Focas Vol. 5 - Second Front: Interrogating Art, Religiosity & Violence
Lucy Davis (Editor)
The theme for the main section of focas 5 Second Front emerges from the current global political context and the refractions thereof. The title is, of course, an ironic reference to Southeast Asia as George W. Bush's "second front" in the war on terror, but also to Art as a "second front" of representational struggle. Rather than respond to this unavoidable context head-on, nd risk reproducing, or worse, fetishising the violence of the Real in discursive form, these essays interrogate in a more tangential and oblique manner sites of Art, Religiosity and Violence - the scripting of and slippages between these three terms, and the ways each of them are performed in a range of contexts. What is more, although we are a "forum on contemporary art & society", we are not trying to privilege arts as "resistance" - be it resistance to political economic violence or resistance to hegemonic absolutes. What we are trying to do is straddle the more immediate cultural political context with ongoing discussions about the multiple significances of diverse arts practices in Southeast Asia and beyond.
Lucy DAVIS is an Assistant Professor at the School of Art, Design and Media, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.
publication year: 2004
600 pages
ISBN: 978-9810-49-901-3 Paperback US$16.00 S$25.00
Distributed for FOCAS (Forum On Contemporary Art & Society).
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