No Strings Attached: Exploring the Relationship between Anthropology and Contemporary Arts

ABSTRACT

Critical Arts has hosted a number of special issues that revisit the “ethnographic turn” in contemporary art (see previous volumes 27 [5], 27 [6], and 30 [3]). The aim of these issues is to explore how artists engage with anthropological and ethnographic perspectives in their work, starting from the many forms in which art can present itself today. The issues zoom in on globalised, hyper-diverse societies in which different cultures and communities live together. The following questions are addressed: In what way does art connect cultures and communities across borders? How does one capture people on camera (or recorder) with respect and integrity? What does it mean to make art in an age of “superdiversity”? What are the implications of shifts in our media ecology for the production, mediation, and consumption of “culture”? This article sets the scene for this edition of the special issue. It ends with a discussion about the Brussels-based art collective Sound/Image/Culture, which instigated this revisiting of the ethnographic turn in contemporary art.

Keywords:

• art
• ethnography
• anthropology
• arts-based research
• co-presence