Third Text
Issues
Volume 36, 2022
Issue 2
Number 175, March 2022
Enjoy Sara-jevo: Coca-Cola, Material Culture and the Siege of Sarajevo 85–106
Jasmina Gavrankapetanović-Redžić
This article argues that the narrative of the independent Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina and of its capital city Sarajevo under siege (1992–1995) was built on the trope of Sarajevo’s European, Western-oriented, cosmopolitan cultural identity, based on the image initially nurtured by Socialist Yugoslavia. In the new context of the implosion of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (1945–1991) the siege of Sarajevo and the war in one of the Yugoslav republics, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Yugoslav socialism was replaced by the multi-ethnic and cosmopolitan character of the young Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina. I argue that the image of Sarajevo during the siege, as a by-product of foreign attention to the plight of the country and its citizens, was built on the pre-existing premises that promoted Socialist Yugoslavia as Western-oriented and therefore progressive, in contrast to other communist countries beyond the Iron Curtain.
Wallen Mapondera’s Conceptual Art: Reflections on Zimbabwe’s November 2017 Bloodless Coup d’etat and Beyond 107–123
Barnabas Ticha Muvhuti
Wallen Mapondera’s ‘Pahukama’ is an artwork carrying memories of Zimbabwe’s November 2017 bloodless coup d’etat. The artist employs it as a gateway to documenting the everyday transactions taking place on the country’s streets. This article examines this readymade artwork’s unique qualities in the context of Zimbabwe, where a generation of young artists is making art out of found objects. It interrogates ‘Pahukama’, a concept capturing the marriage of convenience struck between the feared army militias and the masses on November 18. On a normal day, commuters crisscross the road, the homeless live on it, street vendors and the illicit forex traders strike deals on it. The multiple meanings hidden in the artwork as a visual text are explored. While the work is conceptual, some would be tempted to read it literally because of Robert Mugabe’s stature. In conclusion, a suggestion is made for the artwork to be exhibited within Zimbabwe.
Phantom Images, Phantom Limbs, Phantoms of Empire 124–144
Kriss Ravetto-Biagioli
Kader Attia’s ‘Refléchir la Mémoire’ (Reflecting Memory, 2016) and Cyprien Gaillard’s 3D motion picture ‘Nightlife’ (2015) engage the politics of memory by invoking the musical practice of dubbing to convey a sense of haunting. Yet this is not a haunting that simply conjures ghostly voices, images or sounds from the past. It is, instead, a practice of mixing, remixing and distorting − making something hidden or invisible critically present. Rather than attempting to restore or repair those who suffer from historical or even physical traumas, they focus on transformations that are not simple acts of self-overcoming or reclaiming one’s sense of self but ones that initiate a complex set of affective relations. These remediated voices and images do not conjure ghosts to make singular demands on the present, but produce ‘ghost effects’ that generate multiple possible readings of the always present politics of memory.
The Spotted ‘Seppuku’: Commodifying Suicide with Yayoi Kusama 145–160
Erin K Stapleton
Yayoi Kusama, the self-proclaimed ‘international avant-garde artist’ has enjoyed global commercial success in the most recent decades of her lengthy career. In this article, I address this by taking her body of work as whole, with the message of self-destruction, sifted through the branding of ‘obliteration’ and ‘accumulation’ which I term the ‘Kusama-Seppuku’. Drawing on analyses of Kusama’s visual and literary work alongside Pierre Klossowski, Georges Bataille and Friedrich Nietzsche and the simulacra that permeate each, I argue that Kusama has created a body of work that expresses a desire to disengage from any illusion of cohesive identity through modes of obsessive, repetitious acts, processes and accumulations designed to allow an experience of a return ‘to the infinite universe’ (Yayoi Kusama, quoted by Alma Reyes in ‘Art of Eternity at the Yayoi Kusama Museum, Tokyo’ in Taiken Japan (Explore Japan) online publication, 21 Oct 2017: https://taiken.co/single/art-of-eternity-at-the-yayoi-kusama-museum-tokyo/). Each iteration of her work expresses a gesture that constitutes a part of the Kusama-Seppuku, a lifelong performance of suicide, exhaustively commodified.
Militancy from the Margins in Brazil: The Photographs of Claudia Andujar and Nair Benedicto 161–175
Erika Zerwes
This article discusses some aspects of the political commitment visible in the lives and work of two female photographers in Brazil: Claudia Andujar and Nair Benedicto. It analyses two photographic series that were sent by these photographers to the Latin American Photography Colloquia in 1978 and 1981: Andujar’s work with the Yanomamis, the Amazonian Indigenous people; and Benedicto’s work with young offenders incarcerated in the Brazilian cities of São Paulo and Ribeirão Preto. For both photographers, training their lenses on some of the most marginalised sectors of Brazilian society at that moment also meant engaging politically with the military dictatorship. However, in both cases their political engagement was not limited to photography; it transcended to social and political militancy.
Postsecular Longings? Religious Dissent, Faith, and Gurus in Indian Cinema 176–191
Pavan Kumar Malreddy
While the figure of the ‘Indian guru’ has established itself as a source of spiritual knowledge in the West, it played a unique role in the construction of the secular image of post-independence India. Historically, gurus, fakirs or monks were considered neither a threat to the construction of secular India, nor were they given a privileged treatment on the basis of their religious denomination. Such secular ‘indifference’, however, has been challenged by competing narratives of religious modernities in popular culture, particularly in Hindi cinema. Drawing from three recent productions – ‘Oh My God’ (2012), ‘PK’ (2014), and ‘Dharam Sankat Mein’ (2015) – this article argues that the specific generic, cinematic and narrative devices employed in these films gesture towards what Manav Ratti has identified as a ‘postsecular’ move in India, one that helps articulate the paradox of ‘nonsecular secularism, a non-religious religion’ wherein the figure of the guru serves as a tabula rasa of repressed secular anxieties.
THIRD TEXT is published in print and online by Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group