Category Archives: Art and Visual Anthropology
Astrea Nikolovska: Geopolitics Socks
In the mid-2010s, the tourist center of Belgrade was full of various souvenirs featuring the image of Vladimir Putin. T-shirts, hoodies, mugs, pins, and magnets were sold at every souvenir stand. It was not particularly surprising, given that Serbian people have long felt a particular closeness to Russia. The Pan-Slavic idea of a brotherhood rooted […]
Anna Balazs: War, displacement, and cultural heritage: reflections on a workshop
“On the form, I ticked that I had got enough pads. I ticked that I had been instructed. I ticked that I had applied for microloans, more than once. I ticked that I had been encouraged. I ticked that I had nowhere to live. I ticked that I had nowhere to study. I ticked that […]
Görkem Akgöz: “The Sad Truth” Then and Now: Pasts and Presents of Danish Refugee Policy
This text was originally published in Swedish in Arbetar Historia (No.191-192, 2024). Special thanks to the editors for granting permission to republish. In 2015, during the peak of what became known as the “refugee crisis,” global attention turned towards an unexpected actor: Denmark. Long regarded as a liberal refuge and one of the first signatories […]
Julija Kekstaite, Soline Ballet, and Ava Zevop: Fabricating political imagination in contemporary art ‘peripheries’. Postcolonial and postsocialist encounters in Slovenia and Lithuania
The Eastern edges of the European Union stand as landscapes of transformation and socioeconomic and cultural flux, situated between shifting empires and layered histories. Their in-betweenness mirrors a duality of political imaginaries: remnants of collapsed past utopias colliding with the alluring yet hollow promises of contemporary global capitalism. These places also inhabit the peripheries of […]
Anagha Anil: Portrait Populism: On the Communist Iconography of Kerala
Communism continues to thrive both as a ubiquitous presence and a powerful electoral force in the south Indian state of Kerala. Established in 1940, the Communist Party of Kerala formed the first democratically elected government of the state in 1957. By organizing popular movements which demanded the abolition of feudalism, landlordism, and the transfer of […]
akshay khanna & Alice Tilche: The Political Voice and The Revolutionary
This is the fourth in our series of blogposts in relation to the Budhan podcast project, a community led initiative that has sought to capture the experiences of some of the most marginalised communities in India during the COVID19 pandemic. In the previous blogposts we reflected primarily on Season 1 of our series, at a […]
akshay khanna & Alice Tilche: That which cannot be spoken
This is the third of our series of blogposts in relation to the Budhan Podcast project. In earlier posts we have looked at narrations of collective suffering and the re-embodiments engendered by the shift from theatre to film. In this post we turn our attention to a particular feature of the emergent form of film, […]
Alice Tilche & akshay khanna: Embodying emotions in theatre and film
This is the second in our series of blogposts in relation to the Budhan podcast project, a community led initiative that has sought to capture the experiences of some of the most marginalised communities in India during the COVID19 pandemic. In this post we focus on a fundamental transformation engendered through the project – a […]
Alice Tilche & akshay khanna: The Village of the Dead
“Near Ahmedabad’s civil hospital, in a small dilapidated house. A dog lives with his wife and their children. After two days, the dog returns to his home. After seeing him, the wife says: “Oh! Look at your face, it is glowing First tell me where you have been for two days? The dog shakes his […]
Sanderien Verstappen: Hidden behind toilet rolls: visual landscapes of COVID-19
During the lockdowns of spring 2020, short videos became a popular means of reflecting on new experiences of quarantine and social distancing. Passed around on social media platforms, downloaded in microseconds, and stored on smartphones where they became nested amidst other videos and photos, Corona videos brought about smiles amidst anxious circumstances and reflected meaningful […]