Viewers of contemporary art are often invited to involve themselves actively in artworks, by entering installations, touching objects, performing instructions or clicking on interactive websites. Why have artists sought to engage spectators in these new forms of participation? In what ways does active participation affect the viewer's experience and the status of the artwork? Spanning a range of practices including kinetic art, happenings, environments, performance, installations, relational and new media art from the 1950s to the present, this critical anthology sheds light on the history...

The event occurs in and over time; the aftermath concerns the traces, which are frozen into images, objects, re-presentations. Traditionally, art history is written in the aftermath as representational. A different perspective on the visual arts is opened up when scholars insist on exploring the status of the event itself, allowing temporality to remain in place. By focusing on the event, recognition of the complex character of the traces becomes all the more evident, challenging the singularity of representation itself.
This book opens up debates on art history and theory to a broad...

In early modern Europe, the visual image began to move, not only as it traveled across great distances but also due to the introduction of innovative visual formats that produced animation within the image itself.
This book traces the arduous journeys of visual images through evidence of their use and reproduction along missionary routes from Europe to India, Japan, China, Brazil and Chile. It argues that missionary world travel was crucial to the early modern re-animation of the image through devices such as the reflection of the mirror, the multiple registers of vision of the...

Projected-image art occupies an increasingly important place in the contemporary art-world. But does the projected image have its own specificity, beyond the histories of experimental film and video on the one hand, and installation art on the other? What is a projected image, and what is the history of projected-image art? These questions and others are explored in this thoughtful collection of nine essays by leading international scholars of film and projected-image art. Clearly structured in three sections - 'Histories', 'Screen', 'Space' - the book argues for recognition of the projected...

Timed out is a pioneering study of modern and contemporary art in the aftermath of empire. It addresses the current 'global turn' in the study of art by way of the transnational Caribbean, offering an in-depth account of its integral role in histories of art in the Atlantic world. It looks at why art of the Anglophone Caribbean and its diaspora has been placed not only 'outside' but 'behind' more familiar and dominant art canons, and how the politics of space and time can be engaged in new ways to rethink the global geography of art.
This is an essential addition to the growing field of...

Is gender implicated in how art does its work, or is defined as work, in global space? Is a global imperative exclusive to capitalism's planetary expansion or does it also animate oppositional practices in art and curating? And what is new in the gendered paradigms of art after the fall of the Berlin Wall, in a persistently divided Europe and elsewhere?
Angela Dimitrakaki addresses these questions in an insightful and highly original analysis of travel as artistic labour, the sexualisation of migration as a relationship between Eastern and Western Europe, the post-documentary aesthetic of...

Do artists travel away from or towards trauma? Is trauma encrypted or inscribed in art? Or can aesthetic practices (after-images) bring about transformation of trauma, personal trauma or historical traumas? Can they do this in a way that does not imply cure or resolution of the traces (after-affects) of trauma? How do artists themselves process these traces as participants in and sensors for our life-worlds and histories, and how does the viewer, coming belatedly or from elsewhere, encounter works bearing such traces or seeking forms through which to touch and transform them?
These are...

Contemporary art is embedded within the structures that characterise globalization - from the transnational circulation of artworks as commodities to the cross-cultural exchange of images, objects and ideas - and the multiple and mobile territories described by these structures are always, already gendered. Women, the Arts and Globalization: Eccentric experience is the first anthology to address these interlinked issues, bringing transnational feminist theory and criticism together with women's art practices in a coherent and sustained discussion of the legacy and trajectory of aesthetics,...

Art since the 1980s reveals a striking proliferation of works exploring the complex cross-cultural identities that have resulted from a long history of exchange between France and the Maghreb. This adventurous study examines distinctively visual means of presenting 'Franco-Maghrebi' identities in performance, video, photography and installation art. Transcultural encounters investigates the ways in which such art spurs a re-thinking of both postcolonial and feminist issues and critical terms in an uneven globalised frame. It demonstrates how this corpus develops art historical debates...

Photography and documentary film in the making of modern Brazil investigates the Brazilian image world in the first four decades of the twentieth century, an era of significant economic, political, and cultural change. Examining a constellation of still and moving images produced across the Brazilian territory by filmmakers, explorers, anthropologists, intellectuals and missionaries of various kinds, including Claude Levi-Strauss, Mario de Andrade, Silvino Santos and Aloha Baker, the book maps the relationships between visual culture, nation-building, colonialism and global modernity.
In...