Grant Kester
I am a Professor of Art History and the founding editor of FIELD: A Journal of Socially Engaged Art Criticism (www.field-journal.com). My publications include Art, Activism and Oppositionality: Essays from Afterimage (Duke University Press, 1998), Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art (University of California Press, 2004, second edition 2013),The One and the Many: Contemporary Collaborative Art in a Global Context (Duke University Press, 2011), Collective Situations: Readings in Contemporary Latin American Art 1995-2010, co-edited with Bill Kelley (Duke University Press, 2017), The Sovereign Self: Aesthetic Autonomy from the Enlightenment to the Avant-Garde (Duke University Press, 2023) and Beyond the Sovereign Self: Aesthetic Autonomy from the Avant-Garde to Socially Engaged Art (Duke University Press, 2024). My essays have been published in Art in Theory: The West in the World-An Anthology of Changing Ideas (Wiley/Blackwell, 2020), A Companion to Public Art (Oxford, 2016), The Blackwell Companion to Contemporary Art Since 1945 (Blackwell, 2006), Theory in Contemporary Art Since 1945 (Blackwell, 2004), Poverty and Social Welfare in America: An Encyclopedia (ABC-Clio, 2004), Politics and Poetics: Radical Aesthetics for the Classroom (St. Martins Press, 1999), and the Encyclopedia of Aesthetics (Oxford University Press, 1998).
Address: Visual Arts Department, 0084
University of California, San Diego
9500 Gilman Drive
La Jolla, CA. 92093
Address: Visual Arts Department, 0084
University of California, San Diego
9500 Gilman Drive
La Jolla, CA. 92093
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We are seeking contributions for an anthology devoted to activist artistic and cultural practices developed in Iran from the post-revolutionary period to the present. While Iran today stands as a pillar of authoritarian rule, its history over the past four decades has also been defined by remarkable new forms of creative resistance, often unfolding in the vernacular spaces of everyday life. We have much to learn from Iran as a laboratory of dissent in terms of both the ideological protocols employed by totalitarian regimes, and the modes of cultural production necessary to challenge them. We seek essays which explore the myriad ways in which Iranians have sought to contest fundamentalist domination through new forms of embodied and symbolic action, from turban tossing (Ammāmeparāni), to public singing and dancing by women, to the flouting of compulsory hijab regulations, to the creative disobedience of Iranian youth. We are also interested in essays that examine the complex points of interconnection and reciprocal influence between artistic and cultural production and key moments of political resistance, from the pro-democracy protests of the 1990s to the Green Movement of 2009-10 to the Women Life Freedom movement today. Essays and proposals can address projects operating both within, and beyond, conventional art institutions (the gallery, museum and theater) and which unfold in cities and villages, on rooftops and city walls, in public, private and virtual space, and in Iran itself as well as the broader Iranian diaspora. We are especially interested in projects that operate in the interstitial space between art and activism and which foreground the generative and creative dimension of resistance itself. Submissions can include essays, interviews, case studies or project descriptions, translations of key texts, and theoretical analyses that reveal the complexities, tensions and potentials of engaged art. Areas of practice can include performative, participatory or collaborative projects, demonstration-based interventions, covert or surreptitious gestures, media-based practices, and more conventional forms of visual art, music and performance. We will consider completed, previously unpublished essays as well as essay proposals that could be finalized within six months (September 2024
[1] See Bria Dinkins, “Interview with Saba Zavarei,” FIELD #17 (Winter 2021). http://field-journal.com/editorial/interview-with-saba-zavarie
We are seeking contributions for an anthology devoted to activist artistic and cultural practices developed in Iran from the post-revolutionary period to the present. While Iran today stands as a pillar of authoritarian rule, its history over the past four decades has also been defined by remarkable new forms of creative resistance, often unfolding in the vernacular spaces of everyday life. We have much to learn from Iran as a laboratory of dissent in terms of both the ideological protocols employed by totalitarian regimes, and the modes of cultural production necessary to challenge them. We seek essays which explore the myriad ways in which Iranians have sought to contest fundamentalist domination through new forms of embodied and symbolic action, from turban tossing (Ammāmeparāni), to public singing and dancing by women, to the flouting of compulsory hijab regulations, to the creative disobedience of Iranian youth. We are also interested in essays that examine the complex points of interconnection and reciprocal influence between artistic and cultural production and key moments of political resistance, from the pro-democracy protests of the 1990s to the Green Movement of 2009-10 to the Women Life Freedom movement today. Essays and proposals can address projects operating both within, and beyond, conventional art institutions (the gallery, museum and theater) and which unfold in cities and villages, on rooftops and city walls, in public, private and virtual space, and in Iran itself as well as the broader Iranian diaspora. We are especially interested in projects that operate in the interstitial space between art and activism and which foreground the generative and creative dimension of resistance itself. Submissions can include essays, interviews, case studies or project descriptions, translations of key texts, and theoretical analyses that reveal the complexities, tensions and potentials of engaged art. Areas of practice can include performative, participatory or collaborative projects, demonstration-based interventions, covert or surreptitious gestures, media-based practices, and more conventional forms of visual art, music and performance. We will consider completed, previously unpublished essays as well as essay proposals that could be finalized within six months (September 2024
[1] See Bria Dinkins, “Interview with Saba Zavarei,” FIELD #17 (Winter 2021). http://field-journal.com/editorial/interview-with-saba-zavarie