Image-making with Jeanne Duval in mind: photoworks by Maud Sulter, 1989−2002

This essay focuses on a major theme in the art of Maud Sulter (1960-2008), her long-standing interests in Jeanne Duval. Best known as the model, muse and companion of the poet Charles Baudelaire, Duval was a performer in the entertainment industry of mid nineteenth-century Paris, and one of several African diaspora women who moved in artistic and literary circles. The essay considers Sulter's art and writings, focusing on her renowned series, Zabat, 1989, a series of four photomontages entitled Jeanne: A Melodrama, 1994-2002, and a suite of 9 large-format Polaroid photographs, Les Bijoux 2002, included in the major exhibition she curated for the Scottish National Portrait Gallery in 2003, Jeanne Duval : A Melodrama, which placed her own art work alongside major paintings which depicted or may have portrayed Duval. For Sulter, Duval signifies 'the continuing African presence at Europe's cultural heart and the simultaneous denial and erasure of that presence' . The essay concludes by exploring connections between Sulter's artistic conjuring of Duval and Derrida's thinking on haunting and revenants. Key words: Jeanne Duval. Maud Sulter. African diaspora. Spectres. Revenants

Conviviality as a politics of endurance: the refugee emergency and the consolations of artistic intervention

Against the impasse of despair in the public response to the refugee emergency, artistic interventions emerge to offer fleeting significant opportunities for restorative and reparative action. This article takes up conviviality as a conceptual tool to understand artistic interventions to the forced migration and asylum issues that variably aim for healing, empathy, and reflexivity. Drawing on comparative research consisting of interviews of artists in France, the United Kingdom, and the United States and textual analyses of their performances, we discuss specific motivations and diverse representational practices that aim to enact togetherness-in-difference. We discuss the potentials and risks of convivial artistic productions, which we argue produce a politics of endurance that, as Feldman has said, helps “people live better with circumstances they cannot change.

Kate Davis: re-visioning art history after modernism and postmodernism

This article engages with the work of Scotland-based artist Kate Davis (b.1977). The discussion begins to articulate a framework for understanding Davis’s work within a feminist logic of re-visioning and re-citing,strategies that are explicated and suggested as paradigmatic to feminist art production since 1970.Fundamentally, the article explores Davis’s complex strategies for adopting and adapting motifs from within the archives of art history, arguing that her work constitutes a mode of visual research and historiography

Mega screens for mega cities

This article considers how networked large urban screens can act as a platform for the creation of an experimental transnational public sphere. It takes as a case study a specific Australia-Korea cultural event that linked large screens in Federation Square, Melbourne, and Tomorrow City, Incheon,1 through the presentation of SMS-based interactive media art works. The article combines theoretical analyses of global citizenship, mobility, digital technologies, and networked public space with empirical analyses of audience response research data collected during the screen event. The central argument is that large public screens can offer a strategic site for examining transformations in the constitution of public agency in a digitized, globalized environment. The idea of ‘aesthetic cosmopolitanism’ is finally proposed as a conceptual framework for understanding how new forms of transnational public agency in mediated public spaces might operate

The case of Asialink’s arts residency program: towards a critical cosmopolitan approach to cultural diplomacy

This paper explores the ways in which one of Australia’s cultural diplomacy initiatives aimed at bringing Australia closer to Asia – the Asialink Arts Residency Program – may provide valuable insights for reimagining cultural diplomacy with a revised understanding of the national interest that reflects the increasingly transnational realities of the contemporary world. Drawing on extensive data gained from interviews and an online survey, the author found that program participants are engaging in exceptionally complex and at times unintended activities, and that policy concerns, such as positive image projection abroad, are rarely high on the residents’ list of priorities. However, these experiences are of particular value for the national interest, in ways not yet formulated by or included in existing cultural diplomacy discourses. With the findings in mind, the author takes a critical cosmopolitan approach to reconceptualising cultural diplomacy