Tiffany E. Barber on the darkly humorous world of performance artist Narcissister, whose play on race, gender, and sexuality challenges conventional conceptions of identity
Category: From Art Journal
Art History and the Modern in Southeast Asia
Pamela N. Corey reviews an anthology of the work of art historian and critic T. K. Sabapathy.
“Come Out to Show Them”: Speech and Ambivalence in the Work of Steve Reich and Glenn Ligon
Ellen Tani explores how an incidence of police brutality in the Harlem of 1964 is deployed in artworks by musician Steve Reich and visual artist Glenn Ligon.
Traces of Traces: Image Histories in Lebanon
Anneka Lenssen reviews two recent books on photography in Lebanon.
The Future Is Present: Electronic Café and the Politics of Technological Fantasy
In the predigital era, an experiment in community-based virtual network building is launched in Los Angeles. Philip Glahn and Cary Levine uncover the activist collective Mobile Image’s project of 1984, Electronic Café.
The Challenge of a Global Modernism
Edith A. G. Wolfe on two recent studies of “discrepant modernities” in Latin America
“a salting of sorts”: Salt, Sea, and Affective Form in the Work of Deborah Jack
C. C. McKee examines the materiality and significance of salt in Deborah Jack’s art practice and poetry.
Questions of Identity: Photographic Series by Alicia D’Amico, 1983–86
María Laura Rosa on how Alicia D’Amico’s images of female desire reflect “dissident and destabilizing identities in the heteronormative visual imaginary.” (In English and Spanish.)
Exorcising the Soviet: The Unfolding of Contemporary Artistic Practice in Armenia
Duygu Demir reviews The Political Aesthetics of the Armenian Avant-Garde: The Journey of the “Painterly-Real,” 1987–2004.
In Tehran: A Conversation with Iranian Gallerists
This roundtable conversation among Iranian gallerists, available in English and in Persian, explores the politics and particularities of gallery ownership in Tehran.
At Home in the World: The FotoFest 2018 Biennial of Indian Photography
Sophia Powers reviews the 2018 exhibition India/Contemporary Photographic and New Media Art, and its accompanying catalogue by the same name.
Artful Embodiment: Genealogies of the Impossible
Stephanie Sparling Williams reviews Uri McMillan’s Embodied Avatars: Genealogies of Black Feminist Art and Performance, and Malik Gaines’s Black Performance on the Outskirts of the Left: A History of the Impossible.