an important role in mediating fields of artistic practice to audiences. The different curatorial logics of platforms hel...

The rise of Egyptian women artists and art teachers at the end of the 1940s appeared in tandem with an active women’s movement that asserted the agency of women in modern Egyptian public life. In this article, we discuss the art career of Menhat Helmy (1925–2004), a 1949 arts graduate of the ma`had al-ali li-ma`lumat al-funun al-jamila (Higher Institute for Women Teachers of the Fine Arts), located

The story of Israel and its raison d’être are suffused by memories of the Holocaust, which construct the self-definition and identity of the state. This article examines works by three contemporary Israeli women artists—Dvora Morag, Miri Nishri, and Bracha Ettinger—who subvert the traditional telling of history and enable rethinking of the past as the basis for the individual’s existence in the nation

Van Gogh immersive exhibitions—multi-sited, branded multimedia environments inspired by the artist’s life and paintings—are seemingly ubiquitous in 2022. These itinerant digital spectacles bundle reproductions of Vincent Van Gogh’s most recognizable artistic motifs with tropes of fin-de-siècle madness, bathing their visitors in an artistic wonderland of projected images and soundscapes spread throughout

The concept of metamodernism relies on our understanding of modernism, postmodernism and the bigger cultural periods that originated them. While modernism is a product of modernity, postmodernism is not situated comprehensively within a well-defined period. Moreover, when dealing with the dichotomy of movement and era in the last century, we are presented with a taxonomic dilemma of conflating eras

By juxtaposing two ostensibly divergent characters, the Jewish art historian and Egyptologist Hedwig Fechheimer (1871–1942) and Soviet filmmaker and theorist Sergei Eisenstein (1898–1948), this paper investigates how both approaches folded time, creating Cubist chronologies. Fechheimer adapted the philological focus of her Berlin School contemporaries to create an ahistorical, anti-teleological grammar

Although the global art market has often been resilient to international economic and political events, it has faced some of its biggest challenges under the influence of COVID-19. Among others, the pandemic and the accompanying restrictive administrative measures taken by world governments have significantly influenced such key economic indicators as gallery employment, art sales, and the organization

Discussions of conceptual art both East and West have focused on the notion of “dematerialization” of the artwork and the substitution of “art as idea” for concrete works of art. Yet such an approach oversimplifies the role of materiality in works of conceptual art generally and underestimates the transformative role of the concrete object in early Moscow conceptualism in particular. An examination

The article contains a comparative study of the visual poetics observed in the literary texts of American writer Ambrose Bierce and Russian-American writer Vladimir Nabokov. In particular, the study focuses on Bierce’s short story “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” and Nabokov’s three short stories “Details of a Sunset”, “Aurelian”, and “Perfection”, in all three of which a number of narrative tools

Increasing usage of digital technologies in daily life has affected even tech savvy students. With the prominent development of augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality technologies, this study concentrates on the ongoing development of AR in art education and its potential in art education. As an educator in visual arts at a higher education institution, the author explored AR-integrated curriculum

A socially engaged art project conducted in Malta in 2021 brought together a group of participants from different sub-Saharan African countries with artists and researchers to promote civic engagement and cultural inclusion and understand how participants' ideas could be promoted and discussed beyond the workshop. This article addresses one of the project's central themes – citizenship – and argues

United Nations (UN) released the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development in 2015. This agenda has received attention from various disciplines and sectors globally; partnerships from private and public sectors were formed to play a role in this challenging ambitious plan. However, architectural education and professional organisations in Turkey have not been strongly engaged with the agenda in particular

ABSTRACT In discussing both decolonial and posthuman conceptual frameworks, the article advocates for putting the ‘human’ back into the humanities. However, most work on decoloniality refuses engagement with the posthuman and the Anthropocene. Similarly, posthumanism barely acknowledges the parallel work in decolonial literature. The posthuman turn is inadequate without acknowledging decolonial literature

The article considers the concept of new anthropology in the works of Vasily Chekrygin in the context of the scientific and philosophical ideas of his time. Chekrygin’s anthropology drew on the new concepts of life, discoveries made in biology and chemistry and new ideas of matter. A paradoxical fusion of scientific and occult thought, coupled with ideas of Christian anthropology, formed a crucial

The article discusses an artistic method of the post-Soviet artist Vlad Mamyshev-Monroe (1969–2013) as the nexus of several traditions embedded in modernist legacy. His main genre is remastered (scratched) photographs depicting him impersonating various historical and fictional characters, from Marylyn Monroe (whom he considered his alter ego) to Hitler, Jesus Christ, and Putin. His art and artistically

The article examines the paintings by Eduard Steinberg, a Soviet non-conformist painter from the 1950s to the 1980s from the standpoint of the plastics of his language. The author focuses on Steinberg’s polemical dialogues with the greatest names in Russian and European avant-garde art, including both common points and disagreements. By analyzing the painter’s texts through the prism of poetics of

In the early years of the discovery of Indigenous bark paintings in Australia, anthropologists regarded this artform as part of a static and unchanging tradition. Inspired by the images of Arnhem Land rock art and ceremonial body design, the bark paintings were innovatively adapted by Indigenous Australians for the bark medium. Today, this art is recognised for its dynamism and sophistication, offering

ABSTRACT To transform traditional postgraduate psychotherapeutic training programmes, we need educational strategies which acknowledge every clinical interaction as culturally situated. Autoethnography is put forward as a method of research-based self-study which can enable students to foster an awareness of the social unconscious. This approach can aid students bridge the gap between social order

In Diagrammatic Writing (2013), Johanna Drucker discusses the power dynamics between texts interacting on a page. So-called autotheoretical texts often engage in similar types of performative and relational lay-outs, and yet, not much has been written about this formal phenomenon. Bearing this in mind, I propose an experiment that performs relations by thinking with, and through, Las Meninas, a self-portrait

This article presents a project which is an experiment in the emerging field of human-machine artistic collaboration. The author/artist investigates responses by the generative pre-trained transformer (GPT-2) to poetic and esoteric prompts and curates them with elements of digital art created by the text-to-image transformer DALL-E 2 using those same prompts; these elements are presented in the context

In order to achieve successful products and services, design research nowadays is searching for new methods that unify collaboration between professional designers and future users. Developing and using these new design methods is also of interest in design education. In this study, design toolkits are developed to practise participatory design with a user-centric orientation. The purpose of this study

Published in Critical Arts: South-North Cultural and Media Studies (Ahead of Print, 2022)

The role of female collectors in the promotion of non-official Soviet art is rarely reflected in texts on the history of art. In the shadow of the well-known figures, their patronage stays obscure. This article proposes to reflect on the exhibition practice of the Marie-Thérèse first Gallery in order to add to art history by rethinking the context with a gendered lens.

ABSTRACT For the Oromo, music remains a means of expressing political repression. This study is an exploration of linguistic choices subsumed in an Oromo Protest song, “Maastar Pilaanii” by Caalaa Bultume. In this research, I explored the textual instrumentality of the lyrics of the song as a form of political discourse. To this end, I adopted Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) framework to identify

This article examines autotheory and clinical trauma theory in relation to the author’s studio-based visual arts practice. This is addressed through surveying the development of the drawing series An open love letter. This ongoing series stems from an expanded practice of life drawing and explores experiences of love in relation to PTSD. Trauma is an event that fractures the sense of self, sometimes

ABSTRACT In Flanders and the Netherlands, a controversy arises each year over “Black Pete”, a blackface character that is one of the traditional figures of the children’s festival of Saint Nicholas. Through a rhetorical listening analysis of mainstream print media sources in Flanders, this article aims to understand the conflicting positions and unproductive stances haunting the public Black Pete debate

This article scrutinizes the use of liminality as a term to understand medieval dance practices. With the case of the feast day of St. Eluned described in Gerald of Wales Itinerarium Cambriae, I first present common ways that historians and theologians have used the term liminality in order to describe historical depictions of feasts of saints where more unruly forms of movement and dancing have happened

ABSTRACT Artificial intelligence (AI) art is the product of AI technology applied to art. In terms of technical application, AI art has two methods: symbolism and connectivism. In terms of the human-machine system, there are three levels: human using machine, human guiding machine and human-machine separation. AI art is a special form, existing between natural beauty and human art: AI art, first of

ABSTRACT Drawing on theorisations of popular culture as a site of cultural hegemony and Bourdieu’s sociology of taste, this paper is an analysis of social media discourses about Skhosana Buhlungu’s song Dlala ntethe. Our main thesis is that the song became the locus of expression and contestations about ethnic identity. We demonstrate how the song, like all forms of popular culture, became implicated