Search Results (32)

The Ukrainian–Crimean artist Maria Kulikovska’s artistic practice has addressed war in Ukraine since the Annexation of Crimea and outbreak of war in the Donbas regions of Ukraine in 2014. In 2019 she created the video-performance Let Me Say: It Will Not Be Forgotten that responds to the ways artworks and women’s bodies are targeted by derisive retaliation and physical attacks during periods of political instability. Informed by explorations of feminism in post-Soviet countries, theories of prosthetic memory, and destruction art of the 1960s, I argue that Kulikovska does not let the destruction of her artwork silence her, but, rather, she uses destruction as a strategy to take control of oppressive forces. In their place, I argue that Let Me Say: It’s Not Forgotten demonstrates subjective and complex ways of building resilient feminist presents and futures that overcome oppressive violence and testify to continual perseverance. Full article

Roman Bordun’s twenty-first century photograph The Apartment After the Artillery Bombardment. Heat resistant Ceramic Vase. Irpin [Ukraine]. June 2022 uses light to express the Christian paradox of suffering that leads to redemption and eternal life for the just. In order to imbue spiritual meaning into a photographic work, Bordun draws from Renaissance artists in his use of technique (chiaroscuro), topic (warfare), and geography (the city) that all reference Christ’s Resurrection. Comparing and contrasting Bordun’s Apartment with Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino’s [Raphael] paint on wood Saint Michael Overwhelming the Demon (c. 1505) demonstrates how Bordun’s photograph can transcend its discrete historical context, merging the factual and the mythic as described by C. S. Lewis. Through his references to Raphael and the masters, Bordun lays claim to a Christian iconography and challenges the political use of religion in waging human warfare. His works all demonstrate contemporary or even quotidian plays on Renaissance works in order to address current political issues. The art of photography and stylistic references to churches’ involvement in politics, as opposed to Christian teachings, critiques Moscow’s “post-truth” justifications of the Ukrainian invasion and war. Full article

The Oakland, California-based artist Adia Millett is among an ever-growing generation of Black artists who have embraced abstraction in their creative production. Her approach is significant, considering that one of the more pernicious dimensions of art history has been its omission of African-American painters from the history of late-modernist American abstraction. In this 2024 interview, scholar Derek Conrad Murray and Millett exchange ideas about the intersection of Blackness and abstraction. Identity and representation have always been a thorny terrain throughout the history of American art, from the nineteenth century to the present—and Black artists’ commitment to reflecting on racial injustice dubiously rendered their work incommensurate with the aesthetic dictates of post-war abstraction. Since the 1990s, there has been an increase in corrective efforts dedicated to recuperating Black artists who have fallen through the cracks of history. As a result, the twenty-first century has seen an acknowledgment of many artists who were overlooked—and a blossoming of formalist abstraction among recent generations of contemporary Black artists. As articulated in this interview, Adia Millett, like many of her peers, has resisted the falsehood that abstraction is beyond her purview—and has embraced abstraction while refusing to abandon the complexities of Blackness. Full article

This article explores the official exhibition of Austrian art held in May 1930 at The Society for the Encouragement of the Fine Arts in Warsaw. Showcasing 474 artworks by 100 artists, the exhibition spanned the years 1918–1930, a period marked by Austria’s efforts to overcome post-war political isolation. The article examines the exhibition’s rhetoric and its critical reception in Warsaw within the broader context of Polish–Austrian diplomatic relations, influenced by Austria’s challenging political and economic situation and the priorities of the Second Polish Republic. The introductory essay in the exhibition catalogue, authored by Hans Tietze, emphasized Vienna’s seminal role as a cultural center at the crossroads of European artistic trends. This approach aligned with the cultural diplomacy of Johannes Schober’s government, which aimed to underscore a rhetoric of openness to the cultures of other nations, particularly the successors of the Habsburg Empire. This contrasted with the later identity policy of the Bundesstaat Österreich, which elevated Tyrol as emblematic of the core German–Austrian identity constructed in the new state. The analysis reveals that the exhibition represented the peak of Polish–Austrian cultural relations during the interwar years, suggesting the potential for broader engagement. However, this potential was short-lived, ultimately thwarted by the Anschluss of Austria to Germany in 1938. Full article

Ukrainian art, from the economic and political transformation of the 1990s through the events of 2014 (Crimea’s annexation and war in Donbas) to the Russian Federation’s full-scale invasion in 2022, has been haunted in various ways by the question of trauma and loss. At the same time, however, the problem of trauma is not just a problem of war or conflict but is somehow inscribed in post-Soviet space. Photography has a special role to play here, as a medium constantly oscillating between visible and invisible and between presence and absence. Since traumatic images transform and question the medium, a discussion about trauma becomes a discussion about the image itself. This article analyses selected projects by Ukrainian artists in various disciplines made in three chronological moments: the first half of the 1990s, after 2014, and now, in response to the ongoing war. Each project touches in different ways on the issue of trauma and the traumatic view while also touching the broader level of relationships between affects, vision, and history. Full article

Russian interference and invasion in Ukraine have transformed that nation’s historical practice of mural painting. A traditional art form with deep religious and political resonance in Ukraine, murals have become an instrument for patriotic mass mobilisation against the Russian military threat. From the mid-2000s, spraypaint graffiti underwent a gradual process of professionalisation and reconciliation with mainstream culture as Ukrainian municipalities pursued urban beautification initiatives and city-branding strategies to mitigate the socioeconomic challenges of postsocialism. It was this legacy of apolitical, privately funded street art that provided the foundations for patriotic muralism following the Maidan “Revolution of Dignity” and the Russian annexation of Crimea. Amidst the post-Maidan search for a postcolonial understanding of Ukrainian culture disentangled from Soviet and Russian influences, professionally produced murals in central urban districts proposed new visions of national identity. The war’s intensification since 2022 has resulted in a decentralisation of mural production. No longer reliant on international festivals in urban centres, conflict murals are now made by Ukrainian artists in large cities and small towns across the country. The newest murals represent a blending of the physical and digital—with a subject matter often inspired by viral conflict memes; artworks are, in turn, shared with worldwide audiences via social media. Full article

Following the trauma of the Second World War, Hong Kong, under British governance, enjoyed considerable economic and political freedom to establish a local entertainment industry. Musical films became a major genre of Hong Kong’s film releases in the 1950s. Local melodramas, Hollywood musicals, celebrities, and ideals of female beauty were all present in the growth of Hong Kong musical films, which culminated in a glorious display of cinematic art. This article aims to provide insight into the popularity of Chinese-speaking musical films by examining the social, economic, and political complexity of 1950s Hong Kong, including post-war migration and colonial censorship. An in-depth analysis of Li Han-Hsiang’s The Kingdom and the Beauty demonstrates how Hong Kong studios adapted the Hollywood musical to tell Chinese stories and how Hong Kong musical films incorporated Chinese literature and music to represent cultural memory, local identity, and modern aesthetics. This case study sheds light on the localization of a Hollywood genre and the hybridization of Chinese and Western entertainment forms to appeal to a Chinese audience, thereby broadening the definition of cultural hybridity and informing the practice of Hong Kong’s musical filmmaking. Full article

Haniya Yutaka (1909–1997) was one of the leading figures in postwar Japanese literature and avant-garde art movements, chiefly remembered today for his unfinished metaphysical novel Dead Souls [Shirei, 1946–1997]. This essay, however, examines his hitherto unknown theoretical writings on film. Haniya and other writers gathering around the literary magazine Kindai bungaku [Modern Literature, 1946–1964] shared a keen interest in film’s unparalleled importance in twentieth-century modernity. And their collective efforts to transgress conventional boundaries between literature and film culminated in the 1957 publication of the anthology entitled Literary Film Theory [Bungakuteki eigaron]. Above all, Haniya’s film writing was clearly distinguished for its tendency to explicate film’s paradoxical mode of existence philosophically, an approach that the film critic Matsuda Masao later called an “ontological film theory” [sonzaironteki eigaron]. Looking closely at his essays and interviews collected in Literary Film Theory and two other volumes on this topic—Thoughts in the Darkness [Yami no naka no shisō, 1962] and Dreaming in the Darkness [Yami no naka no musō, 1982]—the present essay reads Haniya’s theorization of cinema in relation to both Martin Heidegger’s existential phenomenology and recent scholarly debates on non-Western film theory. Full article

Media coverage was vital in establishing the popular reputation of the Abstract Expressionists. Reporting regularly relied on photographic portraits to present these artists as modernist innovators who were an extension of (or even a replacement for) the work of art. Jackson Pollock came to epitomize the Abstract Expressionist artist, with “action” photographs capturing his radical painting method. Pollock’s contemporary, American sculptor David Smith, similarly transformed his medium—in his case by embracing industrial methods to make three-dimensional objects. However, given the constraints inherent in the process of welding he employed, how could Smith’s image be reconstituted as a celebration of artistic individuality so crucial to modernism? The very method Smith embraced to push the boundaries of art kept him from representing the genius creator who channeled the forces of nature to produce culture. By tracing photographs documenting his career published in local and regional newspapers, popular magazines from Popular Science to Life, and mass art magazines from Magazine of Art to Arts, this paper demonstrates that images of Smith at work as an anonymous industrial worker enveloped in protective gear were regularly balanced with images of contemplation—the traditional image of the artist as mediating intelligence. Yet, over the years of his career, the problem of representing Smith was addressed somewhat differently. Early on, there was a tendency to show Smith applying his novel art-making techniques to the production of more traditional objects. During World War II, when Smith was employed as a commercial welder, Smith the artist legitimized reporting on Smith the worker. Finally, in the post-war world—as Smith benefited from the burst of publicity surrounding the triumph of Abstract Expressionism—his rigorous manipulation of metal was celebrated as masculine display, effectively shifting attention away from common industrial labor to heroic individual struggle. Full article

This article explores visual arts and literature in the Slovenian diasporic community in Argentina, founded by post-World-War-II refugees who fled Slovenia at the end of the war and the beginning of the communist revolution in Yugoslavia. Based on the ethnographic data collected among the Slovenes in Argentina and biographical interviews with selected Slovene artists, the article addresses how art and cultural production in the diaspora, imbued with social memories and themes of war, violence, mass executions in the post-war period, and exile from the homeland is encompassed in three levels of cultural policies: (a) an Argentinean framework of cultural pluralism that integrated migrant communities into the national identity and narrative, allowing them to preserve and express their ethnic and cultural backgrounds and identities; (b) a diasporic level that institutionalized specific themes important for diasporic ideologies, some explicitly related to violence, exile, and mass executions; and (c) a transnational level that facilitated the integration of artists from the diaspora into Slovenian and international “art worlds”. These cultural policies were often contradictory and required artists to shift between inclusion in the Argentinean art domain and the diasporic one, which favored partial social exclusivism. Full article

The abstractionist paintings of Puerto Rican artist Olga Albizu (1924–2005) gained prominence in the late 1950s when her work debuted in galleries across the Americas and entered the commercial music industry with RCA and Verve records. However, existing scholarship has failed to capture the complex relationship between Albizu’s anti-commercial abstractionist aesthetic and its mass reproduction as cover art for vinyl records during the Cold War era. Returning to the canvas to explore the iconographic, formal, and aesthetic qualities of Albizu’s work within its sociohistorical post-World War II context, this study reveals Albizu’s devotion to formal borders, vivid color juxtapositions, and compositional tensions. I argue that Albizu’s practice constitutes an ongoing concern with a Modernist dialectic and ideals about subjective transformation in a postmodern world of mass culture, a message she conveyed through the material and experiential borders of the canvas. As an avowed formalist and Modernist existing between the postcolonial and postmodern worlds of San Juan and New York City, her work merits formal scrutiny. This paper will add to the diverse histories of Abstract Expressionism and mid-century Modernisms across the Americas while shedding light on an important post-war historical moment and artistic impulse that held on to anti-commercial values in an all-encompassing consumerist world. Full article

The feminist agenda in Russia experienced a phase of intense aesthetic search in the field of contemporary art and contemporary theater. The split in society, war, increased censorship and state propaganda, and mass emigration stopped this process. Feminist ethics and aesthetics are oriented toward democratic values and the absolute value of human life; it is difficult for them to survive in totalitarian states. Using material from the history of feminism and aesthetic practices in the post-perestroika decades of Russia, this article examines two historical forms of such survival: the Stockholm syndrome and, in more detail, “anti-propaganda”, the popularization of the feminist agenda through aesthetic practices with mandatory feedback and the utmost attention to individual fate and personal trauma. Full article

Mindfulness and meditation was explored with the view to support the use of trauma-sensitive mindfulness (TSM) in clinical practice with survivors of war refugees in the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorders. The following questions were explored: (1) How are mindfulness and meditation defined? (2) What are the practices and perceived value of mindfulness practices? (3) What are the evidence and non-evidence-based treatments for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)? (4) What are the possibilities of using TSM to support war-traumatised refugees in the treatment of PTSD in a refugee camp setting? Findings that measured currently actioned interventions for war-traumatised refugees did not account for psychological support that could be implemented in a refugee camp setting on a once-off basis. In response to the gaps and limitations highlighted, the study suggests an adaptation of the TSM intervention and professional development of practitioners in the art of TSM therapy. Full article

Oil contamination is a major source of pollution in the environment. It may take decades for oil-contaminated soils to be remedied. This study models oil-contaminated soils using one of the world’s greatest environmental disasters, the onshore oil spill in the desert of Kuwait in 1991. This work uses state-of-art remote sensing technologies and machine learning to investigate the oil spills during the first Gulf War. We were able to identify oil-contaminated and clear locations in Kuwait using unsupervised classification over pre- and post-oil spill data. The research area’s pre-war and post-war circumstances, in terms of oil spills, were discovered by developing spectral signatures with different wavelengths and several spectral indices utilized for oil-contamination detection. Following that, we use this data for sampling and training to model various oil-contaminated soil levels. In addition, we analyze two separate datasets and used three modeling methodologies, Random Tree (RT), Support Vector Machine (SVM) and Random Forest (RF). The results show that the suggested approach is effective in detecting oil-contaminated soil. As a result, the location and degree of contamination may be established. The results of this analysis can be a valid support to the studies of an appropriate remediation. Full article

French artist and poet Camille Bryen (1907–1977) is usually, and always very briefly, cited as a member of the post-Second World War (1939–1945) lyrical abstraction trend in Paris, often designated as Ecole de Paris or Nouvelle Ecole de Paris, Tachisme, or Informel. Bryen painted hybrids of plants, animals, rocks, and humans, mixing the organic with the inorganic, evoking cellular agglomerations, geological structures, or prehistorical drawings. He emphasized the materiality and the process through thick impasto, visible brushstrokes, and automatic drawing. Along with other abstract painters in post-war Paris, Bryen’s work is usually associated with vague humanist interpretations and oversimplified existentialism. If the above statement is true for a number of his peers, it does not correspond to the way he envisaged his art, and art in general. His views are reflected in his intense theoretical reflection revolving around the term of “Abhumanism”, too often completely ignored in the critical literature. Coined by his close friend, the playwright and writer Jacques Audiberti, Abhumanism claimed the inconsistency of a fallacious and pretentious humanism faced with the rawness and cruelty of recent history, and called for a revision of the humanist subject, including anthropocentrism. Both men considered art, namely painting, as a salvatory vitalist “abhumanist” act. In this paper, which is the first consistent publication on Bryen in English, I will argue that Abhumanism is essential for the understanding of the artist’s work because, separating him from the School of Paris, it is, first, harmonious with his artistic production—paintings and writings; second, it clarifies Bryen’s place in the history of the avant-garde, in the wake of Dada and Surrealism. This essay will contribute to the re-evaluation not only of Bryen’s still underestimated œuvre, but more largely to the reappraisal of the artistic life in Paris after the Second World War. Full article