Art and the Politics of Visibility

Zeena Feldman is Lecturer in Digital Culture in the Department of Digital Humanities, King's College London. She publishes on the relationship between social media and everyday life.

`Things do not get seen by simply existing. In the world of visual culture, visibility remains highly political and a much-contested concept that touches upon issues of identity and representation, ethics and recognition, responsibility and justice. This rich collection of texts is a commendable attempt to rethink the politics of visibility in the context of art. It is essential reading for anyone interested in understanding the vicissitudes of (in)visibility'. - Btihaj Ajana, Senior Lecturer in Culture, Digital Humanities & Creative Industries, King's College London and Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies, `Art and the Politics of Visibility provides a lively and productive space for academic debates between visual culture, critical theory and transnationalism to meet, to develop and to exchange. It is wide-ranging in scope, moving from feminist arguments over the veil to the precarities of Chinese art, from the hospitality of Thai cinema to racializations of UK video production. A powerful concern with ethics, borders and transnational knowledge exchange runs throughout this thoughtful collection, which will be of great interest to scholars across a range of disciplines'. - Jo Littler, Reader in the Centre for Culture and Creative Industries, City University of London, `This is an extraordinary book. Genuinely transnational and transdisciplinary, it troubles borders and asks important questions about art, politics, representation and visibility. In doing so it opens up new ethical, intellectual and political spaces for thinking about visual culture. An exciting and contemporary read it will be of interest to artists, students, philosophers, sociologists, media scholars, film-makers and journalists- and anyone interested in the spectacular visuality of our rapidly-changing world'. - Rosalind Gill, Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis, City University of London, `At a time when interdisciplinarity has largely ceased posing the exciting challenges that it posed 30 years ago and has been comfortably assumed into old orders of discourse, along comes Zeena Feldman with Art and the Politics of Visibility to reassert the radical possibilities of such work. Bravo to her and her brilliant contributors'. - Toby Miller, Visiting Professor for the Department of Social Communication at Universidad del Norte, Barranquilla, Colombia.

• List of FiguresList of ContributorsAcknowledgementsIntroduction: Why Visibility MattersZeena Feldman (City University London)Chapter 1 Chinese Artist Films in the Transnational Art World: Yang Fudong and the Politics of PrecarityChris Berry (Goldsmiths)Chapter 2 The Blind Spots of Representation: The Difficulty of ReadingJuliet Steyn (City University London)Chapter 3 Defiant Embodiments and the Gender Geopolitics of SeeingMarianne Franklin (Goldsmiths)Chapter 4 (In)Visibility as Resistance: Performing the Right to Disappear in J. M. Coetzee’s Life and Times of Michael K Patrick Hanafin Chapter 5 Valences of Subjectivity: The Politics of Personal Narrative in Video ArtRachel Garfield (video artist)Chapter 6 Hauntology and Hospitality in the Films of Apichatpong WeerasethakulJanet Harbord (Queen Mary)Exhibitions on the Move: Biennales, Borderlines, andPolitics of ItinerancyAnthony Gardner (University of Melbourne)Chapter 4 Visible Veil Dressing and the Gender Geopolitics of‘What (Not) to Wear’Marianne Franklin (Goldsmiths)Chapter 5 Textures of Displacement: Local Sites, Global StuffPhilip Crang (Royal Holloway)Chapter 6 The Horse, the Stranger and the Therapist:Media and Estrangement in the Age of New VisibilityShani Orgad (London School of Economics)Chapter 7 Ethics and Visual CultureZeena Feldman (City University London)Bibliography Index