Cambridge Journal of Visual Culture

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Cambridge Journal of Visual Culture

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Cambridge Journal of Visual Culture - Volume 1

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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
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
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
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
Global Yet Local: Reimagining Geographic Space in the Work of Layla Curtis
(2024-10) Nixon, Ella
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
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
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
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
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.