Pub Date : 2022-08-08DOI: 10.1080/25785273.2022.2109846
Neha Bhatia
ABSTRACT Studies of Indian cinema have traditionally placed more emphasis on directors, stars, aesthetics and issues of ideology than on the practices of creative producers. Although these are important concerns, the role of Indian producers deserves careful scholarly attention, especially in the context of transnational film projects, where producers are often involved from the pre-development stage through production and distribution. To address this problem, this article examines the production stories of an Indian creative producer, Guneet Monga (1983-), who is well-known for setting up Indian-European co-productions that deviate from contemporaneous spectacle-driven mainstream Bollywood productions. Through an in-depth personal interview with the producer herself and insights from film and media production studies, this article demonstrates how Monga’s micro-production stories reveal larger creative and collaborative practices that are transforming India’s independent film production culture and making it more transnational. This article shows that producers––the least researched figure in Indian film scholarship––gain several navigational tactics through transnational co-productions such as telling tales of tenacity, hustling and interpersonal networking, among others. These tactics, in turn, challenge the precarious conditions of working in the Bollywood-dominated film culture of India.
{"title":"The transnational tales of an Indian creative producer: the case of Guneet Monga","authors":"Neha Bhatia","doi":"10.1080/25785273.2022.2109846","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/25785273.2022.2109846","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Studies of Indian cinema have traditionally placed more emphasis on directors, stars, aesthetics and issues of ideology than on the practices of creative producers. Although these are important concerns, the role of Indian producers deserves careful scholarly attention, especially in the context of transnational film projects, where producers are often involved from the pre-development stage through production and distribution. To address this problem, this article examines the production stories of an Indian creative producer, Guneet Monga (1983-), who is well-known for setting up Indian-European co-productions that deviate from contemporaneous spectacle-driven mainstream Bollywood productions. Through an in-depth personal interview with the producer herself and insights from film and media production studies, this article demonstrates how Monga’s micro-production stories reveal larger creative and collaborative practices that are transforming India’s independent film production culture and making it more transnational. This article shows that producers––the least researched figure in Indian film scholarship––gain several navigational tactics through transnational co-productions such as telling tales of tenacity, hustling and interpersonal networking, among others. These tactics, in turn, challenge the precarious conditions of working in the Bollywood-dominated film culture of India.","PeriodicalId":36578,"journal":{"name":"Transnational Screens","volume":"66 1","pages":"234 - 248"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-08-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"74008223","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-06-30DOI: 10.1080/25785273.2022.2094612
S. Ponzanesi, Ana Cristina Mendes
This special issue proposes new ways of seeing and thinking about postcolonial intellectuals through the frame of transnational screens. For this purpose, the issue develops around the twofold notion of the intellectual as a filmmaker and the intellectual as an object of filmmaking. In particular, it focuses on the ways in which this interrelationship expands notions of postcolonial theory and practice regarding the aesthetic and political intervention of intellectuals in transnational screen culture. Many postcolonial figures have been influential not only in rethinking the ways in which representation should be conceived and theorized but also in inspiring new forms of visuality and aesthetics through their life and work. These figures include Frantz Fanon, Assia Djebar, and Stuart Hall, and others explored in this issue, such as Toni Morrison, Raoul Peck, Ai Weiwei, and Steve McQueen. The special issue also includes exclusive interviews with Ai Weiwei and Trinh T. Minh-ha, artists, intellectuals, activists, and filmmakers whose engagement with postcolonial debates, and more broadly with the politics and aesthetics of filmmaking, have contributed to a reshaping of contemporary postcolonial realities and discourses, in scholarship and the public sphere.
{"title":"Screening postcolonial intellectuals: cinematic engagements and postcolonial activism","authors":"S. Ponzanesi, Ana Cristina Mendes","doi":"10.1080/25785273.2022.2094612","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/25785273.2022.2094612","url":null,"abstract":"This special issue proposes new ways of seeing and thinking about postcolonial intellectuals through the frame of transnational screens. For this purpose, the issue develops around the twofold notion of the intellectual as a filmmaker and the intellectual as an object of filmmaking. In particular, it focuses on the ways in which this interrelationship expands notions of postcolonial theory and practice regarding the aesthetic and political intervention of intellectuals in transnational screen culture. Many postcolonial figures have been influential not only in rethinking the ways in which representation should be conceived and theorized but also in inspiring new forms of visuality and aesthetics through their life and work. These figures include Frantz Fanon, Assia Djebar, and Stuart Hall, and others explored in this issue, such as Toni Morrison, Raoul Peck, Ai Weiwei, and Steve McQueen. The special issue also includes exclusive interviews with Ai Weiwei and Trinh T. Minh-ha, artists, intellectuals, activists, and filmmakers whose engagement with postcolonial debates, and more broadly with the politics and aesthetics of filmmaking, have contributed to a reshaping of contemporary postcolonial realities and discourses, in scholarship and the public sphere.","PeriodicalId":36578,"journal":{"name":"Transnational Screens","volume":"56 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-06-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77472460","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-05-19DOI: 10.1080/25785273.2022.2076980
Gabriel Moreno-Esparza
captures the particularity of the non-western political cinema of this age without getting lost in the outer reaches of Deleuze-speak. Curiously, despite explicit engagement with complex post-structuralist thinkers, Holtmeier frequently rests within the liberal-phenomenological. Holtmeier asserts that ‘film is an affective medium’ (19), that ‘cinema brings verisimilitude to politics by depicting the lived experiences of individuals caught in the midst of these cultural clashes’ (40), and in approaching mainstream critique of ISIS militants as overly humanised in Abderrahmane Sissako’s Timbuktu (2015), Holtmeier demurs that they are not ‘humanized so much as their militant subjectivities are compromised and complicated.’ (77) So – humanised then? If ISIS fighters are not individual agents who spend time grooming children or travelling to warzones and damning local culture but ‘complicated, globally networked subjects’ (78) then exactly what liberation or progress beyond neoliberalism and boundaries and precarity is made? Holtmeier is strong and precise when unpacking the subtle juxtapositions of globalism and fundamentalism in Timbuktu and more, but it is unclear which politics are being served in this analysis of the political cinema.
{"title":"Transnational Latin American Television: genres, formats and adaptations","authors":"Gabriel Moreno-Esparza","doi":"10.1080/25785273.2022.2076980","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/25785273.2022.2076980","url":null,"abstract":"captures the particularity of the non-western political cinema of this age without getting lost in the outer reaches of Deleuze-speak. Curiously, despite explicit engagement with complex post-structuralist thinkers, Holtmeier frequently rests within the liberal-phenomenological. Holtmeier asserts that ‘film is an affective medium’ (19), that ‘cinema brings verisimilitude to politics by depicting the lived experiences of individuals caught in the midst of these cultural clashes’ (40), and in approaching mainstream critique of ISIS militants as overly humanised in Abderrahmane Sissako’s Timbuktu (2015), Holtmeier demurs that they are not ‘humanized so much as their militant subjectivities are compromised and complicated.’ (77) So – humanised then? If ISIS fighters are not individual agents who spend time grooming children or travelling to warzones and damning local culture but ‘complicated, globally networked subjects’ (78) then exactly what liberation or progress beyond neoliberalism and boundaries and precarity is made? Holtmeier is strong and precise when unpacking the subtle juxtapositions of globalism and fundamentalism in Timbuktu and more, but it is unclear which politics are being served in this analysis of the political cinema.","PeriodicalId":36578,"journal":{"name":"Transnational Screens","volume":"47 1","pages":"250 - 252"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-05-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86040437","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-05-04DOI: 10.1080/25785273.2022.2094613
Eszter Zimanyi
ABSTRACT Ai Weiwei is one of the most prominent contemporary artists to engage the so-called ‘migrant’ or ‘refugee crisis’ since 2015. His work spans several mediums, from feature-length documentary films to gallery exhibits, public installations, and social media content. Ai has garnered both admiration and criticism for his representations of migrants and refugees, with some critics alleging Ai’s works are tone-deaf and self-serving publicity stunts that disregard the uneven power dynamics between the artist and his subjects. These critiques, however, often overlook Ai’s postcolonial positionality and the ways in which his own experiences with exile shape his approach to representing mass displacement. In this essay, I offer a reappraisal of Ai Weiwei’s work by considering how his documentary practices productively discomfit viewers and invite audiences to interrogate the limitations of humanitarian art. Through close readings of his documentary film Human Flow (2017), gallery installation Laundromat (2016), and the notorious India Today portrait of Ai Weiwei as Alan Kurdi, I show how Ai destabilizes humanitarian documentary tropes typically used to represent refugees. In doing so, Ai calls attention to the constructed nature of his own work and invites viewers to re-examine their practices of looking.
{"title":"Interrogating the limits of humanitarian art: the uncomfortable invitations of Ai Weiwei","authors":"Eszter Zimanyi","doi":"10.1080/25785273.2022.2094613","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/25785273.2022.2094613","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Ai Weiwei is one of the most prominent contemporary artists to engage the so-called ‘migrant’ or ‘refugee crisis’ since 2015. His work spans several mediums, from feature-length documentary films to gallery exhibits, public installations, and social media content. Ai has garnered both admiration and criticism for his representations of migrants and refugees, with some critics alleging Ai’s works are tone-deaf and self-serving publicity stunts that disregard the uneven power dynamics between the artist and his subjects. These critiques, however, often overlook Ai’s postcolonial positionality and the ways in which his own experiences with exile shape his approach to representing mass displacement. In this essay, I offer a reappraisal of Ai Weiwei’s work by considering how his documentary practices productively discomfit viewers and invite audiences to interrogate the limitations of humanitarian art. Through close readings of his documentary film Human Flow (2017), gallery installation Laundromat (2016), and the notorious India Today portrait of Ai Weiwei as Alan Kurdi, I show how Ai destabilizes humanitarian documentary tropes typically used to represent refugees. In doing so, Ai calls attention to the constructed nature of his own work and invites viewers to re-examine their practices of looking.","PeriodicalId":36578,"journal":{"name":"Transnational Screens","volume":"33 1","pages":"141 - 156"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88551695","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-05-04DOI: 10.1080/25785273.2022.2080355
Florian Stadtler
ABSTRACT This article discusses Steve McQueen’s collaborations with the BBC to examine how his ‘Small Axe’ anthology of five films represents Black British experiences in Britain, charting discrimination, racially motivated violence, police persecution, and activism for social justice as well as ordinary life. The anthology chronicles events between 1968 to the early 1980s and centres anti-racist activism, resistance struggles, and key debates around Black British subjectivity. From a contemporary twenty-first-century lens, McQueen intervenes in important public debates, refracting them in the context of today, highlighting the ongoing importance and relevance of this history in Britain’s contemporary moment, especially in a time of increased racially motivated violence fuelled by ethno-nationalism. Arguably, through the platform of public service broadcasting, these interventions position McQueen in wider public debates and link him into Black British public intellectual traditions. The article argues that by focusing on key moments and events in Black British history, under-represented in mainstream narratives, and by collaborating with BBC One, McQueen opens up crucial questions about whose history is centred and how these events are opened up to wider public audiences. The article examines how McQueen intervenes in important public debates by centring the margins, and argues that the ‘Small Axe’ anthology challenges received understandings of Britain’s recent past and contributes to necessary conversations around social justice, equality and inclusion, especially important to ongoing debates around citizenship, belonging, and conceptions of Britain.
{"title":"Theatres of memory; un-silencing the past – Steve McQueen’s ‘Small Axe’ anthology","authors":"Florian Stadtler","doi":"10.1080/25785273.2022.2080355","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/25785273.2022.2080355","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article discusses Steve McQueen’s collaborations with the BBC to examine how his ‘Small Axe’ anthology of five films represents Black British experiences in Britain, charting discrimination, racially motivated violence, police persecution, and activism for social justice as well as ordinary life. The anthology chronicles events between 1968 to the early 1980s and centres anti-racist activism, resistance struggles, and key debates around Black British subjectivity. From a contemporary twenty-first-century lens, McQueen intervenes in important public debates, refracting them in the context of today, highlighting the ongoing importance and relevance of this history in Britain’s contemporary moment, especially in a time of increased racially motivated violence fuelled by ethno-nationalism. Arguably, through the platform of public service broadcasting, these interventions position McQueen in wider public debates and link him into Black British public intellectual traditions. The article argues that by focusing on key moments and events in Black British history, under-represented in mainstream narratives, and by collaborating with BBC One, McQueen opens up crucial questions about whose history is centred and how these events are opened up to wider public audiences. The article examines how McQueen intervenes in important public debates by centring the margins, and argues that the ‘Small Axe’ anthology challenges received understandings of Britain’s recent past and contributes to necessary conversations around social justice, equality and inclusion, especially important to ongoing debates around citizenship, belonging, and conceptions of Britain.","PeriodicalId":36578,"journal":{"name":"Transnational Screens","volume":"54 1","pages":"129 - 140"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90779804","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-05-04DOI: 10.1080/25785273.2022.2076857
Ana Cristina Mendes
ABSTRACT Framed by an understanding of Raoul Peck as a transnational filmmaker performing the role of a public intellectual, this article reads Exterminate All the Brutes, his self-referential and self-reflective documentary released on HBO in 2021, as an essay film that scrutinizes the role of image-making in the production of history to advance a form of counterhistory and a practice of ‘potential history.’ This reading of the structural hinge between visual apparatuses, imperialism, and white supremacy – the core story Peck aims to crack open ‘from the inside out’ in the essay film – engages with Ariella Aïsha Azoulay’s arguments, in Potential History, on how the camera shutter operates as the primary mechanism of imperialism. To demonstrate Peck’s deployment of scripted fictional scenes in Exterminate as a documentary strategy of creating a counterhistory and rehearsing ‘potential history,’ I consider two re-enactments: 1) the archival montage of wet-plate photographs (c. 1872–1873) of the Victorian explorer Henry Morton Stanley and his enslaved adopted child Ndugu M’hali (renamed Kalulu), and 2) the dramatization of Frederic W. Farrar’s lecture on the ‘Aptitude of Races’ delivered at the Ethnological Society of London in 1866.
本文将拉乌尔·佩克理解为一个扮演公共知识分子角色的跨国电影制作人，并将其作为一部散文电影来阅读，这部纪录片是他于2021年在HBO上映的自我参照和自我反思的纪录片，审视了图像制造在历史生产中的作用，以推进一种反历史形式和“潜在历史”的实践。这种对视觉设备、帝国主义和白人至上主义之间的结构联系的解读——派克在这部散文电影中旨在“由内而外”揭开的核心故事——与阿雷拉Aïsha阿祖莱在《潜在的历史》中关于照相机快门是如何作为帝国主义的主要机制运作的论点相结合。为了证明派克在《灭绝》中使用脚本化的虚构场景是一种创造反历史和排练“潜在历史”的纪录片策略，我考虑了两个重演:1)维多利亚时代探险家亨利·莫顿·斯坦利(Henry Morton Stanley)和他被奴役的收养的孩子恩杜古·姆哈里(Ndugu M ' hali，后来改名为Kalulu)的湿板照片档案蒙太奇(约1872-1873年);2)弗雷德里克·w·法拉(Frederic W. Farrar) 1866年在伦敦民族学学会(Ethnological Society of London)发表的关于“种族的能力”的演讲被改编成戏剧。
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Pub Date : 2022-05-04DOI: 10.1080/25785273.2022.2078568
D. Olivieri, T. Minh-ha
ABSTRACT This article consists of a conversation between dr. Domitilla (domi) Olivieri, scholar and activist, and Trinh T. Minh-ha, renowned filmmaker, writer, theorist, and professor. Through questions and answers, the piece starts with Trinh’s take on the notion of the intellectual; the dialogue then continues by traversing some of the themes and issues that characterise Trinh’s work as a filmmaker and a scholar: films as forms of political and intellectual intervention; the matter of (diasporic) communities, subjectivities, and locations; how the issue of labels and genres plays out in the film industry; the question of audiences; the film as encounter; politics of knowledge productions; matters of time and temporalities. Sustaining the conversation is also an understanding that Trinh’s films do not only address issues of (trans)national movements, encounters, technologies, poetry, and rhythms of lives, but they also enact and perform those very movements. Finally, the article discusses Trinh’s legacies as feminist and postcolonial practices, and the role of criticism and (non)knowing in her work across genres and registers of filmmaking that are complex and poetic, as well as strongly political.
{"title":"In the spiral of time: conversation between Domi Olivieri and Trinh T. Minh-ha","authors":"D. Olivieri, T. Minh-ha","doi":"10.1080/25785273.2022.2078568","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/25785273.2022.2078568","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article consists of a conversation between dr. Domitilla (domi) Olivieri, scholar and activist, and Trinh T. Minh-ha, renowned filmmaker, writer, theorist, and professor. Through questions and answers, the piece starts with Trinh’s take on the notion of the intellectual; the dialogue then continues by traversing some of the themes and issues that characterise Trinh’s work as a filmmaker and a scholar: films as forms of political and intellectual intervention; the matter of (diasporic) communities, subjectivities, and locations; how the issue of labels and genres plays out in the film industry; the question of audiences; the film as encounter; politics of knowledge productions; matters of time and temporalities. Sustaining the conversation is also an understanding that Trinh’s films do not only address issues of (trans)national movements, encounters, technologies, poetry, and rhythms of lives, but they also enact and perform those very movements. Finally, the article discusses Trinh’s legacies as feminist and postcolonial practices, and the role of criticism and (non)knowing in her work across genres and registers of filmmaking that are complex and poetic, as well as strongly political.","PeriodicalId":36578,"journal":{"name":"Transnational Screens","volume":"12 1","pages":"176 - 188"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82822160","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-04-29DOI: 10.1080/25785273.2022.2069754
L. Plate
ABSTRACT The Foreigner’s Home is a documentary film that is grounded in footage shot at the Louvre in November 2006, when the African American writer and Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison was guest-curator at the famous Parisian museum. It experiments with form to further public dialogue about citizenship, belonging, the legacies of slavery, and the power of art, articulating interviews, archival film footage, animation, and music in a homage to and amplification of Morrison’s intellectual and artistic vision. In this article, I discuss the documentary’s cinematic representation of Toni Morrison as a postcolonial intellectual, exploring its treatment of her as object of filmmaking, and inquiring into the ways in which this contributes to revisiting notions of aesthetic engagement and political intervention into the public sphere. Analyzing the film and bringing it in dialogue with other texts by and about Morrison, I examine the ways in which the documentary weaves and modulates the notion of the public intellectual Morrison represents. Dialogue, I argue, stands at the heart of this vision. Therefore, I especially attend to the dialogues the film stages, not only between people but also between texts, media, artworks, and artforms.
{"title":"Portrait of the postcolonial intellectual as a wise old woman: Toni Morrison, word-work, and The Foreigner’s Home","authors":"L. Plate","doi":"10.1080/25785273.2022.2069754","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/25785273.2022.2069754","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The Foreigner’s Home is a documentary film that is grounded in footage shot at the Louvre in November 2006, when the African American writer and Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison was guest-curator at the famous Parisian museum. It experiments with form to further public dialogue about citizenship, belonging, the legacies of slavery, and the power of art, articulating interviews, archival film footage, animation, and music in a homage to and amplification of Morrison’s intellectual and artistic vision. In this article, I discuss the documentary’s cinematic representation of Toni Morrison as a postcolonial intellectual, exploring its treatment of her as object of filmmaking, and inquiring into the ways in which this contributes to revisiting notions of aesthetic engagement and political intervention into the public sphere. Analyzing the film and bringing it in dialogue with other texts by and about Morrison, I examine the ways in which the documentary weaves and modulates the notion of the public intellectual Morrison represents. Dialogue, I argue, stands at the heart of this vision. Therefore, I especially attend to the dialogues the film stages, not only between people but also between texts, media, artworks, and artforms.","PeriodicalId":36578,"journal":{"name":"Transnational Screens","volume":"13 1","pages":"96 - 110"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-04-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78802493","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-04-17DOI: 10.1080/25785273.2022.2061143
Ana Cristina Mendes, Ai Weiwei
ABSTRACT Ai Weiwei positions himself first and foremost as a thinker, driven by curiosity and even selfishness, and not shying away from ridicule. Through immersion and direct response to different, unfamiliar conditions, he aims to defamiliarize pre-set thinking, not letting himself be trapped by rationality and led by simplified, predetermined conclusions about the world. Despite the self-proclaimed selfishness at their core, Ai’s artistic acts become selfless through resonance, inviting the viewer into his thought experiments with the world, which he engages with as if the world were a readymade. This conversation departed from the transnational film Tree (2021), where Ai meticulously documents the work of Brazilian and Chinese artisans in creating his 32-metre iron sculpture Pequi Tree (2018–2020). We began with political curiosity as a creative driver for the artist, the influence of Duchamp and Warhol, and the choice of the audiovisual medium to reflect reality. The conversation branched out to consider aesthetics, tying the issue of aestheticization to Ai’s role as a public intellectual, from an earlier refusal of aesthetics or ‘beautification’ in the interest of unmediated transparency to the realization that new aesthetics are needed for new publics.
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