ABSTRACT This visual essay explores a number of artistic and curatorial practices in which the archive acts as a primary tool for rereading histories. Contemporary art reveals a growing interest in the use of archival material and in the formation of new archives inside and outside institutions. Considering the archive as a series of documented and preserved knowledge, one motivation for such attentiveness could be the merging of artistic productions with curatorial practices. Building my argument on Irit Rogoff's analysis of curatorial practice as an “epistemic structure”, I examine how archives have the potential to produce knowledge against historical forgetfulness. Furthermore, the process of sustainable changes within the museums, as discussed by Peter Osborne, is studied here as another motive for the increasing use of archives in contemporary art. This is done by focused examinations of a research-based exhibition, Karnameh: Visual Culture of Iranian Children (1950-1980); two curatorial projects (one temporary and one ongoing), respectively Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art's Poster and the Archaeology of the Final Decade (AOTFD) and lastly an installation art piece, Documentation. Through these examples, I argue how working with archives, especially in conflicted places, is crucial to help with recovering erased histories and accumulating shattered memories.

ABSTRACTThe gaze contributes to a way of seeing in the exploration of visual art. However, this visual logic often remains within the subjective ‘fold’, neglecting the ‘unthought’ arising from the interaction between the observer and subject, and leading to a certain closure. My research investigates Su Shi's bamboo theory and the interpretation of liubai space in Chinese landscape painting. I aim to uncover the ‘logic of immanence’ that extends the concept of gaze beyond the physical. I achieve this by proposing that vision no longer holds precedence; instead, it is internalized as a motivating factor influencing an artist's movements and behaviors. This perspective sparks a consideration of the ‘unthought’ aspect of the gaze within art practice.

ABSTRACTA visual presentation of Zhang Qiang’s experimental calligraphy is set alongside a reading of the notion of ‘International Experimental Calligraphy’. This term serves a dual purpose. Historically, it provides a framework to understand and acknowledge calligraphy from ancient times and unconventional writing practices within the context of Chinese calligraphy. It also serves to validate Western abstract expressionism as an experience aligned with calligraphy, so enriching a genealogical account of ‘visual history’. In doing so, the poet and calligrapher, Su Shi, is a representative figure. His early thinking offers an important reminder that for Chinese calligraphy to be recognized as modern and contemporary, it needs to move beyond the confines of merely an intangible cultural heritage, and rather be understood an integrated aspect of an international, genealogical visual history.

ABSTRACT This article presents a sequence of drawings belonging to the wider project Letters to Anni (2022-). At the centre of the project is an event of writing: the habitual gesture of handwriting – in this instance, in the context of a longhand letter to Anni Albers – recorded using motion sensors. A sequence of translation processes applied to the captured digital data allows the usually ephemeral movement of points on the hand to be registered as linear compositions. The interspersed text ruminates on inscribed line as expression of thought, and mediator between language and movement. It draws together a constellation of reference points, including the personal experience of learning to write, Vilém Flusser’s ‘Gesture of Writing’, and Albers’s interest in visual forms of writing that influenced her figurative weavings, and which inspired the project. A context for the work unfolds; the drawings, characterised by a writing aesthetic that is read as image rather than text, are positioned as a kind of ‘para-writing’, made in the moment of inscribing meaning, they are drawings located beside the lines of writing.

ABSTRACT Views from Expatria: Photographing Place and the Self in Transience echoes the contradictory contexts of accelerated global migration and the recent pandemic border closures and controls. These conditions contribute creative parallels and new relationships to an escalating interest in concepts of place, home, expatriation and transience in contemporary society. As a creative-based research initiative using landscape photography as both a tool and methodology, the project reflects aesthetic trends, legacies and current debates about landscape photography and its contemporaneity. The paper critiques the literature and community of practitioners around concepts of non-place, home, transience and expatriation, and concepts central to the featured artist’s photographic project Views from Expatria (2021). The paper also seeks to explore ways in which the practice is informed by contemporary photographic theories and practices.

ABSTRACT In this article I initiate an inquiry into the artistic act and its relation to self-expression in an age of computational virtuality, a time when subjectivity is being subsumed by ubiquity and its requisite social mediation. Starting from my painting practice, I attempt to access the tacit aesthetic prior to the emergence of the algorithmic mediation permeating contemporary culture, by exploring metaphor in precomputational artistic praxis. I examine the entanglement of self and context in a ‘cognitive autoethnography' reflecting on artists' reports from late Modernism, a time when subjectivity found focus in the studio of the individual practitioner, not across networks of digital mediation. I examine metaphors of curiosity and intuition in the creative ‘play’ of artists to offer a qualitative analysis of 10 articles published in ARTnews magazine during the 1950s and 1960s interviewing Expressionist artists of the New York School. I seek the individual in the creative act to relocate myself as a practitioner in our age of distributed subjectivity. The study brings into question presumptions about sampling and interpretation, explores the subjective dimensions of creative praxis and speculates on what we – as artists and humanists – may be losing in the algorithmic transformation of embodied creative intentionality.

ABSTRACT Contemporary artists utilise a variety of methods which allow unpredictable forces, such as randomness, chance, chaos, the subconscious, participation, and others, to influence their creative process. These sources of unpredictability are situated against the artist’s control in the creative process. We developed a system of control-limiting strategies that enable the simultaneous study of different methods with similar sources of unpredictability. Through examples – including works by other artists and works by one of the authors – we introduce Internal, External, Relational/Interactive and Mechanical strategies. We analyse the way control is limited in the creative process and draw conclusions on how this affects the artwork.

ABSTRACT Despite the various restrictions brought about by the Covid pandemic, Southampton City Art Gallery staged a year-long exhibition, ‘Face of Britain’ (September 2020–September 2021), curated by the artist Nahem Shoa. The exhibition brought together a number of outstanding portraits held by (or on loan to) the Gallery, of artists who painted British individuals from the seventeenth century to the present day. Importantly, however, these ‘canonical’ works from established collections were shown in confluence with a selection of Shoa’s own striking oil paintings of black sitters. In asking ‘head-to-head’ how diverse we are, it was a timely show, not least given the context of heightened debates of decolonisation, a growing acknowledgement of social inequities (further exposed by the Covid pandemic) and the newly emerging reality of a post-Brexit Britain. In this essay, Shoa offers a contextual account of the exhibition. It draws back to his development as an artist of mixed race in the early 1990s, and offers commentary on his major undertaking ‘Giant Heads’, as a means to establish just what it has meant to end up being the curator of a show entitled ‘Face of Britain’. Nahem Shoa, Daniel Sulleiman (2008) oil on canvas, 60.8 × 50.7 cm.

ABSTRACT The article explores the implications of Giorgio Agamben’s The Man Without Content for beliefs necessary to visual art practice. It examines in particular Agamben’s critique of Kantian aesthetics and the use he makes of ideas of historicity. While Agamben has controversial but sometimes insightful and persuasive things to say about the modern art world, specifically aspects of making, spectating and exhibiting, his reading of Kant is distorted by his adoption of a technique of neutralising dialectical oppositions, and then his determination to find in key texts the grounds for this operation. At times Agamben’s critical judgements, uncorrected by the perspective of practice, are indiscriminate and insensitive, and it is difficult to see how his politics escapes quietism or apathy on the one hand or an unwitting convergence with Kantian notions of moral providence on the other.

ABSTRACT This article provides an account of the practice PhD in art and the nature of the debates surrounding its development and status. Primarily, the article is aimed at prospective and current PhD candidates (as well as supervisors), offering a critical approach to shaping and championing practice research. In helping to define the practice PhD, the article distinguishes between projects and practice and provides a reference to key debates. A catalogue of articles from Journal of Visual Art Practice is included in an appendix as part of wider encouragement for candidates to be critically informed about practice research and to help develop a literature review. The article ends with 8 practical steps for pursuing the practice PhD.