Tobah Aukland-Peck’s essay offers a fascinating inquiry into empire through posters and seashells, seemingly mundane objects tied to a complex history of travel, advertising, oil, and empire. No longer solely the domain of Romantic painting wistfully imagining the expanses of empire under the guise of a serene landscape, this paper focuses on an aspect of material culture not often studied. Aukland-Peck argues that the “bucolic” domestic landscapes pictured throughout a number of posters advertising Shell’s enterprises neglected to depict the ravages wrought on the landscape by empire and capital in an effort to achieve material and corporate gain at a moment of Britain’s anxiety about its own status. Focusing on posters with their catchy phrases designed to foster interest in Britain, Aukland-Peck shifts our way of thinking about the proliferation of empire towards the innocuous nature of cost-effective, reproducible media. The “visual responses to war within the pastoral nostalgia”, as so poignantly articulated by the author, point towards the dialectical constructions laden within the imperial geography of empire and its visual culture. The presence of a peaceful landscape reveals a dialect of destruction; through visions of the countryside, the absence of imperial geography becomes present; and the relationship between the metropole and colony, as well as urban and rural, continue to be co-constitutive.

This dissertation traces a history of how art museums in the United States and the United Kingdom began to collect and curate contemporary art from the Arab world, Iran, and Turkey (or the Middle East, or Southwest Asia and North Africa (or the SWANA region)). Current thinking suggests that contemporary artists from the SWANA region first appeared in Western art museums following the events of September 11th, 2001, in the US as a way to dispel Islamophobia and foster intercultural, inter-religious understanding. Furthermore, the predominant line of inquiry focuses on the content and frameworks of major temporary loan exhibitions as opposed to the development of permanent collections and the longue durée of shifting art historical canons as they are formed in and represented by museum collections.

By contrast, I show how interest in contemporary Middle Eastern art took form in the 1970s as it emerged from a complex nexus among festivals, galleries, alternative spaces, and museums. Festivals, such as the World of Islam Festival (London, 1976) and the Smithsonian Festival of American Folklife (Washington, DC, 1973–76), sparked an interest in Arab religion and culture, often through historicized presentations that focused on specific topics, including historical Islamic art, dance, and music. However, festivals frequently neglected contemporary cultural production and nearby diasporic populations. Instead, contemporary Arab artists acted on the momentum generated by festivals in an era of multiculturalism to present their work in alternative spaces and craft their own historiographies. These artists and their work, as I demonstrate, later became part of major Anglophone museum collections beginning in the 1980s; these collections were formative to the now well-known museum exhibitions after 9/11. The constellation of networks connecting different spaces and the dialectics between representation and self-representation brings forward a complex history of exhibitions and collections that subsequently repositions the genealogy of SWANA artists in major Anglophone institutions.

In short, competing forms of knowledge produced across and between cultural institutions of all kinds facilitated the proliferation of contemporary Middle Eastern art in the US and the UK from the 1970s until the present. To outline this trajectory, I read official festival archives against press records, exhibition histories, and artists’ recollections contrapuntally in order to outline a constellational art world as it shifts in a proto-global, multicultural era. My dissertation thus offers several major contributions to the fields of museum studies, American art, contemporary Middle Eastern art, and festivals by extending festival literature into the late-twentieth century; augmenting British and American art histories with SWANA voices; foregrounding SWANA artists in global art histories; fostering dialogue between exhibitions and festivals in a trans-Atlantic context; considering Arab American art histories; and expanding SWANA art histories to consider their diasporas.

Volume two of react/review: a responsive journal for art and architecture explores the spiritual, monstrous, cosmological, and otherworldly within or as forms of political action or resistance. Considering how spiritual themes are entangled with political action or resistance invites new attention to a range of subtle distinctions between manifestations of the “spirit,” whether as methodology, content, and/or the effect of a work. Reproducibility, with its attendant notions of mimicry, copying, and dissemination, also emerges as a key analytic in the contributions to this journal. These ideas are reflected in DJ Morrow’s balloon recreation of Goya’s Saturn Devouring his Son, which appears on this volume’s cover. Like the original on which it is based, Morrow’s piece engages with the monstrous and the political in a moment of crisis. However, its playful use of an everyday medium simultaneously veils and unveils the violence of the scene, demonstrating the power of mimicry to produce new configurations of the macabre and otherworldly. Relatedly, processes of aesthetic reproduction addressed in this compilation also reveal class, race, gender, and cultural identity as factors shaping the form in which the “spirit” emerges in the shadow of political action. Contributing authors address the modern and contemporary eras, engaging with a range of topics from Black life in the Bay area and anti-racism, to monsters in Spanish art, anti-totalitarian politics, cosplay, and the aesthetics of queer Chicana zines, as well as National Socialist black metal bands. Contradictory and subversive ways of knowing and being emerge through these studies as they integrate the supernatural and immaterial into art historical discourse, allowing us to recognize the spirit in the shadow.