Cultural Critique Through the Detour of Art

This book brings together a selection of articles that have been published throughout a series of special issues of the journal Critical Arts: South-North Cultural and Media Studies that originally focused on the so-called 'ethnographic turn' in contemporary arts. An increasing wave of art events has occurred since the 1990s that have displayed significant similarities with anthropology and ethnography in their theorizations of cultural difference and representational practices. The aim of these works was to revisit the ethnographic turn in contemporary art by bringing together contributions from theorists, artists and critics, to engage critically with the ethnographic perspective in their work. This focus on the 'ethnographic turn' has been expanded in subsequent special issues to explore how culture and society can be critically explored and challenged trough the detour of art, how contemporary art practices engage with participation, interaction and technology in an increasingly digital (screen) culture, and what the role can be of (critical) art to conceptualize, contest and/ or develop an engaged and critical pedagogy. This collection aims to re-expose the special issues to an international audience by presenting a (non-exhaustive) selection of articles that exemplify the different perspectives and discussions that are tackled throughout. It starts with three of the introductory articles that have attracted large readerships and that give a detailed introduction for the special issues. The compilation ends with three so-called Vignettes, these are short statements and reflections by artists about their practice, which are an important feature of the special issues.

Kris Rutten is Associate Professor at the Department of Educational Studies of Ghent University, Belgium, where he leads the research group Culture & Education. His fields of expertise are the rhetoric of cultural literacy, the rhetorical curriculum and the ethnographic turn in the arts. He is an associate editor of Critical Arts. Keyan G. Tomaselli is founder and co-editor of Critical Arts, and distinguished professor, Faculty of Humanities, University of Johannesburg, South Africa.

Introduction 1. Revisiting the ethnographic turn in contemporary art 2. The rhetorical turn in contemporary art and ethnography 3. Participation, Art and Digital Culture 4. Woundscapes': suffering, creativity and bare life - practices and processes of an ethnography-based art exhibition 5. Towards an ethnographic turn in contemporary art scholarship 6. Beyond the Ethnographic Turn: Refiguring the Archive in Selected Works by Zanele Muholi 7. Aesthetics of self-scaling: parallaxed transregionalism and Kutlug Ataman's art practice 8. Making sense: affective research in postwar Lebanese art 9. The artist as anthropologist of the current globalisation: a view on the present-day cultural imagination in the artworks of Xu Bing, Takashi Murakami and Shahzia Sikander 10. Organising complexities: the potential of multi-screen video-installations for ethnographic practice and representation 11. A Different Point of View: Women's Self-representation in Instagram's Participatory Artistic Movements @girlgazeproject and @arthoecollective 12. YouTube Scenes and the Public Re-seen: Natalie Bookchin and the Digital Public 13. Staging the World: Cross-Cultural (Il)literacy, Taiwan's Mobile Stage Phenomenon, and Shen Chao-liang's Stage Series 14. Unlearning Imperialism Through Artistic Remediation: A Critical Pedagogy Approach 15. Archival F(r)ictions: A Queer Vocabulary for a Live art Pedagogy 16. Urban cracks: sites of meaning for critical artistic practices 17. To cite ... in time 18. FIG(URATIONS): One Extended Metaphor for the Poetic Method, a Vignette for Convolute H (and an Ode to Walter Benjamin)