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This article analyses the Conflictorium – Museum of Conflict, founded in 2013, in Ahmedabad, Gujarat, India, and its use of museum space both within its designated location and the broader socio-spatial surroundings of the neighborhood and city. The museum is discussed as a site that offers space to experience and engage with conflicts about religion, citizenship, caste, identity and belonging in the historically and contemporary, polyphonic processes of Indian nation-making. By unpacking four, partially interrelated, dimensions of spatial transformations in the Conflictorium, the article offers an empirically-grounded understanding of museums’ different spatial strategies to convene information, create affective atmospheres and memories about contentious aspects of contemporary Indian society that might not be attended to in state-run museum or political discourse. In sum, the article argues that museum spaces can function as socio-spatial and -technological infrastructures that forge for the cultivation of consciousness about conflict, and the radical interrelatedness of India’s diverse social fabric.

This article presents a nuanced discussion of four episodes on the complexity of possible trajectories for sustainable futures through diverse but intersecting practices and discourses as heterogeneous but complementary articulations of ‘adaptation and space.’ As design and creative processes evolve, new tools and methods, often adopted from science and technology, are integrated into art, design, and architecture. However, knowledge flow in these developments tends to be unidirectional, with science and technology influencing these fields more than vice versa. The diverse developments relating to the concept of ‘space’ have profound impacts on industries, urban habitats, design approaches, and the arts within the expanded field. This article engages in a conversation from four different disciplinary perspectives, each articulating its own voice in relation to the broad notion of ‘adaptation and space.’ Through this multidisciplinary dialogue, presented in four episodes, it critically contributes to the ongoing discussion on sustainable futures, offering new trajectories for Problem-Based Learning (PBL) beyond disciplinary boundaries. In an era dominated by umbrella terminologies like sustainability, the field of higher education faces the challenge of integrating different expertise to foster new solutions for complex challenges. This article highlights the need for diverse fields such as architecture, art, and social science to engage in a dialogue about perception, interaction, and manipulation of space. Its purpose extends beyond the exploration of novel solutions, instead inviting multifarious perspectives that shape interconnected agencies for sustainable futures and their impact on education.

In this paper, we explore urban cultural politics and policy-making in Austria through the conceptual lens of the arena. In relation to this, we apply the methodological toolbox of Adele CLARKE's situational analysis. With a focus on the dynamics of cultural political conflicts and negotiation, we analyze urban cultural policies and programming. A particular focus is placed on a city-wide cultural program in the city of Graz. Via interpretive analysis of interviews and situational mappings, we aim to analytically unpack the continuous and contingent processes of cultural political negotiation with conflictual consensus as a sensitizing concept. With this objective, our analytical engagement is situated at the intersection between radical democratic theory, referring mainly to Chantal MOUFFE and Oliver MARCHART on the one hand, and social worlds and arenas theory by Adele CLARKE on the other. We hope to contribute to a theoretically sensitized and empirically informed cultural policy research effort by operationalizing the notion of conflictuality in constellations of cultural political actors and negotiation processes in cultural policy-making.

All operate galleries that exhibit art, facilitate the production of new art and support artists' practices. Beyond What is Finished in Practice The integration of art projects as essential components of so-called "culture-led regeneration" has necessitated an interdisciplinary working practice be forged between planners and artists and art professionals. (Dis)Ordering Space and Sense in the Built Environment Danny McNally and Katie McClymont Robin Hood Gardens: The Aesthetic Politics of Listed Buildings Edward Brookes Screaming Public Art: Tonalities of Agonism in Planning Politics and Practice Friederike Landau-Donnelly and Jason Luger Mapping Cities - Intersections in Art and Planning Gloria Lanci Beyond Beauty - Re-Discovering Planning as Civic Art Katy Lock and Rebecca Lambert From the Ground Up: Non-Profit Galleries and Planning Gerda R. Wekerle Creative Practices for Planning Urban Mobility Elahe Karimnia Beyond What is Finished in Practice Julie Crawshaw Planning and Urban Imaginaries: A Reflection on Speculative Planning with Slum-Dwelling Children in the Philippines Aireen Grace Andal Planning for Environmental Change and Learning from Engaged Creative Practice George Revill and Liza Griffin A Speculative Afterword: (Dis)Ordering Space and Sense in the Built Environment Danny McNally and Katie McClymont Planning, Art, and Aesthetics: (Dis)Ordering Space and Sense in the Built Environment This I Interface i presents nine pieces which engage with the broad theme of "art and planning" in a new and diverse way. Outlook: Art, Planning and the Complex Tones of Our Time Thus, given the a(nta)gonisms, complexities and shifting tonalities of art's interface with urban planning, we return, critically, to the possibilities and challenges between planning and art. [Extracted from the article]

In this paper, we explore urban cultural politics and policy-making in Austria through the conceptual lens of the arena. In relation to this, we apply the methodological toolbox of Adele CLARKE's situational analysis. With a focus on the dynamics of cultural political conflicts and negotiation, we analyze urban cultural policies and programming. A particular focus is placed on a city-wide cultural program in the city of Graz. Via interpretive analysis of interviews and situational mappings, we aim to analytically unpack the continuous and contingent processes of cultural political negotiation with conflictual consensus as a sensitizing concept. With this objective, our analytical engagement is situated at the intersection between radical democratic theory, referring mainly to Chantal MOUFFE and Oliver MARCHART on the one hand, and social worlds and arenas theory by Adele CLARKE on the other. We hope to contribute to a theoretically sensitized and empirically informed cultural policy research effort by operationalizing the notion of conflictuality in constellations of cultural political actors and negotiation processes in cultural policy-making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focusing on the epistemic dimension of exclusionary institutional structures in the German cultural sector in relation to cultural production, this article searches for decolonial cultural policy conceptions that are critical of knowledge-related power imbalances and their entanglements. By taking the international art exhibition documenta fifteen in Kassel in 2022 as a case study, the paper examines the community- and collectivity-based practices and methodologies introduced by the Indonesian artist collective ruangrupa. In particular, this empirically grounded inquiry focuses on ruangrupa's lumbung values as a proposition of epistemic pluriversality. In this way, it also reveals various conflicts that occurred before and during the fifteenth edition of the exhibition, arisen from epistemological differences in perspectives, narratives, aesthetics and artistic methodologies between colonial and capitalism-critical cultural practices and Western art institutions. Following the tenets of the decolonial turn and decolonial thought, the paper explores alternatives to the dominant Eurocentric universalism of knowledge through the example of documenta fifteen, transcending the binary of either/or and advocating pluriversality as a universal option, rather than Eurocentric universalism as a singular totality, as proposed by Walter Mignolo. Following Catherine Walsh, the quest for the recognition and dissemination of pluriversal perspectives is intrinsically linked to the search for other ways of knowing, thinking, theorising and being that resist totalising power. In doing so, the authors ultimately seek to outline some attributes of decolonial conceptions of cultural policymaking, aiming at reducing epistemological inequalities in accessing cultural production for marginalised and racialised artists and cultural practitioners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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In this exploratory paper, we discuss local cultural political tensions in Austria's three largest cities (Vienna, Graz, and Linz). Against the backdrop of COVID-19, which hampered, yet also created new opportunities to host cultural events in public space, we analyze large-scale cultural events (Vienna and Graz), and a newly emerging cultural policy theme (Linz). Drawing on 30 qualitative interviews with cultural politicians, administrators, cultural producers, and artists (2020–2022), situational mapping, and the analysis of media coverage, we unpack (1) agential conflicts that manifest in unequal access to funding and decision-making; (2) symbolic conflicts that variously instrumentalize culture; (3) procedural conflicts that problematize lack of transparency and collaboration; and (4) spatial conflicts that materialize in diverging views about safety, cleanliness, and ownership of public space between state and self-organized cultural actors. Ultimately, we argue for a conflict-oriented approach to cultural policy to grasp the interrelations between power, agency, and space in cultural politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the political implications of public art using frameworks of conflict and antagonism. We introduce 'restor(y)ing' as an analytical scaling device for examining public art's potential to destabilise official planning processes and reclaim cities through acts of re-telling (restorying) and re-making (restoring) urban spaces. We probe how commissioned/formal and unsolicited/informal public art practices can concurrently operate as artistic activism – or 'artivism' – to subvert the status quo in urban contexts that encounter rising socio-spatial inequalities. We deploy restor(y)ing both as an epistemic and real-world commitment to challenging hegemonic powers, and thus amplify activist agendas of marginalised communities. Our argument demonstrates how such politics of restor(y)ing works as a device to unpack conflictual interrelations between 'æffects': affects and effects that political public art can invoke simultaneously, yet potentially unevenly. The politics of æffects reveal contestations around public art in urban planning contexts and policies, public communication, and reception. They foreground intended inclusions vs. systemic exclusions (politics of effects) and the emanating impacts on urban belonging vs. alienation (politics of affects). While much public art scholarship accentuates its alleged positive benefits, we attend to the (oft-ambiguous) negative, conflict-attuned æffects of public art. Ultimately, we advocate for an intersectional approach to restor(y)ing urban justice through public artivism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the limitations that pertain to the hierarchical nature and regulatory arrangements embodied in and through institutions, this article sets out to envisage museums as agonistic platforms that can contest the neoliberal hegemony and the predominant narratives of the West. To do so, it delves into the political presuppositions and organizing principles of Not An Alternative (a collective that works at the intersection of art, activism, and critical theory) and examines its theory of "institutional liberation" alongside other accounts of institutionality. By inventing a para-institution —the Natural History Museum—to infiltrate the natural history sector and by forging alliances with museum professionals and Indigenous-led campaigns, the article untangles Not An Alternative's understanding of museums as sites to be seized and turned into counterpower infrastructure. In this respect, this article aims to contribute to critical theories that engage with questions of institutionality by reimagining the role of museums in a time of mounting inequalities and climate emergency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines entanglements between past, present and futures of queerness visible in monuments as materialized forms of memory. We distinguish between queer monuments (i.e. positioning, and potentially imposing reified representations of queer history or memory) and the queering of monuments (i.e. challenging heteronormative or otherwise reductionist historical discourses, practices or memorial cultures of remembrance). By reflecting on oscillations between institutionalization, recognition, commodification and counter-memorial practice, we suggest the queering of monuments as an unfinished conceptual trope that embraces the non-conclusiveness of the past and future. Queering monuments nuances underlying tensions about the meaning and aesthetics of queer-themed heritage sites, objects and subjects, which emerge from multi-stakeholder arrangements of monument-making. Our approach chimes with critical heritage and monument studies that emphasize performative, affective-emotional and ghostly dimensions of heritage. By pulling hauntology into queer memorial discourse, we discuss queerness as an embodied and epistemological appearance that can challenge presentist, monolithic and thus potentially exclusive understandings of both heritage and monuments. Through queer temporality we situate our reflections in the public monument ARCUS – Shadow of a Rainbow – Memorial for Homosexuals Persecuted during the Nazi Era in Vienna, Austria (2023). We unpack the conflictual constellations of past and present voices, materialities and memories around the sculpture, using the rainbow motif (which became a symbol for queer people in the 1970s) to remember the persecution of queers during the Nazi Era. The monument begs the question how Vienna seeks to brand itself as a 'rainbow city', while continuously displacing queer practices from urban public space. Queering, in sum, embraces ghosts of past and present complex histories, trauma and joy instead of squeezing them into smooth or unambiguous narratives. Queering monuments thus outline a conflict-attuned approach to queer(ing) art, curation and collaboration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article serves as an introduction to this Special Issue of Art & the Public Sphere on the topics of Queer(ing) art, curation and collaboration. The overall aim of this issue is to explore current trends in queer art, curatorial practice and forms of collaboration. The articles in this issue draw on international perspectives that provide the reader with global approaches to the topics in question. The following editorial is in three parts, the first explores a range of definitions or (un)definitions of queer and queering. Drawing on key theorists to provide context for their usage, we must preface that these definitions are by no means exhaustive but are illustrative of the type of writing available (although authors might also offer their own definition). The second part of the editorial explores a small selection of examples and approaches to queer art, curation and collaboration that we identify as significant. Again, this is not a full list of queer practice ongoing globally, but a small selection of case studies that act as examples that are pertinent to us. The final section of the editorial functions as a question and answer/interview between academic Dr Chris Green and project producer Dominic Bilton about Bilton's recent curatorial project (Un)Defining Queer, an exhibition held at the Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester throughout 2023. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This text resides alongside a soundwalk that took place in Al-Hussein Park, Amman, Jordan at the end of the first day of the Art and the City conference at Columbia Global Centre in Amman, June 2023, coordinated by Columbia University's Andrew Mellon Fellow Tijen Tunali. This text is not an explanatory component but an additional and complementary chorus of bird and human voices. As an art form, soundwalks take audiences out of the gallery, theatre and concert hall and connect participants to the sounds of a place, to listening at a specific site. A temporary intervention, soundwalks are a form of public art that enable audiences to engage socially and politically with place. This soundwalk was oriented to our troubled relationship with the more-than-human world, specifically the calls and songs of wild urban birds. In addition, at the end of the soundwalk a participatory component encouraged attendees to contribute to a voicing structured using experimental written scores. This text is an informal narrative in a story-telling and inclusive writerly style, grounded in fieldwork, creativity and research. It is polyphonic: the voices of the birds occur throughout the text as do several of the participants from the soundwalk. The structure of the text drifts and spirals like a bird gliding upwards on a warm thermal. It circles around the soundwalk that is at the heart of the writing. There are pauses and diversions throughout. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relation between politics, ontology, and space remains one of the most contested concerns in human geography, often leading to a dismissal of ontology in favor of the politicization of space. In contrast, this article mobilizes post-foundationalism to propose a political ontology of space. After reviewing geographers' engagements with politics, post-politics and the political, the article demonstrates how a post-foundational geography radically uproots geographic understandings of political and socio-spatial realities. Grounded upon parameters of negativity, contingency, and antagonism, the article equips geographers to grapple with the crumbling foundations of an uncertain present, and unknown futures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a nuanced discussion of four episodes on the complexity of possible trajectories for sustainable futures through diverse but intersecting practices and discourses as heterogeneous but complementary articulations of 'adaptation and space'. As design and creative processes evolve, new tools and methods, often adopted from science and technology, are integrated into art, design, and architecture. However, knowledge flow in these developments tends to be unidirectional, with science and technology influencing these fields more than vice versa. The diverse developments relating to the concept of 'space' have profound impacts on industries, urban habitats, design approaches, and the arts within the expanded field. This article engages in a conversation from four different disciplinary perspectives, each articulating its own voice in relation to the broad notion of 'adaptation and space.' Through this multidisciplinary dialogue, presented in four episodes, it critically contributes to the ongoing discussion on sustainable futures, offering new trajectories for Problem-Based Learning (PBL) beyond disciplinary boundaries. In an era dominated by umbrella terminologies like sustainability, the field of higher education faces the challenge of integrating different expertise to foster new solutions for complex challenges. This article highlights the need for diverse fields such as architecture, art, and social science to engage in a dialogue about perception, interaction, and manipulation of space. Its purpose extends beyond the exploration of novel solutions, instead inviting multifarious perspectives that shape interconnected agencies for sustainable futures and their impact on education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we introduce our special issue on the topic of "Social Worlds, Arenas, and Situational Analyses." We start by giving short introductions of situational analysis and of social worlds/arenas theory. By addressing both the commonalities between the individual articles as well as their distinctive features in terms of four thematic areas, we demonstrate the potential of situational analysis and of social worlds/arenas theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the term "gentrification" was coined by Ruth Glass in 1964, this concept and the phenomenon it referred to have been subject to change. This paper reviews the literature and employs Ian Hacking's work to investigate how two types of changes—that is, changes of the concept and of the phenomenon—are implicated by each other. By investigating the interaction between a classification and its class, it becomes possible to understand gentrification as, in Hacking's terms, a "moving target." This paper argues that gentrification can be conceptualized as such and explores the consequences of this for gentrification research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper explores the politics of (dis)assembling borders within Europe. It examines the performance of the Berlin-based artist collective Zentrum für Politische Schönheit (Center for Political Beauty, ZPS) in 2014, in which artist activists temporarily removed white border crosses commemorating death at the former Berlin Wall. With this unauthorized displacement, ZPS sought to problematize ongoing violence and death at European borders. Via a three-part analysis of the performance Erster Europäischer Mauerfall (First European Fall of the Wall), the paper outlines a political framework for understanding art around and against borders – contributing to accounts on border art and the politics of borders. Staged as critique against the official commemoration of the 25th anniversary of the Fall of the Wall, perceived by ZPS as festivalized and thus apolitical event, the multiple performance acts highlight material and emotional movements. They oscillate between past and present border death, commemorated and forgotten border objects, bodies, places. In particular, ZPS aimed to denounce (implicit) hierarchies regarding how and whose death at European borders is remembered via acts of (dis)assembling. By unsolicitedly (re)moving Berlin's border crosses (Act I), mobilizing over 100 activists to dismantle border fences and temporarily installing replica crosses at Southern EU borders and placing them in the hands of contemporary refugees (Act III), ZPS mobilized public concern about contemporary border politics and commemoration. The paper contributes to border studies that view borders as inherently complex and contingent symbolic, socio-spatial arrangements, which affect and are affected by objects, bodies, and policies that oscillate between contested absence and presence. Accompanied by controversial media coverage, the performance gathered (im)mobile bodies, moving objects, and multiple emotional responses about the what, where and who of Europe. Ultimately, politics of (dis)assembling unfold absence and presence to articulate mo(ve)ments of 'the political' as contestation against complacency and border violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The year 2020 was accompanied by a new apocalyptic zeitgeist. After the COVID-19 pandemic shattered lifeworlds in many societies around the world, it seemed easy to imagine it to be the end of the world. No image was more evocative of this moment than that of the empty city. Due to the various lockdowns implemented in numerous countries, images of empty cities spread across the media. This paper investigates this image by emphasising the political implications of the apocalyptic imagination. By focusing on those who remain in the public space after the city was emptied, this paper questions whether the image of the empty city simply fuels the fantasies of 'urban exploration', as critiques have stated, or if it, rather, paves the way for an open view of the inequalities produced by urban societies today. Therefore, the paper stresses that the remaining people we see in the images of emptied public spaces are mainly those who either have no home to stay inside or work for those who stay inside. Subsequently, it investigates the particular qualities of public spaces pictured during the lockdowns. Imagining cities as empty has been vehemently criticised through the notion of 'ruin porn'. In contrast to this critique, the paper emphasises that the image of the empty city allows us to see the city with 'inhuman' eyes, which leads to a shift in perspective through recognising how little public space is still available when it no longer functions under the imperative of the pre-pandemic status quo. In concluding, the paper reflects on the subversive, or 'emancipatory', potential of witnessing the urban void opened up by the pandemic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In autumn 2020 the open-air construction fence exhibition Face It! of Vienna's city museum (Wien Museum) was repeatedly damaged and marked with graffiti during demonstrations against measures taken by the government to fight the COVID-19 pandemic. Ultimately, the museum decided to re-curate the initial exhibition and exhibited the protesters' graffiti markings instead. Approaching these events through situational analysis, I interrogate their political and politicizing dimension in reference to Chantal Mouffe's idea of 'agonistic pluralism' and a radical democratic conceptualization of museum practice. By delineating their agonizing effect, I argue for a conflict-attuned notion of graffiti-based cultural practices in order to foster their democratic potential. In the end, I assess the museum's decision to re-curate and ask if it contributes to a democratization of its practice and furthermore which role (re-politicized) museum education did and could play in this context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we examine how the Conflictorium – Museum of Conflict in Ahmedabad, India, grapples with the complex and interrelated phenomena of emptiness and absence. We explore how emptiness at once appears, disappears, and reappears in museum spaces, and how activist curatorial choices around exhibition-making and community engagement intermingle with subtly enforced prohibitions (i.e., orchestrated or planned absences) from state actors. Accordingly, we discuss emptiness as both a spatial and discursive challenge, which mobilises tensions around what a museum 'is', what takes place in museums and who undertakes such actions. While we take note of the unprecedented phenomenon of emptiness in museums around the globe due to the Covid-19 pandemic, we nevertheless argue that emptiness has always existed in both traditional, larger-scale museums and in alternative (e.g., community-organized, self-funded, temporary or smaller) institutions. Emptiness can be perceived in various ways, but often manifests in privileging some narratives over others, excluding certain voices, bodies, and stories while granting others ample space on pedestals and exhibition walls. Forging a critical engagement with existing museum definitions, the Conflictorium considers a museum to be 'nothing' more than what its artists, curators and diverse audiences make of it – thus placing emptiness, as one manifestation of more structural absence, at its core. In accordance with this 'negative' approach to museums, we interweave political theories of conflict and antagonism (Landau et al. 2021; Marchart 2018) with critical museum studies' accounts on the 'radical democratic' (Sternfeld 2018) and 'activist' museum (Janes and Sandell 2019) to conceptualise how emptiness can operate as a crucial component of (un)making museums as places for activism. In conclusion, the paper offers a conceptual discussion of activist museums' political engagement with emptiness beyond pandemic survival strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Is a virtual museum experience the same as a physical museum experience? In her concluding remarks to I Empty Museums i , Ana Maria Theresa Labrador draws on her discussions with museum managers across Southeast Asia to reflect on the need to look for new ways to approach disruptions and unforeseen events in museum practice. This issue of I Museum International i examines the unprecedented pandemic crisis and shows the ways in which museums have found opportunity therein, reaffirming the promotion of museum work as a resilient tool to support communities and as a catalyst for effective recovery. Massimo Bernardi invites the museum community the take on the Anthropocene as a useful concept for climate change adaptation, and to solidify museums' commitment to shaping new and more sustainable visions for a post-Anthropocene world. [Extracted from the article]