In Mexico, an average of 11 women are murdered every day as victims of feminicide, making gender-based violence an urgent and pervasive crisis. In response to this extreme context of violence, feminist activists have developed creative, embodied forms of resistance and collective healing. One such practice is el bordado (embroidery), which holds a long tradition in feminist protest across Latin America. In this article, I explore the multiple and layered meanings of bordado in feminist activism, drawing on ethnographic fieldwork - including participant observation, field notes and group interviews - with two collectives in Mexico City: Las Siemprevivas and Fuentes Rojas. The results show that embroidery can become a form of emotional solidarity and collective healing, providing a way to express the "unspeakable", and share experiences of injustice and loss. Embroidery fosters the establishment of meaningful connections, "affective communities" and "de-privatising" the pain. Bordado also serves as a form of (counter-)memory work - dignifying and humanising the victims of feminicide while creating a "textile archive" against forgetting. The embroidery circles (juntanzas) offer spaces of mutual support, practices of care, and empowerment. Furthermore, as a political act of resistance and denunciation, activists carry the bordados to demonstrations, exhibit them in museums and public spaces across Mexico and globally. By occupying sidewalks and plazas, activists reclaim public space and transform urban landscapes into sites of counter-memory and feminist resistance. In doing so, they fight the normalisation of violence, oppose victim-blaming, and sensitise the public. In short, bordar (to embroider) is a political, affective, and artistic practice that challenges gender-based violence and enacts collective feminist resistance in Mexico.

This article highlights the transformative potential of projection activism in sparking feminist discourse and advocating for equity, emphasising its role in occupying and redefining public spaces to challenge and dismantle oppressive structures. Using as a case study the Dalit Women Fight projections (2015) on the Brooklyn Bridge and on the Permanent Mission of India to the United Nations building in New York, curated by the US-based activist collective The Illuminator, the article illustrates the potent role of ambient activism in addressing gender-based violence and advocating for feminist equity. By occupying public spaces with powerful visual narratives, the projections serve as a catalyst for public discourse on feminism, particularly spotlighting the pervasive issue of caste-based sexual violence against Dalit women in India. Therefore, this article aims to delve into how projection activism, by showcasing political content outside institutionalised actions, transforms spaces into vibrant arenas of protest. Here, the built environment itself becomes a dynamic participant in the collective dissent, turning ordinary urban landscapes into powerful stages for social and political expression.

After the death of a loved one, specific objects transform to assume a unique identity and meaning to the bereaved. These melancholy objects, as articulated by Margaret Gibson (2004), start to have their own afterlife as objects memorialising the deceased, and the bereaved's own experience of mourning. In this article, I consider how the melancholy object, as an impoverished replacement of the body of the deceased, echoes experiences of bereavement and ruination. I investigate the objects of grief and our changing relationship with them (Mathijssen 2017) through the example of an episode of the British television series Black Mirror (2011-) titled Be Right Back (2013). Furthermore, I consider how artists respond to complex experiences of grief and loss, and how this is influenced by melancholy objects, by generating meaning through visual picture-making and artmaking. I propose that my digital drawing, Sancrosanctity (2019), can address melancholy objects and loss to become a nuanced melancholy object. Although melancholy objects, devices, and acts reiterate and remind us of the devastation - the ruination - of loss, they are the closest we come to tangibly engaging with what remains of the deceased.

Since the 1980s, South African comics have explored resistance history, with organisations like the South African Committee for Higher Education (SACHED) producing works to counter apartheid education. Muziwakhe Nhlabatsi's Down Second Avenue (1981), a comic adaptation of Es'kia Mphahlele's autobiography for SACHED's Upbeat magazine, is a key example. More recently, Richard Conyngham's All rise: Resistance and rebellion in South Africa 1910-1948 (2021) has continued this tradition, highlighting working-class resistance. One chapter, The widow of Marabastad, illustrated by Dada Khanyisa, recounts Helena Detody's defiance of the 1925 night passes law, leading to a legal victory for black women's freedom of movement. Both The widow of Marabastad and Down Second Avenue depict Marabastad, emphasise women's roles in resisting injustice, and reflect the distinct styles of their illustrators. The analysis of drawing styles in graphic histories is often overlooked despite their importance in historical narratives (Ahmed 2012). In this article, we focus on Khanyisa's portrayal of the characters and Marabastad, using Mikkonen's (2017) writing on narratology in comics. We specifically examine graphic style and subjectivity, and following an interview with Khanyisa, we argue that their approach challenges the notion of "objective history", explicitly acknowledging their own subjectivity, and encouraging readers to critically engage with how history is presented.

In my practice-based research for the project, Decay without mourning: Future-thinking heritage practices, I employ decentering strategies to uncover aesthetic-conceptual potential within the marginalised material ruins of an archive. This involves scrutinising visual and sonic traces of decay to depict the "anarchival impetus" - that which threatens the archive may paradoxically liberate the captures of the past from the colonial confines of their conservation. In this article, I discuss my artistic exploration of decay across three personal collections of an enthusiast, an archivist, and a photographer. The Hidden Years Music Archive (HYMA) documents an alternative view of the South African music scene from the mid-1960s to the early 2000s, reflecting the countercultural impulse against apartheid. The Decay Anarchive consists of discarded elements of processing artefacts within HYMA while being incorporated into the Documentation Centre for Music (DOMUS) at Stellenbosch University. Finally, a collection of outdated photographic paper provided the basis for producing a range of lumen print experiments in collaboration with Jurie Senekal titled Spectres of decay I (2023). This series of chance compositions in a time-based medium captures the spectral qualities of archival detritus as fabricated palimpsests that illuminate the trajectory of decay.

Decolonisation is a group of critical theories aimed at negating colonialism by eradicating its multifaceted effects on the life of the colonised. According to Olufemi Táíwò (2022:xvi), it is an all-encompassing theory that has become a catch-all idea to tackle anything with any, even minor, association with the 'West'. Decolonial scholars such as Quijano, Walter Mignolo, Nelson Maldonado-Torres, Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Achille Mbembe, NgügT wa Thiong'o, and Sabelo J Ndlovu-Gatsheni argue that colonialism did not end with the political independence of colonised nations as the effects have extended beyond independence and have continued to permeate all aspects of the lives of the colonised. The continuing power of colonialism, according to these scholars, is manifested in the coloniality of power, coloniality of being and coloniality of knowledge (Mignolo & Walsh 2018:10). They advocate for a decolonial turn from the dominant hierarchical, white, male, and Christian supremacy of Western hegemony and universalism to a dynamic pluriversal recognition and acceptance of knowledges from the Global South.

This study explores the processes and curatorial techniques that support corporeal engagements with online exhibitions. Exhibitions, physical and otherwise, are a complex interplay between spaces - real and imagined -audiences, and tangible or intangible objects. This is a guiding notion of this article, supported by Merleau-Ponty's perspective of the relation between internal human experiences and the external bodily encounters that shape them. I maintain that differing digital curatorial presentations can enhance or subdue the embodied interaction of visitors. By relying on my lived experience of navigating the transfer of the Klein Karoo National Arts Festival's visual arts programme of 2020 to the online sphere, I discuss various strategies deployed to encourage embodied engagement. Amongst other findings, the study underscores the need to consider audience preferences and allowing visitors a sense of agency to choose how they want to engage artwork online. Even though the arena of exchange might differ, I argue that all exhibitions, whether online or brick-and-mortar, provide audiences with the possibility of an engaging experience. In addition to the exhibition itself, viewers embody another energy - and it is the viewer's deliberate performance and choice to interact that produces the distinctive experience of an exhibition.

The memorialisation of place and representation of land and landscape is topical in many societies that are dealing with the aftermath of political trauma, such as Post-Colonial or Post-Soviet countries. In such contexts, artists engage with land and notions of place through processes of memorialisation and landscape representation, or very often, the undoing of these traditions as they were entrenched by regimes that are now redundant. In this article we investigate two different artistic agendas that engage with such sites in South Africa, in the work of Paul Emmanuel, and the collective Avant Car Guard. Though separated by a decade, the artworks discussed here share a dialogic engagement with existing memorial sites, or indeed, traditions that memorialise settler belonging, such as the landscape painting tradition or military equestrian monuments. While Emmanuel's work may be understood to employ a dialogic, anti-monumental strategy in response to the statue of Louis Botha at the Union buildings in Tshwane in South Africa, Avant Car Guard insert themselves in spaces where they engage parodically with memorial sites and the tradition of landscape representation. In both cases, white masculinity is called into question through self-representation, engaging with notions of Afrikaner hegemony and white anxiety.

Black Panther's (Coogler 2018) popularity amongst its black audiences in part stems from its foregrounding of the persistent social injustices engendered by colonialism and slavery (what Aníbal Quijano (2000:533) terms 'coloniality') and black people's struggles to overcome them. As a representational tactic in approaching this theme, the Hollywood blockbuster draws on the imaginings of Afrofuturism, which variously endorses radical or more conciliatory approaches to decoloniality. This southern theoretical approach and the critique of coloniality offered by Afrofuturism frame our exploration of how the film positions the hero, T'Challa and the villain, Erik Killmonger, as embodiments of contrasting approaches to emancipation from colonialism's entrenched legacy. Using a structuralist approach that draws on the narrative models of Tsvetan Todorov, Vladimir Propp and Claude Levi-Strauss, we analyse the film's approach to decoloniality by examining the relationship between T'Challa and Killmonger as the protagonist and antagonist respectively. The analysis reveals the limitations of the film's construction of the hero's and villain's understandings of the path to liberation. Rather than offering a revolutionary remedy for the injustices of colonialism and its aftermath, the film embraces a liberal standpoint that remains palatable to the white establishment, both within Hollywood and the broader socio-political milieu.

The American pragmatist, Richard Shusterman, has given shape to a field of study known as somaesthetics. In his formulation of this field, Shusterman (1999:302) recommends that, in philosophical discourse and in relation to aesthetic experience, close attention should be paid to 'bodily states and experiences'. His concern is especially to place the thinking body and its capacity of knowing at the centre of academic attention and to develop awareness of how the living body is experienced, used, and cultivated in particular situations. African somaesthetics: cultures, feminisms, politics (2020) takes up Shusterman's proposal by applying the discourse of somaesthetics to issues of race and gender in the contemporary African context. The chapters in this volume, therefore, focus on interrogating the body in African cultures in the context of colonisation, decolonisation, and globalisation. In her introductory chapter, editor Catherine F. Botha briefly explains that the contributors take Shusterman's conception of somaesthetics as a provocation that arouses and stimulates thinking around the importance of attending to the lived body in understanding human existence. Thus, each chapter offers a unique and refreshing view on the significance of the bodily dimension of aesthetic expression and experience in general. An interesting array of topics are covered in the volume, including albinism, film, philosophy, cultural activism, and various forms of dance including ballet, contemporary dance, and break dancing.