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Cambridge Journal of Visual Culture - Articles

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Open Access
The ‘Wrongs’ of the Hindu Right: Ram Ke Naam (‘In the Name of God’, 1992) as Resistance
(2024-10) Siddiqui, Saad
With the Hindu Right ascending to power in India, the use of anti-colonial metrics to discourage and disregard Muslim presence in the subcontinent has exponentially increased as well. This paper, while analysing Anand Patwardhan’s documentary Ram Ke Naam (‘In the Name of God’, 1992), brings to the fore the perplexing state of postcolonial affairs in India. It uses Ram Ke Naam as a tool of resistance against the false, exhilarating, and anti-Muslim narratives curated by the Hindu right for maintaining their electoral and political dominance. This essay does a close reading of certain excerpts from the documentary, clinically analysing the events leading up to the Babri Masjid demolition in 1992, reiterating their unpretentious reality. It also highlights the politicised divide between Hindi and Urdu to position the Indian Muslim experience. The author uses his own experiential imprints and reflexivity to foreground Muslim voices in the India of today.
Open Access
After_Stand These Runes
(2024-10) Landmark, Osvald
The passport identifies the holder through various material details and serves as a non-verbal rite of passage. The inside cover of the Danish passport features a depiction of Christ from the Jelling Stone – a monument raised by King Harald Bluetooth in 925 CE symbolizing Denmark’s transition to Christianity. But once you look past the initial political message, the embedded motifs and runes carry ambiguity, mysticism and multiple layers of meaning where even the gesture of language itself become more significant than the message.
Open Access
Why Don't Cataloguers Write Like Curators? Taste Operations and Other Soft Systems of the Art World
(2024-10) Rinehart, Richard
A consideration of how aesthetics, in the form of taste culture, operates as a soft system of the art world, guiding not only discourse around the subject of art but also the modalities and activities of art world professionals and institutions.
Open Access
Watching with Mark Cousins - The Story of Looking
(2024-10) Cousins, Mark; Velody, Alexander
Mark Cousins is a Northern Irish director and writer. Well-known for ‘The Story of Film: An Odyssey’ (2011, headlined as the cinematic event of the year) and A New Generation (2021)’. Both comprehensive chronologies of world cinema are praised for their detailed and diverse approaches. His esteemed film-making career spans five decades. The following interview is presented as a discussion in response to the latter half of his film ‘The Story of Looking.’ The film meditates on the richness of visual experiences, framed around Cousins preparing for surgery to restore his vision during COVID. For the majority of the film Cousins narrates alone in the dark from his bed; as such, this interview was conducted via Zoom with us both in our respective beds. The hope was this exercise in free association and viewing would provide an emergent insight into Cousin’s film philosophy, hence our comfortable viewing locations to encourage us to pause the viewing and discuss thoughts freely as they came to mind. I collated the most striking thoughts relevant to the systems facilitating filmmaking; the still and timestamp from those moments are provided.
Open Access
Finding Force: Forced Entertainment's Non-Conforming Interpretation of the Systems, Conventions and Orders within Theatre
(2024-10) Etchells, Tim; Velody, Alexander
Sheffield-based ensemble Forced Entertainment is celebrating their 40th birthday as a company this year. The same core six of the company are constant throughout; Tim Etchells, Robin Arthur, Richard Lowdon, Claire Marshall, Cathy Naden and Terry O’Connor. Over this period, they have created over sixty theatrical productions with their other practices extending to book production, gallery installations and bus tours. Winning the International Ibsen Award in 2016, they cemented themselves as trailblazers of British theatre in modern times. From performing the entire works of Shakespeare solely with kitchen supplies to this year’s touring piece ‘Signal to Noise’ which utilises AI to help perform the text, their work is often unconventional. I had the pleasure of chatting with Artistic Director Tim Etchells, to dive into Forced Entertainment’s 40-year boundary breaking, extending, mocking and ignoring ethos.
Open Access
The Parrhesia Diptych: Cassandra and Clytemnestra (2022)
(2024-10) Salmon, Yvonne
This submission details The Parrhesia Diptych: Cassandra and Clytemnestra (2022), a painting sequence by Yvonne Salmon. Images of the two paintings that make up the diptych are included alongside an explanatory text, which outlines the piece as a whole. "The Parrhesia Diptych," is composed of two reclaimed canvases overlaid with 24 carat gold leaf. The artwork symbolically reclaims the voices of two figures from Greek classical literature, Cassandra and Clytemnestra. It looks at the intersection of authority systems and Greek mythological systems, to interrogate how we might speak truth to power. By excoriating the gold leaf to reveal imagined sigils, Salmon emphasizes the power of myth and truth to challenge authority. The text also details how the work was physically transformed through its journey and interaction with different elements, symbolizing change and resistance. Finally, the text makes clear that by physically ingesting some of the gold leaf, the artist integrates the artwork into their own body, thus combining three systems: personal, political and mythological.
Open Access
Matsuzawa Yutaka's Early Mandalas: 1-to-9, 9-to-1, and 1-through-9
(2024-10) Kusztyk, Alexander
This article explores the ritual system of Matsuzawa Yutaka’s early mandalas. Adapted from the nine-panel Diamond Realm mandala format of Esoteric Buddhism, Matsuzawa’s mandala system poses two opposite space-time paths: one radiating clockwise from the centre (from 1 to 9), and the other revolving anticlockwise to the centre (from 9 to 1). A third space-time experience from both the beginning and end could also be achieved by seeing 1 through 9 simultaneously. While Matsuzawa’s art draws from a wide range of historic thought including science, theology, and parapsychology, this article focuses on its connections to the traditions arising from the Lake Suwa area of Nagano, Japan. It begins with Matsuzawa’s gohei mandalas from the late 1950s in which he incorporated forms derived from Shinto ritual objects into the nine-panel mandala format. It then discusses the artist’s experimentations in the early 1960s that culminated in his three-dimensional mandalas known as the Psi Chamber and Psi Altar, stressing the importance of the accompanying writings and diagrams provided in his first text-based work, On “Meaning of Psi” and “Psi Chamber” from 1961. This article concludes by examining Matsuzawa’s 1973 account of his transcendental engagement, facilitated by his activated Psi Chamber mandala system, with the Shinto festival known as the Onbashira Matsuri associated with the Suwa Taisha near his home.
Open Access
Graffiti, History, Systems
(2024-10) Fleming, Juliet
Graffiti is a global phenomenon of current concern and consequence. It has produced enormous historical archives. But graffiti is not a unified concept and no single definition has yet been developed that fits all cases of its occurrence. Informed by the work of Jacques Derrida, this essay calls for the reconceptualization of graffiti as an ancient, popular, multi-platform, and multi-media communications system.
Open Access
Global Yet Local: Reimagining Geographic Space in the Work of Layla Curtis
(2024-10) Nixon, Ella
Open Access
Systems of Building: The Case of Venice
(2024-10) Howard, Deborah
This essay considers the ways in which the art of building in Venice evolved within specific typologies, in response both to physical constraints and to the unusually stable political and social context. Just as the building technology was adapted to the unstable foundations in soft lagoon mud, so, too, the layouts of the different types of architecture reflected particular institutional and social practices.
Open Access
A State in a State
(2024-10) Aslanishvili, Tekla; Gambino, Evelina; Rowold Cavusoglu, Ella
A State in a State is a 2022 video work by Tekla Alsanishvili, made in collaboration with Dr Evelina Gambino. The work straddles the boundary between documentary and film, in its exploration of railroads, in particular the Baku-Tbilisi-Kars railway. It investigates the role that such infrastructure plays in the wake of the legacies of the Soviet Union, whereby infrastructure is entangled with the re-emergence, and maintenance of, political borders. In this interview, Ella Rowold Cavusoglu talks to Tekla Aslanishvili and Evelina Gambino. It explores the work’s themes of systems of infrastructure, their entwinement with politics, and the forms of sabotage and connectivity that emerge out of them.
Open Access
Reflecting on and Grappling with the Repercussions of Cooling Technologies in the Arabian Peninsula
(2024-10) Aljomairi, Maryam; Alkhayat, Latifa
Sweating Assets, (the National Pavilion of the Kingdom of Bahrain at the Venice Architecture Biennale 2023) commenced as an inquiry into the loose ends of air conditioning systems, where vast amounts of condensate is produced and drained to sewers. This condensate is a valuable resource, a result of conditioning systems interacting with Bahrain’s hot and humid air. Beyond water wastage, this research extends to raise critical questions about the overreliance on modern cooling systems, examining the extent of their use and how they've shaped not only architecture but also our relationship with the environment. The project challenges the assumption that active cooling is always necessary, pointing out how systems have become embedded in the design of buildings to the point where they are treated as essential lifelines, rather than supplements for comfort. By interrogating these systems, Sweating Assets encourages a broader consideration of the environmental cost and inefficiencies that arise from maintaining constant temperature control. It critiques the top-down, centralized control that many systems impose, which limits individual agency by assuming “optimality” and climate control to the scale of landscapes. Instead, a reconsideration of architecture’s role in this energy intensive cooling endevour is explored, considering the history of the Arabian Gulf region and how the past can complement the evolution of comfort technologies for critical use.
Open Access
Oracles, Spores and Signals: Systems in the Works of Matt Kenyon and Nick Bontrager
(2024-10) Kenyon, Matt; Bontrager, Nick; Stephens, Robin
Open Access
In Favour of an Emotional Museological System
(2024-10) Attia, Kader; Keck, Sylvia
In this interview with French-Algerian artist Kader Attia, we discuss how his notion of ‘repairing’ the wounds of colonialism can be applied both practically and theoretically to museums. Kader Attia talks to Sylvia Keck about museums as both repressive and liberating systems and how to articulate a political statement within the art world. We also tackle the question of how to display African objects repaired with a Western element that were forgotten in storage, and how to have an emotional relation to artefacts in the museum, a fundamentally sacralized institution.
Open Access
Inside or Outside the System? Thoughts on the Radical Potential of Art
(2024-10) Olive, Colette
For better or for worse, we are in the habit of holding new cultural artefacts to pretty high standards when it comes to their socio-political messaging. A memorable recent example is Barbie, the Greta Gerwig/Margot Robbie film about the eponymous toy that sought to do the impossible: rehabilitate Barbie as a feminist. This was always going to be a tall order given that, as Andi Zeisler wrote in The New York Times last year, “Barbie holds the weight of several generations’ worth of beauty standards and feminist analysis on her tiny shoulders.” But perhaps we shouldn’t look for social analysis or a radical emancipatory feminist project in something that is too wrapped up in the various systems it seeks to criticise. This article considers whether truly radical art must exist “outside” the systems in wants to criticise, or whether it is possible for artworks to critique from within.
Open Access
An Interview With Sohelia Sokhanvari
(2024-10) Sokhanvari, Sohelia; Vasickova, Marketa
Marketa Vasickova interviews multimedia artist and human rights activist Soheila Sokhanvari, discussing themes of resistance, citizenship, and the intersection of science and art. The conversation also delves into Soheila’s recent exhibition, "We Could Be Heroes", at the Heong Gallery in Cambridge, and her artwork "Passports", which directly addresses the hierarchies of nationality and belonging.
Open Access
The Diachronic Projection: Past and Future Movements of Hydrographic Systems on Early Modern Maps
(2024-10) Martino, Davide
To this day, the Mercator projection allows cartographers to flatten the three-dimensional world onto two-dimensional paper. As this article shows, Mercator’s was not the only cartographic innovation pioneered in the early modern period: contemporary hydraulic experts routinely included the fourth dimension, time, in their maps. Capturing past movements of water, such as floods, but also future ones, such as planned land reclamation, required the development of a visual language allowing several temporalities to coexist within the same space. Early modern hydraulic experts can thus be said to have developed the diachronic projection. As well as allowing for the reduction of four dimensions onto two, this captured affects and desires on paper by combining depictions of the undesired (floods) and the desired (land reclamation). Given the recent interest for the history of projects, and the reframing of the early modern period as a projecting age, this article argues that it is time for scholars to recognise the importance of the diachronic projection.
Open Access
Pink in Architectural Drawings
(2024-10) Porter, Maggie
Surprisingly, the use of colour in architectural drawing has not been extensively documented. Today, as colour saturates our contemporary world, it is important to reflect on a time when the use of colour in drawings required careful consideration. Basile Baudez’s book “Inessential Colors”, published in 2021, is one of the first comprehensive works to explore this topic. This essay will focus on the use of pink, which was initially used to represent cut masonry but later evolved into a more decorative and possibly alluring role. The piece will discuss the shift from the systematic use of colour to a more creative approach, highlighting a drawing from the late eighteenth century by Antonio Asprucci, whose pink washes depicting the Temple of Diana express something beyond the marble structure of the temple.
Open Access
Recovering the Messy Side of Urban Life
(2024-10) Nevola, Fabrizio
In this interview Fabrizio Nevola discusses Italian Renaissance urban spaces as an aspect of visual culture, delving into the way in which cityscapes were designed and how inhabitants interacted with them – whether through ceremonial rituals or simply everyday activities. He also evaluates how digital humanities research can facilitate a more nuanced understanding of this topic.
Open Access
Untitled (SNAP), 2023
(2024-10) Owen, Jackson