Art as a Political Witness, edited by Kia Lindroos and Frank Möller and published in 2017, is now an OPEN ACCESS title (DOI: 10.3224/84740580) which is free to download.
Art as a Political Witness explores the concept of artistic witnessing as political activity. In which ways may art and artists bear witness to political events? The contributors engage with dance, film, photography, performance, poetry and theatre and explore artistic witnessing as political activity in a wide variety of case studies.
Table of Contents
| List of Contents List of Figures List of Plates Contributors Preface 1. Kia Lindroos and Frank Möller, Witnessing in Contemporary Art and Politics 2. Louie Palu, Image Control in the Age of Terror 3. Dana Mills, The Body Remembers: Dance, Discourses of Citizenship, Phenomenology and Memory 4. Kia Lindroos, Chris Marker as Cinematic Witness 5. Sally Butler and Roland Bleiker, Embodied Witnessing: Indigenous Performance Art as Political Dissent 6. Cynthia E. Milton, Art as Remembrance and Trace in Post-Conflict Latin America 7. Bruno Lefort, Achrafiyeh Invaded – The Politics of Fear in a Visual Representation of the Lebanese Factionalism 8. Tommi Kotonen, Witnessing Language: Charles Bernstein and 9/11 9. Suvi Alt, Bearing Witness and Playing in Ruins: On the Onto-Poetics of Abandoned Places 10. Frank Möller, The Violence of Witnessing |
The book engages with the conceptual and theoretical dimensions of its general theme – art as political witness – and presents a wide variety of theoretically reflected case studies. Therefore, the understanding of art is not limited to fine art but open to various forms of artistic expression including popular culture.
In the social sciences, the concept of witnessing has widely been used in connection with memories of tragic and traumatic events such as the Holocaust.
The book acknowledges a certain expansion of the concept in recent scholarly work, decoupled from tragic events and increasingly applied to the everyday. A witness is a spectator, observing a scene, but a witness is also someone who observes a scene indirectly, mediated through representation including artistic representation. Art witnesses, and makes others witness, politics.
The individual chapters, while exploring dance, film, photography, performance, poetry and theatre as political witness, acknowledge, engage with and build upon the existing literature thus enhancing our understanding of the interrelationship between art and politics.
The book is free to download at:
Verlag Barbara Budrich online shop
OAPEN
Open Research Library
Social Science Open Access Repository
Barbara Budrich Publishers (Opladen, Berlin, Toronto 2017)
ISBN: 978-3-8474-0580-1
The book holds a Creative Commons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).