‘Seduction is always more effective than coercion’—so wrote Joseph Nye in his 2004 book Soft Power.1 Nye had been developing the concept since the late eighties, arriving at an idea of political influence that was not founded on militaristic force, fear, and bribery, but culture’s attractive qualities and national charm. It is, however, no less sinister. A 2024 report by the British Council noted that ‘soft power is increasingly being mobilised to promote national identities, sometimes assertively or controversially’, and that there was increasingly ‘less commitment to the global order and ideas of the common good’.2 For all its seductive qualities, soft power remains the quiet ally of a world where militarisation and aggressive political rhetoric are on the rise, where competition and polarisation persist, and where division is rife.
Nye died in May 2025, but soft power is far from dead. As we met to discuss the direction for this year’s issue in the early months of 2025, the UK Government met to launch a Soft Power Council, an advisory body that seeks to co-ordinate Britain’s wealth of cultural assets to drive global influence. Among its twenty-six members are senior figures in the university, gallery, and museum sectors—worlds intimate with our own. We found it difficult, therefore, to avoid the issue of softness, and so put out a call to engage critically with ideas of empathy, influence, care, and collectivity. We asked, more hope- fully, how tenderness might resist these narratives of aggression, how empathy might offer an alternative, how care might encourage reconciliation. The Courtauld’s postgraduate community answered enthusiastically with thoughtful, varied, and considered research that we are delighted to present in this issue of Immediations.
Ekaterina Zinurova’s article on the Martiros Saryan’s paintings for the Soviet Pavilion at the 1924 Venice Biennale chimes particularly with the concern for soft power. Zinurova undertakes a nuanced examination of the meeting of Soviet cultural propaganda and transnational diplomacy in Saryan’s Armenian landscapes.
Beyond issues of political power, softness and care surface too in the subject of maternity—a motif that runs throughout the issue and has been prevalent in the art world more broadly over this last year. In their article on Chantal Joffe’s The Squid and the Whale, Orlando Giannini and Ana-Maria Milčić consider the complicated temporalities and affective shifts of motherhood. Amelia Mielniczek explores how art and the politics of maternity have frequently collided in her review of Hettie Judah’s Acts of Creation: On Art and Motherhood (Thames and Hudson, 2024). Meanwhile, Emily Abney’s review of Siena: The Rise of Painting 1300-1350 at the National Gallery considers what the maternal imagery at the heart of the exhibition lent to its intimate, affective curation. Rachel Hartley, too, turns her attention to a matrilineal artistic culture in her review of Małgorzata Mirga-Tas’ recent exhibition at the Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester, examining the artist’s large-scale textile works and the politics of their home-made appearance.
Beyond the maternal, care reaches out through collectivity—through the time we spend attending to others. In her review of Simon O’Sullivan’s From Magic and Myth-Work to Care and Repair (Goldsmiths Press, 2024), Alex Bispham notes that care and co-operation inform the structure and form of O’Sullivan’s essays on the relationships between the body, magic, and the more-than-human world; gesturing continually outwards, towards collectivity with other texts. Amy Elder too interrogates collectivity in her review of Connecting Thin Black Lines 1985-2025 at the Institute of Contemporary Art, highlighting where it successfully intervened into the art historical canon, and critiquing where it fell short in not extending a hand to the next generation of Black British women artists.
We find care also extends to the artwork itself. In her article on a previously unresearched gothic ivory in the collection of the British Museum, Molly Lewis transforms intimacy and nurturing to art historical method. In her article, close material and visual analysis—paying attention to the care these private devotional objects received when in use—arrives at a careful and considered understanding of the making and function of a highly emotive work.
Care towards museum objects is also the core concern of this issue’s interview with Dr Emma Richardson, a preservation scientist and Director of Research at Rochester Institute of Technology’s Image Permanence Institute in New York. Our conversation with Dr Richardson meandered through the material properties of softness and how, in the museum environment, this necessitates empathy, understanding and co-operation between disciplines and departments. We are very glad to feature on our cover a beautiful and strange micrograph of polyurethane foam taken by Dr Jacek Olender, a colleague of Dr Richardson at the Image Permanence Institute and a Courtauld alumnus.
There has been no end of care and collectivity in the production of this issue of Immediations, and we offer our warmest thanks to everyone who has been involved this year: to our External Advisory Group; Dr Acatia Finbow; Leyla Bumbra, Diego Arteche, and everyone at the Research Forum; and our designers Kit Moran (print) and Dr Grace Williams (online).
This issue has been selected and edited by Alice Dodds and Emma Iadanza and the editorial board: Zoe Bomberg-McCarthy, Matthew Cheale, Leylim Erenel, Tatjana Schäfer, Clara Shaw, and Millie Riddell. For their good humour and hard work, we cannot thank them enough.
Alice Dodds & Emma Iadanza (Editors-in-Chief)