This book analyzes recent artistic and activist projects in order to conceptualize the new roles and goals of a critical theory and practice of art and photography. Vered Maimon argues that current artistic and activist practices are no longer concerned with the “politics of representation” and the critique of the spectacle, but with a “politics of rights” and the performative formation of shared yet highly contested public domains. The book thus offers a critical framework in which to rethink the artistic, the activist, and the political under globalization. The primary focus is on the ways contemporary artists and activists examine political citizenship as a paradox where subjects are struggling to acquire rights whose formulation rests on attributes they allegedly don't have; while the universal political validity of these rights presupposes precisely the abstraction of every form of difference, rights for all. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, contemporary art, photography theory, visual culture, cultural studies, critical theory, political theory, human rights, and activism.

Taking citizenship as a political position, cultural process, and intertwining of both, this edited volume examines the role of visual art and visual culture as sites for the construction and contestation of both state-sanctioned and cultural citizenships from the late 1970s to today. Contributors to this book examine an assortment of visual media—painting, sculpture, photography, performance, the built environment, new media, and social practice—within diverse and international communities, such as the United States, South Africa, Turkey, and New Zealand. Topics addressed include, but are not limited to, citizenship in terms of: nation building, civic practices, border zones, transnationalism, statelessness, and affects of belonging as well as alternate forms of, or resistance to, citizenship.

"Citizens of Photography explores how photography offers access to forms of citizenship beyond those available through ordinary politics. Through contemporary ethnographic investigations of photographic practice in Nicaragua, Nigeria, Greece, India, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and Cambodia, the PhotoDemos Collective traces the resonances between political representation and photographic representation. The authors emphasize photography as lived practice and how photography's performative, transformative, and transgressive possibilities facilitate the articulation of new identities. They analyze photography ranging from family albums to social media to state and public archives, showing how it points to unknown futures and destinations in the context of social movements, the aftermath of atrocity and civil war, and the legacies of past injustices. By foregrounding photography's future-oriented, open-ended, and contingent nature and its ability to subvert and reconfigure conventional political identifications, this volume demonstrates that as much as photography looks to the past, it points to the future, acting in advance of social reality"--

In Projecting Citizenship, Gabrielle Moser gives a comprehensive account of an unusual project produced by the British government’s Colonial Office Visual Instruction Committee at the beginning of the twentieth century—a series of lantern slide lectures that combined geography education and photography to teach schoolchildren around the world what it meant to look and to feel like an imperial citizen. Through detailed archival research and close readings, Moser elucidates the impact of this vast collection of photographs documenting the land and peoples of the British Empire, circulated between 1902 and 1945 in classrooms from Canada to Hong Kong, from the West Indies to Australia. Moser argues that these photographs played a central role in the invention and representation of imperial citizenship. She shows how citizenship became a photographable and teachable subject by tracing the intended readings of the images that the committee hoped to impart to viewers and analyzing how spectators may have used their encounters with these photographs for protest and resistance. Interweaving political and economic history, history of pedagogy, and theories of citizenship with a consideration of the aesthetic and affective dimensions of viewing the lectures, Projecting Citizenship offers important insights into the social inequalities and visual language of colonial rule.

Lieven Gevaert Series 7Does photography have a hybrid or chameleonic character because it can be part of entirely different mixed-media works of art? Photography as a medium is faced with the challenge of escaping from its too-frequent use as rather noncommittal and "poetic" visual imagery. How best might photographers proceed to maintain the integrity of their art? A distinguished group of art historians, art theorists, and specialists in contemporary photography address these issues in Photography between Poetry and Politics. They suggest that by raising a critical debate on the internal workings of the artistic system itself or on broader social problems, photographers might be able to transcend both political and aesthetic concerns, and so revitalize their art form and regain its autonomy.

In this groundbreaking work, Ariella Azoulay thoroughly revises our understanding of the ethical status of photography. It must, she insists, be understood in its inseparability from the many catastrophes of recent history. She argues that photography is a particular set of relations between individuals and the powers that govern them and, at the same time, a form of relations among equals that constrains that power. Anyone, even a stateless person, who addresses others through photographs or occupies the position of a photograph’s addressee, is or can become a member of the citizenry of photography. The crucial arguments of the book concern two groups that have been rendered invisible by their state of exception: the Palestinian noncitizens of Israel and women in Western societies. Azoulay’s leading question is: Under what legal, political, or cultural conditions does it become possible to see and show disaster that befalls those with flawed citizenship in a state of exception? The Civil Contract of Photography is an essential work for anyone seeking to understand the disasters of recent history and the consequences of how they and their victims are represented.

A catalogue published to accompany an exhibition of the same title at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver. The exhibition and catalogue survey politically engaged art made since 2016. In response to political events and the current climate, as well as recent art world trends, the exhibition posits art making as a critical civic act. The works in the exhibition exemplify how artists act as citizens. Many of them facilitate viewers' participation, demonstrating how we, too, can engage in civic life. Works included address specific political crises, such as the opioid epidemic and Flint, Michigan's battle for a clean water supply. Others highlight specific legal issues that shape the American citizenry and society. And others simulate civic engagement in ways that distill it to its essence, transcending partisan politics.The exhibition features recent work and several new commissions by more than 30 artists and organizations: Nicole Awai, Alexandra Bell, Tania Bruguera, the Center for Urban Pedagogy (CUP), Alex Da Corte, Jeremy Deller, Shannon Finnegan, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Nan Goldin, Ann Hamilton, Adelita Husni-Bey, Ekene Ijeoma, the Institute of Sociometry, Ariel René Jackson, Paul Ramirez Jonas, Titus Kaphar, Kenya (Robinson), Robert Longo, Alan Michelson, Marilyn Minter, Vik Muniz, Jayson Musson, Ahmet O?g?u?t, Yoko Ono, Trevor Paglen, Pope.L, Pedro Reyes, Yumi Janairo Roth, Dread Scott, Laura Shill, Aram Han Sifuentes, Rirkirt Tiravanija, and Nari Ward.