The Honkōji Hokekyō-mandarazu, a fourteenth-century set of Japanese hanging scrolls illustrating the Lotus Sutra, reinterprets the temporality of the narrative text through a technique that condenses multiple temporal moments into a single visual field. This paper examines how the painting’s temporal structure both parallels and diverges from the Lotus Sutra’s narrative framework, exploring the ways in which visual strategies create a distinct mode of devotional engagement.

The Lotus Sutra’s temporality is fluid and expansive, employing vast cosmological scales, cyclical retellings, and parables to emphasize continuity between past, present, and future. For the reader or auditor, these shifting temporalities unfold sequentially, guiding them through layers of revelation and doctrinal development. By contrast, the Honkōji Hokekyō-mandarazu condenses this sequential movement into a simultaneous visual experience. Through a technique in which multiple narrative moments are represented in a single pictorial space, the viewer is required to navigate non-linear time interactively. This technique transforms the act of viewing into an interpretative practice in which meaning emerges through active participation.

Rather than merely mirroring the sutra’s temporal structure, the mandala reconfigures it, inviting viewers to inhabit a devotional world where time collapses, allowing past teachings and future enlightenment to be visually realized in the present. This visual strategy enhances the Lotus Sutra’s doctrinal emphasis on timeless accessibility to Buddhahood, turning the act of viewing into an embodied, experiential engagement with the text’s transcendent temporality.

This paper explores visual depictions of Japanese yōkai and other supernatural creatures within the genre of ukiyo-e printmaking primarily made during the Edo period as a creative outlet from the societal issues happening under the strict governmental control of the Tokugawa shogunate. Yōkai is an umbrella term that essentially encompasses all that is strange and unusual, they are “monsters” created when phenomena cannot be normally explained. Artwork of yōkai is an important part of the study of ukiyo-e and Japanese art history that has often been overlooked by art historians as important because of their fantastical subject matter. These art objects can give us insight into what was going on politically and socially during the period. Yōkai themselves can provide insight into the way humans chose to interpret the world around them at a particular place or time, as culture informs its folklore and vice versa. Japanese culture as we know it would not be the same without stories and art of yōkai. By examining multiple representations of yōkai from different plays, exaggerated historical accounts, and stories spread via oral tradition, one can surmise the values, traditions, and fears of the Edo period under the sometimes-oppressive Tokugawa shogunate.

Between the Goryeo (918-1392 CE) and Joseon (1392-1897 CE) dynasties of Korea was a gradual stylistic transition from maximal to minimal motif, mirroring its respective governances from an ostensibly robust, ideologically Buddhist golden age to a centralized Neo-Confucian order. A century into the Joseon Dynasty, hangul—the Korean alphabet—was introduced by the fourth monarch Sejong, designed to decentralize literacy by a systematically derived, mouth-organ reflecting lettering that is now recognizable by its characteristic circle-box-line form. Coinciding with and a product of Joseon’s political adoption of a relatively modest, erudite identity, the aesthetics of Korean artisanship manifest this calculus: court objects, minhwa painting, textile-work, ceramic, and furniture pivoting from almost psychedelic oscillatory colorings and intricate vegetal engravings to a style of candid angularity. The radial influence of political philosophy and academics on culture is par for the course, so that this aesthetic shift can be argued to be an organic output. Here, I’d like to offer a phenomenological perspective in defense of the maker’s spirit through these periods, of how, in Joseon Korea, is traceable what could be called a conservation of artistry: where, in simplicity, is not compromised the desire to create. Across moon jars, hair-pins, and textiles, in its seemingly reductionist appearance, lies beneath a beauty in subtlety, expressed by technical aptitude, material value, and an egregious effort for purity. Beneath all its Neo-Confuncian modesty, plainness, cubic form and hexagonal axes, craft—independent from the Western hegemony over fine art—demands to be art. Affected, perfectionistic, “simple,” it’s coy.

This thesis paper examines how Confucian ideology influenced the material culture and expression within private studies during the Joseon dynasty, focusing on the strategic display of power through portraiture, chaekgeori (책거리), and spatial organization. While Confucianism emphasized humility, its hierarchical structure encouraged elites to curate their private spaces in ways that reinforced status and scholarly authority. Official portraits served as moral exemplars, chaekgeori symbolized intellectual scholarship, and the arrangement of these elements within the study reflected Confucian spatial principles. By integrating material culture with Confucian values, Joseon elites transformed their studies into sites of both self-cultivation and social distinction. This paper argues that these displays were not merely aesthetic choices but deliberate assertions of power, illustrating the dual function of private studies as spaces of introspection and instruments of hierarchy. My research examines how Confucian ideals shaped visual displays of authority in private study spaces during the Joseon dynasty, particularly through portraiture and chaekgeori paintings. I explore how these artistic forms functioned as reflections of moral and intellectual hierarchy, reinforcing Confucian notions of order and self-cultivation.

This research explores genre painting as a lens to examine cultural identity and societal dynamics in late eighteenth-century Korea and France, two nations undergoing political and social transformation. By comparing the works of Sin Yun-bok and Jean-Honoré Fragonard, this study investigates how artistic expression reflects shifting power structures and socio-economic landscapes. Both Sin and Fragonard come from middle-class backgrounds during periods marked by the rise of the middle class in their respective societies. This is significant as their work reflects the shifting socio-economic landscape of their times, where there was new rising tension between the traditional aristocracy and the emerging bourgeoisie.

In late eighteenth-century Korea, the Joseon dynasty saw a gradual erosion of traditional Confucian values. Sin’s paintings of aristocrats served as critiques of the Joseon aristocracy’s moral decay. His satirical depictions of courtesans and aristocrats in leisure settings challenged societal norms, highlighting class and gender dynamics. Sin’s artistic choices can be interpreted as a form of resistance against the power structures of his time, reflecting the growing discontent among the middle class and lower classes towards the aristocracy. Meanwhile, in late eighteenth-century France, the Rococo era witnessed a similar fascination with the depiction of everyday life, specifically the idealized life of the aristocracy. Fragonard’s romanticized genre paintings celebrated opulent lifestyles of the French elite. Unlike Sin, Fragonard reinforced the aristocracy’s social status rather than challenging it, aligning his work with the tastes of his patrons.

By juxtaposing Korean genre painting with Rococo art, specifically through the works of Sin Yun-bok and Jean-Honoré Fragonard, this research project seeks to illuminate the contrasting ways in which genre painting was employed to negotiate power dynamics and cultural values.

Insects, a seemingly minor subject, offer a compelling lens through which to examine the interplay of adaptation and hybridity in late-Joseon art. While the caochong (plants and insects) genre had long held a place in Chinese literati art, Korean artists uniquely transformed this tradition, incorporating insects into genres like chaekgeori and baekseondo. Insects in Korea were readily observable, often moralized, and symbolically linked to resilience, transformation, and broader social ideals. By the nineteenth century, these natural subjects were integrated into artificial, man-made environments, reflecting the culture of commerce and collection that characterized the period.

This study examines One Hundred Fans and Butterflies, a folding screen that juxtaposes Nam Gye-u’s literati butterfly paintings with Bak Gijun’s court-produced baekseondo. The dynamic compositions of Nam’s butterflies and Bak’s meticulously rendered fans blur distinctions between literati and commercial art. These works embody the fluid exchange of ideas and influences between social strata, challenging rigid categorizations. The integration of imported painting manuals facilitated this hybridity, enabling artists to selectively adapt foreign techniques and motifs to local contexts.

By situating One Hundred Fans and Butterflies within its sociopolitical and cultural milieu, this investigation explores how late-Joseon artists used insect imagery to negotiate evolving class structures and ideologies. The study traces the transformation of insect painting from its Neo-Confucian roots in China to its reinterpretation in Korean contexts, highlighting the impact of silhak (practical learning) and increased access to imported goods. Ultimately, this research reveals how these hybridized compositions reflect broader shifts in late-Joseon society, where traditional boundaries between natural and artificial, literati and non-elite, and indigenous and foreign were continuously redefined.

Yong Soon Min’s On the Road: Northern Exposure is a video work containing Min’s narrations overlaid over edited footage of a day-long road trip of Min’s visit to North Korea 1998. Min thematizes the video work with a statement made towards the end of the video, “…the blurred images of the many people we passed on the streets are suggestive of the frustrating sense of disconnect that I felt with the place and the people.” By analyzing the video work, we will see how disconnection operates on multiple levels–language barriers, cultural misconceptions and interactions with people, and the blurred figures observed in the footage–urging us to make sense of the travel and understand the sense of disconnect at work.

The study of North Korean art has boomed internationally in the past 15 years. As a field still in its infancy, the presentation of North Korean art and the public reactions surrounding it have matured and evolved in various ways. Three exhibitions, occurring since 2010, have broken down barriers: Flowers for Kim Il Sung at the MAK Vienna, North Korean Art: Paradoxical Realism at the 2018 Gwangju Biennale, and Border Crossings: North and South Korean Art from the Sigg Collection at the Kunstmuseum Bern. Each showcases the challenges of contextualizing North Korean art within the political and ideological frameworks surrounding the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK). My research project analyzes the curatorial choices, exhibition catalogues, and public reactions to these exhibitions. As seen through these presentations, representations have drastically diverged from the narrative the North Korean government desires. These case studies illustrate the growing maturity in international engagement with North Korean art, emphasizing the importance of contextual framing to navigate sociopolitical complexities. Through evolving representations, art serves as a lens for understanding the DPRK, moving beyond state-controlled narratives to enable critical and nuanced dialogue. I argue that should the presentation of North Korean art continue to grow in the same direction, more nuanced dialogue in both artistic and political spheres will emerge. From this, art can serve as a throughline for enabling an international audience to one day view the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea through a lens of truth.

Queer fashion is intrinsically woven with meaning, signals, and desire from top to bottom with special concentration dedicated to accessories. The carabiner as a lesbian and greater queer accessory is the central focus of this paper, tracing its history and deducing its origins in permeating lesbian visual culture. Much research acknowledges the ubiquitousness of this overlooked accessory but seldom explains why and how it has managed to hook itself inseparably to the belt loops of many queer women. With the overall lack of scholarly research dedicated to lesbians and queer women, this paper seeks to dually investigate the solid and rich visual culture of queerness as well as acknowledge its very real existence. This paper briefly tracks the invention of the carabiner from the Holy Roman Empire to the catwalks of high fashion, dedicating particular attention to the appearance of the accessory in queer spaces and on queer people. Adopting an art historical methodology, this paper analyzes photographs of lesbians, investigating the presence of the carabiner on their persons and in their spaces. As evidence would suggest, the carabiner has long been adopted by masculine and butch lesbians employed in blue-collar professions. Through the complex implications of personal presentation and the subversion of gender roles within the lesbian community, the carabiner developed as a mark of lesbian’s sexual competency as well as a tool for manufacturing visual and aesthetic desire among queer women.

American artist Romaine Brooks (1874–1970) is best known for her contributions to twentieth-century art and literary circles, especially through her portrait paintings that captured the spirit of 1920s lesbian Paris. Through her portraits, Brooks worked to define this community and, in turn, herself, in a newly public light. At the forefront of her artistic practice was a pursuit of capturing and affirming the essence or “soul” of her upper-class, queer sitters, a goal that remained consistent as she branched beyond the canvas. Amidst her celebrated paintings, Brooks’ oeuvre contains a collection of over 200 line drawings that have largely evaded scholarly attention. The drawings diverge from her portraits, embracing a whimsical, subconscious treatment of psychological subjects reminiscent of trends in psychoanalysis and surrealism developing at the time. There are two main periods when Brooks produced these drawings: her adolescence and the end of her career, although we know she was drawing throughout her entire life. The drawings made in her childhood were private and made to amuse herself and cope with a particularly unstable childhood. The drawings produced at the end of her career, however, were initially made to accompany her unpublished memoir, No Pleasant Memories, but eventually expanded into a larger series. Brooks’ drawings stem from her childhood desire to create and express an intimate and emotional interior but shift in purpose as they work in tandem with her memoir to construct a public image of a tortured artist. Through this presentation, I argue that Brooks harnesses the personal, psychological style of her drawings to craft a compelling public persona to claim a space for herself within an exclusive, male, and heteronormative art world.

Active in a New York swarming with Abstract Expressionists and expatriate Surrealists, Swiss-American artist Sonja Sekula (1918–1963) occupied a unique position, shaped by her lesbian identity and struggles with mental illness. Like many of her contemporaries, Sekula engaged deeply with Zen Buddhist thought, as reflected in her archival writings. However, her approach to Zen in her visual work complicates this engagement. Her sole painting that explicitly metabolizes Zen imagery, Amies (1963), responds to Sengai Gibon’s The Universe (c. 1820). Yet, rather than mere imitation, this engagement positions her Zen as a tool—a praxis. Through Zen, Sekula interrogated persistent questions in her work, particularly those of lesbianism and figuration, in the tumultuous final years of her life, ultimately revealing a profound humanism. 

This paper explores the work of Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt, a queer postmodernist artist whose intricate, maximalist sculptures challenge the boundaries between queerness and religion. Lanigan-Schmidt’s art intertwines his Catholic upbringing, queer identity, and working-class background, utilizing salvaged, “low art” materials such as saran wrap, aluminum foil, and candy wrappers. His 1981 sculpture Do You Remember When Cupid Went Diving for Pearls and All He Got Was Crabs? (BAMPFA) serves as the focal point of this analysis–this whimsical yet deeply symbolic piece transforms “trash” into ornate, sacred forms, embodying both camp aesthetics and Catholic iconography.

My presentation situates Lanigan-Schmidt’s work within broader art historical contexts and, considering the dangers and utility of biography to interpret his work. Drawing parallels to the scholarship on Eva Hesse, it highlights how overly biographical readings can pigeonhole artists, particularly those whose identities and practices defy categorization. While Hesse’s early death cast her work as “bodily” and “wounded,” Lanigan-Schmidt’s longevity enables a more multifaceted discussion of his art. His assemblages blend impermanence, salvaging, and excess, reflecting themes of queer ephemerality and Catholic resurrection.

Through close analysis, this paper argues that Lanigan-Schmidt’s work bridges the seemingly irreconcilable worlds of queer identity and religious devotion, while also resisting neat categorization. His use of discarded materials mirrors the transient lives of queer individuals, and his subversion of religious visual language critiques institutionalized homophobia while affirming spirituality. This exploration ultimately situates Lanigan-Schmidt as a significant figure in the postmodern canon, whose work exists at the intersection of faith, sexuality, and materiality. By unpacking Do You Remember When Cupid…?, this paper contributes to the limited scholarship on Lanigan-Schmidt, emphasizing the complexity of his artistic practice and the necessity of understanding the intersections of queerness and divinity in his work.

While body-horror films can be appreciated for their frequent subversion of gender stereotypes, they all unfortunately face the pitfall of eugenic undertones throughout their narratives. Even seemingly well-intentioned films of this genre, including David Cronenberg’s The Fly (1986) and Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance (2024), portray the bodily transformations as pitiful, tragic, and a fate worse than death. If they were subverting ableist stereotypes, they would embrace these transformations instead of ostracizing them. The films’ portrayal of gender stereotypes, on the other hand, succeeds in its subversion. Destruction of the body breaks down barriers between the sexes, and these new “monstrous” bodies are inherently androgynous, allowing genderqueer people to see themselves in cinema outside of the cis-normative gaze.

A hand, drawn in clear, simple lines, gently holds an old photograph rendered in naturalistic detail. Bluish-gray tones wash over the background and carve out the seductively posed young man in the photo. The cartoonish hand is all we see of the main character, looking at the photo from her point of view. When recounting her past, how objective should she be? What is gained, or lost, from leaning into her personal perspective? Both figures were illustrated by the same artist, Alison Bechdel, and appear at the midpoint of her graphic memoir Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic. In the novel, Alison simultaneously comes to terms with her lesbianism and learns of her deceased father’s own closeted homosexuality, causing her to recontextualize her family dynamics from a queer perspective. Crucially, Fun Home’s comic medium allows readers to intimately experience Alison’s inner life more than a purely written memoir and underscores the tensely liminal quality of her household and upbringing. This paper examines two scenes in the middle of the novel where Bechdel uses the graphic medium to meditate on difficult questions relating to objectivity. The scenes state true facts about Alison’s lived experience, but refrain from drawing simplistic conclusions, allowing the novel to subtly detail Bruce’s impact on the Bechdel family without reinforcing negative stereotypes. Bechdel embraces unlikely or uncomfortable connections between her and Bruce, and this very decision inherently queers the novel. Using Jack Halberstam and Scott McCloud as theoretical frameworks, this paper will expand on how specific scenes in Fun Home use simplistic style, multiple gazes, and text to underscore the queer discomfort of Bechdel’s lived experience between extremes.

Gender is a ubiquitous construct. Even within art history, gender plays a stringent role in shaping how we view and talk about a given piece or artist. Too often, however, is this analytical viewpoint constrained to a binary, and we give little room for the exploration of gender experience outside the comfort zones of both the traditional Western canon and feminist art history. This is a sore injustice, as art and the transgender experience are inherently homogenous. Art, in its most basic form, is a means of creation; it relies on more than mere labels to achieve an understanding, the same way that the act of transitioning is a creative process that extends beyond plain identifiers, shaping and redefining one’s sense of self. Despite existing arguably as long as some of the most revered societies themselves (albeit more often in silence than not), transness is a concept often overlooked and undervalued by the art community. Very few, if any, transgender artists have been accepted into the art history canon.

Born from a hypothetical exhibit project for a class at Bates College, this paper aims to explore the role of art both as a metaphor and as a means of best understanding or sympathizing with the transgender experience. Through the examination of pieces by trans or gender-nonconforming artists such as Cassils’ 2013 performance Cuts: A Traditional Sculpture and Vaginal Davis’ 2021 installation Wicked Pavilion, this paper serves to establish the inseparability between art and transness. This exploration, in tandem with its hypothetical exhibition space, provides a transitional space – a trans space – for the art history canon to be reconstructed into a sphere that best reflects this entangled history of broken binaries.

Non-Binary Code, a soft sculpture installation by Los Angeles-based artist Ben Cuevas, exemplifies and encapsulates centuries of often-overlooked art and craft histories into a single, unassuming, interactive room. At its most basic, the sculpture features a series of knit panels and cushions in which individual knit and purl stitches stand in for ones and zeroes to spell, in binary code, the word “nonbinary”. Aside from creating a humorous contradiction between binary code and non-binary identity, Cuevas’s installation, contextualized by the rest of their work, draws clear connections between fiber arts, the physical labor of creation, and community action. Fiber arts have been extensively recontextualized in the last few decades, transported by “craftivists” and writers such as Rozsika Parker and Joseph McBrinn from the realm of “mere” craft to a radically expressive set of artistic skills and disciplines capable of autonomous rebellion. These artists’ choices to pursue fiber arts frame their works within a historically feminized and undervalued set of skills that, throughout the twentieth century, prompted heated discussions about what is “fine art” and what could or should be delegated to the “lesser” realms of craft and design. In particular, these selected artists combine and alter the traditional techniques of fiber arts into soft sculptures that explore the relationships between gender, body, and space. Their works often invoke aspects of the intentionally unnatural, disturbing, and grotesque, which showcase interpretations of the ever-changing queer self and community and prompt viewers to reconsider their preconceived notions regarding gender, space, and self-presentation. Through this essay, I intend to examine Ben Cuevas and Non-Binary Code’s relationships to and between fiber arts, craft, and queer bodies to answer the question: How does Non-Binary Code reframe and posit new internal and external perceptions of how a queer and/or trans body can exist in physical space?

The city of Prague became a center for enlightened intellectualism in the early twentieth century. An unofficial collective of German-speaking writers, poets, and artists made up the Jung Prag. This group had a particular interest in the mystical and esoteric, borrowing heavily from the well-established community of Jews in the city of Prague, with many members themselves being Jewish. A mentor of these intellectuals, Gustav Meyrink, (1868 – 1932) fused Eastern and Western traditions of theosophy, alchemy, and mysticism in his work, most famously in his novel The Golem (1915). With the shadow of fascism rising across Europe, the Jung Prag would face violent antagonism for their avant-garde attitudes. Like many other intellectuals and creatives in Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Jung Prag’s proximity to Jewishness would also have their work labeled as “degenerate”. By looking at The Golem, more specifically at its illustrations by artist Hugo Steiner-Prag, both antisemitic and pro-Jewish sentiments are revealed. The similarity between Steiner-Prag’s golem and the stereotypical iconography of the vampire draws both figures into the larger history of monsters. Through formal analysis and cultural studies, the social construction of the Jew as monstrous can be shown to embody both the efforts to destroy and to preserve Jewish life and culture. The influence of Steiner-Prag’s artistic style on German Expressionist cinema is another vital piece to understanding the rise of antisemitism in European art, film, culture, and politics.

My research examines the contrasting documentary approaches of two historic illustrated books depicting the experience of Japanese American concentration camps during World War II: Born Free and Equal (1944) by Ansel Adams and Citizen 13660 (1945) by Miné Okubo. While existing scholarship often addresses each work individually, this study fills a gap by comparing how these two artists pioneered new methods of documentation to present truths of incarceration. Okubo’s insider perspective offers a poignant personal narrative and utilizes drawings to depict the emotional and psychological toll of forced relocation and loss of identity. In contrast, Adams, an outsider, captures the dignity and resilience of the Japanese American community through his photographic lens.

However, I argue that these two artists often interchanged their positions as insiders and outsiders, with both artists adopting an ethnographic approach that shifts the power dynamics between them and the greater incarcerated population. Rather than unrelenting surveillance, they emphasize compassionate observation, transforming their documentation into visual testimonies that challenge both the dehumanizing effects of incarceration and the government’s patronizing narrative of humanizing the Japanese American community as “pioneers.” This analysis identifies and interrogates three key dichotomies—pioneer/incarceree, insider/outsider, and past/future—to reveal how these different forms of documentation shape public memory and historical trauma. Through a comparative analytical framework, this paper aims to broaden our understanding of the cultural and psychological impact of wartime incarceration and its ongoing legacy in American history.

In 1969, Kurt Vonnegut published his satirical, science fiction, anti-war novel entitled Slaughterhouse-Five or The Children’s Crusade: A Duty Dance with Death. 54 years later Vincent Valdez was commissioned by Arion Press to create illustrations for a limited-edition release of Kurt Vonnegut’s anti-war novel. He created 20 ink drawings depicting different events from the novel and his own visual interpretations of certain contextual events. My research focuses on five illustrations highlighting Vincent Valdez’s main driving force in his works, to bring contemporary relevance in media, and shed light on how he sees the world and how he creates these visuals. Additionally, I consider how they correspond not just with his previous works but how he connects with them in the familial. While all the illustrations are original depictions interspersed within the novel, most come from literary descriptions or are even based on Vonnegut’s own drawings he made for the book. Of the five I have chosen, two are completely original, only coming from one or two words from the novel, and time periods within the book, but no actual description within the story. Another two are direct illustrations from notable events within the novel, and the fifth is based on an original illustration by Vonnegut. Valdez develops these works for the novel using appropriation, inspiration, familial connection, and satire. He implements his own style as he interprets the story of Slaughterhouse-Five to represent his own visual reality on how he sees and chooses to depict the events of the novel, underscoring survival, and hope.

This paper examines Amy Balkin’s A People’s Archive of Sinking and Melting as a conceptual critique of environmental degradation and the embodiment of socio-political asymmetries of climate change. Drawing on Rob Nixon’s concept of slow violence, I explore how Balkin’s archive exposes the incremental, unseen effects of ecological decline, emphasizing disproportionate burdens borne by third-world countries. I also contextualized Balkin’s work within postcolonial theories of environmental racism and dispossession, incorporating Frantz Fanon’s reflections on land as a source of dignity and identity within the scope of decolonization.

Balkin’s participatory approach, centered on contributions from ordinary people, challenges the hierarchical narratives of traditional art institutions that emphasize acquisition and ownership. By rejecting aesthetic romanticization, her archive avoids the ideological cushioning of visual pleasure, presenting mundane objects such as personal possessions and natural fragments as material debris of loss. These objects are analyzed through the temporal framework of “future anterior,” a tense of “what will have been,” rendering the archive a retroactive reflection where objects become historical signifiers that underscore the interdependencies of past, present, and future instead of fragmenting time into isolated, static entities.

This paper also draws a horizontal comparison with Olafur Eliasson’s Ice Watch within the thematic context of icebergs. While Eliasson employs aesthetic emotionalization to create intimacy with nature, Balkin adopts a stark, minimalist presentation that invites intellectual engagement over sensory pleasure. This contrast illustrates how both artists, through different methodologies, underscore the fragility and urgency of environmental crises.

The paper critiques the mechanisms of industrial capitalism and colonialism that commodify land, labor, and cultural identity through the lens of Balkin’s work. Her project serves as both a repository of loss and a call to action, functioning as an ecological critique and a testament to cultural resilience that offers a new paradigm for climate justice.

Art’s connection to consumer culture and materialism make it intrinsically tied to conversations regarding the onset of climate change. The approaches by Oxford Tire Pile #5 and nanoq: flat out and bluesome explore the unique role that artists can provide to conversations about climate change, in argumentation and awareness, although they differ in medium and ideological presence. Burtynsky documented what at the time was the largest site of discarded tires, arising from large-scale urbanization and an increased dependence on individual transportation.

Utilizing the language derived from landscape photographers of the American West, he parallels the perpetual power of nature with the relentless growth of human material gain. Snæbjörnsdóttir and Wilson categorically recorded every taxidermized polar bear in the UK. They staged a small number of them in a gallery setting, which generated tension between the constructed identity of submission by their human hunters and the loss of their self-determination. Both artworks, essentially free of the artist’s hand, record preexisting manipulations to the environment to reevaluate narratives of the inexhaustibility of nature. The western transactional view of the environment is realized when the subtleties of habitual human behavior are contextualized through art. Narratives converge in the paradoxical view that nature is simultaneously all powerful and inexhaustible, that the abuses of human impact will never be able to alter the landscape. This paper argues that the work of Snæbjörnsdóttir and Wilson, and Burtynsky destabilize the belief of human neutrality in the climate crisis; invoked through the documentation of humanity’s past abuses.

Forensic Architecture (FA) is a London-based multidisciplinary research collective and human rights agency that uses digital modeling, architectural and spatial analysis, and open-sourced images to investigate and present visual evidence of human rights violations committed by state governments, militaries, and corporations. The team of architects, software developers, filmmakers, investigative journalists, scientists, and lawyers, collaborates with civil society groups, witnesses, and victims to establish a counternarrative in the service of human rights and social justice, exhibiting their investigations in institutional settings as varied as international and domestic courts of law, mass media, citizen assemblies, universities, and art museums. My research focuses on FA’s critical reception within these institutional settings and questions how the evidentiary and aesthetic nature of such exhibitions impact the viewer’s experience, specifically within the space of the art institution. As I explore how the categories of “art” and “evidence” are upended, broadened, or otherwise transformed through the interaction between FA’s particular aesthetics and the museum spaces in which FA often exhibits projects, I also question what this work says about our conceptions of truth in contemporary culture. My presentation will outline FA’s exhibition, The Long Duration of a Split-Second, at the 2018 Turner Prize competition and discuss the different opportunities and limitations that come with exhibiting in each forum; how this exhibition informs, and is informed by, our notion of “art” and its social responsibilities. How is it that FA is reproached in legal courts because their production of evidence is ‘too artistic,’ while simultaneously, the artworld finds it difficult to consider FA’s investigations to be artwork in the first place. My approach to this problem is interdisciplinary; I utilize theories of social art history, institutional critique, and museum studies, as well as human rights discourses about changing narratives, the role of images in testimonies, and moral responsibility.

Where the Western canon may have categorized the arts of the ‘Eastern region’ of Europe, shadowed by the strict ideologies of communist Soviet Union, as ‘controlled’, ‘propagandist’, ‘collectivist’, ‘unpolitical’ and so forth, construing these spaces for artists as repressive spaces that discouraged and prevented any pursuit for individual creativity, much less differing political agendas, the Eastern bloc valued these spaces for its creative ingenuity. For what the Western world saw as a ‘controlled’ minimal space, the Eastern bloc viewed as a place for hidden exchanges and subtle meanings: a space that required one to be familiar with surveillance and censorship–a space that thrived in the shadows, or in other words, a place that was abundant in individual and abstract levels of thinking.

Despite the artworks, ranging between realist paintings to the performative arts, appearing to be non-political in nature, various examples reveal that these hidden artists, such as Sanja Ivekovic from ex-Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakian Julius Koller and Lutz Dammbeck during what was once East Germany, utilized a multitude of different mediums and styles that dug deep into subtextual and symbolical meaning – injecting non-political gestures rooted in historical, political and culturally understood meaning that commentates on the individual experiences that were shared in this, singular, reality.

Hence, this paper argues that in this portrayal of the Eastern Bloc, of which the dominating Western canon constructs, as ‘collectivist’ and non-political spaces that lacked any creative individualist thought or expression, a re-evaluation of these artworks and their contexts leads to an alternative perspective, where artworks are thought of not as collectivist or as lacking in political and artistic expression, but rather as a resistance to surveillance and censorship where artists would thrive in subtext and hidden motifs to promote their political beliefs, individual identities and artistic styles. In this way, although these ‘controlled’ spaces appear to lack individuality–a trait highly valued among their Western neighbors–these spaces were largely the opposite as Eastern European artists would dedicate their hidden efforts toward Individualism, with the censoring of dissident art and advocating for collectivist ideologies generating a vast network of creativity that sparked a myriad of artworks and performances–those which, unlike the Western arts, thrive in the quiet moments where subtle gestures and disguised meanings comprised of passionate artists and genius minds.