Drawing upon conversation with artist and curator Mike Collier, this text considers the significant wider conditions for experimental art forms that existed in the northern UK. Based at Newcastle upon Tyne’s municipal art gallery from 1985 and collaborating with partners including artist-led organization Projects UK, Collier developed a series of innovative exhibitions of performance, video, and installation, demonstrating how cultural networks, including the regional art schools, were circulating radical practice beyond a London-centred artworld. By the mid-1990s, however, institutional resistance associated with a developing neoliberal administration would significantly reduce the opportunities and spaces for that practice in Newcastle, as elsewhere.

Critics have struggled to describe the artists’ books and text-based art works of walking artists Hamish Fulton and Richard Long. By analysing their use of lists, combinatory logic, and other non-narrative elements, I show that Fulton and Long anticipate the posthuman turn taken by theorists of New Materialism. The artists break with representational strategies of the landscape tradition, which centre and empower the viewer, and form assemblages of – and with – nonhuman objects that retain their own agency.

This article explores a hitherto undertheorized trend that prevailed amongst radical British filmmakers embroiled in the politics of representation during and in the aftermath of the long 1970s: the mobilization of the ekphrastic mode. It attends to the practices of a range of individuals and collectives who, though invested in distinct ideological movements – including Feminism (Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen), Black Radicalism (Black Audio Film Collective) and Socialism (Marc Karlin) – are united by their shared ambition of producing a critical viewing subject; an ambition they achieve partly through transposing plastic artworks into the form of moving images.

The paper discusses the cultural memory of the Miners’ Strike 1984–1985 and questions the role that photographic documents can play in the process of memorialization of the events. The photographs of solidarity groups composed of women and LGBT people taken by Format agency photographers and currently held in archives have been largely understudied. The paper discusses whether revisiting these neglected photographic documents taken at the time might enable for a reassessment of the cultural memory of the miners’ strike from the perspective of female photographers.

This special issue of Visual Culture in Britain contains five articles that examine the role of the transnational in the production of political satires. The articles range from early-nineteenth-ce...