This book published by Routledge brings together a selection of articles that have been published throughout a series of special issues of the journal Critical Arts: South-North Cultural and Media Studies that originally focused on the so-called ‘ethnographic turn’ in contemporary arts, which was initially edited by Kris Rutten and An van. Dienderen. Kris Rutten and Keyan G. Tomaselli have now collected different articles from these and following issues of the journal.

An increasing wave of art events has occurred since the 1990s that have displayed significant similarities with anthropology and ethnography in their theorizations of cultural difference and representational practices.The aim of these works was to revisit the ethnographic turn in contemporary art by bringing together contributions from theorists, artists and critics, to engage critically with the ethnographic perspective in their work. This focus on the ‘ethnographic turn’ has been expanded in subsequent special issues to explore how culture and society can be critically explored and challenged trough the detour of art, how contemporary art practices engage with participation, interaction and technology in an increasingly digital (screen) culture, and what the role can be of (critical) art to conceptualize, contest and/ or develop an engaged and critical pedagogy.

This collection aims to re-expose the special issues to an international audience by presenting a (non-exhaustive) selection of articles that exemplify the different perspectives and discussions that are tackled throughout. It starts with three of the introductory articles that have attracted large readerships and that give a detailed introduction for the special issues. The compilation ends with three so-called Vignettes, these are short statements and reflections by artists about their practice, which are an important feature of the special issues.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction Kris Rutten and Keyan G. Tomaselli

Part I: Setting the scene

1. Revisiting the ethnographic turn in contemporary art Kris Rutten, An van. Dienderen and Ronald Soetaert

2. The rhetorical turn in contemporary art and ethnography Kris Rutten, An van. Dienderen and Ronald Soetaert

3. Participation, Art and Digital Culture Kris Rutten

Part II: The ethnographic turn (revisited)

4. Woundscapes’: suffering, creativity and bare life – practices and processes of an ethnography-based art exhibition

Chiara Pussetti

5. Towards an ethnographic turn in contemporary art scholarship Fiona Siegenthaler

6. Beyond the Ethnographic Turn: Refiguring the Archive in Selected Works by Zanele Muholi Leora Farber

Part III: Cultural Critique Through the detour of art

7. Aesthetics of self-scaling: parallaxed transregionalism and Kutluğ Ataman’s art practice Cüneyt Çakirlar

8. Making sense: affective research in postwar Lebanese art Mark R. Westmoreland

9. The artist as anthropologist of the current globalisation: a view on the present-day cultural imagination in the artworks of Xu Bing, Takashi Murakami and Shahzia Sikander Frank Maet

Part IV: From culture to (digital) screen

10. Organising complexities: the potential of multi-screen video-installations for ethnographic practice and representation Steffen Köhn

11. A Different Point of View: Women’s Self-representation in Instagram’s Participatory Artistic Movements @girlgazeproject and @arthoecollective Sofia P. Caldeira, Sofie Van Bauwel & Sander De Ridder

12. YouTube Scenes and the Public Re-seen: Natalie Bookchin and the Digital Public Holly Arden

Part V: Engaging pedagogy

13. Staging the World: Cross-Cultural (Il)literacy, Taiwan’s Mobile Stage Phenomenon, and Shen Chao-liang’s Stage SeriesLi-Chun Hsiao

14. Unlearning Imperialism Through Artistic Remediation: A Critical Pedagogy Approach Ana Cristina Mendes

15. Archival F(r)ictions: A Queer Vocabulary for a Live art Pedagogy Nashilongweshipwe Sakaria

Part VI: Vignettes

16. Urban cracks: sites of meaning for critical artistic practices Elly van Eeghem

17. To cite … in time Elias Grootaers

18. FIG(URATIONS): One Extended Metaphor for the Poetic Method, a Vignette for Convolute H (and an Ode to Walter Benjamin) Olivia C. Guntarik

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