Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15100229

Authors: Ianick Takaes

This article examines how Philippe Thomassin’s Last Judgment (1606) engraving traveled from Rome to the colonial Spanish Americas, acting as a powerful tool for reshaping both local belief systems and the physical environment. Moving beyond simple artistic analysis, I show how this image promoted a worldview that prioritized human salvation over the survival of the natural world. I connect this historical visual culture to the modern destruction of the Amazon rainforest by apocalypticist religious groups, who view clearing the forest not as an environmental disaster but as the preparation of a divine paradise. By linking early modern prints to today’s climate crisis, I argue that art history must address the active role of eschatological images such as Thomassin’s: they do not just depict the end of the world but can actively help bring it about. This case study reveals how colonial visuality continues to shape the precarious future of the Amazonian biosphere.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15100228

Authors: Marco De Mutiis

This paper examines the emergence of the image decoy as a tactic in contemporary digital and networked visual culture: an image that exploits the tension between its representational surface and its underlying algorithmic operations in order to deceive, distract, or lure both human and machine viewers. Building on Harun Farocki’s notion of the operational image and its extension by later media scholars, it argues that the operational capacities of digital images—their legibility to machine vision, their circulation through platform algorithms, their role as training data—are not the exclusive property of corporations, platforms, and states, but can be reclaimed, redirected, and weaponised by artists, designers, technologists, and everyday users. Through an analysis of vernacular and artistic practices from the past two decades, the paper maps four thematic clusters of image decoys: Hiding in Plain Sight, which conceals messages within ubiquitous images; Image Triggers, which baits or evades automated machine vision; Occupy the Internet, which reclaims algorithmic visibility through tagging and search; and Superspreaders, which infiltrates the infrastructures of circulation themselves. Together these cases sketch an adaptable grammar of counter-operational tactics, positioning the image decoy as a form of tactical media suited to a condition of continuous technological adaptation.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15100227

Authors: Mert Ağaoğlu

This study examines the bulbous roofs appearing in buildings constructed or comprehensively restored in the capital city of Istanbul during the late Ottoman period, moving beyond the one-dimensional interpretations predominantly found in existing scholarship. While previous research has largely attributed these Eastern-origin forms directly to a conscious “Orientalist” or “self-orientalizing” mindset orchestrated by the palace or patrons, this paper provides a comprehensive comparative analysis. The structures examined include the Selimiye Barracks, Taksim Artillery Barracks, Ahmed Afif Pasha Mansion, Theron Damon Mansion, Heybeliada Madam Mari Mansion, Çengelköy Vahdettin Mansion, Alay Köşkü (Procession Pavilion), Arnavutköy Anonymous Mansion, Dikranyan Mansion, Huber Pavilion, Sirkeci Terminal, Mekteb-i Tıbbiye-i Şahane (Imperial School of Medicine), Dolmabahçe Clock Tower, Kumkapı Tavaşi Süleyman Agha Mosque, Hidayet Mosque, Kadirihane Tekke Hacı Piri Mosque, Akbıyık Masjid, Sheikh Zafir Tomb, and Hobyar Mosque. The research follows a four-stage methodology, categorizing these forms according to their morphological attributes and analyzing them within the contexts of aesthetic, urban-architectural, and political representation layers. The resulting data indicate that bulbous roofs emerged as a composite resultant of the desire to create focal landmarks in the urban silhouette, 19th-century eclecticism, the pursuit of diplomatic prestige, and the aesthetic tastes of period patrons and architects.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15100226

Authors: Izabela Sykta Anna Staniewska Agnieszka Greniuk

Contemporary housing is increasingly shaped by standardized models that weaken local identity and overlook the ecological knowledge embedded in vernacular settlements. While vernacular architecture is widely recognized as a source of inspiration for sustainable design, considerably less attention has been devoted to translating this knowledge into transferable design frameworks applicable to contemporary housing. This paper investigates how research on the architectural and landscape heritage of a small town can be transformed into a place-based model of residential design through the integration of Research by Design (RbD), Project-Based Learning (PBL), and Transhistorical Pedagogy (THP). The empirical basis is the interdisciplinary 10+1 Hrubieszów Climate Houses and Gardens project developed at the Faculty of Architecture, Cracow University of Technology within the research programme Local Development of Hrubieszów—From Participation to Implementation (2021–2024). A comparative multi-criteria analysis of eleven housing proposals demonstrates that the resulting design model is structured around three interrelated principles: the creative reinterpretation of vernacular traditions through the strategy of “good continuation”; the redefinition of the homestead—rather than the individual building—as the primary unit of design; and the integration of contemporary climate-responsive strategies with local ecological knowledge. Together, these principles constitute a transferable framework for designing culturally rooted, regenerative and climate-resilient residential environments applicable to small-town contexts beyond Hrubieszów.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15100225

Authors: Matteo Bittanti

This essay reads the video game Sneaky Sasquatch as a moving-image environment whose interfaces administer the world they display. The essay examines administrative recognition as a modality of performative imaging: interfaces make institutional standing actionable, while repeated play sustains the roles through which Sasquatch participates in the game’s social world. The game’s disguises, meters, licenses, keycards, balances, and alerts allocate access, direct bodily movement, and normalize institutional labor. In Sonia Fizek’s account of the video game as an algorithmic spectacle, on-screen images arise from computational processes and participate in the game’s operations. Judith Butler’s theory of performativity supplies a theory of subject-formation through repeated norms, which the essay then translates into administrative and interface performance. Bettina Bódi’s concept of cozy agency identifies the comfort through which that order becomes ordinary. The analysis moves from disguise and social legibility to jobs, banking, governance, care work, platform dependency, everyday domestic use, and the absorption of nonhuman agency. Apple’s May 2025 acquisition of RAC7 places these image operations inside an integrated corporate ecology. Sneaky Sasquatch shows how a child-facing, platform-distributed game organizes action and subjectivity through ordinary play, most powerfully when its lessons feel least like instruction.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15100224

Authors: Hyoungee Kong

Netsuké (1904) is an illustrated collection of short stories co-written by Renée Vivien (née Pauline Mary Tarn, 1877–1909) and her lover Hélène van Zuylen (1863–1947) under the pseudonym Paule Riversdale. The collection radically rewrites Japanese and Chinese folkloric and mythological tales, replacing male characters with female ones, reinventing plots to foreground women’s achievements, and offering lesbian remixes of heterosexual romances. Reproductions of Japanese prints depicting women enjoying art or each other’s company punctuate the stories. Analyzing its visual and literary program alongside Belle Époque representations of Lesbos and Japan, I argue that Riversdale queers classical imaginings of Japan, presenting Japonisme—the Western taste for Japan—as a means of founding a lesbian community grounded in shared aesthetic sensibility and care. In Netsuké, Japan re-emerges as a feminine utopia of artistically accomplished women devoted to one another, mirroring Lesbos as imagined in turn-of-the-century Paris. This essay recovers an underexamined lesbian iteration of classical Japonisme, one enabled by a broader geo-cultural imagination according to which Japan, the paradoxically farthest corner of l’Extrême-Orient, was repeatedly compared to ancient Greece as the frontier between West and East.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15100223

Authors: Gretchen Renshaw Carmen Merrick Audrey Bacharach Allison Barron Sarah Graham Ashley Kordsmeier

The field of neuroarts is rapidly growing its understanding of the impact of art on well-being. This conceptual design aims to apply the neuroarts in a musical concert with the aim of lowering stress levels and increasing aesthetic mindset for the concert performers. The conductors of the Hendrix College Chamber Orchestra, Choir, and Wind Ensemble chose a program of music intended to promote well-being. Then, conductors and ensemble members co-designed a concert experience that would educate performers and audience members about the field of neuroarts, while collecting pre- and post-concert data on measures of performers’ well-being. The preliminary results suggest likely decreases in measures of stress and anxiety, and likely increases in measures of social connection, confidence in problem-solving, and aesthetic mindset. As a result, this conceptual design suggests that active participation in a musical concert could improve well-being along these five measures.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15100222

Authors: Ogechukwu Elizabeth Okpalanozie Zainab Uche Kilba

In recent years, the call for the return of Africa’s tangible cultural heritage has increased, leading to the repatriation of cultural objects, and Nigeria is no exception. Amidst the growing demands for the restitution of Africa’s cultural heritage objects, post-restitution conservation is rarely incorporated into restitution plans despite its critical role in ensuring sustainable care and interpretation. There is a need to give this negligence utmost attention not only for the purpose of preserving the objects but also because holding institutions refuse to return objects, claiming that there is poor conservation capacity in Africa. This paper explores the limitations of some Western conservation methods in the Nigerian context using the National Museum, Lagos, as a case study. It discusses how effective indigenous knowledge systems and community engagement can be included in the conservation strategies of Nigerian museums. The present study used a qualitative method to identify the gaps in post-restitution conservation with a theoretical framework based on ‘Third Space’ and ‘Contact Zone’ concepts. The outcome of the research showed that repatriated objects can be conserved in the National Museum, Lagos. A hybrid conservation approach and collaboration with holding institutions were recommended for sustainable post-repatriation conservation.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15100221

Authors: Krzysztof Ślachciak Joanna Stefańska

This article proposes a conceptual framework for analysing spatial relationships between the photographic image and its surroundings, understood both as an exhibition context and as an element shaping the viewer’s experience. The analysis begins with the native features of photography, including its indexical relationship to the referent and the historically established trust viewers place in photographic images, which is now being challenged by AI-generated imagery. Drawing on the concept of the photo-object and critical analyses of gallery space, the article introduces a two-level analytical framework. The first level identifies the direction of adaptation: photography may be adapted to space (complementarity), space to photography (development), both processes may occur simultaneously, or no deliberate adaptation may take place. The second level concerns the semantic mode of the relationship: convergence (symbiosis), divergence (dissonance), or an intermediate configuration. The framework was developed through logical and conceptual analysis, while its practical applicability is explored through selected examples drawn from the authors’ artistic practice and from exhibitions they curated or co-curated. The article offers an analytical tool for examining photography in expanded spatial practices, contemporary art, and visual culture.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15100220

Authors: Victoria Fortuna

Buenos Aires-based choreographer Julia Gómez’s 2016 work Chamber Cumbia explores cumbia culture through contemporary dance vocabulary, an ostensibly odd pairing. Cumbia, a popular music and dance form with diverse influences originating in Colombia, gained immense commercial popularity across the Americas in the late 20th century. In Argentina, a version known as cumbia villera emerged during the 1990s in the context of deep structural inequalities that left millions of Argentines and migrants from neighboring countries living in poverty in villas or urban shantytowns. In Argentina, cumbia generally and cumbia villera specifically are associated with racialized, working-class, and often migrant bodies, despite broad commercial appeal. Contemporary dance, in contrast, continues to be situated in the realm of ‘high’ art and is frequently understood to be racially unmarked and universal in its themes. Where, then, do we locate Gómez’s particular mix of high/low and racially unmarked/marked work within Argentine dance history? More broadly, what does this work signal in the context of pervasive academic, artistic, and public discourses that continue to situate Argentina as exceptionally white and European among Latin American nations, an enduring project perpetually haunted by its own incompleteness? Cumbia de cámara, I contend, makes visible tensions and contradictions inherent in Argentine racial projects that simultaneously rest on and refuse acknowledgment of racial difference. This article nuances a small but growing body of scholarship about cultural production that challenges Argentine Whiteness and Europeanness through its focus on dance.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15100219

Authors: Denis Topal Lavinia Grumeza

This article examines a corpus of so-called “Argive–Corinthian” bronze mirrors from the northern and western Black Sea region, exploring their circulation, use, and reinterpretation within Scythian, Thracian, and related non-Greek societies during the late sixth to fourth centuries BC. Rather than treating these mirrors as mere Greek luxury imports or markers of Hellenisation, the study examines how they acquired new meanings after entering local funerary and social contexts. The analysis combines typological study, archaeological context, chronology, distribution, and iconography to reconstruct these objects’ biographies. A catalogue of securely documented mirrors reveals consistent patterns in their geographical distribution, with Olbia emerging as the principal intermediary through which these prestige goods entered the Pontic hinterland. Most examples derive from richly furnished female burials, where they occur alongside jewellery, imported pottery, horse equipment, pigments, spindle whorls, and other high-status objects, indicating their role in elite representation and ritual performance. Particular attention is paid to mirrors decorated with gorgoneia, sphinxes, and frontal female figures. These motifs are interpreted not as fixed carriers of Greek mythological meaning but as visual forms whose significance was reshaped in local cultural settings. Evidence for repair and prolonged use, especially at Mereni and Mamay–Hora, demonstrates that many mirrors remained valued for generations, functioning as curated possessions or heirlooms whose biographies extended well beyond their original production. This article argues that these mirrors should be understood as active participants in processes of cultural translation rather than passive indicators of exchange. Their movement across the Black Sea frontier involved not the straightforward transfer of Greek meanings, but their selective reinterpretation within local systems of status, gender, ritual practice, and social memory. By tracing the circulation, reuse, and deposition of these objects, this study contributes to broader discussions of intercultural interaction, object biographies, and the role of material culture in mediating relationships between Greek colonial centres and the societies of the Pontic steppe.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15100218

Authors: Gerald McMaster

This essay argues that Indigenous relational ontologies provide a foundational framework for rethinking art historical method in ecological terms. Drawing on Plains Cree intellectual traditions, it foregrounds concepts such as wâhkôhtowin (kinship and interdependence), kanawâpâtahmowin (the condition of seeing), and miýikosiwin (a gifted form of relational insight) to demonstrate how Indigenous visual knowledge contests the human/non-human and nature/culture divides that continue to structure Western art history. Rather than treating relationality as a recent theoretical innovation associated with post-human or ecological thought, the essay shows that Indigenous epistemologies have long articulated more-than-human understandings of culture in which land, water, animals, ancestors, and spiritual forces actively participate in the production of knowledge and memory. Drawing on Blackfoot scholarship, particularly the work of Betty Bastien, alongside the teachings of Blackfoot Elder Herman Yellow Old Woman, the essay reframes testimony, survivance, and visual practice as relational processes grounded in networks of responsibility among human and more-than-human beings. By placing Indigenous epistemologies in conversation with contemporary critiques of colonial knowledge systems—including Max Liboiron’s analysis of structural colonialism in research practice and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s critique of linguistic imperialism—the essay argues that the ecological future of art history depends not on expanding its thematic scope but on rethinking its methods. It proposes an approach grounded in Indigenous pedagogies that foreground reciprocity, relational accountability, and the living relationships through which knowledge is sustained, transmitted, and held responsible.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15100217

Authors: Ioanna Miliaresi

Machine learning approaches have enabled increasingly powerful analysis of musical audio, allowing computational models to capture complex acoustic patterns related to musical structure, performance, and expression. However, whether learned audio representations preserve information related to the bodily actions underlying musical sound production remains an open research question. This review examines how machine-learned audio representations encode information associated with embodied musical processes by connecting perspectives from embodied music cognition, computational music analysis, and multimodal machine learning. It establishes a conceptual framework that organizes embodied musical information according to gesture type, acoustic observability, and the relationship between physical action and sound production, distinguishing sound-producing gestures, expressive movements, individual embodiment, and collective performance processes. The review then surveys datasets for audio–gesture research, including motion-capture recordings, instrument-performance datasets, audiovisual resources, and large-scale audio-only datasets, highlighting challenges related to embodiment fidelity, scalability, annotation, and multimodal alignment. It further examines conventional audio descriptors, deep neural and self-supervised audio representations, cross-modal learning approaches, and evaluation methodologies for assessing embodied information within learned representations. Particular attention is given to gesture–sound ambiguity, limited benchmarking resources, generalization across performers and instruments, and the distinction between gesture-related encoding and acoustic correlation. Current evidence suggests that learned audio representations contain partial and task-dependent traces of embodied musical information, particularly for gestures with strong acoustic coupling, while evidence for higher-level expressive and communicative movements remains limited. Determining whether these representations capture meaningful relationships between physical performance processes and musical sound remains an open challenge requiring multimodal, interpretable, and perceptually grounded evaluation frameworks.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15090216

Authors: Aleksandra Pelikhovska

Although the central panel of The Garden of Earthly Delights is perceived as a coherent visual whole, it lacks an obvious compositional center and is commonly interpreted as a polycentric image. This study argues that its visual organization is nevertheless governed by a reconstructable functional hierarchy. To investigate this structure, the study develops a functional method based on the analysis of compositional operators and the viewer’s perceptual route. The method is first applied to selected fifteenth-century paintings and then used to examine the central panel of Bosch’s triptych. The analysis demonstrates that Bosch preserves the traditional principle of compositional hierarchy while transforming its spatial organization: instead of unfolding along the vertical axis, the hierarchy is reconfigured through pictorial depth. The study therefore offers a new explanation of the compositional coherence of the central panel. It also extends the concept of visual engineering by treating compositional hierarchy as both a mechanism of visual organization and an independent object of art-historical analysis.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15090215

Authors: Sarah R. Cohen

This essay examines and compares Watteau’s approach to crafting satyrs and the human males that resemble them both in body and, especially, in their impulsive, animalistic actions. The demi-gods known as satyrs were a familiar presence in European art and literature extending from classical antiquity; their close association with fertility and lewdness evidently stemmed directly from their half-goat, half-human corporality. Al-though as an artist specializing in pastoral scenes of fashionable and theatrical sociability, Watteau did not have many occasions to paint mythological subjects, satyrs occupy a notable place among his drawings. These include both studies after other artists and an unusual group of drawings from the nude male model. I compare Watteau’s treatment of the satyr with certain aggressive males in his fêtes galantes, arguing that these satyric characters destabilize the humanism of his gatherings. Watteau’s improvisatory approach to composition moreover fostered an unusually egalitarian treatment of human and nonhuman animals.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15090214

Authors: Kasia Głowicka

Process-based arts interventions—engaging participants in active embodied creation rather than analysis of completed works—produce more substantive cognitive, emotional, and behavioural change than product-based methods, yet present a significant accessibility challenge: non-artists asked to engage in such practices often respond with resistance, discomfort, and self-doubt, particularly in higher education where embodied learning differs from assumptions about legitimate study formats. This article introduces ARTFUL—a six-stage framework informed by neuroscience research on physiological readiness for learning, cognitive scaffolding, and embodied cognition—which addresses this barrier through progressive pairing of cognitive understanding with embodied experience. The framework was developed iteratively in an exploratory qualitative case study format: earlier course editions employed a three-stage format and the resistance observed motivated the extension of the format. Qualitative data from 24 management students (pre-programme surveys, post-programme semi-structured interviews, creative diaries and reflective portfolios) were analysed thematically. Three self-reported domains of cognitive change emerged: enhanced attention and concentration, increased openness to novelty, and reduced cognitive rigidity. Students moved from initially dismissing embodied methods as inappropriate for higher education to actively integrating them into professional and academic contexts. These findings suggest that systematic scaffolding may support a self-reported shift from initial resistance towards perceived cognitive flexibility, offering a transferable approach for designing accessible process-based arts interventions for non-artist learners.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15090213

Authors: Liana De Girolami Cheney

This essay examines the Italian Mannerist artist Giorgio Vasari’s mythological depictions of Minerva, Venus, and the Ephesian Diana as a coherent allegorical program rooted in Florentine Neoplatonism. Through detailed visual and textual analysis of The Forge of Vulcan (1564, Gallerie degli Uffizi, Florence), The Toilet of Venus (1558, Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart), and Diana of Ephesus (1548, Casa Vasari, Arezzo), it shows that Vasari shifted away from narrative myth toward philosophical emblematic abstraction. These figures symbolize Mind, Beauty, and Nature, aligning with the Renaissance Neoplatonic philosophy of Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499) and his Ficinian hierarchy, in which the soul ascends from material diversity through aesthetic contemplation to rational unity. By integrating readings of Ficino’s writings with insights from Vasari’s 1568 Le Vite (Le Vite de’ più eccellenti pittori, scultori e architettori), this study situates Vasari within a Warburg-inspired iconological framework and proposes that the Mannerist style itself functions as a form of metaphysical rhetoric. Vasari’s reputation has long rested on two achievements: his architectural and pictorial contributions to the Medici court, and his authorship of Le Vite. His mythological imagery has seldom been examined as part of a sustained philosophical program. Rather than depicting specific mythological stories, Vasari condensed these goddesses into symbolic ideas. The resulting hierarchy—Nature (Diana), Beauty (Venus), and Reason (Minerva)—reflects the Ficinian ascent of the soul. In this way, Vasari engaged in a distinct sixteenth-century fusion between classical imagery and metaphysical meaning. Vasari’s Diana, Venus, and Minerva allude to a structured ascent from Nature through Beauty to Reason. Through Mannerist stylization and Renaissance Neoplatonic metaphysics, he transformed mythology into philosophical allegory. Vasari’s art visually enacts Ficino’s ascent (anados). The viewer encounters generative multiplicity, contemplative beauty, and sovereign intellect—a unique ordered ladder of being, depicted in paint.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15090212

Authors: Scott Thomas Carter

The TransformativeArts Framework (TAF) holds that the neural systems recruited to make and perceive art are not peripheral modules but expressions of the core architecture of thought. This essay asks whether contemporary neuroscience supports that claim, and it identifies three observations that the predictive-processing literature on the arts has not yet made. Peer-reviewed neuroscience from 2019 to 2025 on music, visual art, narrative, and dance, together with recent work on manipulation, was read through the lens of predictive processing, with competing accounts presented alongside supporting ones. Across these domains, aesthetic experience recurrently engages the brain’s predictive machinery and the default mode network (DMN). Building on that convergence, the essay advances three observations: that a single cognitive process reads distinct artistic domains in a common way, which is what makes aesthetic cognition transferable; that this process can be corrupted from within a work, not only by external deception; and that the difference can be identified by comparing a communication against defined patterns of deception and of effective, good-faith exchange. The essay concludes that aesthetic cognition is a mode of thinking rather than a specialized add-on, and that its cultivation is a testable protective factor against manipulation.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15090211

Authors: Jane Barnwell

The Crown tells the story of Queen Elizabeth II’s reign, showing the personal and political dramas behind the scenes. The show stitches together a portfolio of locations and set builds to create a claustrophobic sense of containment. In reality, Buckingham Palace is fragmented, whereas the design for the show creates a continuity of space that generates a world that becomes an enclosed system, trapping the royal family within. The production designer of the show, Martin Childs, says, ‘My sets look as much like the real thing as Claire Foy looks like the Queen. I always want my work not to be visible but to be inevitable so that the audience looks at it and accepts it without question. Part of that is keeping tied together several different locations.’ (Author interview, 2019). Using rigorous research, Childs attempts to ‘get to the truth that is other than the facts.’

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15090210

Authors: Lucia Adascalița Viorica Cazac Nicoleta Vasiliev

The study presents the experiences of emerging artists from the Republic of Moldova in the field of comic strips between 2000 and 2025. Comic strip creation has undergone various periods of development, as well as periods of stagnation. The evolution of current technologies, with their implications for the visual arts, alongside contemporary societal imperatives and challenges, is shaping a new attitude amongst young readers towards documentation, information and knowledge. Drawing on current global trends regarding the relevance of publications with sequential graphic content, the aim of this article is to map the new visual discourses of emerging comic strip creators in the Republic of Moldova, documenting their stylistic and thematic contributions, as well as the role of digital technologies in their creative process. The objectives focus on analysing the artistic development, visual language and messages of key figures such as Octavian Curoșu, Cristina Grati, Alex Buretz, Inna Sacali, Călin Enachi, Valentin Enachi and others. The methodology combines case studies with stylistic and semiotic analysis, examining the structure of the comics, their layout and the relationship between text and image. The results reveal significant diversity. Octavian Curoșu combines the sensitivity of traditional techniques with digital media, addressing historical and socio-cultural themes. The artist Alex Buretz uses caricature and the grotesque as tools for civic activism and social criticism. Comic strip artists Cristiana Grati and Inna Sacali explore the world of family life and human relationships, using an expressive digital style and colour palettes that are either evocative or decorative. Graphic designers Călin and Valentin Enachi bring a youthful and adventurous touch to the narrative images, with experimental and original page layouts. All the artists featured make full use of specialised software (Adobe Photoshop, Clip Studio Paint, Procreate and others) and graphics tablets, modernising the creative process. The use of these tools has enabled the emerging artists to emulate traditional techniques, as well as create complex visual effects, optimising work on layers and facilitating publication on online platforms. Thus, through stylistic diversity and digital adaptation, these artists are strengthening the presence of comic strips within the cultural landscape, confirming a vibrant and modern revival of comic art in the Republic of Moldova.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15090209

Authors: Oksana Lifantii Oleksandr Shelekhan

Scythian Studies, or Scythology has a complex and discontinuous history as a branch of archaeology. In its modern form, it is a relatively young discipline. Rather than showing steady development, the field is marked by major interruptions, particularly under the Soviet regime. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Iron Curtain, Scythology entered Western academia more fully, enabling mutual access to literature, collections, and excavations across Eastern and Western Europe. However, by the 1980s, new conceptual challenges grew stronger than ever, particularly the division between narrow and broad definitions of “Scythian culture”. This article argues that the increasingly popular, broad usage of the term, especially in genetic, isotope-based, and popular-science contexts, is rooted in political frameworks. It further examines how colonial and neocolonial narratives have influenced and continue to shape scholarly interpretations, museum representations, and political discourse surrounding Scythian heritage.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15090208

Authors: Caroline A. Jones

Oikos (οἶκος, home) is a concept that split in modernity as it became “eco”: the oikos of economics and of ecology (quantification versus study of our home). In this essay, both derivations will be touched upon since the quantification of our natural home (econometrics) is arguably the modern source of the current climate crisis, while its study (ecology) claims to name that crisis—the Anthropocene—in order to begin to cure it. What role can art history play in this agonistic drama? There is already an architectural history (as in Reyner Banham’s Los Angeles of “Four Ecologies,” 1971). Art history, too, has ecological frameworks from the 1970s that need to be unearthed; this essay argues that they must necessarily be tied to economic ones. We get no ecological art history without the social history of art. Economic relations are found in art that represents or enacts human cultural patterns of extraction (what Marx himself identified as an “irreparable rift”); parallel ecological perceptions follow the Humboldtian logics of geographical niches hosting specifically local forms of life. Art history emerged as a discipline to deal with both these modes. It is coeval with the naming of “ecology,” and its many relations to the oikos deserve to be engaged. In three acts, this brief essay charts a dramatic arc from extraction to relation, with ecology as mediation throughout. The first act looks at a significant moment in which the economic aspects of social art history were foregrounded in Michael Baxandall’s classic Painting and Experience (1972). Baxandall theorized the “experience” of capitalist reckoning as a visual practice conjoined to aesthetic valuation. Relatedly, the quality of ultramarine, visually assessed and theologically charged, was contractually bound to systems of extraction and trade. In the second act, the essay considers Earthworks artists such as Robert Smithson, and anti-Gestalt psychologists, from Anton Ehrenzweig to perception scientist James J. Gibson. Gibson’s 1979 book The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception created a second mode of approaching the oikos: as a set of productive visual “habits” formed by the human body interacting with affordances of the planet. Act Three builds a simultaneous expansion and refutation of Gibson, privileging the non-visual senses in relation to strange media objects that can be analyzed by an art historian—epistemologies departing from vision to embrace amodal senses as ways of knowing environmental disaster in the Anthropocene. This necessarily engages the cultural polemic of symbiontics. Crafted in response to the newest forms of BioArt, this new ecological theory of aesthetics draws on the philosophical category of ontics, viz, symbiontics: symbiosis as that which is. Defeating the isolation fostered in Western art (think of Dūrer’s exceptionally precise and utterly alienated 1504 Hare), the symbiontic art discussed in Act Three is fully entangled. These relational aesthetic gestures are radical—a word whose root is radix, literally, root. Symbiontics engage us in a revolution in rooted sensibility, taken up in art that is in reciprocity with life. Presenting a mutual interdependence, second-wave BioArt performs itself on a planet that is oikos—art in reciprocity with the more-than-human species that maintain this garden of a home.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15090207

Authors: Xinyu Wang Zhijun Wang Rigen Mo

The Liao Dynasty culture among the northern nomadic peoples absorbed profound West Asian historical heritage and uniquely ingenious artistic essence to enrich its own diversity. These mural paintings of Liao tombs most concentratedly reflect this phenomenon. As a visual medium for cultural integration along the Steppe Silk Roads, their artistic expression profoundly reflects the Liao Dynasty’s process of absorbing West Asian art. This article examines the tomb of Zhang Shiqing 张世卿, a former Song subject, now an official of the Liao Dynasty. It employs image analysis alongside interdisciplinary theories from art history, geography, archaeology, and history, aiming to reveal the logic of localized adaptation of West Asian artistic elements—the zodiac signs (Greek: zōidiakos kyklos, “circle of animals”; Chinese: 黄道十二宫图) and the curved-neck pipa—within the murals. The article argues that multiple underlying factors within the Liao Dynasty’s political-cultural structure, Buddhist propagation, and functional demands drove both the zodiac signs and the curved-neck pipa to exhibit a pattern of knowledge-integration adaptation. This adaptation manifests as juxtaposition and fusion in visual composition, functional integration and recontextualization in spatial arrangement, achieving a creative transformation of West Asian artistic motifs. This process not only revitalized the ritual space of the murals but also represented the inevitable projection of dualistic systems within the cultural sphere of the Liao Dynasty.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15090206

Authors: Katharine D. Scherff

Early modern engravings of the tattooed arms of pilgrims such as Ratger Stubbe and Otto Friedrich von der Gröben preserve rare visual evidence of a devotional tradition whose origins lie in medieval pilgrimage to Jerusalem. While these tattoos have often been interpreted as souvenirs, marks of travel, or signs of religious identity, this paper argues that they functioned as living devotional images whose efficacy depended upon their permanent inscription within the living body. Rather than merely representing Jerusalem, pilgrimage tattoos transformed the Christian body into a devotional medium through which sacred place remained materially and visually present long after the journey had ended. Drawing upon seventeenth-century pilgrimage imagery, travel accounts, and the tattoo traditions of the Razzouk family, this paper examines how pilgrimage tattoos materialized memory, sacred geography, and Christian identity. It examines the engraved arms of Ratger Stubbe and Otto Friedrich von der Gröben, whose tattoo programs reveal sophisticated visual narratives that merge sacred history with sacred geography. These images demonstrate that pilgrimage tattoos operated simultaneously as indexical traces of bodily inscription, iconographic representations of holy places, and symbolic affirmations of Christian devotion. Building upon theories of embodiment, materiality, and image studies, I propose the concept of the living devotional image to describe images inseparable from the bodies that bear them. By foregrounding early modern visual evidence, this paper demonstrates how pilgrimage tattoos collapse conventional distinctions between body and image, relic and representation, and memory and place. In doing so, it offers a new framework for understanding devotional imagery, embodiment, and sacred geography in both medieval and early modern visual culture.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15090205

Authors: Zvi Orgad

This article examines a group of Torah arks made for rural Jewish communities in German lands during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Scholarship on Ashkenazi synagogue furnishings has largely focused on monumental Torah arks associated with larger and wealthier communities. The examples discussed here reveal a different tradition, one that emerged under distinct social and material conditions and served smaller rural congregations. Drawing on an analysis of construction techniques, materials, and design, the article demonstrates that these arks were rooted in regional woodworking practices shared with contemporary furniture, cabinetry, and church furnishings. Produced in local workshops, likely by Christian craftsmen, they adapted familiar carpentry forms to Jewish liturgical requirements. Visible structural compromises, improvised solutions, and simplified construction techniques preserve traces of this process. Rather than evaluating these arks primarily against monumental urban examples, this study situates them within the regional material and craft environments in which they were produced. Their forms reflect a localized process of sacralization through which ordinary woodworking traditions were transformed into ritual furnishings and focal points of communal worship. By highlighting this group of objects, whose carpentry, construction, and relationship to regional furniture traditions have not been systematically examined, the article expands current scholarship on Torah ark design and demonstrates the diversity of material solutions developed by Jewish communities in early modern German lands.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15090204

Authors: Roy Hanney

Immersive installation is often evaluated through the language of spectacle, sensory intensity, and technological sophistication, yet such terms offer only a partial account of how moving images operate within embodied and participatory environments. This article examines performative imaging through the practice-based case study of Rituals for Earthly Survival, an immersive installation combining Butoh-informed performance, projection, sound, responsive technologies, and participatory ecological gestures. It considers how such encounters might create conditions for transformation through shifts in attention, relation, and imagination. Awe is considered one affective register through which such reorientation may occur, particularly where encounters with vastness unsettle existing perceptual or conceptual frames. Analysis of the installation, supported by project documentation, limited post-show audience feedback, and two independently commissioned peer reviews, suggests that performative imaging can operate as an ecological encounter by entangling images with bodies, architecture, technologies, and material processes. The evidence also reveals uneven experiences of participation, legibility, and immersion. The article argues that transformative potential depends not only on what images represent but also on the conditions they help to produce.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15090203

Authors: Ángeles Jordano

The Palace of Galiana in Toledo stands within the former royal suburban estate, or almunia, of al-Maʾmūn, ruler of the taifa of Toledo. Following the Christian conquest of the city in 1085, the estate passed to Alfonso VI and subsequently became known as the Huerta del Rey. The surviving residential hall has been attributed to the eleventh-century taifa period on typological and historical grounds, although this attribution still awaits archaeological and fabric-based analysis. This article examines the Mudéjar plasterwork and mural paintings added to the building under Christian rule in order to clarify their chronology, stylistic context, and visual function. The study combines formal and iconographic analysis, parallels with Andalusi and Mudéjar precedents, available technical evidence, and heraldic and documentary sources. The ground-floor plasterwork can be dated more securely to the late fourteenth century, probably around or shortly after 1397, on the basis of converging stylistic, heraldic, and documentary evidence. The painted dados on the upper floor present a more complex chronological problem: the available technical evidence does not provide an independent absolute date, while stylistic and stratigraphic evidence favors a broad chronology within the Christian period, probably between the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and suggests that the surviving fragments may represent more than one decorative phase. The spatial distribution of the decoration also reveals a close relationship between ornament, views, water, and landscape. Galiana thus offers a significant example of the ways in which Andalusi and Christian artistic traditions were combined and transformed in the Christian-period redecoration of an earlier palatial setting of probable Andalusi origin.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15090202

Authors: Anastasiia Chirileanu Tatiana Laura Pocinoc

The piano preludes of Borys Lyatoshynsky (1895–1968)—the Three Preludes, Op. 38, the Two Preludes Based on the Melodies of Ukrainian Folk Songs, Op. 38bis, and the Five Preludes, Op. 44, all composed during the 1942–43 wartime evacuation—have re-entered Western concert life as vehicles of Ukrainian identity. This article asks how performing and curating the preludes afford an experience of Ukrainian identity for the present-day listener, extending the Ukrainian analytical literature on the cycles outward into curation and Western wartime reception. Drawing on recent documented cases—Vadym Kholodenko’s recital programming of Op. 38 alongside the canonical European repertory, and Margaret Fingerhut’s curated album Ukraine: A Piano Portrait—it argues that performance and curation operate not as distinct operations but as interacting practices: different degrees and forms of mediation through which the preludes’ folkloric idiom is configured as Ukrainian for the listener they address. The preludes’ internal difference between literal folk-song quotation (Op. 38bis) and folk intonation (Opp. 38 and 44) becomes a resource that performers and curators mobilise. Situating these cases within three documented strands of Lyatoshynsky’s re-reception during the Russo-Ukrainian war—orchestral, pianistic, and scholarly—the article reframes the wartime prelude as a site where national identity is configured for present-day listeners through layered acts of mediation.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15090201

Authors: Dian Shi

Digital technologies are increasingly reshaping contemporary visual art, not only through artificial intelligence and generative systems but also through material-based artistic practices. While existing scholarship has extensively explored computational creativity, digital aesthetics, and AI-generated imagery, less attention has been paid to how digital fabrication transforms artistic practice through its interaction with physical materials and spatial perception. This paper addresses this issue through a practice-based investigation of contemporary glass art. Drawing upon the author’s long-term artistic practice, the study examines two interconnected projects: the Glass Calligraphy Series and the Spatial Cutting Series. The first project explores how traditional Chinese calligraphy is translated into glass through digital drawing, vector-based design, and waterjet fabrication, revealing how artistic agency is redistributed among artist, software, fabrication systems, and material processes. The second project investigates how layered glass structures generate spatial depth, optical relationships, and embodied viewing experiences. The paper argues that digital fabrication should not be understood merely as a technical tool. Instead, it functions as a creative framework that reconfigures artistic agency, activates the material and spatial qualities of glass, and transforms viewer experience. By examining the intersection of computation, material practice, and visual perception, this paper proposes a broader understanding of digital fabrication as an integral component of contemporary visual art. It argues that digital technologies are not external instruments applied to artistic production but active agents in the formation of artistic methods, material relationships, and aesthetic experience.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15090200

Authors: Mariya M. Vodyanyk

Engagement in the arts, particularly developing skills in an art form, represents a cognitively rich activity involving attention, memory, executive function, and sensorimotor coordination. Despite widespread assumptions that artistic abilities such as drawing are innate, they are highly trainable through targeted learning. Different techniques exemplify how structured observational drawing exercises can reshape perceptual and cognitive processing. For example, the negative space drawing technique directs attention to the shapes surrounding an object rather than the object itself. Specific techniques can map onto underlying cognitive processes, and this article examines the translational potential of learning to draw as a cognitive intervention. Due to the Arts’ aesthetic nature, the benefits extend beyond cognitive and can impact modifiable salutogenic factors at large. A toolkit of drawing techniques is provided, with information on the underlying cognitive processes. By connecting the cognitive neuropsychology of observational drawing to cognitive aging, this work contributes to a growing body of evidence supporting the arts as a vehicle for brain health, with particular promise in an aging global population. As technology transforms the landscape of arts and aesthetics, the cognitive value of embodied artmaking is underscored.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15090199

Authors: Jessica Potter

‘Making of a Meadow’ is an expansive research project developed in 2024, culminating in the ‘Language and Landscape Impact Fellowship’ in 2025, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council Impact Acceleration Account, the Royal College of Art, in collaboration with the Kent Downs National Landscape. The project consists of a series of public workshops led by selected artists across the KDNL. The KDNL is applying for UNESCO Geopark status, and these creative projects form part of a body of evidence demonstrating the importance of the relationship between creativity, geodiversity and biodiversity. A key aim of the project is to expand access to and provide creative engagement with the bio- and geodiverse habitats of the Kent Downs in support of this application. The project also supports creative learning through the design of an educational resource for the KDNL (Making of a Meadow Notebook) for schools and the public to use to encourage, celebrate and attend to geo- and biodiversity. This article evaluates and advocates for creative methods of paying attention to chalk grassland habitats to support understanding their value alongside expanded conceptions of literacy, textual, sonic, visual and linguistic, raising awareness of the vital importance of bio- and geodiverse habitats to the health of the world in both human and planetary ways.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15090198

Authors: Heather Rastovac-Akbarzadeh

In the 2020 screen-based performance Extraterritorial صوت, artists Dena Al-Adeeb, Sholeh Asgary, Leyya Mona Tawil, and Daiane Lopes da Silva develop a feminist refugee praxis through video, sound, and choreography to reclaim “post-apocalyptic landscapes … where ghosts reside at the end of the world.” Filmed along the San Francisco Bay shoreline, the work brings bodies, rocky terrain, synthetic material, and the spectral into relation with layered histories of displacement, settler colonialism, and (neo)colonial violence. Through an analysis of choreography, cinematic form, and material interaction, the essay develops “steadfastness” as an analytic for examining how performance cultivates practices of remaining within the ongoing coloniality of the postapocalypse. The analysis proceeds across three interrelated dimensions. First, it examines material persistence through the dancers’ sustained contact with shifting ground and Mylar emergency blankets, foregrounding how histories of extraction, Indigenous dispossession, and humanitarian governance endure through embodied and environmental relations. Second, it examines temporal duration, showing how delay and recurrence interrupt accelerative temporalities and cultivate an unfinished present by rendering slow violence discernible as an ongoing condition. Third, it turns to spectral persistence, where ancestral relations and colonial violence continue to inhabit bodies and landscapes while unsettling dominant regimes of visibility. Working within the incommensurable frictions between Indigenous sovereignty and SWANA (Southwest Asian and North African) displacement, these dimensions establish steadfastness as a choreographic analytic that foregrounds the labor through which livability is sustained within the postapocalypse.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15090197

Authors: Louise A. Hitchcock

The historical connection between art history and archaeology dates back to the origin of art history in emerging as a discipline from classical archaeology. The practices of both continue to diverge and intersect, rendering an ironic status for both as summarised in this contribution. Ecological approaches to archaeology are problematic, with the role of -scapes (land, sea, sky, etc.) and environments being weighted differently, depending on region, time period, and research questions. These are influenced by broader methodological approaches such as environmental determinism (processualism), traditional art history, field archaeology, and the emphasis of environmental studies on macro (-scape studies) and micro (archaeobotany and phytolith analysis) levels. Field archaeology is by necessity interdisciplinary, requiring different but complementary areas of expertise as discussed below. This contribution will elaborate on the relationship between archaeology, its intersecting disciplines and approaches, and the role of collaboration. It concludes with a brief case study summarising the relationship between trade, complex society, and scapes in the Late Bronze Age (ca. 1700–1200 BCE) Mediterranean and the possible role of climate change, piracy, and religion that caused its collapse in the 12th century BCE.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15090196

Authors: David Davies

It is generally assumed that works in the performance arts are objects. They are not physical objects, of course, but abstract objects of some kind. Such abstract objects are made available to us through the activities of composers, playwrights, choreographers and dance companies, and are appreciable through performance events. Dance objects in a strict sense, it is assumed, are such abstract objects. And, it is further assumed, such abstract objects are properly thought of as types which have particular performance events as their tokens. Dance inherits this ontological picture from classical music, where it is the central element in what I have termed the ‘classical paradigm’. I begin by briefly sketching the classical paradigm as it applies to musical works and performances, and the reasons it has been widely assumed to be ‘the only game in town’. I then present what I take to be powerful objections to the classical paradigm in its ‘pure’ form, and some desiderata for any adequate philosophical account of works in a performing art. I sketch what I take to be the most plausible strategy for defending a ‘type’ theory of works in the performing arts, Jerrold Levinson’s view of musical works as ‘initiated types’. I then argue that this view as its stands fails to account for one very significant desideratum, but might be amended so as to address this challenge. I consider here Anna Pakes’ account of dance works in her Choreography Invisible. I suggest, however, that any account of dance works as types, pure or ‘initiated’, faces serious difficulties. Finally, drawing on Wollheim’s account of multiple artworks as ‘types’, I offer an alternative account of dance works that does not commit us to works as abstract objects, and that thus denies that there are dance objects in the strict sense.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15090195

Authors: George Graham Vasey

This essay examines a long-term collaboration between writer and curator Dr George Vasey and the London-based organisation Intoart, which supports a group of 24 artists with learning disabilities. Throughout the collaboration, a broad array of practice-based curatorial methods have been employed—including field recording, creative writing, and drawing—to develop an interpretative framework for a growing organisational collection of over 6000 artworks. Drawing on John Dewey’s writing on art as experience, the essay expands on Dewey’s concept of thinking through doing in the context of disability arts, arguing for progressive studio provision as a site of exchange and community learning that emphasises an art of lived experience. The essay explores what an artist-led approach might mean in the context of disability, revisiting Dewey’s practice-led approach and foregrounding embodied and experimental forms of engagement. By centring the voice and intention of learning-disabled artists, the project focuses on facilitative strategies that merge the disciplines of art criticism, visual arts, curating, and pedagogy. The essay contributes to ongoing debates in curatorial and disability studies by demonstrating how facilitative and practice-led approaches can reshape interpretative frameworks, artist agency and knowledge production.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15080194

Authors: J. Keri Cronin

This article focuses on a series of cat photographs taken by Belle Johnson, a photographer from Monroe City, Mo., in the early years of the 20th century. These photographs were included in a project called With Other Photographers, an initiative from 1909–1910 which showcased the studio set-ups and techniques of professional photographers. Through this set of photographs we see not only the finished results but also process shots of Johnson working with the cats in her studio. In this article I explore how these photographs were part of a larger discussion around two very different approaches to photography in the United States at this time while also insisting on seeing these cats as individual subjects with agency who played an active role in the creation of these images.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15080193

Authors: Zhilong Yan Manyi Pei

This study examines the mediumistic paintings of Guo Fengyi (郭鳳怡 1942–2010) through the lens of Daoist inner contemplation (neiguan 內觀) and traditional Chinese medicine. Guo developed distinctive self-cultivation techniques, including Ziran Chaoneng Gong (自然超能功 Natural Superpower Qigong), Qi’e Gong (企鵝功 Penguin Qigong 氣功), and Liu Ling Shuzi Gong (劉陵數字功 Liu Ling Numerology Qigong), which resonate with ancient Chinese practices of Zhouyi (周易) divination, shamanic ritual, and Daoist visualization. Through sustained spiritual practice, she experienced what she understood as mystical revelations transmitted by the High Masters. Vivid visionary images repeatedly emerged in her consciousness, accompanied by an overwhelming sense of being guided by an unseen spiritual agency to depict an unknown transcendent realm. Following these experiences, she created nearly one thousand mediumistic paintings. Her work delves into inner landscapes of consciousness and energetic experience, expanding visual art research into the domain of “inner vision”. This study argues that Guo’s art challenges ocular-centric creative paradigms: her mode of “seeing” operates through the supersensory “eye of spirit” rather than physical sight, and artistic creation becomes a process of receiving higher-dimensional messages rather than singular self-expression. Her practice offers a critical reference for recovering the spiritual dimension in contemporary art and provides theoretical perspectives for comparative studies of international mediumistic artists such as Hilma af Klint (1862–1944) and Georgiana Houghton (1814–1884).

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15080192

Authors: Farah Benbouabdellah

Britain’s historical spectacles of animal performance, from Victorian circuses and travelling menageries to early visual media, did more than entertain, they shaped how humans imagined, controlled, and valued nonhuman life. Animals were transformed into objects of fascination and domination, while hunting and poaching practices reinforced imperial authority over wildlife. These performances codified visual and moral frameworks that positioned Britain as arbiter of “wildness,” embedding hierarchies of power and ethical order into the cultural imagination. This paper draws on performance studies, postcolonial ecocriticism, and visual anthropology to trace how circus rings, menageries, and early animal films laid aesthetic and ideological foundations that resonate in contemporary British environmental art and regeneration discourse. By historicising these visual legacies, it reveals how dominion, spectacle, and exploitation persist as underlying structures in Britain’s engagement with nature. Yet contemporary environmental arts are not merely reactive, they reinterpret these histories, transforming frameworks of control into imaginative possibilities for ethical, regenerative, and multispecies representation. By linking past and present, this study demonstrates that understanding the visual politics of historical animal performance is essential to imagining sustainable and inclusive futures for human and nonhuman life in Britain.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15080191

Authors: Maureen Kendal Alana Lake

This paper examines the practices of three women artists working across the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Drawing on Martin Buber’s philosophy of relation and Vilém Flusser’s analysis of technological mediation, it considers how their practices respond to changing conditions of production across analogue and digital technologies. The methodological approach is informed by autoethnography, using situated first-person experience to extend broader social and cultural critique. While one practice spans the transition between analogue and emerging digital modes, the other two operate within post-digital conditions in which material and technological processes are increasingly entangled. Across these contexts, the artists share recurring concerns with relation, ethics, embodiment, and a renewed emphasis on materiality and the tangible. Rather than treating technology as a determining force, the paper argues that changing technological conditions sharpen philosophical questions of presence, relation, and mediation. Through close attention to materials, processes of making, and artistic encounter, it proposes three interconnected ways of understanding presence as encounter, trace, and mediation. Together, these perspectives demonstrate how relationships become materially tangible through forms of embodiment, residual marks, and technologically mediated environments. In doing so, this paper positions presence as a relational and material site of meaning, showing how contemporary artistic practice can produce encounters that resist the reduction of the other.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15080190

Authors: Camelia Lenart

On 24 February 2022, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine intensified a broader sense of precarity across Eastern Europe, including Romania, and longstanding anxieties related to threat, instability, and loss—rooted in the Cold War past—resurfaced with renewed urgency. This article examines how, since 1989, Romanian contemporary dance has responded to these conditions, functioning as a site for expressing and processing the physical and emotional “edginess” of the body and psyche in the post-socialist present. Drawing on archival research, audiovisual materials, and interviews, the study argues that Romanian contemporary dance operates across multiple temporalities. Looking to the past, it preserves and reactivates the memory of bodies that shaped its history, resisting their erasure amid shifting national and transnational identities. Rooted in the present, dancers and institutions navigate a fragile social terrain marked by regional conflict, migration, economic instability, and ongoing debates surrounding diversity and gender. At the same time, they confront the resurgence of nationalist, xenophobic, and exclusionary discourses within Romanian society. Through performance, pedagogy, institutional initiatives, and collaborative projects, contemporary dance in Romania emerges as a critical space of reflection and intervention, actively engaging social tensions while contributing to the reimagining of political and cultural futures.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15080189

Authors: Yucel Yazgin

This study presents an iconographic analysis of cylinder seals from the British Museum’s collection belonging to ancient Near Eastern cultures that depict big cats. A total of 542 cylinder seals were examined, from which 171 big cat representations on 101 seals were selected as the sample. The sample was analyzed using the visual analysis method. Data obtained from the analyses were coded with the MAXQDA 2024, version 24.7 software, thematic and sub-thematic categories were established, and content analysis was conducted. The results indicate that only one of the big cat figures can be identified as a leopard, while the remainder represent lions. In terms of formal characteristics, lion figures predominate, followed by hybrid forms such as griffin-lions. Most of the big cats are depicted standing upright on their hind legs with open mouths in aggressive or attacking postures, emphasizing the lion’s ferocity. The figures are generally highly stylized and possess strong representational qualities. Lions also appear in protective forms, such as sphinxes and griffins, symbolizing strength and guardianship. Additionally, heroes and rulers shown defeating lions function as visual expressions of political authority. Overall, big cat imagery on cylinder seals served as a symbolic medium conveying power, authority, protection, and sacredness within ancient societies.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15080188

Authors: Andreas Rutkauskas

This article examines wildfire smoke as a critical yet disproportionately represented subject within ecocritical photography, arguing that its diffuse, persistent, and atmospheric qualities challenge dominant modes of landscape representation and environmental imagery. While photographic and artistic depictions of wildfire have frequently privileged the spectacle of flame—emphasizing destruction, immediacy, and sublime encounter—smoke operates through ambiguity, duration, and embodied experience. Drawing from my own photographic practice, archival research, and critical engagements with environmental history, this paper investigates how smoke disrupts aesthetic conventions rooted in clarity, distance, and visual mastery. Through a case study of the 2023 McDougall Creek wildfire in British Columbia’s Okanagan Valley, I consider how smoke functions simultaneously as material condition, photographic subject, and representational problem. The paper situates these questions within the broader context of the Pyrocene, examining how colonial fire suppression practices and contemporary climate change have shaped both wildfire regimes and their visual representation. By analyzing historical archives, contemporary photographic practices, and artistic responses to atmospheric crisis, I argue that smoke offers a critical alternative to spectacular images of burning landscapes. Rather than representing wildfire as a discrete event, attention to smoke reveals fire as an ongoing atmospheric condition—one that complicates the boundaries between landscape, image, and lived experience. In foregrounding smoke, this paper proposes new possibilities for environmentally engaged visual culture that move beyond spectacle toward more embodied and ethically attentive forms of representation.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15080187

Authors: Yingjie Chen

This paper explores the relationship between John Cage’s seminal work 4′33″ and the philosophies of Zen and Mahāyāna Buddhism, while reflecting on the limitations of Western philosophical frameworks in cross-cultural musical analysis. Existing scholarship has primarily focused on musical structure, performance practice, audience perception, and interpretations through Western theories such as those of Ludwig Wittgenstein and postmodernism, with limited attention to the influence of Eastern philosophy on Cage’s creative thought. Drawing on Mahāyāna concepts including emptiness, dependent origination, and the Two Truths, this study argues that the work’s use of silence encourages contemplation of the impermanence and relational nature of all phenomena. The paper further critiques the tendency to impose Western theoretical models upon Eastern thought, advocating instead for an experience-centred approach to cross-cultural analysis. It contends that 4′33″ is not merely an experimental musical work, but also a practical manifestation of Zen philosophy at the auditory and perceptual levels.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15080186

Authors: Seán Mac Risteaird

Widely associated with third- and fourth-wave feminism, Ani DiFranco’s artistic practice creates and curates queer and feminist musical experiences through the tools of songwriting and spoken-word poetry. Since the release of her eponymous debut album in 1990, DiFranco has carved out a distinctive voice within American folk and popular music and has cultivated communities of affiliation across feminist and queer communities. Drawing on Judith Butler’s theory of performativity and David Halperin’s conception of queerness as a form of non-normative identity, this article offers close, textual readings of a selection of DiFranco’s earlier songs and spoken-word poems, including “The Whole Night”, “In or Out”, “Lost Woman Song”, and “Self Evident”. In doing so, the article demonstrates how DiFranco’s performances extend beyond musical expression to function as sites of queer and feminist cultural production, where audiences are invited to participate in broader conversations about identity, community, and social change.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15080185

Authors: Xuezi Zhang Wonhwa Kim

Alphonse Mucha’s oeuvre is frequently categorized as a formalist paradigm of ornamentation within the Art Nouveau movement. This study, however, contends that Mucha’s signature Q Formula is far from a mere aesthetic redundancy or a utilitarian embellishment; rather, it manifests as Autonomous Ornament—an autonomous generative process and an inherent rhythm. Adopting a synchronic structural perspective that transcends linear historical causality, this research frames ornament as a dynamic relational medium connecting individual perception with collective evolution across geocultural boundaries. With Theosophy serving as a historical mediation and synthesizing Rudolf Arnheim’s psychology of visual perception with Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy of the ornamental refrain (ritornello), this paper traces the cross-cultural construction of the Q Formula—from Mucha’s Moravian Catholic roots to the avant-garde Theosophical milieu of Paris. Through a horizontal comparative analysis with contemporary fin-de-siècle artists—specifically contrasting Gustav Klimt’s ornamental dissolution and Aubrey Beardsley’s ironic fragmentation—the study underscores Mucha’s distinct integrative strategy. Furthermore, it demonstrates a profound structural homology in topological energy between the Q Formula and the Eastern Kālacakra Mandala. Within this pure and vital ornamental logic, the circular main body acts as a centripetal anchor referencing Emptiness (Śūnyatā), while the boundary-crossing media serve as a metaphor for centrifugal Dependent Origination (Pratītyasamutpāda) and worldly manifestation through clothed repetition. Such ornamental rhythms collapse the classical hierarchy between structure and surface. Amidst the pervasive anxiety of fin-de-siècle industrialization, these forms exerted a visual soothing function, providing deep emotional and psychological efficacy. Mucha’s ornamental schemata reveal how repetitive and structural rhythms successfully transmuted traditional religious paradigms into channels for the internal integration of the modern subject. The paper thus reaffirms ornament as a form of critical imagination and an independent artistic force, which not only reshapes the psychological homeostasis of the modern subject but also constructs a profound resonance between form and life within a cross-cultural context.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15080184

Authors: Ana Paula Cavalcanti Simioni

This article examines the contribution of the Multipla Gallery—founded in 1972 by two women, Teresa Nazar and Edla Van Steen—to the introduction of a new artistic modality in Brazil: the multiples. The “motherhood” of this artistic modality was, at the time, attributed to a third woman: the French gallerist Denise René. This case reveals female presence and agency in the Brazilian art market during the 1970s, a period when women played a significant leading role. The feminization of the role of gallery owners is a topic that has yet to be thoroughly explored in Brazil from a historical and sociological perspective. The third part of the article also aims to discuss, based on the case of Teresa Nazar, the extent to which such female agency was not completely immune to gender inequalities.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15080183

Authors: Sergei Polin Marina Daragan

The appearance and spread of the image of the bicorporate sphinx in Scythia of 4th century BC can be regarded as an example of selective borrowing from ancient iconography. In the Greek world, this type is encountered rarely, but it gained considerable currency among the Scythians of the Northern Black Sea region. Its spread coincides with the period of expansion of the fantastic bestiary among the Scythians and the increasing complexity of the funerary rite of the Scythian elite. The predominance of finds in female burials indicates that this image was part of the circle of signs associated specifically with women’s high social status. The doubling of the body enhanced the image’s visual expressiveness and protective nature. More complex interpretations of the worldview are not supported by the sources and cannot be considered proven.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15080182

Authors: Stanislav Zadnikov

Bilsk hillfort (or gorodishche in Ukrainian) is the largest fortified settlement of the Early Iron Age in Eastern Europe. Long-term excavations made it possible to determine that it was a powerful industrial, political, religious, and trade center of the forest-steppe populations. Thanks to trade relations with the ancient cities of the Northern Black Sea region, wine in amphorae, ceremonial tableware, and glassware came to the settlement. The latter were mainly represented by beads of various shapes and ornaments. In this article, for the first time, 61 unique (or 135, taking similar ones into account) glass beads found during the excavations at the Bilsk hillfort are analyzed. To establish their chronology and the assortment of receipts in the different periods of the settlement’s existence, only beads from burials and various economic complexes with reliable dating were considered. It was established that glass beads reached the Bilsk settlement through Greek-mediated exchange networks from the last quarter of the 7th century BC. Their arrival continued continuously until the end of the 4th century BC, that is, during the entire Scythian period of the fortified settlement’s existence. The beads most likely reached Bilsk through exchange networks linking the settlement with the Greek cities of the Northern Black Sea region. Three overland routes may have been involved: the Olbian, Muravsky and Chersonesan routes. Evidence from Greek ceramics and other Mediterranean or Olbian imports suggests that the Olbian route was probably the dominant channel.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15080181

Authors: Yuriі Polidovych Evgenia Velychko

This article discusses an unknown Scythian burial discovered by Serhiy Mazaraki near the village of Velyki Budky (Sumy Oblast, Ukraine) at the end of the 19th century and previously unknown to researchers. An assemblage of gold objects from this burial is identified, including a ring and seven plate appliqués depicting a scene in the Scythian “animal style,” dated to the second or third quarter of the 5th century BCE. The objects have numerous parallels, which help illuminate broader aspects of Scythian culture. The ring belongs to a small group of high-conical-shielded rings, likely crafted by Bosporan jewelers catering to a Scythian clientele; it is suggested that they were common in the northern Black Sea region throughout the 5th century BCE. The image of a curled-up predator on the gold appliqués corresponds, in both compositional and stylistic features, to the artistic tradition of the “animal style” of the 5th century BCE. Unique is the depiction of another image—the head of an antelope with a straight horn on the plaques. The assemblage of artifacts enables us to explore various aspects of the artistic traditions of the northern Black Sea region, the Kuban, the Cis-Urals, and even Western Asia.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15080180

Authors: Yingqiu Song Caiyan Chen Zhengdong Wang

Depression, anxiety disorders and sleep disorders are becoming increasingly prevalent among college students. While psychotherapy and pharmacotherapy remain important interventions, their practical implementation in university settings may be constrained by factors including limited service accessibility, scheduling constraints, privacy concerns, stigma, and poor long-term adherence. As a low-threshold supportive intervention that can be readily integrated into campus environments, art healing offers a complementary approach to promoting college student mental health. This review includes 20 studies retrieved from the Web of Science and PubMed databases. These studies provide evidence for the mental health benefits of auditory art, visual art, and integrated art healing. The findings indicate that music-based interventions (the primary form of auditory art) have relatively robust supporting evidence for alleviating stress and anxiety; visual art and integrative art healing also yield measurable positive mental health outcomes. However, existing research is limited by heterogeneous intervention delivery protocols, small sample sizes, short follow-up periods, and substantial variation in methodological quality. Current evidence supports art healing as a complementary strategy for mental health promotion in higher education settings, rather than an alternative treatment modality. Future work should test standardized protocols in multi-site student samples. Long-term follow-up designs to further clarify its target populations, underlying mechanisms, and sustained efficacy.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15080179

Authors: Xianqun Yi Hongsheng Li

Recent generative art outputs across music, literature, painting and moving-image media have attracted extensive scholarly and public interest, yet evaluations of their creative capacities are mostly limited to informal observational accounts. Drawing on neuroaesthetic reasoning, this paper puts forward a dual-layer analytical framework that differentiates two distinct modes of aesthetic reception: Alignment, defined as statistical template matching, and evocation, referring to the novel association of scattered embodied memory fragments. Building on this binary categorization, the study introduces the tentative Ring Scale taxonomy—a figurative target-shooting metaphor rather than quantitative metric—as a purely descriptive tool for stratifying relative aesthetic evocation intensity. This framework further unpacks the neurocognitive underpinnings of auditory, visual and textual aesthetic pathways, alongside their combined multimodal interactions within film and television works. It tentatively accounts for why generative systems tend to deliver more cohesive aesthetic outcomes within the auditory domain, and hypothesises a present functional limitation of current large models: these systems perform comparatively well within Alignment-driven aesthetic effects, while layered high-order evocation remains constrained by inherent structural limitations of statistical training architectures. From this diagnostic observation, three directional paradigm shifts for human–AI collaborative creation are outlined: shifting from human substitution to human–machine complementarity, shifting from exhaustive template imagery generation to targeted latent fragment elicitation, and shifting from optimising figurative Ring-tier descriptive labels to pursuing transformative aesthetic fission effects. The study frames imaginative cognition as the central driving force behind fruitful human–AI co-creation, and positions prompt engineering as the actionable operational bridge connecting human imaginative thought to machine-executable generative parameters. Three tentative prompt design tactics are then elaborated: physiological arousal framing, multisensory scenario simulation prompts, and intentional strategic blank-leaving. Additionally, this work discusses the plausible constructive functions of model hallucination phenomena when viewed through the lens of high-tier aesthetic evocation, rather than merely framing such outputs as technical errors. All judgments and tier comparisons raised throughout the paper are framed as unvalidated observational hypotheses open to empirical testing. To facilitate follow-up empirical scrutiny, the paper collates a full set of testable hypotheses derived from its theoretical reasoning and outlines feasible experimental validation pipelines, with an open call for controlled empirical research to corroborate or refine the proposed qualitative framework.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15080178

Authors: Seçil Soytok Nalçacı Kutup Ata Tuncer

The nineteenth century witnessed a significant transnational movement of European musicians and their pedagogical traditions across continents. Among the figures who contributed to this process, the Belgian flutist and composer Mathieu-André Reichert (1830–1880) occupies a distinctive position—trained in the Franco-Belgian tradition, he emigrated to Brazil, where he introduced the Boehm-system flute and produced pedagogical materials that continue to be used in flute education across a range of national traditions. This study examines Reichert’s method, 7 Exercices Journaliers pour la Flûte, Op. 5, from dual perspectives: a structural–pedagogical analysis of the seven exercises and a cultural–historical contextualization of the method’s transnational circulation. Designed as a qualitative research study, this work employed document analysis as the data collection tool and thematic analysis as the method for data analysis and interpretation. The B. Schott’s Söhne (Mainz) edition of the method was examined as the primary source; secondary data was obtained from articles, theses, books, and digital sources. Each exercise was examined in terms of structural characteristics—including meter, metronome speed, melodic patterns, and harmonic structure—and the technical demands and potential pedagogical applications associated with articulation, tongue–finger coordination, lip flexibility, and breath control. The findings reveal that the method possesses a distinctive structural organization that systematically cycles through all keys, employs a different melodic pattern in each exercise, and consistently embeds technical demands within harmonic and melodic contexts. Beyond its pedagogical content, the study traces the method’s cultural trajectory—from its composition in nineteenth-century Brazil through its adoption by French school luminaries, such as Marcel Moyse, Michel Debost, and Trevor Wye, to its current use in music education programs across diverse cultural contexts, including Türkiye. The convergence of structural–pedagogical and cultural–historical analysis suggests that the method’s continued relevance across diverse teaching traditions reflects not only its coherent structural design but also broader processes of cultural transfer, the mobility of musicians and their pedagogical ideas, and the formation of transnational pedagogical networks in instrumental music education.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15080177

Authors: Mal Meisels

In 1864, four French artists—Nathalie Micas, Rosa Bonheur, Isidore Bonheur, and Paul Chardin—gathered at Rosa Bonheur’s château in By-Thomery, a hamlet adjacent to the Fontainebleau forest. At the château’s main studio, the community members—connected through romance, blood, and friendship—crafted the Passy Cravat, or Parody of By’s Inhabitants, an experimental multi-media work in gouache, ink, and black pencil on canvas. In 1860, Rosa Bonheur, a celebrated animal painter, and Nathalie Micas, an amateur painter, engineer, and medical practitioner, moved to By from Paris with Micas’s mother and a menagerie of nonhuman animals used as pets and artist models. Red bands divide the Passy Cravat into rhombuses and triangles, each constituting a space on the estate, which the artists filled with irreverent caricatures of By’s human and nonhuman residents. This paper argues that the Passy Cravat, a work that has thus far been overlooked by art historians, is a prime example of nineteenth-century queer aesthetics because it constitutes a historically specific movement away from institutional classifications of genre and medium by a community that tinkered with the limitations of heteronormative life. The paper contends that queer aesthetics in the Passy Cravat are reliant upon the artists’ approaches to citizenship and human–animal relations. Ultimately, the Passy Cravat reveals By-Thomery to be a messy nexus of human autonomy and nonhuman subjugation bound to conceptions of belonging in the Second Empire (1852–1870).

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15080176

Authors: Magdalena Czalczynska-Podolska Wojciech Bal

This article examines the memory landscape of the Bieszczady Mountains and Bieszczady Foothills region in south-eastern Poland, based on an original concept of its structural organization and a comparative analysis of selected sites of memory located in Sanok, Zagórz, Lesko, Baligród, Cisna, and Solina. The aim of the study was to identify the role of individual sites of memory in shaping the regional memory landscape and to explore the relationships between its constituent elements. The research employed an interdisciplinary approach combining memory studies, cultural geography, cultural landscape studies, and conflict heritage research. Case-study analysis, field investigations, historical-interpretative research, and qualitative comparative assessment were applied. The analysis was conducted across five interrelated dimensions: memory types, functions of sites of memory, historical layers, memory narratives, and the significance of sites within the memory landscape structure. The results demonstrate that the regional memory landscape constitutes a multi-layered, polyphonic, and dynamic structure. National, local, traumatic, transnational, landscape-related, and absence-based memories coexist, forming a complex network of narratives and meanings. The findings confirm that the region can be interpreted as a palimpsestic borderland memory landscape in which successive historical and narrative layers do not replace one another but coexist and remain subject to continuous processes of reinterpretation.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15080175

Authors: Nicholas Maniu

This article examines the art of Paul Hoecker (1854–1910) as a visual negotiation of queer desire, repression, and transgression in late 19th-century Germany. One of the first progressive professors at the Munich Art Academy, Hoecker remains an understudied figure in queer art history. In a private letter to the sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld, he acknowledged his same-sex desire. Focusing on his recurrent depictions of handsome young men—often in the guise of Pierrot—alongside his numerous images of nuns, this article reads Hoecker’s work as a site of tension between desire, Catholic imagery, and social constraint. It further addresses the allegations surrounding the use of a male sex worker as a model for a depiction of the Virgin Mary. Finally, Hoecker’s later, more overtly erotic works, mostly produced for Jacques d’Adelswärd-Fersen, will also be considered, interrogating their problematic aspects, particularly the sexualization of youthful bodies. This research is conducted as part of the Paul Hoecker research group at the Forum Queeres Archiv München.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15080174

Authors: Sun Park Dragana Ćirić

The convergence of artistic practices and AI system development has introduced novel forms of artistic worldbuilding. This paper theoretically discusses how human artists (will) perceive and involve AI systems in their artistic worldbuilding. Adopting a qualitative foresight methodology to explore the artistic autonomy and artistic authority with which humans and AI systems engage, this paper presents three scenarios of human–AI interaction in macro art worlds (art societies) and micro artworlds (worlds within artworks). Drawing on a review of the generative art approach as the current use of AI systems in art-making, the other two futuristic scenarios of human–AI interaction illustrate the shifting roles of humans and AI systems in artistic worldbuilding. The hypothetical scenarios of human–AI interaction in art-making provide a theoretical test bed for recognising diverse types of artistic contribution ranging from human inspiration and curation to non-human decision-making.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15080173

Authors: Dennis Ioffe

In what follows below I reconceptualize the relationship between the European avant-garde(s) and technology across the longer century from 1850 to 1950 through the classical notion of tékhnē, understood as the inseparability of making and knowing [...]

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15080172

Authors: Majid Rahmandoust Renke He

The Makara, a potent hybrid guardian figure from Indian architectural sculpture, poses a question for the study of artistic exchange: how did this complex motif travel across Asia and transform into a simplified painted emblem on Chinese export ceramics? We address this question by analyzing a corpus of textual sources, sculptural reliefs, and ceramic assemblages, with a focused case study on ninth-century Changsha kiln production and the pivotal evidence from the Belitung shipwreck. The analysis reveals a profound morphological and functional shift. In stone, the Makara appears as a powerful, three-dimensional guardian in complex crocodilian or elephantine forms. In contrast, on mass-produced Changsha bowls, it is abbreviated to a stylized, two-dimensional head, often paired with a pearl. We argue that this transformation was not a simple degradation but a sophisticated act of modular translation. The shift in medium from stone carving to swift underglaze painting and the demands of a global market forced a functional reinvention: the static, architectural guardian became a portable, commercial emblem. Ultimately, the analysis frames the Changsha artisan as an active cultural translator and the Makara bowls as an early, successful example of customized export design for a global audience.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15080171

Authors: Juliet John

In contemporary narrative filmmaking, emerging technologies such as virtual production and generative artificial intelligence are impacting production workflows. Yet one central element of the practice remains unchanged: filmmakers seek to create relatable characters who are situated within believable dramatic scenarios. When achieved, narrative authenticity supports audience immersion, which in turn affects the work’s impact. Characters are constructed through a complex matrix of meaning expressed on screen by actors and contributed to by writers, directors, costume designers, production designers, cinematographers, editors, composers and sound designers. Over the last century, the Method technique has been a widely recognised practice used by many actors to find authenticity in their performances. Like actors, production designers rely on developing an understanding of a character’s inner life as a path to designing authentic fictional worlds. Is there an implicit approach in production design practice that aligns with the Method approach used in performance? Are there similarities between the way a production designer prepares a character’s environment and the way an actor prepares to perform in it? And once created, does the design itself perform authenticity? If so, can making this practice more explicit assist with the development and broader understanding of how designers contribute to screen works? As a way of elucidating the comparatively less visible contribution of the production designer, this article compares selected Method techniques used by actors with those used by production designers in seeking authentic characterisations. By placing these practices in dialogue, this article proposes production design as a form of performative practice that implicitly draws on a Method approach to effectively solve the design problem in narrative screen practice.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15080170

Authors: Aziz Tamer Güler Ramazan Bilge

Associated with Nietzsche’s nihilism, the concept of ressentiment—the resentment felt by the slave toward the master—is defined by Max Scheler, following Nietzsche’s line of thought, as the self-poisoning of the mind. This emotion frequently appears in cinema and the performing arts, which are nourished by conflict. Theatre does not merely reflect the calm moments of life; it also incorporates its complexity, tensions, and distortions. This study examines Jean Genet’s The Maids through the concept of ressentiment. Situated at the intersection of underground literature and absurd theatre, The Maids offers a particularly suitable context for examining the dynamics of ressentiment. Ressentiment emerges as one of the principal forces shaping the characters’ actions and relationships. Their resentment is directed toward the woman for whom they work and functions as a central force that generates dramatic conflict. While the characters attempt to transform their resentment into violence, they simultaneously enact what Scheler describes as the self-poisoning of the mind. Dramatic and post-dramatic theatre, sustained by conflict, operates in close relation with negative emotions. Accordingly, this article examines ressentiment as the central affect structuring conflict in The Maids, drawing on Nietzsche’s and Scheler’s accounts of ressentiment.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15080169

Authors: Philip Charrier

This article examines endangered-animal photography as a prominent and often unquestioned form of conservation visual culture. Focusing on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species and Joel Sartore’s Photo Ark, it considers how photographs of endangered animals move between scientific documentation, emotional appeal, archival preservation, and conservation publicity. Framed through Val Plumwood’s analysis of human/nature dualism and its objectifying structures, this analysis argues that such images can render nonhuman life knowable as an object of human classification and intervention. While conservation photography can generate attention and concern, it can easily reproduce dualistic patterns by isolating animals from ecological relations, framing them as passive objects of visual knowledge and management, and substituting symbolic preservation for ecological understanding and protection. A less dualistic conservation visuality would not abandon endangered animals as photographic subjects, but instead situate them within the damaged, interdependent, and politically produced worlds that shape their vulnerability.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15070168

Authors: Claudian Ciprian Șiman

This article reads Matthew Bourne’s Swan Lake (1995) not merely as a refunctionalisation of the classical ballet, but as a historiographical instrument that excavates the queer tensions latent in the Romantic-era ballet. Its premise is that Tchaikovsky’s score and the original libretto (1877/1895) already contain the fissures of non-normative desire, sublimated by imperial censorship and the aesthetic conventions of the period. The theoretical framework mobilizes Nick Salvato’s concept of uncloseting, Judith Butler’s account of gender performativity, and a Freudian reading of melancholia. This conceptual map is then applied to Bourne’s choreography to show how his production reactivates the repressed archive through male bodies. Three principal axes structure the analysis: the deconstruction of the swan archetype, the Oedipal function of the Queen-Mother as repressive Super-Ego, and the reinterpretation of the Prince’s melancholia as the symptom of a structural impossibility. On the basis of these elements, the article proposes the concept of historiographical uncloseting, defined as a mode in which performance operates as embodied historical research, reactivating affective archives inaccessible through textual sources alone. Bourne’s Swan Lake thus becomes a critical instrument for re-reading the queer dimensions of the archive of Romantic ballet.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15070167

Authors: Reilly Clark

The return of African cultural objects represents an opportunity to practice what Felwine Sarr and Bénédicte Savoy call “a new relational ethics.” Oftentimes, repatriation begins and ends with the literal return of physical objects. This does little to address legacies of colonial theft, value extraction, and epistemicide. It can also reinscribe the power of Western interpretive frameworks and reproduce Western patterns of state power by returning objects to Western-style institutions within postcolonial nation-states. This essay considers the return of the Benin bronzes as a case study for these missed opportunities and alternative paths forward. It follows the various and sometimes competing means by which Benin bronzes came “home:” whether to the postcolonial nation of Nigeria, to the Oba of Benin himself, or to the controversial public-private partnership known as the Museum of West African Art (MOWAA). This essay considers how these various means of return, and these various meanings of “home,” can work against one another and can be co-opted as neoliberal and neocolonial forms of control. The essay also explores alternative paths forward through the framework of relational ethics. Sarr and Savoy first applied the phrase to the return of African cultural objects in their 2018 report. This essay expands on Sarr and Savoy’s report and builds from Native American and Indigenous scholars like Margaret Kovach and Linda Tuhiwai Smith, who identify opportunities to remake relations as a means of restitution. This includes remaking relations between indigenous communities, Western institutions, and postcolonial nation-states. It also includes remaking relations between human beings and the more-than-human world, including spirits of the ancestors, outside the systems of Western knowledge and value production.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15070166

Authors: Adesola Akinleye

This paper reflects on what dance reveals about the notion of “human-ness” at a time when globalization could be understood as defining humanity in terms of bound, isolated bodies that generate capital, are fixed by borders, and recognized through surveillance. Rather than treating humans as a bounded interior essence of a bodied-self, I suggest it emerges at the edge, where sense of self meets otherness. I suggest dance offers conversation at the periphery of self, where perceived othernesses are met (floor, music, another dancer). In dancing, the self becomes most discernible at points of encounter with texture, rhythm, and trajectory. Human-ness, then, is not form/possession but relational. Drawing on Sylvia Wynter’s critique of the colonial figure of “Man,” within the notion of ‘human’, and Timothy Morton’s concepts of hyperobjects and ecological entanglement, which challenge bounded scales of human perception, I position dance as a practice that unsettles narrow categories of the human. I discuss dance as a method to unearth epistemologies of the edge, articulating humanness as intra-active and ecological, constituted through relation rather than containment. In this framing, the edge of globalization reveals an urgent fragility and the hopeful possibility of other genres of being human: relational, porous, and responding to ecological and historical entanglements. I suggest that dance as a method of moving together discloses an opportunity to reevaluate humanness and consider a definition of ‘to be human’ that is an action and an ever-emerging practice of being in relation.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15070165

Authors: Joanna Porucznik

Kurgans in the Northern Black Sea region have long been treated as monuments “frozen” in their Scythian moment, yet excavation records show repeated re-engagement over much longer timescales. This article argues that kurgan reuse in the Western Scythian world is best understood not as a single behaviour, but as a bundle of practices with different archaeological signatures and social implications. Rather than offering an exhaustive catalogue, the study develops a methodological framework based on selected published case studies. It proposes a three-part typology: (1) intrusive mortuary reuse, that is, later secondary or inserted burials placed within earlier mounds; (2) associative reuse, including landscape appropriation, in which older barrows structured later funerary space through clustering, demarcation, visibility, and spatial reference; and (3) reuse through reopening, including shafts, tunnels, selective removal, and the manipulation of human remains. The article applies this framework to evidence from Scythian, Sarmatian, Greek, and early medieval/medieval contexts, with particular attention to Sarmatian intrusive burials in earlier barrows, the structured reuse of older kurgans in the Molochna basin, reopening and looting in Scythian and Sarmatian mounds, and the cross-cultural case of Koshary in the Olbian chora. The discussion situates these practices within mortuary archaeology, social memory, and the politics of the past, and argues that older kurgans could function not only as burial places, but also as mnemonic anchors, territorial markers, and targets of symbolic aggression.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15070164

Authors: Zeyefu Li Diana Angoso de Guzmán

This study analyzes how sociological factors within the context of globalization have influenced the development of secondary markets for contemporary art in China and Spain. Through a comparative approach, it examines the impact of economic, cultural, and legal changes on market structures and collectors’ behavior. Special attention is given to the growth of the Chinese market as a new global player, contrasted with the Spanish market, which is characterized by a more gradual institutional development and greater structural challenges. The study also explores how the interaction between East and West is transforming collecting practices and perceptions of cultural value. Finally, strategies are proposed to strengthen the resilience and competitiveness of both secondary art markets in a shifting global landscape. In doing so, the study highlights the importance of adapting sociological structures to the new dynamics of the contemporary art market.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15070163

Authors: Marina V. Akimova

Valentin Yakovlevich Parnakh (1891–1951)—poet, dancer, translator, critic, and indefatigable mediator between artistic milieux—developed idiosyncratic avant-garde poetics in which verbal texture, choreographic invention, and graphic inscription form a single communicative ecology. Focusing on Parnakh’s Parisian collection The Acrobat Climbs (Karabkaetsya acrobat) (1922), this article reconstructs how “low” temporal arts (cabaret, music hall, circus, pantomime) and the modernist revaluation of the body reoriented lyric practice away from a representational “image” toward a performative event and a kinetic sign. The argument proceeds from Parnakh’s struggle “to free oneself from the burden of the word” to the compensatory emergence of dance as an international, non-nationalized medium—at once existential (a “cry of the soul”) and formally experimental. Central attention is given to the author’s attempts to fix movement: the enigmatic “hieroglyphs of dances” printed in 1922 and their later clarification through more legible pictographic systems (“stick-figures”) published in the second half of the 1920s. By correlating poems, self-descriptions of choreography, and visual materials, this study reframes Parnakh’s apparent “obscurity” not as gratuitous zaum, but as a deliberately intermedial hermeneutic problem—one that presupposes translation between sign systems (word/line/body) as the very substance of avant-garde meaning.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15070162

Authors: Ann R. David

The article begins with a detailed description of a brief and rare film clip of Indian dancer Ram Gopal applying his black kājal eyeliner in front of the mirror in his dressing room before a performance, giving us an intimate glimpse into a dancer’s essential and careful preparation. Material objects related to dance performance such as make-up, mirrors and costumes are often essential to the presentation of Indian dance, especially in that historical period, but are often overlooked as significant artefacts or objects of dance. In considering this short clip of preparatory make-up, I argue how the materiality of cosmetic stage make-up together with dramatic stage costumes (in particular headdresses) and other material objects assist the process of alteration from dancer into a Hindu deity (Śiva) or mythological character on stage. I examine the process of making up, asking how it might manipulate what comes to be seen on stage and what affect is created through such a process. This article takes an imaginative look at the affective register of selected dance objects and their power to create transformation, drawing on theoretical evidence from philosophy and psychology relating to mirror image and the aesthetics of making up and the use of mirrors in early Indian art.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15070161

Authors: Elena Penskaya

This article analyzes the laboratory discourse in Soviet society during the first third of the twentieth century through the lens of tékhnē—the ancient fusion of making and knowing—arguing that the laboratory became a key site for redefining artistic practice as a form of knowledge production. Drawing on the institutional critique of the laboratory (Bruno Latour), the author raises the question of the potential for mutual influence between different types of laboratories established in the fields of art, technical sciences, and production. The mechanisms of a laboratory’s influence on society, as identified by Latour, allow for a new interpretation of the phenomenology of the All-Russian Theatre Society and its significant internal divisions. The history of the emergence and defeat of the Laboratory of Mass Psychology at the All-Russian Theatre Society (ARTS) in the 1920s–1930s is reconstructed on the basis of archival materials from RGALI (fund 970). Meeting minutes and documents from 1929 to 1932 reveal the main modes of the anthropology of the “laboratory genre” within the ARTS system (1920s–1980s). These are examined within the general experimental context of the era: the laboratory boom of the 1920s–1930s reshaped the boundaries between the natural sciences and the humanities. The second mode is the human experience of being on the threshold between life and death—a transgressive state. The third mode is the laboratory as a site for new forms of labor and technology. Within the laboratory’s work, psychotechnics acquired particular significance, reaching its culmination in 1931–1932. This period, marked by an intense flurry of events and new laboratory practices of psychological influence, was rightly called a “psychosis of activities” by the participants of the ARTS laboratory themselves.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15070160

Authors: Alexandra Kolb

This article analyses pneumatic (inflatable) objects as used in the work of four contemporary European artists from diverse disciplinary backgrounds: choreographers Adrienne Hart and Gabriella Engdahl, and visual artists Michael Shaw and Bambí Benkö. Deployed across deconsecrated churches, swimming pools, theatres, galleries and streets, these works demonstrate a broad spectrum of engagement with inflatables, ranging from formalist to existential, social and political-activist purposes—all implicating choreography in an expanded sense. Informed by theories from the visual arts, dance studies and sociology, as well as interviews with the artists themselves, the analysis adopts a multi-methodological approach attuned to this diversity. Overarching concerns about spectatorship, site and materiality centre on how inflatables’ precarious properties—porous seams requiring continual reinflation—engender playful instability and encourage interaction with audiences. Proposing ‘whimsy’ as a critical lens, the essay reimagines contemporary inflatables as cultural-choreographic objects that question disciplinary boundaries. The artists’ practices both extend a 1960s legacy of pneumatic experiments and redirect their utopian-critical impulses toward twenty-first-century issues.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15070159

Authors: Xuemei Zhong

The Goddess of the Luo River is a visible painting that depicts The Rhapsody on the Goddess of the Luo River, an invisible poem. How does the painter convey the intricate plot, abstract verbal imagery, and musicality of the poem—particularly the subtle emotions of betrayal, anguish, and regret—in a tangible visual form? In translating the text, the painter employs at least five methods: literal depiction, perspective shift, metaphor, suggestion and symbolism. Corresponding to these methods, the painter selects, abridges, modifies, or expands upon the textual content. The success of this transformation from text to image lies precisely in the fact that the image does not rigidly adhere to the text but instead captures its spiritual essence. The indirect translation from literature to image is fundamentally grounded in the heterogeneous nature of poetry and painting and must respect the inherent principles of each art form.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15070158

Authors: Fangfei Miao

This paper examines the under-researched pivotal career moment of Shen Wei (沈伟, b.1968, last name Shen and first name Wei), one of the most renowned Chinese American dance artists in the West, when he traveled from China to the United States for the first time in 1995 and his unacclaimed early career in New York from 1995 to 2000. Based on primary sources, I compare the divergent conceptualizations of universalism in China and the United States, as embodied in Shen’s choreographies and as manifested in the contrasting receptions of his works by Chinese and American critics. Building on existing dance scholarship on universalism and situated at the intersection of Asian studies and Asian American studies, this paper explores how Shen’s choreography of universalism convinced Chinese critics but discouraged American critics from recognizing the significant value of his art. I question the United States as a neutral platform for artistic freedom and propose that Shen must perform according to the expectations of American society—the “dress code” for Asian artists—to gain acceptance and success. In so doing, I challenge the intent that primarily examines Shen based on his widely acclaimed works. The “failures” that Shen experienced in his career contain the same, if not more, research value as his “successes.”

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15070157

Authors: Robert Ek Federico Visi Anchen Froneman

This article presents a study that applies Laban’s Effort theory to detect a musician’s expressive intentions during performance. Laban Effort theory was chosen for its capacity to support the observation, description, and interpretation of expressive movement. The aim was to develop interactive musical systems that learn from the embodied expressivity musicians cultivate through practice. The study adopts a multidisciplinary approach, combining Laban Motion Analysis with interactive machine learning. Gesture data, audio, and video were recorded during a performance of Brahms’s Clarinet Sonata Op. 120 No. 2. The video was then analysed by an expert annotator observing Laban Efforts. The annotated video was then reviewed in collaboration with the performer to incorporate Effort Phrasing that reflects changes in intensity within Efforts. The annotations were then used as training data, together with motion data recorded during the performance, to train a regression model. The model was evaluated against expert annotations and through qualitative video analysis. Unlike the very linear notation of a Laban analyst, the model reflects the dynamism of human motion by capturing the almost humanly unobservable nuances in Effort variations. This points to the possibility of using machine learning models to reflect a performer’s expressive intentions in real-time.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15070156

Authors: Charles Green Lyndell Brown

Linking art and ecology can mean two significantly different things. First, it may suggest art that takes the objects of ecology as its theme. This, most frequently, means art that is about ecological health, including climate warming. Second, and less often, it may suggest that art can be imagined from the methodologies of ecology rather than from the approaches of art history. The first two parts of this article are deliberately selective literature reviews of each approach, followed by a third part that traces the three-decade trajectory of an artistic collaboration that embodies both. (In full disclosure, I am one of the two artists.) What might such a self-consciously ecological art practice look like? These sections aim to provide the background and critical context for a response to this question, and that response is the final section of the article, an original artist project: The Last Cool Skies (2026) by artists Lyndell Brown and Charles Green. These artist pages are intended to be the principal focus of this article and are presented as research in the form of visual art across this journal’s pages, as original research contributions in themselves and not as ancillary or as simply illustrations to this article’s text.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15070155

Authors: Michał Jędrzejski

This article is devoted to the 18th-century Bernardine repertoire of pseudo-plainchant, that is, Latin liturgical monophony, which differs significantly from the style of Gregorian and Neo-Gregorian chant. The research employs methods of codicological (from Latin, codex = book) analysis of the source, as well as analysis of the repertoire, melody, text and musical notation. Melodies are also transcribed and compared with selected manuscripts from the Library of the Bernardine Province in Kraków. The research reveales that the pseudo-plainchant collection comprises 14 ordinarium missae (the Ordinary of the Mass, i.e., the fixed or invariable parts of the Mass), one Gloria and 15 Patrem (Credo, the Creed). The repertoire dedicated to St Anne, local patron saint, shares tonal language, elements of rhythm and metre, key signatures, chromatic signs, melodic sequences, the repeated use of the same musical material, alternatim technique (vocal and instrumental parts performed alternately), contrasts in performance, register and style, melodies based on Polish church songs, and geographical titles. The term “sweet” (suaves) appearing on the title page may indicate the aesthetic stance of the Bernardines from Święta Anna and their positive attitude towards the repertoire in question, although 20th-century musicological literature has attributed decompositional elements to it. In this way, the manuscript under study may serve as a basis for updating our understanding of the pseudo-plainchant repertoire as such.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15070154

Authors: Anna Maria Wierzbicka Marta Nawrocka

The article examines water as a symbolic and existential medium in contemporary art. Water, present in culture since the earliest times, constitutes both a fundamental condition of life and one of the most enduring archetypes of human imagination. The analysis is conducted from two theoretical perspectives: phenomenological, focusing on the embodied experience, and symbolic, presenting the cultural and spiritual meanings attributed to water, as well as contemporary concepts examining its role in relational and site-specific art. Particular attention is devoted to the analysis of selected case studies in which water serves as a medium for transformation, introspection, and boundary. The findings indicate that in contemporary art, water functions as a multidimensional medium, engaging all the viewer’s senses and eliciting profound aesthetic and existential experiences. At the same time, its use reveals tensions between the authentic message and the risk of greenwashing, or over-technologization. The article emphasizes that the combination of symbolic depth with a responsible approach is crucial for the credibility of water as an artistic medium.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15070153

Authors: Anni Li Yan Xu

Women-centred motifs in African rock art form part of the most persistent symbolic repertoire of early cosmologies. Despite their prominence, these figures have received limited sustained analysis. Examination of their contexts reveals four recurrent logics—care, regeneration, boundary mediation, and the social encoding of voice—that structure social and ritual life. A comparative case from Alice Walker’s The Color Purple shows these logics rearticulated in the narrative of Celie’s self-awakening, demonstrating the afterlives of symbolic forms. This perspective clarifies the role of female imagery as a structuring element of cosmology and offers a heuristic for integrating rock-art studies with broader cross-temporal analysis.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15070151

Authors: Michaela Böhmig

This article reconceptualizes Velimir Khlebnikov’s aesthetic temporality not as a lyrical motif but as an epistemic procedure through which poetic language tests the legibility of history. Treating his historico-mathematical “constants” and his avant-garde formal inventions as mutually implicative, it isolates a double regime: time as oscillatory recurrence (wave, cyclic return, numerical periodicity) and time as a higher-order extension in which duration is spatialized, traversable, and re-coordinatizable. Against linear models of influence, this study situates Khlebnikov within a thick interdiscursive atmosphere—folkloric chronotopes, Romantic time–space convertibility (Novalis), non-Euclidean geometry (Lobachevsky, Riemann), Minkowski–Einstein relativity, and the Russian vogue for “hyperspace” mediated by Morozov and Ouspensky (with Hinton as prototype)—and argues that these matrices are metabolized via poetico-fantastic transmutation rather than imported as explanatory doctrine. Close readings show how reverse temporality, historical inversion, palindromic and collage logics, and the super-narrative architecture of autonomous “planes” operationalize a hyperspatial present in which distant epochs collide without recourse to technological “time machines.” The article thereby reframes Khlebnikov’s project as a cognitive technology: an attempt to re-engineer the chronotope so that past and future become navigable coordinates inside an expanded textual now. In this model, number and word converge as homologous instruments for forecasting, montage, and speculative world-construction itself.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15070152

Authors: Daniel Paul Schwartz

Commissioned for West German public television, Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s hotly debated 1972 series Eight Hours Don’t Make a Day was Germany’s first working-class family drama. Centering on the growing class consciousness of a crew of toolmakers in Cologne, the show provoked an explosion of criticism and debate among conservative critics, leftists, and trade unionists alike. Westdeutscher Rundfunk—a leader in high-quality, non-commercial, socially engaged television—sought to meet the cultural demands of the New Left by embracing the “worker film” (Arbeiterfilm) that aspired to bring the lives and dreams of the working class, WDR’s target audience, to the screen for the first time. What they got instead was a radical call for the abolition of capitalism—a TV-show that did not condescend to workers through representation of their everyday struggles, but rather radicalized them into the knowledge that employers need workers, not the other way around. Within a remarkably intersectional framework that appoints the lone non-straight, racialized worker and female characters the intellectual vanguard of the mobilizing workers, the show takes the contradictions between the factory workers’ interests and those of their management as its dramatic motor, converging on the anticapitalist insight that eight hours do not, in fact, make a day. Unsurprisingly, despite its popularity, Fassbinder’s show was cancelled five episodes into an eight episode series. In this article, I consider its potential in terms of two great thinkers of abolition—Mario Tronti, a founding figure in the Operaismo movement, and Mario Mieli, a gay communist organizer who asserted that the “liberation of Eros and the achievement of communism” were two sides of the same coin.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15070150

Authors: Andrew Philip

This article investigates the reparative politics of resistance at the heart of the production model and formal strategies developed by Joana Pimenta and Adirley Queirós in the film Dry Ground Burning [Mato Seco em Chamas] (2022). Pimenta and Queirós propose an alternative to the tendency of global filmic realism to focus on the suffering of the impoverished. Their participatory approach fabulates heroic collective memories in the marginalised community where the film is set. I propose they are engaging with the Brazilian practice of gambiarra, a reframing of material and discursive possibilities given a lack of economic and/or social resources. By repurposing state financing to radically extend the duration of production, the filmmakers generate a reparative realism that expands the possibilities of World Cinema as well as the revolutionary ideals proposed by Third Cinema.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15070149

Authors: Boris Kriger

This paper argues that art and aesthetic engagement are not cultural luxuries but structural necessities for any cognitive system operating in post-scarcity information environments—a claim derived from a unified structural theory of complex systems grounded in the persistence principle. The argument proceeds in three stages. First, drawing on the formal theory of structural viability, the paper demonstrates that when a cognitive agent’s basic needs are satisfied and information is abundant, the agent’s viability set expands until utilitarian goal structures degenerate. Non-utilitarian goal-setting—creative activity pursued beyond direct utility—remains the only structurally available mode of purposeful agency. Second, the paper provides a neuroaesthetic grounding for this claim: predictive processing, derived as the unique optimal cognitive architecture under physical constraints, entails that creative engagement generates prediction errors whose resolution activates reward pathways shared with reproductive behavior—both being instances of generating new structure. Active perception of art constitutes co-creation through the same mechanism. Third, the paper addresses the role of artificial intelligence: AI accelerates the arrival of post-scarcity conditions and serves as an instrument of creative engagement, but passive consumption of AI-generated content without the agent’s own goal-setting fails to fulfill the structural function of art and deepens the very condition it could remedy. The framework contributes to neuroaesthetics by providing a substrate-independent formal foundation for understanding why cognitive systems require art—not merely enjoy it—and why this requirement intensifies as post-scarcity conditions approach.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15070148

Authors: Marta Gołębiowska Krystyna Januszkiewicz

This article addresses the role of geometry in architecture throughout history as a language that supports and connects the domains of design and aesthetic expression. This study focuses on the analysis of contemporary curvilinear glass architecture, in which geometry becomes a fundamental tool for shaping both form and its visual perception. We define and investigate panelization strategies for freeform surfaces, adopting surface continuity as the primary criterion for their classification. Research is conducted through the confrontation of two complementary approaches: a descriptive one, based on case study analysis, and a generative one, employing parametric modeling of curvilinear surfaces. In the descriptive approach, selected architectural realizations are analyzed, in which panelization strategies and their impact on the aesthetic expression of glass façades are identified. In the generative approach, a digital surface analysis is conducted, enabling the assessment of relationships between geometry, panel typology, and visual continuity. The results provide a basis for developing theoretical and methodological frameworks for the analysis and design of curvilinear glass architecture. This study identifies interdependencies between geometry, material, and fabrication processes. The main contribution of this study is a method for analyzing curved surfaces based on digital analysis, enabling a systematic evaluation of the relationships between geometry, panelization typology, and surface continuity in the context of freeform architectural design. This method may support informed and conscious design decision-making.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15070147

Authors: Marina Sartori

Far from being merely repetitive, the painted decoration in Theban tombs of the New Kingdom reveals a rich variety of individual artistic choices, and therefore offers a privileged point of view for the study of agency in ancient Egypt. By examining selected pictorial units from a number of tombs, personally investigated by the author, this paper will explore the painters’ approaches to tomb decoration through the lens of the agency theory developed by Alfred Gell. Personal intervention can be recognised in many little details which ensure that no two Theban chapels are identical, even where the same scenes are represented. These variations undoubtedly sprang from the individual choices of the artists. Preparatory ostraca show the basic layout of text and scenes, with the division into registers and columns, but these remain only preparatory sketches. All the final details in the lines, colours, and components that make up a figure or a sign offer room for modifications. By analysing how artists interacted with the single pictorial units they were tasked with painting, their patterns of action and horizons of freedom become clearer, offering us a deeper insight into the role of Theban painters in the history of the site.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15060146

Authors: Anna Colin

This article proposes an exploration of British educational initiatives since 1925 that have brought together art- and land-oriented practices, particularly ones that are social, regenerative, and reparative. By juxtaposing historical and contemporary case studies, this article highlights uncharted connections between artistically infused ecopedagogies of past and present. Beyond surveying defunct and currently active educational programmes and comparing and analysing their mode of operation, pedagogies, and contributions to systems change, the article highlights a pattern of emergence, brief flourishing, and closure in art and ecology educational and research programmes in Britain since the 1990s. While Dartington Hall and the Village Colleges, the historical case studies, draw on secondary research, the contemporary ones—Goldsmiths’ MA Art & Ecology, Black Mountains College’s BA (Hons) Sustainable Futures: Arts, Ecology, and Systems Change, The Gathering, and The Gramounce—are composed from interviews conducted with their founder and other key protagonists as well as from empirical research. This article captures the continuities and discontinuities between historical experiments and contemporary initiatives, arguing for the ongoing relevance—and the institutional fragility—of an educational mode that refuses the separation of art and land.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15060145

Authors: Christopher R. Rogers

In this experimental inquiry, I welcome readers into an unfolding undisciplined platform, expanding upon my earlier theorizing of philly soul musicking through insurgent listening to Archie Shepp’s Attica Blues in all of its radical, beautiful, and tragic public memory work of the 1971 Attica Uprising. Philly soul musicking gives regional texture to a transgenerational Black diasporic performance practice that serves to archive the complexity of Black lived experiences and articulate felt collective visions of liberated Black futures. Through these introductory comments, I improvise what I reckon to be essential to the secretive sonic histories of the album, giving shape to a fire music organizing praxis meant to call us into being-with the anticolonial worldmaking project that the men of Attica advanced with their hearts, minds, and bodies on the line. This prelude foreshadows a wider overall project speculating upon how Attica Blues and other related avenues of Black compositional practice attune us to assembling active solidarities with militants/rebels on the frontlines inventing rhythmic zones of autonomy, freedom, and liberation. I ask of the music’s fugitive archive, to draw on the words of James Baldwin, what are the contemporary use(s) of the Attica Blues?

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15060144

Authors: Jan Margaret Hogan

The Porous Line is a drawing inquiry that uses materials and processes to engage in a dialogue with a suburban ecosystem. I follow the physicist David Bohm’s proposal to use dialogue as a mode of engagement where habitual modes of thought are suspended, a form of non-judgmental curiosity. I reflect on how immersing a large roll of French imported paper in my everyday environs reveals the porousness between nature and culture. The binary separation of nature and culture has undergone significant criticism as we deal with the climate crisis. As a foundational medium within western art and thought, how can drawing communicate this growing ontological shift? The essay engages in dialogue with Yolngu art from Yirrkala as a guide on what an ecological art practice entails. Their commitment to work with what ‘country’ provides has resulted in innovative and thoughtful new works. In response to propositions seen in Yolngu artworks, this essay engages with place, materiality, and relationality through the process of merging line and ground, the fundamentals of drawing, physically and conceptually. I reflect on the challenges that need to be addressed within western ontologies to develop an ecological approach in drawing.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15060143

Authors: Boyi He Yu Sun

This article examines how Chinese scholars and institutions selected Western musicological works for translation into Chinese and how these choices shaped the formation of musicology as a modern discipline in mainland China from 1900 to 2025. Drawing on disciplinary translation history, it asks which musicological works were translated, who selected and translated them, under what historical and institutional conditions they circulated, and how they contributed to the intellectual development of Chinese musicology. On the basis of translated works, publication records, archival materials, and the secondary literature, the article identifies four historical stages: technical transplantation (1900–1949), planned transplantation (1949–1978), critical transformation (1978–2010), and two-way dialogue (2010–2025). Each stage was shaped by a different configuration of ideology, academic demand, market forces, and translator agency. The article argues that the Chinese translation of Western musicological scholarship was never a passive import of foreign theories. Rather, it was a historically situated process in which Chinese scholars, translators, publishers, and institutions identified, adapted, and reorganized foreign musicological knowledge in response to local academic needs. The findings contribute to knowledge translation studies by offering a diachronic, multi-agent account of translation selection and by explaining how these choices helped shape modern Chinese musicology as a discipline.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15060142

Authors: Cían Ó Donnchadha

This article develops an understanding of Derek Jarman’s Blue (1993) as a testament film. It considers the filmmaker’s personal philosophy and concept of history, proposing the resonance of Walter Benjamin’s angel of history, the epitome of Benjamin’s contention with the ‘continuum of history’ in his final text, Theses on the Philosophy of History. This article considers the testament of Blue as a concept of history, contextualised by Jarman’s reckoning with the HIV/AIDS pandemic, and thereby with his own mortality, as Jarman’s attestation of a model of history (both personal and national, or coinhered as ‘memory’), which answers the demand of the ‘tradition of the oppressed.’ Theories of profane illumination, second nature, and the crisis of representation are explicated for the purposes of identifying Jarman’s model of history, and of his refusal of a historicist conception. In addition, it proposes the context of the AIDS crisis, as the ‘state of emergency’, the condition which compels this concept of history.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15060141

Authors: Katerina Paramana

Differing perspectives on the ephemerality of performance have led to debates since the 1980s regarding its ontology. Sondra Fraleigh and Peggy Phelan, for example, believe that performance’s ‘only life is in the present’. Others have disagreed. For example, Rebecca Schneider believes that performance remains in the body of the spectator in a complicated manner and Miranda Joseph, drawing on Marxist theory, argues that performance is in fact material because it produces social relations which have material effects: they affect our thinking and behaviour. In alignment with Joseph, this text begins with the presupposition that performance, and, specific to this text, the object we might call dance performance—the dance performance event and its particular contours, in other words, the performance event as an entity which emerges in the space-time where/when the onlooker and the work meet—is material because it is social. I discuss two dance performance objects, my work Martyro (2011) and Jérôme Bel’s (2005) Veronique Doisneau, as (im)material affective objects. I examine each work individually, providing first a thick description of each in order to communicate how they used affect to connect to their spectators and to critique the contexts of their presentation, the worlds in which the Subject in each of these performances worked. Drawing on understandings and theories of affect (from Deleuze and Guattari, Gilbert Simondon, and Brian Massumi to Lauren Berlant) and political economy (including David Harvey, Cedric Robinson, Jeremy Gilbert, Ashok Kumar, and Katerina Paramana), I then argue that both works used affect to remind their audiences, their witnesses, of the power of revealing one own’s experience of ‘suffering’ as Subjects, whilst simultaneously critiquing the wider economies in which these works, these affective objects and their Subjects, are embedded. It is this production of affect, I suggest, that potentiated action for change, by affecting others’ perspectives and behaviours.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15060140

Authors: Yufei Du Shahrul Anuar Bin Shaari Tao Su Jingwen Ding

Research on contemporary Chinese comprehensive material painting has long focused on aesthetic qualities or relied on Western modernist frameworks, leaving the mechanism of material-to-symbol transformation under-theorized. This study investigates the generative logic of material meaning through a qualitative cross-case analysis of forty-eight works by twelve Chinese artists, integrating in-depth interviews and visual analysis. Through systematic analysis of images, material operations, and artists’ interpretations, the study proposes a three-stage semiotic mechanism: anchoring, exemplification, and differentiation. Findings demonstrate that material meaning is formed through continuous negotiation between bodily technique and material resistance, mediated by cultural techniques guided by pre-textual schemata. Material attributes are first filtered and anchored, reinforced through embodied operations, and eventually stabilized into stylistic structures articulating cultural identity. This research argues that Chinese comprehensive material painting constitutes a localized mode of cross-cultural symbolic production rooted in indigenous cultural experience and material praxis. Ultimately, it supplies a mechanism-based interpretive framework for this art form while contributing a localized perspective to global discussions on the relationship among subjectivity, materiality, and cultural identity.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15060139

Authors: Brianne Cohen

The Singaporean government’s Green Plan 2030 aims to “galvanize a whole-of-nation movement and advance [its] national agenda on sustainable development,” transforming the Garden City into a City in Nature. The state’s #OneMillionTrees campaign, which intends to plant a million trees over a decade, seems less focused on climate adaptation, given Singapore’s unresolved environmental issues such as oil refinement, terraforming, and hyperconsumption. Instead, it appears to superficially address deeper socioenvironmental wounds inflicted on the postcolonial people and land. In this article, I explore the visual culture of Singapore’s ableist-nationalist greening campaigns alongside artworks such as Marvin Tang’s A Guide to Tree Planting and History of 39 Cuttings—Hybrids, and Woong Soak Teng’s Ways to Tie Trees and Rules for Photographing a Scoliotic Patient. I argue that Tang and Woong highlight adaptation issues in the face of eco-ableist sustainability in Singapore, challenging simplistic notions of climate adaptation by attending to vulnerable, sexed and gendered more-than-human bodies. The field of art history has an opportunity to probe ableist visions of ecological sustainability—within an emerging discourse between environmental justice and disability studies—by historicizing and interpreting such art, as it speaks to enduring, more-than-human impairment and climate adaptation.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15060138

Authors: Bláithín Duggan

By combining musicology, sound studies, and linguistics, this article goes beyond existing studies of voice and popular song to analyse vocal modifiers in four songs recorded by The Miracles in 1960 and 1967: ‘Way over there’ (1960), ‘Shop around’ (1960), ‘Who’s lovin’ you’ (1960) and ‘I second that emotion’ (1967). Vocal modifiers, a sub-category of paralanguage, are a nonverbal characteristic of speech that can alter meaning or convey emotion. By adopting a mixed methodology (spectral and music analysis alongside paralinguistics), I argue that aspects of The Miracles’ performative quality reside in their use of vocal modifiers, which occur in performance and are retained on recordings. Over time, specific uses, especially by the lead singer William “Smokey” Robinson, give rise to expressive tropes (significant or recurring themes, similar to a motive in Western art music). Expressive tropes are important for not only do they create aural connections across songs, they can also represent thematic content without the aid of lyrics and reveal subtle insights into non-lexical sounds that have long been acknowledged but have resisted analysis.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15060137

Authors: Siaw Hung Ng

The tale commonly known as “Hunter Catches Birds” circulates widely across South Asia, the Islamicate world, and insular Southeast Asia. Despite linguistic, religious, and cultural differences, the narrative architecture of the Hunter Catches Birds tale displays remarkable continuities across Buddhist, Persian, Malay, Indonesian, and Javanese traditions. Its persistence across radically different religious and cultural settings raises a broader question of how narrative meaning remains recognizable through continual reinterpretation. In early Malay renderings, particularly within the Hikayat Bayan Budiman tradition, oral materials are reorganized into framed and nested literary structures. These forms enable both textual and visual interplay while supporting ethical instruction alongside aesthetic elaboration. Frequently positioned as an introductory episode in parrot-cycle literature, the story integrates motifs such as collective escape, feigned death, interspecies conflict, and the tension between loyalty and betrayal. These narrative elements remain open to reinterpretation in different moral and cultural settings. Drawing upon Sanskrit, Persian, Uyghur, Malay, Indonesian, and Javanese materials, this study examines how the tale moved across oral, manuscript, and visual traditions. Rather than treating the narrative as a fixed folktale type, the article approaches it as a flexible modular structure whose ethical meanings were continually reshaped across changing religious and social environments. These interactions generate layered systems of meaning in which image and text jointly shape narrative tension, vulnerability, and strategic judgment. In Persian miniature traditions, scenes of entrapment, sacrifice, and escape are organized through sequential composition and spatial tension, allowing conflict, vulnerability, and narrative causality to be experienced visually as well as textually. By tracing these transformations, this study argues that the enduring vitality of the Hunter Catches Birds tradition may lie less in narrative stability than in the sustained reinterpretation of repeated narrative structures across textual and visual cultures.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15060136

Authors: Maria Berbara Carolina Martínez André Reyes Novaes

Spaces labeled as ‘extreme’ have long fueled the imagination of those who sought to explore, conquer, and represent them. Framed in colonial narratives as terra incognita or finis terrae, these regions generated diverse forms of textual and visual knowledge while simultaneously arousing curiosity and fear. The polar regions, Amazonian forests, and the seas and mountains of Patagonia played a central role in shaping the epistemologies of modern science and art in South America, functioning as laboratories in which ways of seeing were tested and transformed through processes of encounter. In this paper, we move beyond approaches that treat extreme spaces as fixed geographical entities defined solely by climatic severity or environmental hostility. Drawing on a pedagogical experiment inspired by Warburgian image-based research practices, we argue that extreme spaces are better understood as relational constructs, co-produced through multispecies and intercultural encounters. Through a comparative analysis of European iconographies across South America, we identify two coexisting clusters of meaning: one organised around abundance, intercultural cooperation, and extractivism; the other around scarcity, resistance, and environmental imposition. By tracing the circulation and mobilization of these meanings across different environments, we propose an epistemology of extremes, suggesting a mode of knowledge production that classifies spaces through the lens of radical otherness.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15060135

Authors: Tomasz Grusiecki

This article reconsiders the methodological primacy of representation in early modern art history by shifting attention from image to material. Taking Rembrandt’s Polish Nobleman (1637) as its point of departure, it argues that narrative interpretation—long central to the discipline—has obscured the material conditions that make images possible. Rather than assembling meaning from pictorial elements, the essay follows the painting’s support: a Baltic oak panel sourced from the woodlands of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. From this perspective, the artwork emerges not simply as an autonomous image but as the endpoint of an extractive chain linking forestry, peasant labour, river transport, and long-distance trade. Drawing on agronomic manuals, estate records, and economic histories, the article reconstructs these dispersed threads as “story matter”: fragments that, brought into relation, begin to cohere into an alternative mode of narration. In doing so, it advances “material literacy” as a methodological reorientation—an attunement to substances, processes, and infrastructures that precede and exceed representation. Recovering these histories does not replace interpretation but expands its scope, opening art history to ecological and infrastructural forms of storytelling.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15060134

Authors: David Castillo Sari Pamer

This contribution engages with perspectives, concerns and experiences of artists who staged either their own life stories or the life stories of others. At its core, it challenges the idea that staging a life story is solely an empowering, self-enabling and emancipatory aesthetic practice. By analysing two choreographies and their respective working conditions, as well as an interview with one of the choreographers, this article reflects on the commercialisation and neoliberal extraction of personal life stories. Further, this contribution revisits the concept of ‘cultural mobility’ with two case studies. The first one, mi vida en tránsito (2022), draws on the precariousness and vulnerability experienced in times of professional mobility in the Central European dance scene. Overseas (2022), the second case study, criticises the Eurocentric assumption that mobility is equally distributed across the globe. To analyse both case studies, this article establishes ‘cultural immobility’ as a scholarly perspective on how immobility relates to the production, performance, practice and circulation of cultural artefacts and artistic works.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15060133

Authors: Marina Daragan Sergei Polin

This study focuses on the construction sequence of three complex and atypical Scythian kurgans at the Vodoslavka burial ground in the Northern Sivash region, which incorporate several unique structural and ritual elements. One of the most striking features is the layer of mud applied to the ground surface prior to mound construction, which, in several cases, formed anthropomorphic outlines. Funerary feasting, which took place both before and during the burial ceremony, was just one of the other features. So too was the deliberate shaping of soil removed from the central grave into a spherical segment, and the ritual activity associated with this prepared spoil heap. Although the mounds’ preserved height is relatively modest (originally about 3–5 m), their internal organisation and the composition of the grave goods suggest that they were used for burying individuals of high status within Scythian society. The cemetery’s proximity to major salt lakes suggests that the local elite’s affluence may have been linked to their control over this vital resource. The architectural and depositional features of the kurgans can be interpreted as elements of a ritual system designed to ensure the deceased’s proper transition to the afterlife. The design of the burial chambers and the richness of the grave goods reflect a concern for the conditions of existence in the afterlife, while the associated manipulations of the sub-mound space and mound deposits, prepared surfaces, deliberately shaped spoil heaps, and related ritual practices can be understood as material markers and procedures intended to secure the successful passage of the deceased to the afterlife.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15060132

Authors: Kristi M. Peterson

The question of the presence and active participation of artists of African descent is an obscure one in the art history of Mexico. We know that Black hands were vital participants in the arts of the Americas, and their contributions to Spanish American art were innumerable, but the full extent of this contribution remains frustratingly unclear. Relatively little scholarly research has focused on the Black artists of the colonial world; the most famous are the rare exceptions, including Juan Correa of Mexico (1646–1716). Even in this instance, however, misinformation and confusion abound. A distinguished painter of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, Correa was of a mixed-race family and was himself Afro-Mexican. The son of a physician from Cádiz, Spain and a free Black woman, Pascuala de Santoyo, Correa became one of the most prolific painters of his day with upwards of four hundred works identifiably of his oeuvre. He executed a number of works for the cathedral in Mexico City, while others were sent half a world away to Spain. The Correa family was one of the most active families of painters in colonial Mexico City, and his nephew Nicolás Correa was also a mixed-race artist of note. Yet, only recently has Correa’s Black heritage publicly marked his identity. While not overtly hidden from modern viewers, the assertion and emphasis of Correa’s status as Afro-Mexican is relatively new. This is the result of a long history of racial erasure(s), slippage, public disinterest, and modern narratives of Mexicanidad that began in the colonial period. Already a maestro pintor when the painters’ guild in Mexico City instituted new policies in the late seventeenth century designed to prevent artists of othered racial categories from achieving the highest levels of success, Correa stands out as an artist of Black heritage in Mexico who renders the African history of the Americas visible through his own personhood, but who participates in the invisibility of that African-ness in the visual canon. This article therefore proposes to begin from Juan Correa and cast a wide net to examine the invisibility of the Black artist in Mexico and the visibilities of race and rhetorical bodies in New Spain as the larger Viceregal territory.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15060131

Authors: Thomas Aiello

Pornocrates (1878) is the most influential work of Belgian artist Félicien Rops. Featuring a naked woman with a blindfold walking behind a tethered pig on a marble floor, the work caused controversy on its first appearance. It has been interpreted by critics and art historians as representing various possibilities. While the evolution of how critics and scholars have interpreted the relationship between woman and pig is important, what none of them acknowledge is the existing status of the human relationship with pigs at the turn of the century, or the phenomenon of blind pig races that mirrored the action taken in the painting. Those races were arbiters of class and gender in fin-de-siecle United States and Europe, two elements of social standing that Rops often used his work to critique. This paper describes the history and criticism of Pornocrates in relation to interpretations of human-animal difference and compares the work to the largely unknown story of blind pig races.

Arts doi: 10.3390/arts15060130

Authors: David Haley

A micro-commission from Signal Film & Media, Barrow-in-Furness, initiated a two-year dialogue between artist/filmmaker Laurence Campbell and ecological artist David Haley. They started with the question, ‘How did such a small stream serve the development of such a large industrial town?’ Their eco-poetic, video/sonic exploration became a freshwater odyssey, discovering the blood of extinction (chalybeate-polluted water) through arterial tributaries, from deep time to 19th-century extraction to today. Their inquiry was informed by the Cumbria Archives, a local environmental conservationist, a poet and opera singer and passersby. The emergent art form revealed a complex set of ecological narratives. The project continues to raise questions about our relationships with the Nature–Climate–Culture Emergency, and the nuclear, defence, mining and water industries.