Sunil Manghani – författare

India‘s Kochi-Muziris Biennale has been described as one of the most significant newly emergent biennales, alongside Shanghai, Sharjah and Dakar. However, there have been few sustained and critical studies of these events as specific sites of production and reception of contemporary art. This book, engaging with the Kochi Biennale, provides detaile

Image Studies offers an engaging introduction to visual and image studies.In order to better understand images and visual culture the book seeks to bridge between theory and practice; asking the reader to think critically about images and image practices, but also simultaneously to make images and engage with image-makers and image-making processes. Looking across a range of domains and disciplines, we find the image is never a single, static thing. Rather, the image can be a concept, an object, a picture, or medium – and all these things combined. At the heart of this book is the idea of an ‘ecology of images’, through which we can examine the full ‘life’ of an image – to understand how an image resonates within a complex set of contexts, processes and uses. Part 1 covers theoretical perspectives on the image, supplemented with practical entries on making, researching and writing with images.Part 2 explores specific image practices and cultures, with chapters on drawing and painting; photography; visual culture; scientific imaging; and informational images.A wide range of illustrations complement the text throughout and each chapter includes creative tasks, keywords (linked to an online resource), summaries and suggested further reading. In addition, each of the main chapters include selected readings by notable authors across a range of subject areas, including: Art History, Business, Cognitive Science, Communication Studies, Infographics, Neuroscience, Photography, Physics, Science Studies, Social Semiotics, Statistics, and Visual Culture.

Image Studies offers an engaging introduction to visual and image studies.In order to better understand images and visual culture the book seeks to bridge between theory and practice; asking the reader to think critically about images and image practices, but also simultaneously to make images and engage with image-makers and image-making processes. Looking across a range of domains and disciplines, we find the image is never a single, static thing. Rather, the image can be a concept, an object, a picture, or medium – and all these things combined. At the heart of this book is the idea of an ‘ecology of images’, through which we can examine the full ‘life’ of an image – to understand how an image resonates within a complex set of contexts, processes and uses. Part 1 covers theoretical perspectives on the image, supplemented with practical entries on making, researching and writing with images.Part 2 explores specific image practices and cultures, with chapters on drawing and painting; photography; visual culture; scientific imaging; and informational images.A wide range of illustrations complement the text throughout and each chapter includes creative tasks, keywords (linked to an online resource), summaries and suggested further reading. In addition, each of the main chapters include selected readings by notable authors across a range of subject areas, including: Art History, Business, Cognitive Science, Communication Studies, Infographics, Neuroscience, Photography, Physics, Science Studies, Social Semiotics, Statistics, and Visual Culture.

India’s Kochi-Muziris Biennale has been described as one of the most significant newly emergent biennales, alongside Shanghai, Sharjah and Dakar. However, there have been few sustained and critical studies of these events as specific sites of production and reception of contemporary art. This book, engaging with the Kochi Biennale, provides detailed examination of what the editors term as the ‘biennale effect’ — a layered contestation of place, economics, art and politics. It presents a close reading of the unique context of the biennale as well as sets out a broader critical framework for understanding global contemporary art and its effects. Replete with illustrations, this book will serve as an important and rare resource for scholars and researchers of contemporary art, art history, visual cultures, and media studies.

Images: A Reader provides a key resource for students, academics, practitioners and other readers engaged in the critical, theoretical and practical study of images. The Reader is concerned with the notion of the 'image' in all its theoretical, critical and practical contexts, uses and history. The Reader provides a map of the differences and similarities between the various disciplinary approaches to images, breaking the ground for a new interdisciplinary study of images, in the arts and humanities and beyond.

 

Images: A Reader is divided into three parts:

 

• Historical and Philosophical Precedents sets the background for contemporary debates about images.

• Theories of Images provides key texts of the major approaches through which images are conceptualised.

• Image Culture introduces some of the more recent debates about images and today's visual environment.

 

The selection of over 80 key readings, across the domains of philosophy, art, literature, science, critical theory and cultural studies tells the story of images through intellectual history from the Bible to the present. By including both well-established writings and more recent, innovative research, the Reader outlines crucial developments in contemporary discourses about images.

 

The influence of Roland Barthes on Burgin’s work is well documented. Equally, Burgin’s prominence as an artist and theorist concerned with text and image offers a productive dialogue with Barthes’ work. Victor Burgin has long been considered both theorist and practitioner, while Barthes is more known as a theorist and writer. In bringing to the fore Barthes’s practice of painting and drawing, Barthes/Burgin prompts a new critical consideration of Barthes/Burgin, theory/practice, writing/making and criticality/visuality. Barthes/Burgin features two new interviews with Burgin, one concerned with his turn to new digital practices and the other a reflection on his reading of Roland Barthes. Also included are images and texts from the artists and an essay critically examining Barthes’ exercises in drawing and painting.

In the fields of literature and the visual arts, 'zero degree' represents a neutral aesthetic situated in response to, and outside of, the dominant cultural order. Taking Roland Barthes’ 1953 book Writing Degree Zero as just one starting point, this volume examines the historical, theoretical and visual impact of the term and draws directly upon the editors’ ongoing collaboration with artist and writer Victor Burgin. The book is composed of key chapters by the editors and Burgin, a series of collaborative texts with Burgin and four commissioned essays concerned with the relationship between Barthes and Burgin in the context of the spectatorship of art. It includes an in-depth dialogue regarding Burgin’s long-term reading of Barthes and a lengthy image-text, offering critical exploration of the Image (in echo of earlier theories of the Text). Also included are translations of two projections works by Burgin, 'Belledonne' and 'Prairie', which work alongside and inform the collected essays. Overall, the book provides a combined reading of both Barthes and Burgin, which in turn leads to new considerations of visual culture, the spectatorship of art and the political aesthetic.

In the fields of literature and the visual arts, 'zero degree' represents a neutral aesthetic situated in response to, and outside of, the dominant cultural order. Taking Roland Barthes’ 1953 book Writing Degree Zero as just one starting point, this volume examines the historical, theoretical and visual impact of the term and draws directly upon the editors’ ongoing collaboration with artist and writer Victor Burgin. The book is composed of key chapters by the editors and Burgin, a series of collaborative texts with Burgin and four commissioned essays concerned with the relationship between Barthes and Burgin in the context of the spectatorship of art. It includes an in-depth dialogue regarding Burgin’s long-term reading of Barthes and a lengthy image-text, offering critical exploration of the Image (in echo of earlier theories of the Text). Also included are translations of two projections works by Burgin, 'Belledonne' and 'Prairie', which work alongside and inform the collected essays. Overall, the book provides a combined reading of both Barthes and Burgin, which in turn leads to new considerations of visual culture, the spectatorship of art and the political aesthetic.

Rhythm and Critique presents twelve new essays from a range of specialists to define, contextualise and challenge the concepts of rhythm and rhythmanalysis, and includes newly translated materials from Rudolf Laban and Henri Meschonnic. The book begins with a genealogy of rhythm as it occurs through critical theory literatures of the twentieth century, enabling the reader to situate philosophical and contemporary readings that further define rhythm as a critical term and mode of analysis.In placing emphasis upon rhythm as cultural technique and locating its significance for the analysis of the everyday, the book offers a clear and engaging overview of a fascinating theoretical field. It helps map a range of histories and approaches and considers how rhythm might now emerge more forcefully and pertinently as a critical framing for contemporary culture.

Taking the fall of the Berlin Wall as a key marker in recent history – a period in which increasingly we find ourselves watching ‘instant history’ unfold live on air – the book presents a new critical concept of image critique: a double procedure of both a critique of images and the use of images as a means to engage with our contemporary mediated culture for new critical purposes. A rich array of primary sources are woven together to provide a thorough critique of the recent and lively theoretical debates about visual culture. Topics range from Francis Fukuyama’s End of History thesis to metapictures, contemporary East German film and the notion of the public sphere/screen. In staking out a new critical visual theory, the book does not seek to present any straightforward analysis of visual representations of the fall of the Wall, but instead inhabits its historical and ongoing resonance as a means to situate a complex interactive account of history, politics, human action, freedom, the media and visual culture.

Each of the five volumes in the Stone Art Theory Institutes series brings together a range of scholars who are not always directly familiar with one another’s work. The outcome of each of these convergences is an extensive and “unpredictable conversation” on knotty and provocative issues about art. This fifth and final volume in the series focuses on the identity, nature, and future of visual studies, discussing critical questions about its history, objects, and methods. The contributors question the canon of literature of visual studies and the place of visual studies with relation to theories of vision, visuality, epistemology, politics, and art history, giving voice to a variety of inter- and transdisciplinary perspectives. Rather than dismissing visual studies, as its provocative title might suggest, this volume aims to engage a critical discussion of the state of visual studies today, how it might move forward, and what it might leave behind to evolve in productive ways.The contributors are Emmanuel Alloa, Nell Andrew, Linda Báez Rubí, Martin A. Berger, Hans Dam Christensen, Isabelle Decobecq, Bernhard J. Dotzler, Johanna Drucker, James Elkins, Michele Emmer, Yolaine Escande, Gustav Frank, Theodore Gracyk, Asbjørn Grønstad, Stephan Günzel, Charles W. Haxthausen, Miguel Á. Hernández-Navarro, Tom Holert, Kıvanç Kılınç, Charlotte Klonk, Tirza True Latimer, Mark Linder, Sunil Manghani, Anna Notaro, Julia Orell, Mark Reinhardt, Vanessa R. Schwartz, Bernd Stiegler, Øyvind Vågnes, Sjoukje van der Meulen, Terri Weissman, Lisa Zaher, and Marta Zarzycka.