Third Text
Issues
Volume 39, 2025
Issue 3–4
Number 194–195, May–July 2025
Palestine in Japan, Now and Then 141–169
Kimihiko Nakamura
Taking the recent art activist actions by Japanese artists in solidarity with Palestine as a starting point, this article revisits four key moments in the history of Japanese-Palestinian cultural exchange: the 1971 propaganda newsreel created by radical leftist filmmakers Adachi Masao (b 1939) and Wakamatsu Kōji (1936–2012); the Japan Asian African Latin-American Artist Association (JAALA), co-founded by the prominent art critic Haryū Ichirō (1925–2010) in 1977, and its active exchange with Palestinian artists; the 1999 exhibition entitled ‘Seven Angels from Tokyo’, in which Japanese artists toured East Jerusalem, Ramallah and Gaza; and the friendship between Gazan painters and Kamijō Yōko (b 1937) ever since her participation in the 1999 exhibition. Although postwar Japanese art has been predominantly discussed vis-à-vis the Euro-American art scenes, this article reveals that there has been another kind of internationalisation by Japanese artists who committed to the Palestinian struggle and constituted various global networks.
Moving from Double Foreignness to the Universal Subject: An Analysis of Nezaket Ekici’s Performance Art 170–202
Tuğçe Arslan
This article explores the relationship that migrant artist Nezaket Ekici constructs in her performances between double foreignness and the desire for a universal body. Ekici’s position of double foreignness stems from her dual cultural belonging; this position becomes manifest in her desire to create an interval where everyone is equally familiar or unfamiliar to one another. In this interval, where identities, cultures and languages lose their potential to function as boundaries and become entangled with one another, no subjectivity feels foreign to another. Ekici’s performances invite us to consider alternative possibilities of subjectivity inherent in identity. This article was written to reiterate the illusory nature of belonging. It aims to demonstrate that the concept of belonging is a narrative inscribed onto our subjectivities, and that belonging’s fragility can be revealed within the fluidity of identity. I argue that the concept of double foreignness opens alternative possibilities inherent in the identities we consider ourselves to belong to.
Performing (the) Rural Migrant Workers: Redistributing the Sensible in Performances of and by the Nongmingong 203–220
Goh Wei Hao
Since China’s reform era began in 1978, millions of rural-urban migrant workers, known as ‘nongmingong’ 农民工, have moved to cities for better wages. However, they remain marginalised in the very urban spaces they sustain. This article examines how these workers challenge China’s distribution of the sensible − the system of what is perceptible, shaped by the urban-rural divide − through their performances. Specifically, I analyse Wang Wei’s ‘Temporary Space’ (2003), Song Dong’s ‘Potted Landscape’ (2002), and the 2014 Yue Yuen shoe factory protest. Forms of dissensus include how the ‘nongmingong’ assert recognition in spaces where they are rendered invisible, challenge control structures like the ‘hukou’ system and labour policies, and disrupt exploitative urban-rural relationships. These acts enable the ‘nongmingong’ to contest dominant representations and forge new subjectivities that exceed how they are currently perceived in post-Mao China.
What Will Become of You: The Property of Biology 221–235
Max Bowens
The title of this article is adapted from Adrian Piper’s ‘What Will Become of Me’ (1985−ongoing), an unfinished artwork consisting of glass jars filled with Piper’s hair, fingernails and dead skin, which she has been collecting since 1 December 1985. The article takes Piper’s project as a prompt to investigate how biology is valued by art, natural history and medical law. I look to Achille Mbembe’s notion of ‘biostock’ as the primary theoretical locus of the project. Defined as a process of transformation − from the ‘brow sweat of slaves’ into an ‘active value’ − Mbembe uses biostock to argue for remediation as a restorative ontological practice. The article offers a speculative visuality for the notion of biostock through an analysis of three artworks: Piper’s ‘What Will Become of Me’, Kara Walker’s ‘A Subtlety’ (2017) and Cameron Rowland’s park benches in Seward Park (2021).
Photographic Critique Today: Working Technology Against Itself 236–250
Frank Möller, Rasmus Bellmer and Rune Saugmann
This article explores photographer Richard Mosse’s project ‘Heat Maps’ – a project utilising an extreme telephoto military-grade camera recording thermal radiation – to show that photography can act as a critical medium by replicating the very techniques of image-making the political use of which it criticises. We introduce ‘Heat Maps’ and review the literature on art as a critical practice, emphasising attempts at working technology against itself. Critique is understood as a triangular processual relationship among artist, audience and artwork, and form, content and setting are stressed as potential sites of critique. We add audience interaction as another venue for critical engagement. We then exemplify our approach by exploring the conceptual logic underlying Mosse’s work, identifying alienation and defamiliarisation as tools with which to actualise the ambitions of artistic critique in the digital age. Our approach is topical beyond the case study by reflecting upon recent trends in camera technology, image-making and dissemination.
‘What happened? Where are they?’: Producing Counter-Knowledge in the Aftermath of Atrocity 251–269
Richard Levi Raber
I outline Dino Estevao’s journey from a nine-year-old ‘orphan’ dislocated from Angola, subsequently raised by a South African Defence Force military community, to reuniting with his family in 1995 to frame his archival practice. Reunification forced him to ‘re-live’ the atrocity, leading him to recognise its absence and the exclusion of ordinary Black Angolan experiences and perspectives in South African Border War literature and the South African Defence Archive. I suggest his multimodal archival practice (inclusive of photography by him and others, alongside oral history recordings) stretches towards a wider regional history, offering a counter-knowledge to dominant literature on the conflict found in military memoirs and hegemonic archives. Rooted in and driven by his experience, I examine two images to situate him as a vernacular ‘survivor historian’ who, outside the academy, makes vital historical and archival innovations. Following his biography, I argue his practice challenges the national logic of the international refugee regime and southern African decolonisation.
The University as a Work of Art: After and Beyond ’68 270–291
Tobias Dias
What could explain the remarkable appearance and emergence of artist-led universities in the last couple of decades? Or more to the point: what does the university have that the artists want? My argument in this article is developed on the assumption that certain so-called artist-led university projects elaborate on and problematise something that we might call the university-form: a contradictory social and institutional form pivotal for the reproduction of capitalist societies. In a reading of two of the most compelling artist-led universities from the early 2000s and 2010s, Copenhagen Free University and The Silent University, I will elaborate on how these practices not only dialectically sediment and refuse the historical transformation of the ‘university form’ but also give form to a fundamental crisis or exhaustion of its prevalent grammar of struggle and uni-utopianism, namely the historical semantics and memory of ’68. In this way, I suggest considering the two para-institutions as contradictory negating practices exercising a detachment of the university from its own social form.
‘A Collection of Conjurings and Opacities’: Archival Encounters, Curating and Redress in the Afterlife of Colonial Histories 292–310
Daniela Agostinho
This article offers a reflection on the solo exhibition ‘For Alberta and Victor: A Collection of Conjurings and Opacities’, by visual artist La Vaughn Belle, of which I was guest curator in 2021. As a site-specific intervention at the Women’s Building in Copenhagen, the exhibition sought to engage the residue of Danish colonial history, in particular the traces surrounding the 1905 Colonial Exhibition at Tivoli Gardens. I look back on this collaboration with Belle to expand key concerns that the exhibition dealt with and to shed light on the stakes of exhibiting in the afterlife of colonial history. Moving between curatorial reflections and readings of Belle’s artistic practice, I unfold the notion of archival encounter with a focus on the temporal and embodied dimensions of engaging colonial archives. I suggest that the stakes of encountering vexed archives beg us to reconsider relations between archives, performance, the embodied and the spectral, and that the exhibition offered a vocabulary and sensorium with which to contemplate these relations anew.
(Re)Thinking Complicity: The Case of Cai Guo-Qiang 311–331
Ihnmi Jon
Cai Guo-Qiang (1957− ), the hugely successful Chinese-born contemporary artist, has developed a career that traverses both established and emergent globalised artworlds. Since he left China to study in Japan in 1986, and migrated from Japan to the US in 1995, Cai has strategically transgressed the limits of established art-historical periodisations, national genealogy and twentieth-century institutional norms while astutely navigating various geopolitical locales. This article traces the arc of Cai’s career and his self-conscious efforts to forge it, focusing on the period of the early to mid-1990s that stands as the foundation for his ascendancy. In so doing, I recognise that Cai, like other successful global contemporary artists, finds himself in tension with the critical valorisation of the ‘good artist’ as oppositional, given his inevitable entanglements in the machinations of value production that artists are conventionally meant to oppose.
Vernon Fisher and the Hilton Family: The Unseen Work 332–349
Cammie Tipton-Amini
In 1990, the Texas artist Vernon Fisher completed a large-scale, multimedia, site-specific triptych. The work, titled ‘Peace Through International Trade and Travel’ (1989−1990), was commissioned by Public Art University of Houston in order to decorate the newly renovated Hilton College of Hotel and Restaurant Management on the University campus. As the Cold War came to a close and any hope of an equitable world economic system dissolved, Fisher reflects upon mid-century American ideologies, growing American hegemony and the spread of global capitalism. I argue that as Fisher is painting, he is inspired by Conrad Hilton’s autobiography, ‘Be My Guest’, (1957), and the result is a thinly veiled critique of Conrad Hilton, corporate greed and American imperialism. A dispute between artist and patron ensued and the work was never installed. This investigation illuminates the many complexities concerning public art, the artist-donor relationship, and our trust in the artistic process.
THIRD TEXT is published in print and online by Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group