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Books

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Kit Messham-Muir, Uroš Čvoro and Monika Lukowska-Appel (eds.)
The Politics of Art in War Zones: Art in Conflict

Bloomsbury, 2024

This urgent, timely, and important publication examines the ambiguous, distributed and often invisible world of warfare with conviction and insight.  It is compulsory reading for scholars of conflict and all those fascinated by the testimony of learned experience. 

Paul Gough 
Principal and Vice-Chancellor,
Arts University Bournemouth, UK

The Politics of Artists in War Zones: Art in Conflict,

Cover design: Abdul Abdullah, All Let Us Rejoice, manual embroidery made with the assistance of DGTMB Studios, Yogyakarta.  Courtesy of the artist and Yavuz gallery. 

Kit Messham-Muir & Uroš Čvoro
The Trump Effect
in Contemporary Art
and Visual Culture

Bloomsbury, 2023

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"Trump might have lost the 2020 election but there’s absolutely no reason to celebrate. As Kit Messham-Muir and Uroš Čvoro show in The Trump Effect in Contemporary Art and Culture it would be foolish to isolate Trump and explain his presidency as an aberration from some kind of political normalcy. Trump is the symptom of a much larger political aesthetic development in which politics has taken on the form of post-ideological battles where authoritarian politicians thrives attacking imaginary or real political opponents while making sure that any real transformation of late capitalist society is postponed. By focusing on the aesthetic dimension of contemporary authoritarianism Messham-Muir and Čvoro provide a very useful and highly original contribution to the analysis of the new fascist tendencies and the way these simultaneously contest and uphold a torn democratic public sphere." 

Prof Mikkel Bolt
Department of Arts and Cultural Studies,
University of Copenhagen

The Trump Effect in Contemporary Art and Visual Culture. Cover design: Tjasa Krivec

Cover image: The “Trump Baby” blimp, designed by Matt Bonner, now in the collection

of the Museum of London. Photo: AP. © Mike Kemp/Getty Images

Uroš Čvoro & Kit Messham-Muir
Images of War in Contemporary Art:
Terror and Conflict in the Mass Media

Bloomsbury, 2021

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"Lucid, expansive, and necessarily unsparing in its critique of intellectual orthodoxies, Images of War is an urgently important book.  Its argument is creatively theorized but deeply accountable to the realities of militarized violence, ethnonationalism, and authoritarianism.  Confronted with these phenomena and all their attendant harms, Uroš Čvoro and Kit Messham-Muir do more than simply insist, as many scholars have, that we need new ways of thinking about the world.  By patiently dismantling the theoretical paradigms that have come to dominate media and cultural studies, Čvoro and Messham-Muir clear space for a radical rethinking of what art can accomplish.  While most reflections on war in the contemporary moment begin with the attacks of September 11, 2001, Čvoro and Messham-Muir extend their historical framework back to 1989.  In so doing, they demonstrate that a narrow focus on 9/11 has generated a reactionary form of criticism destined to endlessly rehash itself.  By looking further into the past, they uncover the interlocking mechanisms of nationalism, violence, affect politics, and mediation that shape our present and threaten to dictate our collective future. Images of War refuses both platitudes and despair in response to that vision, and instead places its fragile hope in militant humanism and art as a political pedagogy of survival." 

Dr Rebecca A. Adelman
Professor and Chair, Department of Media and
Communication Studies, University of Maryland Baltimore County 

Images of War In Contemporary Art: Terror and Conflict in the Mass Media, cover design: Toby Way.  

Double War: Shaun Gladwell, Visual Culture and the Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, published by Thames & Hudson Australia.  Photo: Ossie Morris.  224 page, full colour, hard back. ISBN: 978-0-500-500054-5. Release date: 1 July 2015, RRP AU$49.99. Edited by Matt Price. Designed by Joe Gilmore / Qubik

"Gladwell’s Afghanistan proves to be ripe terrain from which Messham-Muir can prosecute the politics of visual culture that he establishes in his theoretical chapters"

 

Andrew Yip

(2016) 'Double War: Shaun Gladwell: Visual Culture and the Wars

in Afghanistan and Iraq, by Kit Messham-Muir,'

Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art, 16:1, 117

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