Third Text
Issues
Volume 39, 2025
Issue 1–2
Number 192–193, January–March 2025
Alfonso Ossorio’s Creative Breakthrough: An Artist Working Between the United States, the Philippines and France 1–21
David Clarke
Alfonso Ossorio (1916–1990) was born in the Philippines, later becoming a citizen of the United States. This article considers an intense breakthrough period of 1950 to 1951, during which he created a very large number of works on paper, while working across three continents. During that period Ossorio returned to the Philippines for an extended trip (where he painted an important mural) and he also spent a large amount of time in France (where he developed a close friendship with Jean Dubuffet). Dubuffet wrote a book about Ossorio’s art in 1951, and the same year he himself was to write the catalogue essay for a key New York exhibition of his friend Jackson Pollock. Like many modernists of non-Western origin, Ossorio remains underrated as an artist. This article attempts to help remedy that situation, drawing upon material from the author’s interview with the artist conducted in 1979.
A Conversation on Exhibitions and Cultural Worlds, with Serdar Arat 22–42
Vasıf Kortun and Serdar Arat
This conversation between Serdar Arat and Vasıf Kortun explores the complexities of exhibiting art, particularly within the context of Western museums. Arat, an artist of Turkish origin, reflects on the impact of recent exhibitions such as ‘Calligraphic Abstraction’ at MoMA and ‘Dialogues: Modern Artists and The Ottoman Past’ at the MET, critiquing their tendency to perpetuate stereotypes about Turkish art while celebrating its inclusion. Kortun, an art historian, introduces the concept of a ‘gap’ between looking and reading, arguing that traditional exhibition models fail to fully acknowledge this distinction. He emphasises the importance of reimagining exhibition practices to better reflect the cultural and historical contexts of the artworks on display, suggesting alternative models that prioritise critical engagement and encourage viewers to question their own perspectives. The conversation delves into the challenges of navigating cultural heritage, the impact of colonialism on museum collections, and the role of the museum in shaping our understanding of art and history.
Text-Tiles of Dissent: Human Rights and Her Liberties in Contemporary Palestinian Art 43–67
Nissim Gal
This academic inquiry addresses a noted gap within feminist art discourse theory through a scrutinisation of visual artworks that employ language and writing as central and pivotal means by which to critically confront the issue of violence against women. Specifically focusing on the Palestinian national minority’s existence within the State of Israel, the article delves into an artwork that unpacks the oppressive socialisation endured by Palestinian women. It analyses a visual glossary of hate speech that perpetuates women’s subjugation to patriarchal norms, particularly encapsulated in the concept of ‘family honour’.
The Memory Palaces of Do Ho Suh and Anne and Patrick Poirier 68–83
Laura M F Bertens
The memory palace, as introduced in antiquity, has been an inspiration to artists, especially since Frances Yates’s ‘The Art of Memory’ was published in 1966. This article explores the relationship between memory, the home and the memory palace in works by Do Ho Suh and Anne and Patrick Poirier. In Suh’s work ‘Passage/s’ (2017–2018) outlines of rooms of former homes, made from colourful, transparent fabric and combined into new structures, allow us to study how these spaces retain individual memories, echoing the memory palace described by Cicero and Quintilian. ‘Ouranopolis’ (1995), ‘Mnemosyne’ (1990) and ‘Janus’ (2018) by the Poiriers combine interests in architecture and archaeology. Models of fantastical cities and archaeological remains resemble the human brain and function as metaphors, not of individual but of collective memory. Here, we feel the influence of the Renaissance fascination with memory palaces and in particular Giulio Camillo’s ‘Theatre of Memory’.
Hybrid Aesthetics of Standby 84–101
Giacomo Toffano and Kevin Smets
This article examines three essay films that address refugee standstill at EU borders. It sheds light on the relationship between the formal experimentations in these films and their attempts to resist dominant representations of migrant im/mobilities. Through case studies of ‘Flotel Europa’ (Vladimir Tomic, 2015), ‘Havarie’ (Philip Scheffer, 2016) and ‘Purple Sea’ (Amel Alzakout and Khaled Abdulwahed, 2020), we argue that experimentations with the intermedial character of the essay film can constitute strategies to deconstruct hegemonic tropes in migration narratives. We delve into video art practices that combine critical messages with distinctive forms to effectively showcase the dynamic interaction between aesthetics and politics within the realm of contemporary migration art and culture. Through these case studies, this article establishes a politics of intermediality in films engaging with displacement and border crossings, illustrating how intermediality can be operationalised to challenge conventional portrayals of the border spectacle. The findings highlight how the essay films employ different cinematic resources – such as the use of poor images, insistence on extended durations, and the creation of audiovisual dissonances – to establish original intermedial relations and criticise exclusionary border regimes. Ultimately, we discuss how such artistic explorations produce hybrid media objects with an original ‘aesthetics of standby’ in which intermedial manipulations are implemented to accentuate a dissensual experience of the refugee standby.
Guy Ben-Ner: The Challenge of Creation in an Already-made World 102–114
Ori Levin
Although Guy Ben-Ner created numerous video works with his children, his position is actually that of a son. His videos raise the question of inheritance, or, in other words, what world he has been bequeathed, and what possibilities of creation still remain. The world he inherits belongs to the post-natural age, the Anthropocene. Man has influenced the earth in an unprecedent way and there are no more untouched raw materials or unknown lands to discover. In the videos, assembly instructions replace the last will, outlining obligations in the absence of the testator, ordering: ‘Do it yourself’. Who is that self, and how does he manifest himself through the products of his work? The article explores how Ben-Ner weaves together themes of masculinity, fatherhood, wilderness, domesticity and value, addressing a core question of the Anthropocene: Can creation persist in a world without raw materials?
Diagnostic Revelations: Rifat Chadirji’s Street Photography 115–137
Maryam Athari
From the 1960s through the early 1980s, the Iraqi architect Rifat Chadirji (1926–2020) assembled a significant collection of his own photographs depicting everyday life in Iraq. These images capture the interaction of the Iraqi public with the built environment during a period of rapid social change and uneven modernisation in the country. While focusing on the traditional lifeworld of Iraqi society, Chadirji’s street photography is neither a preservationist project nor an attempt to highlight privations of traditional living. His photographs show people repurposing built spaces through their daily practices, revealing how space is inseparable from the human and social relations that generate it. I term Chadirji’s images ‘diagnostic’, as they go beyond documentation to foreground the role of common Iraqi people as on-site commentators on the project of spatial modernisation and its challenges. I argue Chadirji’s photographs create a site of exchange and dialogue between the architect/photographer and the people.
THIRD TEXT is published in print and online by Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group