Themed Issue: Visual activism

Zanele Muholi, ZaVa XXI SF 2014, 2014, courtesy the artist; © Zanele Muholi

This themed issue was conceived as a way to extend the conversations generated out of the 2014 "Visual Activism" conference of the International Association for Visual Culture (IAVC). The phrase "visual activism" puts pressure on its constitutive words and raises questions abut how we define both the regimes of the visible and the boundaries of activism. Contributors explore, but do not resolve, how art can contribute to political discourse and how activism takes on specific, and sometimes surprising, visual forms not always aligned with or recognizable by art-world frameworks.  Hybrid in form and intentionally multi-vocal, the issue interrogates the intersection of activism with vision, visibility, and visuality from the perspective of activists and non-activists alike. The mix of images, artists projects and articles address overlapping and intersecting themes regarding what "visual activism" might constitute, how it operates in different contexts, and even how the phrase might ultimately fail to account for that which it hopes to describe. - J B-W, J G, D W

(Check out the issue at our Current Issue page. - JVC)