The Nord-Pas-de-Calais mining region, bordering on Belgium, is part of northern Europe’s historical centre of heavy industry, which extends as far as the Ruhr area in Germany. With the end of coal mining in the 1980s, the Lille region transitioned to new economic activities, particularly within the cultural and creative industries, taking advantage of its strategic location midway between Paris, London and Brussels. After de-industrialisation and the 1984 opening of the Lewarde Mining Museu...

In Colonial Legacies, Gabriella Nugent examines a generation of contemporary artists born or based in the Congo whose lens-based art attends to the afterlives and mutations of Belgian colonialism in postcolonial Congo. Focusing on three artists and one artist collective, Nugent analyses artworks produced by Sammy Baloji, Michèle Magema, Georges Senga and Kongo Astronauts, each of whom offers a different perspective onto this history gleaned from their own experiences. In their photography an...

Throughout the apartheid era South Africa maintained a wide-reaching propaganda apparatus. At its core was the information service that strongly capitalised on photography to visually articulate the minority regime’s racist political messages, promote Afrikaner nationalism, and consolidate white rule. By unearthing a substantial corpus of photographs that so far have been hidden in archives, this book offers a distinctive perspective on the institutional context of the regime’s photograph...

Victor Burgin counts among the most versatile figures within art and visual culture since the late 1960s. His artwork both connects with and reacts to minimalism, conceptual art, staged photography, appropriation art, video art and, more recently, computer-based imaging. As a scholar his thinking is informed by phenomenology, semiotics, poststructuralism, feminist theory, and psychoanalysis.

This monograph provides a comprehensive and unique overview of Victor Burgin’s body of work over the...

This compelling publication traces the broad arc of photography’s development in France from the 1970s to the present day. A decade-by-decade account reveals unexpected points of convergence between practices that are not usually considered in a comparative perspective. These include photographic practices in contemporary art, documentary, photojournalism, and fashion. Author Olga Smith sets these practices in dialogue with French philosophy – the writings of Roland Barthes, Jean Baudrill...

In the aftermath of Covid-19, the subject of ‘empty places’ has gained renewed topicality and resonance. Watching, Waiting presents a collection of essays, both photographic and written, that brings emptiness into interdisciplinary focus as an object of study that extends beyond the present. The contributors approach the specific interrelationships of photography and place through emptiness by considering historical and contemporary material in equal measure. Drawing on architecture, anth...

There is little dispute that photography is a material practice, and that the photograph itself is ineluctably material. And yet “matter,” “material,” and “materiality” have proven to be remarkably elusive terms of inquiry, frequently producing studies that are disparate in scope, sharing seemingly little common ground. Although the wide methodological range of materialist study can be dizzying, it is this book’s contention that that multiplicity is also the field’s greatest a...

In 1999, a short video of a solitary boy kicking an empty bottle up a hill in Mexico City became the first instalment of Children’s Games, a series of works by artist Francis Alÿs (b. Antwerp, 1959). The ongoing project, which now numbers around thirty-five works, has gradually given shape to an extensive collection of videos of children at play. For almost twenty years, Alÿs and his collaborators Félix Blume, Julien Devaux, and Rafael Ortega have been travelling around the world to docu...

Radically subjective. Radically unapologetic. Radically demanding. These are the hallmarks of Dirk Lauwaert’s skill, attitude, and sensitivity, which are the result of radical attention.

Belgian writer and critic Dirk Lauwaert (1944–2013) wrote about images, be they moving or still, historical or contemporary, overfamiliar or unseen. He experienced them intensely, studied them attentively, and connected them to ethical, philosophical, or social issues in texts that invited readers to do t...

“Disassembled” Images takes as a point of departure Allan Sekula’s productive approach of disassembling elements in order to reassemble them in alternative constellations. Some of the most pressing issues of our time, such as human labor in a globalized economy or the claim for radical democracy, are recurrent themes in Sekula’s oeuvre and are investigated by a wide range of experts in this book. Addressing a variety of artworks, both by Sekula and other artists, the collected essays ...