This special themed issue, published over two consecutive issues of Critical Arts (October and December 2013), aims to revisit the ethnographic turn in contemporary art by inviting papers from theorists, artists and critics, to engage critically with the ethnographic perspective in their own work or in the work of other contemporary artists. This introductory article briefly recapitulates some of the issues explored in the first themed issue and introduces the second by situating the ethnographic turn as part of a larger rhetorical turn within the human and social sciences. The main argument is that the crisis of representation can be reframed as a focus on the inevitable rhetoricity of representation, implying that one cannot avoid rhetoric in the description and delegation of culture. This argument is related to the different contributions that constitute this issue.

In this second special issue of Critical Arts we continue the discussion on the research – artists assessing the ethnographic perspective in their own work, based on practices and processes – this issue focuses partially on the assessment by Ataman, Walid Raad, Jayce Salloum, Akram Zaatari, Brett Bailey and Kendell Geers. What these artists share, besides their importance on the global art scene (and market), is that their artwork focuses on themes such as travel, memory, migration, identity and (the crisis of) representation, which clearly situates their work within the ethnographic turn in contemporary art. Their work explores complex identities and they position themselves critically vis-à-vis ethnography. While these artists embrace ‘ethnographic’ themes in their artwork, it needs to be emphasised that they do this by developing work which contributes to the more critical discourses that ethnography has precisely developed since the emergence of the crisis of representation in anthropology and the rise of post-colonialism and post-feminism. Their work thus offers an important perspective for unravelling ongoing debates within ethnography itself.