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Journal of Visual Culture

Journal of Visual Culture is an international refereed journal that welcomes compelling, critically engaged contributions that explore and expand trans-disciplinary global visual cultures.

“The Journal of Visual Culture is indispensable.” Professor Christine Ross, Department of Art History and Communication Studies, McGill University

“There is an unmistakable seriousness as well as a handsome hospitality in the range of method, topic and topography on show.” Times Higher Education Supplement

“The Journal of Visual Culture continues to be a critical resource for scholars looking for intelligent analyses of the visual arts, popular culture, media, curatorial practice and digital platforms.” Professor Jennifer A Gonzalez, University of California, Santa Cruz

“The Journal of Visual Culture is the place to look for cutting-edge research on the theory, practice, and circulation of visual culture today.” Dr Nicole Starosielski, Department of Media, Culture, and Communication, New York University

“The Journal of Visual Culture is a generous and inventive site of intellectual possibility where authors and guest editors can reconfigure how the visual and cultural come together, allowing for intellectual challenges to be made – critically and imaginatively – to current disciplinary protocols.” Professor Jane Rendell, The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL

Recent themed issues include:

Armed/Unarmed: Guns in American Visual and Material Culture (2018), guest edited by Faye Gleisser and Delia Solomons, with contributors including Patrice D. Douglass, Michelle Millar Fisher, Colette Galter, Brian Hatton, Lindsay Livingston, and a roundtable with Attequa Ali, Jonathan Ferrara, Kathy O’Dell, and Susanne Slavick.

Affect at the Limits of Photography (2018), guest edited by Lisa Cartwright and Elizabeth Wolfson, with contributors including Ariella Azoulay, Lisa E. Bloom, Matthew Brower, Thy Phu and Elspeth H Brown, Kelli Moore, and Shaw Michelle Smith.

50 Years of Art and Objecthood: Traces, Impact, Critique (2017), edited by Alison Green and Joanne Morra, with contributors Alison Green, Stephen Melville, Joanne Morra, Daniel Rubinstein, Margarita Tupitsyn, Victor Tupitsyn, Phoebe von Held, Duncan White.

Architecture! (2016), edited by Jae Emerling and Ronna Gardner, with contributors Eric Aliez, Alfredo Brillembourg, Sarah Deyong, Alexi Kalagas, Hubert Klumpner, Robin Mackay, Lina Malfona, Gioancarlo Mazzanti, Robert McCarter, Donald Preziosi, Jane Rendell, Martino Stierli, Michael Waldrep.

Visual Activism (2016), edited by Julia Bryan-Wilson, Jennifer González and Dominic Willsdon, with contributors Ariella Azoulay, Macarena Gómez-Barris, Deena Chalabi, Electronic Disturbance Theater 2.0, Miguel A López, Amin Husain, Nicholas Mirzoeff, Nitasha Dhillon, A Joan Saab, Tina Takemoto, Avram Finkelstein, Aaron Gach, Cheyanne Epps, Kyle Lane-McKinley, Elisa Adami, TJ Demos, Amy Lyford, Carlos Motta, Trinh T Minh-ha, Srinivas Aditya Mopidevi, Jerome Reyes, Nine Yamamoto-Masson, Teddy Cruz, Favianna Rodriguez, Zanele Muholi, Selaelo Mannya, Valerie Thomas, Shannon Jackson.

Recent and forthcoming contributions to Journal of Visual Culture include:

  • Jill Casid (UWM) on being undone
  • Georges Didi-Huberman (Paris) on the album of images
  • Tom Holert (Berlin) on immersion
  • Tung-Hui Hu (Michigan) on reticence
  • Esther Leslie (Birkbeck) on atmosphere
  • Rahul Mukherjee (UPenn) on ecologies of ruination
  • MIT’s Lisa Parks (interview by Asbjørn Grønstad and Øyvind Vågnes) on global media technologies
  • Nicole Starosielski (NYU) on thermal vision
  • Magda Szczesniak and Lukasz Zaremba (Warsaw) on paranoid looking
  • Linda Williams (Berkley) on lust, motion and e-motion
  • Beirut-based artist Akram Zaatari (interviewed by Elisa Adami) on history, photography, and the archive


Forthcoming themed issues for 2020 and beyond include:

Robot Vision, guest edited by Luci Eldridge (Winchester School of Art) and Nina Trivedi (Royal College of Art), with contributors including Jeremiah Ambrose, Brian Black, Stephen Ellis, Nea Ehrlich, Joey Holder, Gregory Minissale, Maya Oppenheimer, Nicola Plant, and Bianca Westermann.

Trans, Art, and Visual Culture, guest edited by Cyle Metzger (Stanford) and Kirstin Ringelberg (Elon University), with contributors including KJ Cerankowski, Kara Carmack, Sascha Crasnow, Sebastian De Line, Robb Hernandez, Heather Holmes, Ace Lehner, KJ Rawson and Nikki Tantum, Cole Rizki, Gregory Stamatina, Chris Straayer, Susan Stryker, Elisa Steinbock, and Frial Zachary.

VR: Immersion and Empathy, guest edited by Brooke Belisle (Stony Brook University) and Paul Roquet (MIT).

  • by Kamini Vellodi
    Journal of Visual Culture, Volume 22, Issue 3, Page 292-294, December 2023.
  • by Oğuz Kayır
    Journal of Visual Culture, Volume 22, Issue 3, Page 383-387, December 2023.
  • by Gervais Marsh
    Journal of Visual Culture, Volume 22, Issue 3, Page 388-390, December 2023.
  • by Sarah Richter
    Journal of Visual Culture, Ahead of Print. For 30 years of her art practice, the black queer land artist Beverly Buchanan (1940–2015) researched and reproduced, though aslant, subsistence housing in the South. Here, the author treats Buchanan’s shack works as an expanded aesthetic project, one explicitly embedded in the forms of indebtedness and indenture extracted from the black household after Emancipation. Buchanan’s shacks spanned sculpture, bric-a-brac assemblage, drawing, portraiture, writing, and oral history. The author argues that, by holding and withholding, giving and taking, building and grounding, the shacks make several interventions in the architectural afterlife of slavery – and […]
  • by Mehul Agarwal
    Journal of Visual Culture, Ahead of Print.
  • by Mai Corlin
    Journal of Visual Culture, Ahead of Print. This article is concerned with the Lennon Walls of the 2019 Hong Kong protest movement as central spaces for the formation of an ‘archival imagination’ (Hochberg, 2021). Through producing a collection of protest icons connected directly to the movement’s history, the author argues that the visual expression developed from displaying a multiplicity of voices on to displaying ‘visual iconographies’ for ‘collective identification’ (Yates McKee, 2017: 113). She shows how iconic symbols and figures developed on the basis of actual events and protest characters, and how, over time, a particular collection of these figures […]
  • by Mieke Bal
    Journal of Visual Culture, Volume 22, Issue 3, Page 295-318, December 2023. This article is the English translation of the ‘inaugural lesson’ that began Professor Mieke Bal’s year as professor of the ‘European Chair’ at the Collège de France. How, asks Bal, to overcome Europe as Babel (where no one understands the other), Europe as nostalgia (regretting lost time and idealizing the past), the pessimism close to despair of Europe as apocalypse? While she refuses to offer a positive, practical answer, Bal does propose an approach to some of the major issues at stake in the ongoing invention of Europe. […]
  • by Amanda Cachia
    Journal of Visual Culture, Volume 22, Issue 3, Page 319-341, December 2023. In this article, the author argues how the conceptual curatorial work of Lucy Lippard imbued similar qualities to those that are embodied in the curatorial work of the ‘aesthetics of the undeliverable’. The aesthetics of the undeliverable is a new genre of disability curating that centers the realities of disability and access within curatorial and artistic practice, alongside exhibition design. The line that runs through both styles of curatorial practice, that is, Lippard’s work, and the aesthetics of the undeliverable, is political intent, where the behind-the-scenes labor of […]
  • by Berin Golonu
    Journal of Visual Culture, Ahead of Print. This article looks at three contemporary photo-based projects that reference Istanbul’s visual histories and document its endangered ecologies. These works take a critical approach to cultural heritage practices in contrast to official discourses that serve state power or justify capital accumulation. Osman Bozkurt’s Scenes, Ali Taptık’s Topographic Nostalgia, and Cemre Yeşil and Maria Sturm’s For Birds’ Sake focus on the relationships between the human and non-human elements of urban geographies. Their projects conceive of heritage as a practice that combines ecological concerns with preserving the cultural remnants of the urban past. Whether critiquing […]
  • by Lara Fresko Madra
    Journal of Visual Culture, Volume 22, Issue 3, Page 361-382, December 2023. Between the years 2013–2016, the artist İz Öztat created four distinct bodies of work, all of which engaged aspects of water. This period was marked in Turkey by the heightened tensions around the neoliberal (re)distribution of public space and public resources, which escalated in the aftermath of the Gezi Park Protests of 2013. In this article, the author argues that, beyond its immediate critique of contemporary capitalist appropriation, Öztat’s engagement with water builds relations across time, space, and species to recall histories of the Armenian Genocide, challenging the […]
  • by Jasbir K. Puar
    Journal of Visual Culture, Volume 22, Issue 3, Page 281-291, December 2023. Jasbir K. Puar and Dima Srouji build upon their respective work in architecture, visual art and decolonial theory to produce a collaborative examination of colonial pathologies for Sharjah Art Biennial 15, 2023. Srouji’s architecture and art practice encompass a variety of mediums that allow her to explore notions of heritage and public space in Palestine and the region. Puar is a writer and scholar whose current work focuses on settler colonial violence, disability and debility in Palestine. Their collaborative installations integrate understandings of space and planning with the […]
  • by Mazen Kerbaj
    Journal of Visual Culture, Volume 22, Issue 3, Page 342-360, December 2023. In this visual essay, Mazen Kerbaj and Jana Traboulsi bear witness to the genocidal violence that has been unfolding in Gaza since 7 October 2023. From Berlin and Lebanon, respectively, Kerbaj and Traboulsi have been chronicling and responding to the harrowing day-to-day news and testimonies from Gaza. Their drawings raise fundamental questions about what it is to bear witness to genocide as it unfolds, about the politics of seeing as an act of solidarity against imposed invisibility and about racialized sight – the eye that refuses to see […]