Preview
Issue 4/2025
It has long been a commonplace to note that art no longer dwells in safe zones. Yet the intensity with which today’s upheavals cut into its practice lends this truism a renewed urgency. Spaces of critical debate are becoming narrow, fragile infrastructures buckle under strain, and the very notion of a transnational public sphere that once carried art now falters under scrutiny.
The discourse on the “Global South” rightly occupies a central place in current debates, but often at the expense of those regions that fall outside both the media and economic spotlight. Places where artistic milieus hold themselves in precarious balance appear only as blind spots in the coarse cartographies of the present. Yet it is precisely there that art’s response to social upheaval becomes most sharply visible: as a site of critique, as an attempt at self-empowerment, as a fragile form of publicness.
What is at stake is not a retreat into privacy or a clinging to idealized autonomy, but the question of how art asserts its contemporaneity under advese conditions. How it experiments with the forms of togetherness where state and institutional structures collapse. How it drifts apart from its own diaspora or forges new alliances beyond official channels. And how, amid destruction, displacement or institutional marginalization, it opens spaces that cannot be easily co-opted.
This issue focuses on such fault lines. It searches for moments in which artistic practice unfolds its relevance not despite adverse conditions, but precisely because of them: at the margins, outside the mainstream narratives, in the interstices of critical attention.
Publication date: December 15, 2025