Making the invisible visible: how we depict Covid-19

How do you depict a microscopic bundle of proteins that in just a few months transformed the world? Sria Chatterjee (Max-Planck Kunsthistorisches Institut) looks at how the virus has been visualised in different contexts, and how new ways of tracking and seeing its spread have profound implications for individual freedom

Justice Through a Multispecies Lens

The bushfires in Australia during the Summer of 2019–2020, in the midst of which we were writing this exchange, violently heightened the urgency of the task of rethinking justice through a multispecies lens for all of the authors in this exchange, and no doubt many of its readers. As I finish this introduction, still in the middle of the Australian summer, more than 10 million hectares (100,000 km2 or 24.7 million acres) of bushland have been burned and over a billion individual animals killed. This says nothing of the others who will die because their habitat and the relationships on which they depend no longer exist. People all around the world are mourning these deaths and the destruction of unique ecosystems. As humans on this planet, and specifically as political theorists facing the prospect that such devastating events will only become more frequent, the question before us is whether we can rethink what it means to be in ethical relationships with beings other than humans and what justice requires, in ways that mark these deaths as absolute wrongs that obligate us to act, and not simply as unfortunate tragedies that leave us bereft

NATURING THE NATION: ART AND DESIGN IN INDIA, 1870s-1970s

Naturing the Nation: art and design in India, 1870s-1970s probes the relationship between art, design and the politics of nature in colonial and postcolonial India. It examines two art and design institutions - Rabindranath Tagore's Santiniketan-Sriniketan project (established in early 1900s British India) in Bengal, and the National Institute of Design funded by the Indian government and the United States-based Ford Foundation (established late 1950s, after independence in 1947) in Ahmedabad. Taking into account the transregional and transnational networks of ideas, agents, and institutions around them, it unpacks art and design’s deep relations to colonial and modern science and anthropology between colonial rule and the Cold War. A focus on the relationships between plant neurobiology, agricultural science, art and art theory, as well as exhibition-making allows the chapters to investigate the co-production of ‘nature’ and ‘nation’ as malleable constructs within art and design historical discourse. It reveals, for instance, how the entanglements of art and science were caught up in the articulation of a new Hindu metaphysics by a particular nationalist elite in early twentieth century Bengal. Through the work of artists and art theorists, it traces the crucial relationships of this Hindu metaphysics with the Pan-Asian movement and European vitalism. Through transnational and transregional networks of artists, writers and designers, it identifies a ‘Long Arts and Crafts Movement’ and the paradoxes and ramifications of it between Great Britain, India and the United States of America, investigating the functions of craft, design and rural reform between Victorian socialism of the late 1880s, Indian nationalisms, and American development-oriented aid programmes of the 1950s. Examining the emergence of design, and new ways of seeing, in the 1960s, it investigates how the representation of ‘nature’ and ‘nation’ were reconfigured through a nexus of art, politics, and technology, and the conflicting demands of ‘tradition’ and ‘progress’