This article examines the development of contemporary art in Jerusalem from 1967 to the present, focusing on whether a distinct ‘Jerusalem School’ of art has emerged over the past six decades. Drawing on a historical survey of the city’s artistic groups and movements, the research highlights five defining characteristics of Jerusalem’s art scene: collective and group-based practices, multi-sectoral and multi-stream participation, political and social protest, public space engagement, and performance-based approaches. By analyzing key art collectives and significant works, such as those by the Mashkof group, Leviathan, and Zik, this article shows how these characteristics evolved in response to the city's political, social, and cultural climate. It challenges previous assertions that Jerusalem lacks a cohesive artistic identity, arguing instead that the city’s complex and contested environment has fostered a unique artistic ethos that transcends national borders and engages with global discourses. This study contributes to broader discussions on the role of art in divided cities and conflict zones, positioning Jerusalem as a central yet often overlooked site in the history of contemporary Israeli art.

This paper draws on new materialist theory and considerations of the ontologies of Mesoamerican peoples to examine the emergence of divine rulership during the Formative period in Mesoamerica. From this perspective, rulership was based on the control of a sacrality that flowed through all animate beings with the most powerful of these being divinities. Rather than solely a symbolic construct, sacrality was embedded in material and expressive relations that involved people, maize, rain, earth, weather, agriculture, divinities, sacrifice, sacred mountains, exotic goods, and monumental art and architecture. Throughout Mesoamerica divine rulership emerged in concert with creation narratives and sacrificial rituals involving agricultural fertility, which grew out of the risks and insecurities of a dependence on farming. Although the early Olmecs established some of the key aspects of divine rulership and had a significant influence on many regions of Mesoamerica, I argue that this form of governmentality cannot be demonstrated until the Middle Formative period. At this time, divine rulership emerged in the Gulf Coast, the Valley of Oaxaca, the Morelos Valley, the Chiapas Central Depression, and probably the southern Pacific Coast and parts of the Maya Lowlands. Yet across these regions, there was a diversity of expressions of divine rulership as well as histories of its emergence.

This study presents new archaeological data from Castillo de Huarmey (coastal Peru), a major ceremonial complex of the Wari period (AD 650–1050), to enhance our understanding of rulership in the ancient Andes. In particular, I focus on how ancestor bundles, monumental funerary structures and elite arts were key elements for the consolidation of Wari imperial rule in the Huarmey Valley. By describing a range of burial contexts at the site, especially the royal ‘Red Mausoleum,’ this article examines their role in affirming the social order, materializing hierarchies of power, and legitimizing authority and rulership in Wari’s provincial lands. In particular, the evidence highlights the contributions of female nobles and significant roles of women in provincial rule. I propose that The Principal Lady of the Castillo de Huarmey necropolis functioned as a ‘stranger-queen,’ who embodied a transformative authority rooted in her ability to integrate foreign Wari traditions with local cultural elements, thereby legitimizing her power as both a regional leader and an agent of broader imperial influence.

Classic Maya art and inscriptions offer many clues about links among the kings and the gods, ranging from the use of deity names in kingly name phrases to commemorations of divine impersonation by kings, and representations of royal ancestors as deities. In many ways, Maya divine kingship is comparable to sixteenth-century Mexica and Purépecha models, documented in early colonial sources. The kings of those realms were not considered divine, but were especially close to the gods, received their power from the gods, and their souls were believed to dwell with the gods in the afterlife. The primeval acts of the gods, recounted in mythical narratives, offered paradigms for kingly behavior and appearance. In this paper, I explore paradoxes implied by Maya divine kingship, with examples that relate to four important deities. Maya deities were not unambiguously powerful or morally correct. Instead, they were subject to moral failures and suffered defeats that are highlighted in mythical narratives and artistic representations. I ask whether the paradoxical character of Maya deities projected to the rulers, and whether divine models offered explanations, not only for the rightful rule of kings, but also for the failures and the potential downfall of kings and ruling dynasties.

Histories of Orientalist photography focus predominately on the form and content of positive prints. This article argues that more attention should be paid to the distinctive visual qualities and associated meanings of photographic negatives within the colonial visual encounter. Paper and glass-plate negatives were the objects of frequent spectatorship and discussion for travelling British photographers working ‘in the field’ in the early years of the medium. While scholarship on such photography has traditionally emphasized the camera’s capacity to ‘fix’ the racialized Other as a static image available for the imperial gaze, the actual practice of making photographs ‘in the field’ was defined by fluid chemical processes and the fragile materiality of sensitized plates. I argue that such procedures yielded negative images that were defined not so much by fixity as mutability. The distinctive blemishes and marks that appeared on such negatives were read by photographers as indexes of volatile chemical and climatic agencies that decentered photographic authorship. Attending to photographers’ writings on such visual traits thus reveals a counter-discourse to the standard language of stasis and instantaneity that has come to dominate accounts of photography.

In the context of art history, the rise and fall of linear perspective in painting is typically discussed as a framework for studying changes in artistic styles. This essay aims to re-examine the modes of thinking behind artistic practice between the sixteenth and twenty-first centuries, investigating how shifts in ways of thinking have been applied to artistic creation and noting that the rise and decline of linear perspective are aligned with changes in philosophical thinking in the corresponding periods. Furthermore, cybernetics has penetrated contemporary artistic creation as a further current in organic thinking. The current tendency in contemporary Chinese art is towards technological art, which is based on a cybernetic mindset rather than traditional Chinese art. Focusing on linear perspective in artworks, I compare the relationship between linear perspective, mechanism, and organicism during the same period, in the hope of bringing an appreciation of the sublime back into the work of art, whilst also, countering the sinking homogeneous tendencies of technological systems established by cybernetics.

This paper combines concerns about phenomenology and agency to examine the visuality and materiality of ancient clay and stone friezes in the Nepeña Valley, coastal Peru. Between 2003 and 2010, archaeological excavations documented a series of decorative architectural forms and enhancements associated with the Salinar phase (600–200 BC) residential and civic-ceremonial structures. I report on the discoveries and highlight the transition from polychrome figurative friezes of the Chavín and Cupisnique period to negativised, abstract forms during Salinar times. I detail the construction and material presence of the mural patterns, as well as their contexts of display and visuality. By delving into technical processes and properties of their forms as enchantment, I argue that the friezes graphically condensed spatial and temporal dimensions into special kinetic optical experiences. The efficacy of Salinar murals is discussed in light of their negativisation, abstraction, (im)materiality, and relations to architectural and spatial concepts. I conclude by discussing the broader sociohistorical implications of this shift in visualities including the disintegration of Chavín and Cupisnique’s esoteric styles and the increased popularity of murals, particularly in the realm of residential life and status competition.

This paper analyses how time-based media practices in Taiwan and Hong Kong initially emerged to preserve traces of the disappearing and the already invisible. This phenomenon is intrinsically related to the elusiveness of the colonial subject due to the complex postcolonial conditions in the region. What became the subject for the camera was already disappearing as it was being caught, a situation conditioned by shifting cultural and political identities. Not only is the local subject hard to see, it keeps adjusting in response to different authoritarian powers. My thesis is that early intermedia art works, particularly in their way of reflecting cultural discourses, are formed with an understanding of the impossibility of catching the present moment. As the shutter itself is an imperialist convention, particularly at the margin of the Sinosphere, the artists employ their bodies and performative methods to dissolve the monolithic power of the camera. In addition, early experimental theater provides anti-institutional contexts for intermedia experiments, which also offered technical support and avant-garde networks.

In the last two decades, Southeast Asian contemporary art has secured its place in the global art world, becoming a fixture on the latter’s expanded exhibition circuits and a promising ‘emerging market’ for investors. This consolidation has engendered a burst of scholarly activity, in line with the improving prospects of Asian art history generally and notwithstanding a lack of dedicated academic structures where the region is concerned. But if Southeast Asia has firmed as a framework for organising contemporary art, it has not been favoured as a basis for interpreting or historicising it. As knowledge production in the region has surged, regionalism has waned. In this article, I review the historiography of Southeast Asian contemporary art to reveal a discontinuity between its pioneers, who were regionalists, and a new historicism whose premises are basically nationalist. Reflexive consciousness of region – and of contemporaneity as a regional phenomenon – is advanced as an under-utilised interpretive device and a bulwark against hegemonic and monolithic art histories.