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Cultural Critique Through the Detour of Art book cover

1st Edition

Cultural Critique Through the Detour of Art

Edited By Kris Rutten, Keyan G. Tomaselli Copyright 2026
330 Pages
by Routledge

330 Pages
by Routledge
Also available as eBook on:
This book 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. An increasing wave of art events has occurred since the 1990s that have displayed significant similarities with anthropology and... Read more

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 Series
Li-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

 

Biography

Kris Rutten is Associate Professor at the Department of Educational Studies of Ghent University, Belgium, where he leads the research group Culture & Education. His fields of expertise are the rhetoric of cultural literacy, the rhetorical curriculum and the ethnographic turn in the arts. He is an associate editor of Critical Arts.

 

Keyan G. Tomaselli is founder and co-editor of Critical Arts, and distinguished professor, Faculty of Humanities, University of Johannesburg, South Africa.

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