All tagged art

Wounded Landscapes: Debris of War, Residual Vulnerability, and (Toxic) Intimacy in Post-Cold War Southeast Asia

Wounded Landscapes: Debris of War, Residual Vulnerability, and (Toxic) Intimacy in Post-Cold War Southeast Asia

Chairat Polmuk
Articles, Peer Reviewed

This paper investigates transnational ecologies of the vestiges of war in Southeast Asia, where a shared experience of vulnerability has become the very condition of everyday reality and aesthetic expression. Focusing on the legacies of the U.S. bombardment campaigns in Laos, Cambodia, and Thailand during the Second Indochina War, the author looks at how artists and filmmakers such as Allan Sekula (USA), Tada Hengsapkul (Thailand) Vandy Rattana (Cambodia), and Xaisongkham Induangchanthy (Laos), document the lingering effects—and affects—of Cold War atrocities through topographic aesthetics as a locus of “residual vulnerability”.

Gazing to Africa: A Conversation with Art and Ethnology at the Museum

Gazing to Africa: A Conversation with Art and Ethnology at the Museum

Alexandra Antohin
Articles

This short essay explores how museum displays have traditionally shaped static public knowledge about Africa and Africans. Impressions from the spectator’s experience of the exhibit Beyond Compare: Art from the Bode Museum will serve as a springboard to reimagine how art and ethnological collections can dismantle ideologies of cultural domination embedded in these items’ preservation and presentation to the public.

Hercules in White: Classical Reception, Art and Myth

Hercules in White: Classical Reception, Art and Myth

Aimee Hinds
Articles, Peer Reviewed

The polychromy of classical sculpture has been systematically suppressed in Western art since the Renaissance resulting in an artificial whiteness that fits within a tradition of presenting false racial narratives of the Greco-Roman historical past and mythology, one that codes all idealised bodies as white, young, and hetero-normative. Using an intersectional framework to consider the significance of class, gender and race, the author analyses receptions of the Farnese Hercules and explores why (lack of) colour has been weaponised as a way for Western culture to claim an inheritance from the ancient Greco-Roman world, and how this is perpetuated in modern classical reception.

Immaterial Religion – Yves Klein’s Ex-voto to St Rita of Cascia

Immaterial Religion – Yves Klein’s Ex-voto to St Rita of Cascia

Jessica Hughes
Articles

An essay on the details and aesthetic significance of a votive offering that artist Yves Klein made to St. Rita of Cascia. While art has always played an ineliminable role in the Judeo-Christian tradition, it seems that Klein was particularly sensitive to the entanglement of votive offering, economic sacrifice, and the experiential dimensions of ritual. In many of Klein's works, it would seem that the subsumption of art into religion has been inverted.