• Editorial: Freedom of Expression, Performativity and Civil Disobedience
    It seems to be a rather difficult endeavor to reconcile art and life, also for the proponents of freedom of expression. Is art suitable as a kind of civil disobedience?
  • The Imprisoned Images
    Susana de Sousa Dias’s award-winning documentary ‘48’ uncovers the violence and brutality exercised by the Political Police (PIDE) over men and women during the forty-eight years of the Portuguese Dictatorship (1926-1974). More than a movie, she creates an act of rescue centred on history and the image.
  • Fresh Start: Transnational and Cultural Movements of Identity in Auf der Anderen Seite
    In Fatih Akin's films, social and cinematic discourses related to accented and diasporic cinema combine to deconstruct nationalist myths and provide a wider context for the representation of culturally different Turkish-German identities.
  • Art as Civil Disobedience
    An artwork is a setting for sharing concerns; insofar as it revises collective experience via individual intention, it is always already an act of civil disobedience.
  • A Moving Image That Can Remember Its Past Lives
    The performances of the Phitakon in Isaan, Thailand, reappropriate photography and cinema by integrating the camera in traditional rituals that center on the enigmatic propensities of the Tool. They not only seem to relativize the globalized, western forms of vision with which these media have been rigidly associated, but directly challenge media history and specificity
  • Passages to Palestine: Performing Peace in a High Conflict Space
    My mission was to transmit Dr. Martin Luther King’s message of peace and nonviolence through a multilingual, multimedia theatrical production and to disseminate these ideas in a land that desperately needed them. Such a mission seemed laughable after I had been there on the ground long enough to witness the severity of the situation.

  • Editorial
    This issue of Seismopolite Journal brings texts about art and politics from a number of localities worldwide.
  • Only light and memory: the permeable cinema of Apichatpong Weerasethakul
    Through a local framing May Adadol Ingawanij and David Teh shed a rare light on the many tensions that are channelled, yet somehow balanced, in the films of the Palme d'Or-winning director
  • Details on contemporary fascism
    The exhibition Details at Bergen Kunsthall focuses on the political potential in art as an archaeology of the politics of perception: it specifically inquires about everyday repositories of contemporary fascism.
  • Fear of Speaking
    Curator June Yap discusses the conditions for freedom of speech in Singapore under the so-called 'new normal' after the parliamentary and presidential elections, with reference to a recent theatre play entitled Fear of Writing.
  • Interview with Övgü Gökçe, Project Coordinator of Diyarbakır Arts Center
    The Diyarbakır Arts Center (DSM) is the Diyarbakır branch of Anadolu Kültür, an organization which helps discovering the local cultural and artistic potentials of cities all over Anatolia, and works to form bridges between diverse cities in Turkey and to international cities and art scenes.
  • On the Fallacies of “Useful Art”: Tania Bruguera’s Immigrant Movement International
    Chris Mansour discusses the implications of performance artist Tania Bruguera's concept of Arte Útil, which she opposes to an idea of aesthetic autonomy.
  • The political matrix: The 12th Istanbul Biennial
    This year’s Istanbul Biennial deconstructs the idea of the art space architecturally, and simultaneously reclaims it as a pure function of the visitors’ bodily and intellectual possibilities of navigation.

  • Welcome
    The first issue of Seismopolite! The Journal's main agenda is to investigate the possibility of artists and art scenes worldwide to reflect and influence their local political situation (...)
  • Blind Dates in the Fault Lines of an Empire
    A collaborative project, involving artists and researchers from estranged societies in the former territories of the Ottoman Empire, tackles the master narratives, remains and gaps produced by the empire's fall in an attempt to create new future trajectories.
  • Between Utopia and Dystopia
    In an exhibition at the Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City, Asian artists mediate between art, life, politics, history and social memory in their respective localities and historical contexts.
  • The Performative Archive
    A review of Fluxus East and The Creative Act - two shows in which archives erupt and thereby reassert Henie Onstad Art Center as a transitory arena for groundbreaking art, upholding the search for a way in which art can maintain its political agency, over time.
  • One day it will have to be over
    An exhibition series at Museo de Arte Contemporãnea in São Paulo covers the period of military dictatorship in Brazil, displaying how art became one of the few and most efficient tools of opposition to the regime over three decades.
  • Interview With Map Office
    Josef Ng interviews MAP Office, Valérie Portefaix and Laurent Gutierrez in Hong Kong
  • I can't go on, I'll go on
    This essay addresses the present conditions of art as a means of social and historical betterment, by responding to the 'Questionnaire on 'The Contemporary'' in e-flux and October.

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