Images of War in Contemporary Art: Terror and Conflict in the Mass Media

Description

In Images of War in Contemporary Art, Uros Cvoro and Kit Messham-Muir mount a challenge to the dominance of theoretical tropes of trauma, affect, and emotion that have determined how we think of images of war and terror for the last 20 years. Through analyses of visual culture from contemporary "war art" to the meme wars, they argue that the art that most effectively challenges the ethics and aesthetics of war and terror today is that which disrupts this flow-art that makes alternative perceptions of wartime both visible and possible. As a theoretical work, Images of War in Contemporary Art is richly supported by visual and textual evidence and firmly embedded in current artistic practice. Significantly, though, the book breaks with both traditional and current ways of thinking about war art-offering a radical rethinking of the politics and aesthetics of art today through analyses of a diverse scope of contemporary art that includes Ben Quilty, Abdul Abdullah (Australia), Mladen Miljanovic, Nebojsa Seric Soba (Bosnia and Herzegovina), Hiwa K, Wafaa Bilal (Iraq), Teresa Margolles (Mexico), and Arthur Jafa (United States).

Uros Cvoro (UNSW Sydney, Australia) researches artistic and cultural strategies dealing with the multiple challenges of post-global exchange such as conflict, economic collapse, and migration. His books include Turbo-Folk Music and Cultural Representations of National Identity in Former Yugoslavia (2014), Transitional Aesthetics: Contemporary Art at the Edge of Europe (Bloomsbury, 2018), and Post-Conflict Monuments in Bosnia and Herzegovina: Unfinished Histories (2020). Kit Messham-Muir (Curtin University, Australia) researches contemporary art and visual culture that addresses war, terror, and political violence. He wrote Double War: Shaun Gladwell, visual culture and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq (2015). He is Lead Chief Investigator of the Art in Conflict project, which receives a Linkage Project grant from the Australian Research Council of $293,380 over 2018-2021.