<p><span>Anna Barlik, <em>Anomaly 1 - Stairs</em>, 2022. Courtesy of the artist.</span></p>
<p><span>Anna Barlik, <em>Anomaly 1 - Stairs</em>, 2022. Courtesy of the artist.</span></p>

No. 36: Visibility and Invisibility of Violence

Managing editors: Agata Pietrasik, Dorota Sosnowska

Anna Barlik, Anomaly 1 - Stairs, 2022. Courtesy of the artist.

This issue was supported by the Film School in Łódź, SWPS University, Warsaw, and the Ministry of Education and Science in the framework of "Development of Academic Journals," project number RCN/SP/0698/2021/12.

Table of Contents

Introduction

  1. The Visibility and Invisibility of Violence

    ”The Visibility and Invisibility of Violence”, View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 36 (2023), https://doi.org/10.36854/widok/2023.36.2765

    Introduction to the thematic issue on the visibility and invisibility of violence. The photograph on the cover of the issue presenting Anna Barlik's sculpture – the spatial form into which a bloodstain congealed – serves as the starting point.

    keywords: violence; visibility; invisibility

CloseUp

  1. Reverberating Violence, Visibility, and the Dance of Rachid Ouramdane

    Carrie Noland
    Carrie Noland, ”Reverberating Violence”, View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 36 (2023), https://doi.org/10.36854/widok/2023.36.2719

    The essay explores how the French-Algerian choreographer, Rachid Ouramdane, absorbs the theme of torture into his works. As a practitioner of documentary dance, Ouramdane uses the testimony of torture victims and their families to generate movement that resonates with the trauma, rather than representing it mimetically. In two works that focus on torture, Loin [Far] of 2008 and Des Témoins ordinaires [Ordinary Witnesses] of 2009, Ourmdane raises questions concerning the limits of violent acts, where they begin and end, and how they create reverberations both in the body and the psyche. The essay follows his choreographic practice, examining how he builds his dances on professional and non-professional dancers to reflect their lived experience. In particular, the essay studies how the movements generated in the context of a response to torture return in other works based on the phenomenon of murmuration, also characterized by the transmission of shaped energy.

    keywords: dance; choreography; Rachid Ouramdane; documentary; torture; violence; reverberation; murmuration; France; Algeria

  2. Looking After the Dead: The Collective Gaze in Representations of Anti-Black Violence

    Janice Marie Yu
    Janice Marie Yu , ”Looking After the Dead”, View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 36 (2023), https://doi.org/10.36854/widok/2023.36.2740

    This article addresses the role of the collective Black gaze in media representations of anti-Black violence in the U.S. Studies and critiques of these images have traditionally centered on harmed victims at the cost of overlooking living witnesses. The author therefore turns to the African American communities pictured in media images surrounding the murders of Emmett Till (1955) and George Floyd (2020). Placing images of Black community at the center of analysis shifts the focus away from Black death and suffering, toward the lasting impact African Americans have had on the circulation and reception of anti-Black violence in the media. Till’s funeral and Floyd’s death are pinpointed as marking a departure from earlier incidents of racial violence. This article introduces the concept of the collective Black gaze – a mode of looking historically practiced by African American communities in response to the hypervisibility of anti-Black violence. The collective Black gaze not only offers a framework for reconfiguring racialized modes of looking, but it also functions as an act of care through which a community looks after their dead.

    keywords: anti-Black violence; lynching photography; police brutality; collective gaze; George Floyd; Emmett Till

  3. Mobilizing and Relativizing Violence: Interactional Aspects of Violence in Equal Status Groups Facing Moral Dilemma

    Waldemar Rapior
    Waldemar Rapior, ”Mobilising and Relativising Violence”, View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 36 (2023), https://doi.org/10.36854/widok/2023.36.2722

    Using the perspectives of microsociology, ethnomethodology and Goffman's sociology, the author analyzes the relationship between artificiality (theatricality) of decision-making, the affective dynamic of a laboratory situation (the theatre stage) and interactions between participants. In order to uncover silent methods of coordinating actions (contrary to overtly adhering to institutional rules), I decide to use an innovative methodology. Together with performance artists, I created a simulation of a research situation (an interactive theatre play), in which six people are faced with a moral dillema. The interactions were filmed and analysed with the use of a videograph. No person's position was privileged. What happens when two strangers, occupying an equal position, face a moral dillema? The article focuses on an analysis of violence, which appears in groups or violence which the groups have to face. The author demonstrates how violence is used in social circumstances and rendered relative in order to maintain an interactional order.

    keywords: soft violence; moral dillemas; ethnometodology; Milgram; Goffman; interactional aspects of violence; relativizing violence; mobilization of violence

  4. Self-defence. A Philosophy of Violence

    Elsa Dorlin
    Elsa Dorlin, ”Self-defence. A Philosophy of Violence”, View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 36 (2023), https://doi.org/10.36854/widok/2023.36.2742

    Polish translation of the fragment of the Elsa Dorlin's Se défendre. La philosophie du violence, Editions La Découverte, Paris 2019, pp. 150-181.

    keywords: autodefence; violence; empowerment; care; anamnesis

Viewpoint

  1. In your region, even the mountains are fake

    Lia Dostlieva
    Lia Dostlieva, ”In your region, even the mountains are fake”, View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 36 (2023), https://doi.org/10.36854/widok/2023.36.2757

    Presentation of the work of Lia Dostlieva regarding the Donets basin and its concomittant colonial traumas and reparative fantasies.

Perspectives

  1. “It Is the Spectacle of Violence that Matters There”: On the Margins of the Conversation with Elizabeth Dunn on Border Crises

    Elizabeth Dunn, Inga Hajdarowicz, Natalia Judzińska
    Elizabeth Dunn, Inga Hajdarowicz et al., ”“It Is the Spectacle of Violence that Matters There””, View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 36 (2023), https://doi.org/10.36854/widok/2023.36.2731

    A conversation with anthropologist, Elisabeth Dunn, on violence related to migration and on violence on Polish-Belarussian border.

    keywords: migration; refugees; camp; violence; humanitarian aid; war

  2. Visual History of the Warsaw Ghetto - Montages

    Anna Duńczyk-Szulc, Agnieszka Kajczyk, Katarzyna Bojarska
    Anna Duńczyk-Szulc, Agnieszka Kajczyk et al., ”Visual History of the Warsaw Ghetto - Montages”, View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 36 (2023), https://doi.org/10.36854/widok/2023.36.2747

    A conversation with the editors of the volume Anthology of Glances. The Warsaw Ghetto - Photographs and Films, E. Ringelblum Jewish Historical Institute-Warsaw Museum, Warsaw 2023 on visual historical sources from the Warsaw Ghetto, work on the selection and edition of photographs and frames and the various ways of looking at the ghetto.

    keywords: photography; Warsaw ghetto; film; Jews; Holocaust; memory

Panorama

  1. Polish and Iraqi artists in Baghdad, or peripheral cultural capitals and the negotiation of modernism

    Max Cegielski
    Max Cegielski, ”Polish and Iraqui artistis in Baghdad”, View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 36 (2023), https://doi.org/10.36854/widok/2023.36.2752

    In 1943, in Baghdad, refugee artists from the Anders Army (including Józef Czapski) collaborated with the pioneers of Iraqi modernism (including Javad Salim). The Iraqis supported the Poles, e.g. by lending their studios, and the painters also presented works together at exhibitions. The friendship of members of the peripheral elite from different cultures enabled them to define themselves and resist the colonial domination of the English, and to take a new look at local (Mesopotamian and Arab) art traditions. This influenced the development of Iraqi modern art and the formation of the Baghdad Group for Modern Art, creatively polemicising with Western models and combining them with Middle Eastern traditions. Juxtaposing Polish and Arab sources, the author shows the Polish-Iraqi artistic relationship in the light of postcolonial theories, centre-periphery relations and Pierre Bourdieu's types of cultural capital.

    keywords: postcolonialism; centre-periphery; cultural capitals; Anders Army; modernism; Iraq

  2. Zero-sum Game. The Economy of Shame in "A Time for Witches"

    Łukasz Kiełpiński
    Łukasz Kiełpiński, ”Zero-sum game”, View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 36 (2023), https://doi.org/10.36854/widok/2023.36.2759

    This article analyses the representation of socially excluded groups in Piotr Łazarkiewicz’s film A Time for Witches (1993). The director of the film, when creating the first Polish full-length production dealing with the domestic context of the AIDS problem, declared his intention to create a socially engaged cinema. On the one hand, the aim was to show the harsh reality of the Polish transition period in contradiction to the escapist tendencies of Polish cinema at the time. On the other hand, the purpose of the film was to speak out in defence of AIDS victims and to condemn Polish intolerance. However, at the expense of the symbolic acknowledgement of one group, the filmmaker seems to overlook the compensatory stigmatisation of the working class. This phenomenon is described in the text by an analysis of the way in which Otherness is constructed in the film and by referring to the context of the film's reception in the press of the first half of the 1990s in Poland.

    keywords: AIDS; Piotr Łazarkiewicz; Polish cinema; class; identity; transition period

Snapshots

  1. The Border of Necroviolence

    Wiktoria Tabak
    Wiktoria Tabak, ”The Border of Necroviolence”, View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 36 (2023), https://doi.org/10.36854/widok/2023.36.2750

    Review of the book Nekroprzemoc. Polityka, kultura i umarli [Necroviolence. Politics, culture and the dead] edited by Jakub Orzeszek snd Stanisław Rosiek.

    keywords: necroviolence, refugees, migrants, colonialism, racism, necropolitics

  2. Kenneth Anger and the Deadly Power of the Image

    Krzysztof Świrek
    Krzysztof Świrek, ”Kenneth Anger and the Deadly Power of the Image”, View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 36 (2023), https://doi.org/10.36854/widok/2023.36.2737

    This article is a presentation of the work of Kenneth Anger, who passed away in May 2023.

    keywords: Kenneth Anger; avantgarde cinema

  3. Time Is Not on Our Side: Reading "Solaris mon amour" by Kuba Mirkurda

    Peter Verstraten
    Peter Verstraten, ”Time Is Not on Our Side: Reading "Solaris mon amour"”, View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture 36 (2023), https://doi.org/10.36854/widok/2023.36.2754

    Review and analysis of the film Solaris mon amour by Kuba Mikurda.

    keywords: solaris; hiroshima mon amour; trauma