CALL FOR REVIEWS
CALLING ALL CRITICS!
We are currently seeking pitches & recommendations for
film and exhibition reviews that explore the environment, queer theory, and/or science and technology studies; and
book and electronic media reviews that tackle violence and/or critical race studies
to appear in the 2023 volume of Visual Anthropology Review!
We welcome recommendations from authors, curators, filmmakers, publishers, and fans! For pitches, we are particularly interested in working with new critical voices, and in reviews that document the work of emerging or marginalized filmmakers who should be known to the field of visual anthropology.
For films and exhibitions, contact Eugenia Kisin, eugenia.kisin@nyu.edu; for books and electronic media, contact Natalie Underberg-Goode, natalie.underberg-goode@ucf.edu.
Be sure include the title of the work in the subject line of your email. In the body of your message, include relevant links to the work, and (if pitching) 2–3 sentences explaining why you should review it (i.e, how it relates to your own research, experience, or interests).
Need some inspiration for what to pitch? Here are titles we are interested in having reviewed for 2023.
The Globally Familiar: Digital Hip Hop, Masculinity, and Urban Space in Delhi. Ethiraj Gabriel Dattatreyan, Duke University Press, 2020.
In The Globally Familiar Ethiraj Gabriel Dattatreyan traces how the rapid development of information and communication technologies in India have created opportunities for young people to creatively explore their gendered, classed, and racialized subjectivities in and through transnational media worlds. His ethnography focuses on a group of diverse young, working-class men in Delhi as they take up the African diasporic aesthetics and creative practices of hip hop. Dattatreyan shows how these aspiring b-boys, MCs, and graffiti writers—as they fashion themselves and their city as familiar through their online and offline experimentations with hip hop—access new social, economic, and political opportunities while acting as consumers, producers, and influencers in global circuits of capitalism. In so doing, Dattatreyan outlines how the hopeful, creative, and vitally embodied practices of hip hop offer an alternative narrative of urban place-making in ‘digital’ India.
Ready to pitch? Contact Natalie Underberg-Goode, natalie.underberg-goode@ucf.edu.
Critical Zones: Observatories for Earthly Politics
https://zkm.de/en/exhibition/2020/05/critical-zones
https://critical-zones.zkm.de/#!/
“Over a period of several months ZKM will host an exhibition conceived as a scale model to simulate the spatial novelty of this new land as well as the diversity of relations between the life forms inhabiting it. It will serve as an OBSERVATORY OF CRITICAL ZONES allowing visitors to familiarize themselves with the new situation. This special combination of thought experiment and exhibition was developed by Peter Weibel and Bruno Latour in their previous collaborations at ZKM. »Iconoclash« in 2002, »Making Things Public« in 2005, and »Reset Modernity!« in 2016 constitute the three former »thought exhibitions« (Gedankenausstellungen) that resulted from their intensive working relationship which now spans twenty years.”
Ready to pitch? Contact Eugenia Kisin, eugenia.kisin@nyu.edu.
To Make Their Own Way in the World: The Enduring Legacy of the Zealy Daguerreotypes. Edited by Ilisa Barbash, Molly Rogers, and Deborah Willis. Aperture and Peabody Press, 2020.
To Make Their Own Way in the World is a profound consideration of some of the most challenging images in the history of photography: fifteen daguerreotypes of Alfred, Delia, Drana, Fassena, Jack, Jem, and Renty―men and women of African descent who were enslaved in South Carolina. Photographed by Joseph T. Zealy for Harvard professor Louis Agassiz in 1850, they were rediscovered at Harvard’s Peabody Museum in 1976. This groundbreaking multidisciplinary volume features essays by prominent scholars who explore such topics as the identities of the people depicted in the daguerreotypes, the close relationship between photography and race, and visual narratives of slavery and its lasting effects. With over two hundred illustrations, including new photography by Carrie Mae Weems, this book frames the Zealy daguerreotypes as works of urgent engagement.
Ready to pitch? Contact Natalie Underberg-Goode, natalie.underberg-goode@ucf.edu.
Ready Mix
https://www.diaart.org/exhibition/exhibitions-projects/lucy-raven-exhibition/
“Ready Mix (2021) is an immersive installation featuring a forty-five-minute film shot over two years at a concrete plant in central Idaho. Together, these projects address the formation, depiction, and surveillance of landscapes and civic spaces, proposing abstraction as a tool for (re)perceiving these sites.” By artist Lucy Raven.
Ready to pitch? Contact Eugenia Kisin, eugenia.kisin@nyu.edu.
Return Engagements: Contemporary Art's Traumas of Modernity and History
in Sài Gòn and Phnom Penh.
By Viet Lê. Duke University Press, 2021.
In Return Engagements artist and critic Việt Lê examines contemporary art in Cambodia and Việt Nam to rethink the entwinement of militarization, trauma, diaspora, and modernity in Southeast Asian art. Highlighting artists tied to Phnom Penh and Sài Gòn and drawing on a range of visual art as well as documentary and experimental films, Lê points out that artists of Southeast Asian descent are often expected to address the twin traumas of armed conflict and modernization, and shows how desirable art on these themes is on international art markets. As the global art market fetishizes trauma and violence, artists strategically align their work with those tropes in ways that Lê suggests allow them to reinvent such aesthetics and discursive spaces. By returning to and refashioning these themes, artists such as Tiffany Chung, Rithy Panh, and Sopheap Pich challenge categorizations of “diasporic” and “local” by situating themselves as insiders and outsiders relative to Cambodia and Việt Nam. By doing so, they disrupt dominant understandings of place, time, and belonging in contemporary art.
Ready to pitch? Contact Natalie Underberg-Goode, natalie.underberg-goode@ucf.edu.
Plastic Heart: Surface All the Way Through
https://artmuseum.utoronto.ca/exhibition/plastic-heart/
“Ahead of the promise of a nationwide ban on single-use plastics, this experimental exhibition examines plastic as art material, cultural object, geologic process, petrochemical product, and a synthetic substance fully entangled with the human body. The exhibition includes new commissions, historical and contemporary artworks that relate to plastic as a politically-loaded material and investigations into the paradoxes of plastic conservation in museum collections. It also features data visualizations of a study conducted by the Synthetic Collective that provides a first-ever snapshot of post-industrial microplastics pollution on the shores of all the Great Lakes. This exhibition links scientific and artistic methodologies to show how arts-based approaches to thinking and working can make viable contributions to environmental science and activism.”
Ready to pitch? Contact Eugenia Kisin, eugenia.kisin@nyu.edu.
Art of Captivity / Arte Del Cautiverio. By Kevin O’Neill and Benjamin Fogarty-Valenzuela. University of Toronto Press, 2020.
From the author’s website: Through a series of rich photographs, Art of Captivity / Arte del Cautiverio tells a compelling story about the war on drugs in Central America. This bilingual book focuses on the country of Guatemala and its Pentecostal drug rehabilitation centers. It explores these centers as architectural forms, while also showcasing the cultural production that takes place inside them, including drawings and letters created by those held captive. This stunning work of visual ethnography humanizes those held inside these centers, breaks down stereotypes about drug use, and sets the conditions for a hemispheric conversation about prohibitionist practices – by revealing intimate portraits of a population held hostage by a war on drugs.
Ready to pitch? Contact Natalie Underberg-Goode, natalie.underberg-goode@ucf.edu.
A Thousand Pines. dir. Noam Osband & Sebastián Diaz, A Thousand Pines Film LLC, 2023.
A Thousand Pines shows the lives of migrants who depend on the controversial guest worker visa program, following a crew of workers from Oaxaca, Mexico over the course of a season planting trees throughout the United States. The crew struggles to balance the job’s physical demands and its extreme isolation while remaining connected to their families back home. As the season progresses, they become a small family, cooking and caring for each other in order to endure the punishing work. The film centers on the crew foreman, Raymundo Morales, who is in his 19th season working for the largest reforestation company in the US. When he began, he was single and had few responsibilities. Now, however, he must balance his obligations to his wife, his children, and his elderly mother with a heart condition, while also tending to the needs and emergencies of the planting crew. Spending only three months at home during the off-season, Raymundo’s job is both the family’s salvation and its heartbreak.
Ready to pitch? Contact Eugenia Kisin, eugenia.kisin@nyu.edu.
Critical Zones: Observatories for Earthly Politics
https://zkm.de/en/exhibition/2020/05/critical-zones
https://critical-zones.zkm.de/#!/
“Over a period of several months ZKM will host an exhibition conceived as a scale model to simulate the spatial novelty of this new land as well as the diversity of relations between the life forms inhabiting it. It will serve as an OBSERVATORY OF CRITICAL ZONES allowing visitors to familiarize themselves with the new situation. This special combination of thought experiment and exhibition was developed by Peter Weibel and Bruno Latour in their previous collaborations at ZKM. »Iconoclash« in 2002, »Making Things Public« in 2005, and »Reset Modernity!« in 2016 constitute the three former »thought exhibitions« (Gedankenausstellungen) that resulted from their intensive working relationship which now spans twenty years.”
Ready to pitch? Contact Eugenia Kisin, eugenia.kisin@nyu.edu.
To Make Their Own Way in the World: The Enduring Legacy of the Zealy Daguerreotypes. Edited by Ilisa Barbash, Molly Rogers, and Deborah Willis. Aperture and Peabody Press, 2020.
To Make Their Own Way in the World is a profound consideration of some of the most challenging images in the history of photography: fifteen daguerreotypes of Alfred, Delia, Drana, Fassena, Jack, Jem, and Renty―men and women of African descent who were enslaved in South Carolina. Photographed by Joseph T. Zealy for Harvard professor Louis Agassiz in 1850, they were rediscovered at Harvard’s Peabody Museum in 1976. This groundbreaking multidisciplinary volume features essays by prominent scholars who explore such topics as the identities of the people depicted in the daguerreotypes, the close relationship between photography and race, and visual narratives of slavery and its lasting effects. With over two hundred illustrations, including new photography by Carrie Mae Weems, this book frames the Zealy daguerreotypes as works of urgent engagement.
Ready to pitch? Contact Natalie Underberg-Goode, natalie.underberg-goode@ucf.edu.
Ready Mix
https://www.diaart.org/exhibition/exhibitions-projects/lucy-raven-exhibition/
“Ready Mix (2021) is an immersive installation featuring a forty-five-minute film shot over two years at a concrete plant in central Idaho. Together, these projects address the formation, depiction, and surveillance of landscapes and civic spaces, proposing abstraction as a tool for (re)perceiving these sites.” By artist Lucy Raven.
Ready to pitch? Contact Eugenia Kisin, eugenia.kisin@nyu.edu.
Return Engagements: Contemporary Art's Traumas of Modernity and History
in Sài Gòn and Phnom Penh.
By Viet Lê. Duke University Press, 2021.
In Return Engagements artist and critic Việt Lê examines contemporary art in Cambodia and Việt Nam to rethink the entwinement of militarization, trauma, diaspora, and modernity in Southeast Asian art. Highlighting artists tied to Phnom Penh and Sài Gòn and drawing on a range of visual art as well as documentary and experimental films, Lê points out that artists of Southeast Asian descent are often expected to address the twin traumas of armed conflict and modernization, and shows how desirable art on these themes is on international art markets. As the global art market fetishizes trauma and violence, artists strategically align their work with those tropes in ways that Lê suggests allow them to reinvent such aesthetics and discursive spaces. By returning to and refashioning these themes, artists such as Tiffany Chung, Rithy Panh, and Sopheap Pich challenge categorizations of “diasporic” and “local” by situating themselves as insiders and outsiders relative to Cambodia and Việt Nam. By doing so, they disrupt dominant understandings of place, time, and belonging in contemporary art.
Ready to pitch? Contact Natalie Underberg-Goode, natalie.underberg-goode@ucf.edu.
Plastic Heart: Surface All the Way Through
https://artmuseum.utoronto.ca/exhibition/plastic-heart/
“Ahead of the promise of a nationwide ban on single-use plastics, this experimental exhibition examines plastic as art material, cultural object, geologic process, petrochemical product, and a synthetic substance fully entangled with the human body. The exhibition includes new commissions, historical and contemporary artworks that relate to plastic as a politically-loaded material and investigations into the paradoxes of plastic conservation in museum collections. It also features data visualizations of a study conducted by the Synthetic Collective that provides a first-ever snapshot of post-industrial microplastics pollution on the shores of all the Great Lakes. This exhibition links scientific and artistic methodologies to show how arts-based approaches to thinking and working can make viable contributions to environmental science and activism.”
Ready to pitch? Contact Eugenia Kisin, eugenia.kisin@nyu.edu.
Art of Captivity / Arte Del Cautiverio. By Kevin O’Neill and Benjamin Fogarty-Valenzuela. University of Toronto Press, 2020.
From the author’s website: Through a series of rich photographs, Art of Captivity / Arte del Cautiverio tells a compelling story about the war on drugs in Central America. This bilingual book focuses on the country of Guatemala and its Pentecostal drug rehabilitation centers. It explores these centers as architectural forms, while also showcasing the cultural production that takes place inside them, including drawings and letters created by those held captive. This stunning work of visual ethnography humanizes those held inside these centers, breaks down stereotypes about drug use, and sets the conditions for a hemispheric conversation about prohibitionist practices – by revealing intimate portraits of a population held hostage by a war on drugs.
Ready to pitch? Contact Natalie Underberg-Goode, natalie.underberg-goode@ucf.edu.
UPDATED MAY 2, 2023