Abstract A subversive and poetic take on walking art practice as a tool of expressing dissent/critical stands in a non-offensive manner. This Is The Way is targeting and juxtaposing infrastructure and certain features of police boxes and public toilets, highlighting broad ideas of hygiene, rest and safety together with the mechanics of body control from the perspective of social engineering and critical urbanism. The project was conducted in Tokyo in Summer 2025 as a component of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science fellowship.

Abstract This article examines the curatorial practice that Walter Zanini (Brazil, 1925–2013) applied at the Museu de Arte Contemporânea at Universidade de São Paulo (MAC USP), which he directed from its foundation in 1963 until 1978 and which has stood ever since as Brazil's leading contemporary art museum. I propose that the high impact of Zanini's curatorial work, based on the idea of “museum as forum,” can be traced through Zanini's one-page article “New Direction for the Museum of Contemporary Art,” originally published in Portuguese in December 1974. Zanini's exposure to the idea of the “museum as forum vs. the museum as temple” can, in turn, be traced to his participation in the 1969 International Council to Museums (ICOM) symposium in Brussels. In response, I situate Zanini's curatorial practice within international debates conducted by his contemporaries in the contexts of both post–1968 Paris and Brazil's military dictatorship (1964–1985). Ultimately, my article argues that Zanini's implementation of the concept of the “museum as forum” at MAC USP set the guidelines that continue to determine the display of contemporary art in Brazil and anticipated recent curatorial approaches to contemporary art in a global context that center dialogical exchanges.

Abstract This article examines the Turkestan-Siberia Railroad (Turksib) through its visual culture, exploring how film, painting, and print media portrayed its role in reshaping the Kazakh steppe. Analyzing Victor Turin's Turksib (1929), American maps, Soviet periodicals, and paintings by Victor Ufimtsev and Abilkhan Kasteyev, it investigates how these works framed perceptions of infrastructure and environmental transformation. Situating Turksib within global infrastructural imaginaries and Soviet kolonizatsiya politics, the article interrogates its relation to forced modernization, nomadic sedentarization, and environmental degradation. It argues that Turksib's visual history aestheticized industrial expansion while desensitizing audiences to its human and ecological costs, solidifying the railroad's status as a symbol of Soviet modernity.

Natasha Gasparian is a graduate student at the Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford. In addition to her art criticism, which has appeared in Artforum, Camera Austria, and Texte zur Kunst, she is the author of Commitment in the Artistic Practice of Aref El-Rayess: The Changing of Horses (2020). In 2023, she co-curated the exhibition Je Suis Inculte!: The Salon d’Automne and the National Canon at the Sursock Museum in Beirut.Mahmoud Khaled's multidisciplinary artistic practice encompasses installation, video, photography, and publishing. His artist's books include Fantasies on a Found Phone, Dedicated to the Man Who Lost It (2022) and MKMAEL Stories—An Image Passionate (2007). Recent solo exhibitions include The Beautiful Captive at Gallery Gypsum, Cairo (2023), and Fantasies on a Found Phone, Dedicated to the Man Who Lost It, at the Mosaic Rooms, London (2022). Khaled has been a recipient of the DAAD fellowship in Berlin (2020), and he will participate in the sixteenth edition of the Sharjah Biennial in 2025. He lives and works between Cairo and Berlin.Emese Kürti is a researcher and head of department at the Museum of Fine Arts-Central European Research Institute for Art History (KEMKI), Budapest. She is the coeditor and coauthor of What Will Be Already Exists: Temporalities of Cold War Archives in East-Central Europe and Beyond (2021).Reza Mirzaei currently teaches at the School of Art and Design at Alfred University. His scholarly work has appeared in journals such as ARTMargins and Italian Modern Art, as well as in the edited volume Ubiquity: Photography's Multitudes (2021). Mirzaei has collaborated as an art writer with various magazines in Iran, including Herfeh: Honarmand. He is also the translator of Stefano Benni's Grammatica di dio (2012).Małgorzata Miśniakiewicz is a freelance researcher, curator, and author of essays and articles on Polish and East-Central European postwar and neo-avant-garde art. She has cocurated the research and exhibition series 15% of Abstraction, as well as international projects, including for the ArtTransparent foundation. She is a co-founder of the exhibition and research project ERZAC.Haeyun Park is an art historian and critic who teaches in the College of Fine Arts at Kyung Hee University in Seoul. Recent publications include “Sung Hwan Kim at Barakat Contemporary” (2022), “From ‘Production’ to ‘Practice’: Bikyōtō REVOLUTION Committee's Moving Image Works in the 1970s” (2021), and the exhibition catalog Park Hyunki: I’m Not a Stone (2021), among others. She also curated an online screening exhibition of Imai Norio's film and video works, titled Norio Imai: Eizō as Intermedial Practice, in cooperation with the organization Collaborative Cataloging Japan in 2021.John Roberts teaches at the University of Wolverhampton, and is the author of a number of books, including The Intangibilities of Form: Skill and Deskilling in Art After the Readymade (Verso, 2007), The Necessity of Errors (Verso, 2011), Photography and Its Violations (Columbia University Press, 2014), Revolutionary Time and the Avant-Garde (Verso, 2015), Thoughts on an Index Not Freely Given (Zero Books, 2016), The Reasoning of Unreason: Universalism, Capitalism and Disenlightenment (Bloomsbury, 2018), Red Days: Popular Music & the English Counterculture 1965-1975 (Minor Compositions/Autonomedia, 2020), Capitalism and the Limits of Desire (Bloomsbury, 2022), Art, Misuse and Technology: Micheál O’Connell's “System Interference” (Uillinn, 2022), and Art and Emancipation (Brill, 2024).Joanna Szupinska is a curator at the California Museum of Photography at the University of California Riverside. She curated the traveling retrospective Christina Fernandez: Multiple Exposures (UCLA's Chicano Studies Research Center, 2022) and edited its catalog. Szupinska is also a doctoral candidate in art history at UCLA, where she is working on a dissertation on Polish photographer Zofia Rydet.Gabriella Nugent is an art historian, currently a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of East Anglia. Her books include Colonial Legacies: Contemporary Lens-Based Art and the Democratic Republic of Congo (Leuven University Press, 2021) and Inji Efflatoun and the Mexican Muralists: Imagining Women and Work Between Egypt and Mexico (Sharjah Art Foundation 2022). (Gabriella Nugent's review article “Decolonization, Heritage, And Problems of Forgetting,” was published in ARTMargins 13:3 https://doi.org/10.1162/artm_r_00394.)

Abstract This article foregrounds the Japanese artist Imai Norio (b. 1946)'s contribution to the development and critique of the moving image in the context of Japanese contemporary art and society in the 1970s. While existing art historical scholarship has primarily discussed Imai's work as a part of the collective activities of the Gutai Art Association (1954-72), I focus on his film and video works created after the dissolution of the group in 1972. The 1970 World Exposition in Osaka served as a critical turning point for Imai's practice, which sought to reclaim the moving image from the structures of capitalist consumer culture and the passive consumption of simulacra, through an emphasis on the materiality of the film stock and videotape, the intermedial relation between still and moving image, and the performativity of the body. I situate Imai's practice within the context of the emerging discourse on eizō, the technologically mediated image, and the practice of visual artists in the Kansai region who experimented with new methods of projecting and installing the moving image at the white cube exhibition space to challenge the conventional format of the screen and the restricted mode of spectatorship associated with the cinematic apparatus.

Abstract In 1990s Hanoi, Vietnam, many contemporary artists navigated the written form as crucial to the logic of the pictorial field. These included Vũ Dân Tân (1946-2009), Trương Tân (b. 1963), and Nguyễn Văn Cường (b. 1973), among others. I examine these artistic experiments as integral to what many have hailed as the emergence of contemporary art in Vietnam, linked to the early effects of globalization and the impetus to freely engage with questions of selfhood following over forty years of a socialist realist mandate. However, I also suggest the significance of site to these practices, in particular the postsocialist graphic regime of the urban environment, with its traces of historical inscriptions, influx of commercial signage, and ubiquitous public propaganda posters that continue to coat the surfaces of cities today. The artworks discussed in this essay drove new understandings of art, particularly in the use of line and text to situate artistic expression as part of but also apart from the urban surfaces and graphic materials on and in which such unorthodox actions were enacted. As such, the (calli)graphic regime marked a radical shift in perceptions of what could be art in 1990s Vietnam.

Abstract Art exhibitions acted as facilitators of transnational encounters among artists during the Cold War. This article analyzes the emergence and local circulation of two art critical concepts which described adaptations of art practices and techniques associated with Pop art and conceptual art in Romanian graphic arts of the 1970s as an expanded artistic medium. Focusing on the way Romanian artists Ion Bitzan and Wanda Mihuleac adjusted their experimental art practices to suit different audiences in state-supported exhibitions such as the Romanian Pavilions in Venice or the Ljubljana Graphic Arts Biennale, as well as in other large-scale exhibitions organized in Romania and abroad, the text helps undermine the distinction between official and unofficial art in art under socialism. It argues for the continuities between artistic experimentation in the two spheres of artistic activity and proposes a constellational reading of their graphic art practices as examples of modernisms in translation.

Abstract The article explores the film theory written by the Japanese avant-garde artist Murayama Tomoyoshi (1901–1977). Murayama authored a robust yet understudied body of film writing, in the 1920s and 1930s. Although he had a prolific and stable activity related to film—in criticism, theory, screenplays, and even directing—he held an ambivalent opinion about the medium. For him, film could never fulfill art's political task due to what he saw as the ontological restrictions of the medium: its supposedly incorporeal and incessant display of images. However, he kept repeatedly returning to film, based on the fascination with a certain vitality that he saw in the moving image vis-à-vis other types of images such as photography. By reading his film essays in the larger context of his political engagements and his aesthetic theory, the article argues that the contradictions that animated Murayama's “problem with film”—his ambivalent attachment to the medium—reveal his adherences to the racial logics of the Japanese empire and offer a critical perspective on the broader political stakes of cinematic embodiment.