2023 emerged out of a winter of discontent with widespread strikes across Britain and Europe. Students saw lectures cancelled and marking delayed, school pupils found their teachers on the picket line. Train and underground services were suspended, mail sat undelivered and NHS staff walked out over pay and conditions amid the rising cost of living. Against this backdrop it seemed fitting that, as this year’s editorial board assembled, the issue should coalesce around the theme of ‘disruption.’ As the year draws to a close and the publication is due to go to print, the devastating, polarising Israel-Hamas conflict draws thousands to the streets in London in protests and vigils while calls for a ceasefire go unanswered.
Contributors to this issue explore productive frictions, write against the grain of accepted art histories or give space to those working at the so-called margins to produce an issue that is not inert but actively disruptive beyond the pages of this journal. It is in this vein, and on the occasion of the twentieth edition, that we have altered the usual format to open with a comment piece, ‘Fried Yam in the Museum’, by Debbie Meniru who reaches beyond the factual to the emotional to offer an alternative approach to museum interpretation. This special issue also includes an In-Profile piece on Puerto Rican and Latinx artist Gamaliel Rodríguez, whose artistic practice, as Associate Editor Ana Gabriela Rodríguez discusses, challenges the notion of the centre-periphery axis and makes visible overlooked histories of power.
The corrupted space between the material and the textual in Stevie Smith’s Novel on Yellow Paper (1936) is interrogated by Roisin Kennan whose article traces the erasure of Smith’s own agency, the instability of the editing process and the meddling of publishers in order to galvanise the incurious reader into questioning their vulnerability to textual manipulation.
Jordan’s Quill’s article challenges the dominant, accepted approaches in the field of Himalayan and Tibetan art history. The vital role of Tibetan and Himalayan culture to the arts of the Eurasian continent has been consistently ignored or undervalued and its teaching almost non-existent. We will be breaking with our journal’s own style rules and not transliterating the Tibetan script into phonetic or Wylie systems in celebration of the Tibetan language and in recognition of its being endangered and actively discriminated against. A copy of this issue will be held in the Library of Tibetan Works and Archives in Dharamshala.
The stylistic and ideological tug-of-war that has played out over centuries of refurbishments in the post-medieval life of the Temple Church in London is exposed in Sophia Dumoulin’s article. Dumoulin traces how restoration and reconstruction attempts have caused major disruption to the original fabric of the building, proposing that such an understanding enables an interpretation of its original form.
This issue features five reviews, all of which reflect the year’s mood of resistance. Alice Dodds discusses Amy Elkins’s book Crafting Feminism, which challenges patriarchal and Eurocentric histories of craft-writing by examining how craft is featured in and influences modern and contemporary feminist literature. Archie Gibbs reviews Althea McNish’s Colour is Mine exhibition at the Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester that celebrated McNish’s ground-breaking practice and presented work by other members of the Caribbean Arts Movement who had themselves been marginalised. Guadeloupean artist Minia Biabiany’s installations at the Palais de Tokyo are reviewed by Chloé Glass. Biabiany roots her work in Caribbean networks to resist and overturn the French colonial narratives that, historically, have been imposed on the island of Guadeloupe. Zahra Khademi forensically analyses Shahpour Pouyan’s presentation of ceramic works at the Hayward’s Strange Clay: Ceramics in Contemporary Art exhibition. Channelling the wide-ranging geographical results of a DNA ancestry test that he took into his sculptures, Pouyan questions the mythologies that nations produce around identity and place. Claudia Stanley reviews the Mirror Mirror – Fashion and the Psyche exhibition at ModeMuseum in Antwerp, which subverted the standard blockbuster fashion exhibition by getting under the skin of the fashion industry to expose its unequal power dynamics and ability to define beauty.
The cover features the diptych Tailoring Freedom – Renty and Delia (2021), a work by Helsinki-based multi- disciplinary artist-researcher and activist, Sasha Huber. I am delighted to include an extended conversation between the artist and Associate Editor, Xiaojue Michelle Zhu, which explores how colonial and racist histories have physically altered the geographical landscape through acts of naming and memorialising. Huber’s ongoing campaign seeks to rename colonised places in an attempt to repair colonial trauma.
We are grateful for the support of our External Advisory Group, Professor Alixe Bovey, Dr Lucy Bradnock, Professor Dorothy Price, Leyla Bumbra, Dr Acatia Finbow, and the staff of the Research Forum, designers Kit Moran (print) and Dr Grace Williams (online), Karin Kyburz (image rights), Fred Shan and Damiët Schneeweisz (Editors-in-Chief 2022), and artists Sasha Huber and Gamaliel Rodríguez for generously sharing their time and work with us.
This issue of Immediations has been selected and edited by Hattie Spires and the editorial board: Sophia Adams, Rachel Alban, Nicole Gasparini Casari, Florence Eccleston (Reviews Editor), Ana Gabriela Rodríguez (Reviews Editor) and Xiaojue Michelle Zhu (Issues Editor). For their hard work, patience and good humour, they have my thanks.
Hattie Spires (Editor-in-Chief)
Editorial Group
Hattie Spires (Editor-in-Chief); Sophia Adams; Rachel Alban; Florence Eccleston (Reviews Editor); Nicole Gasparini Casari; Ana Gabriela Rodríguez (Reviews Editor); Xiaojue Michelle Zhu (Issues Editor)
Publisher
The Courtauld Institute of Art Vernon Square, Penton Rise, King’s Cross, London WC1X 9EW. Immediations is published annually. Further information: http://courtauld.ac.uk/research/publications/immediations
© 2023 The Courtauld Institute of Art, London Designed by Kit Moran Printed by N2 Group with thanks to James Hallam
External Advisory Group
Susan Aberth (Bard College); Simon Baker (Maison européenne de la photographie); Tessel M. Bauduin (Universiteit van Amsterdam); Jane Bradney (Institute of Historical Research); Wolfgang Brückle (Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts); Molly Brunson (Yale University); Caroline Campbell (The National Gallery, London); Annemarie Weyl Carr (Southern Methodist University); Judith Clark (London College of Fashion); David Peters Corbett (University of East Anglia and The Courtauld); Finola O’Kane Crimmins (University College Dublin); David Cunningham (University of Westminster); Allison Deutsch (Birkbeck, University of London); Julien Domercq Michael Duffy (MoMA, New York); Helen Evans (Metropolitan Museum of Art); Kate Flint (University of Southern California); Michelle Foot (University of Edinburgh); Jacob Gaboury (University of California Berkeley); Rhonda Garelick (University of Nebraska- Lincoln); Timothy Gitzen (University of Hong Kong); Linda Goddard (University of St Andrews); Pia Gottschaller (The Courtauld); Ari Larissa Heinrich (Australian National University); Isabel Horovitz (The Painting Conservation Studio); Sarah James; Alexandra Kaczenski; Rebecca Karl (New York University); Sabine Kriebel (University College Cork); Deborah Lewer (University of Glasgow); Anna Lovatt (Southern Methodist University); Angeliki Lymberopoulou (Open University); Vasileios Marinis (Yale University); Malcolm Miles (University of Plymouth); Martin Myrone (Paul Mellon Centre); Diana Newall (Open University); Jeanne Nuechterlein (University of York); Anna Russakoff (American University of Paris); Wendy Salmond (Chapman University, CA); Stephanie Schwartz (University College London); Nathaniel Silver (Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum); Camilla Smith (University of Birmingham); Frances Spalding (University of Cambridge); Catherine Spencer (University of St Andrews); Anne Rudloff Stanton (University of Missouri); John-Paul Stonard (Burlington Magazine); Lisa Turvey (Artforum); William Tronzo (University of California San Diego); Sarah Tyler Brooks (James Madison University); Jane Tynan (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam); Sabine Wieber (University of Glasgow); Beth Williamson (University of Bristol); Kim Woods (Open University); Peter Zusi (University College London).
Cover
Front and verso: Sasha Huber, Tailoring Freedom – Renty and Delia, 2021, metal staples on photograph on wood, 97 x 69 cm. © Sasha Huber. Courtesy the artist and Tamara Lanier. Original images courtesy the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, Renty, 35-5-10/530; Delia, 35-5-10/53040.
Immediations is an annual, peer-reviewed journal of art history. The editors welcome submissions from current members of the post-graduate research community of The Courtauld Institute of Art and from pre-doctoral and recent post-doctoral scholars who have spent part of their postgraduate career there.
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