Fine Arts Commons^™

Introduction – Musiques Au Proche-Orient Après Le Tournant Numérique, Amr Abdelrahim, Thomas Michel, Nicolas Puig

Regards

Le développement des pratiques du do it yourself, l’avènement des home studios et la multiplication des circulations sonores (samples, échantillons sonores, etc.) grâce aux supports numériques et aux plateformes d’écoute ont modifié en profondeur la production musicale au Machreq. Cette introduction dresse le tableau des études produites sur la musique au Proche-Orient depuis l’avènement du numérique au début des années 2000 ; elle passe en revue les différents paradigmes mobilisés et propose une approche centrée notamment sur les Science and Technology Studies pour comprendre le sens des évolutions en cours.
Elle décrit ensuite les différentes contributions qui alimentent ce …

Liminality And Monopoly: Contextualizing The Transformations Within The Egyptian Digital Music Scene After 2013, Fayrouz Karawya

Regards

The echoes of the political upheavals, notably in Egypt post-2011 and elsewhere in the Arab world, have produced a supra-monopolistic structure of music production systems and streaming platforms, reflecting post-revolutionary political strategies amid autocratic restoration across the region. While the digital age initially offered greater freedom and creativity to a rising “mediated dissidence class” and countercultural music currents, post-2013 strategies increasingly instrumentalized digital platforms to impose authoritarian control and restrict musical expression. In parallel, social media platforms, which have become crucial for musical mediation, promotion, and marketing, have mirrored broader social and political polarizations that emerged in the post-2013 period. …

Le Stade Rotana De La Pop Arabe, Pierre France

Regards

Rotana, owned by Saudi prince Al-Waleed bin Talal, has been a central and ambiguous player in the Arab music industry since the 1980s, yet its history remains fragmentary and elusive. More than a simple record label with a defined sound and aesthetic, it stands as an audiovisual group embedded within a large holding company linked to Gulf-style capitalism. Rotana has established a lasting model where music operates in close connection — or dependency, from a more critical perspective — with other economic sectors, shaping both artists’ career paths (conceived as buy/sell transactions and transfer markets) and how songs are produced. …

Contentious Culture: The Convergence And Contestation Of Class And Identity In Egypt’S Mahraganat Scene, Elisa Schouten

Regards

Since its inception in the early 2000s, Mahraganat music has undermined traditional cultural gatekeeping and reshaped Egypt’s music scene, becoming one of the country’s most debated music genres in recent history. This paper aims to examine Mahraganat within the broader context of cultural identity formation and technological developments and contextualize the criticism of the genre and its makers. Building on research conducted in Egypt’s capital between 2019 and 2024, this paper explores the history of cultural gatekeeping and argues that social class lies at the core of the heated debate surrounding Egyptian music and Mahraganat in particular. It shows that …

Brehony Louis, "Palestinian Music In Exile: Voices Of Resistance", Le Caire, Auc Press, 2023 – El Rashidi Yasmine, "Laughter In The Dark: Egypt To The Tune Of Change", New York, Columbia Global Reports, 2023., Amr Abdelrahim

Regards

The contributions of this special issue demonstrate a renewed scholarly interest in popular music in the Middle East in recent years. In the face of resilient Arab authoritarianism and the continuing ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians, it is not surprising that many scholars seek to identify a glimmer of hope in the everyday cultural practices of the dominated. The two volumes under consideration are representative of this scholarly impetus, as well as the challenges it must overcome to attain a better understanding of “music in everyday life”: namely articulating art and politics without collapsing one into the other, and resisting …

The Independent Music Scene In The Levant Between 2003 And 2023: Do-It-Yourself With The Support Of Arts And Culture Organizations, Areej Abou Harb

Regards

The beginning of the 21st century witnessed the rise of the internet and mobile technologies, as well as the expansion of the digital sphere and the emergence of the Do-It-Yourself music. Simultaneously, it experiences significant changes that reshaped the arts and cultural scene in general, and the music production in particular across the Levant. This period marked the institutionalization of arts and culture production and diffusion. It saw the formation of “intermediate” pan-Arab and regional organizations such as Culture Resource (Al-Mawred Al-Thaqafy) and AFAC (The Arab Fund for Arts and Culture), as well as the establishment of small record labels, …

Sonic Acts Of Care: Friendship-Based Networks And Grassroots Activism In Beirut, Rim J. Irscheid

Regards

The article examines a Beirut-based network of self-funded, independent musicians that translate memories and their emotions into artistic and activist practices. Drawing on musical albums created since the 2020 Beirut port explosion, the article explores the social and emotional impact of artist-run spaces for music production. Focusing on a friendship-based network around the collectively-run recording studio Tunefork Studios, it examines how care, trust, and solidarity with Lebanon’s citizens and music producers are translated into both their creative practices and their production and distribution strategies. I argue that Beirut-based musicians increasingly thematise the emotional toll and personal investment in political, infrastructural …

Promouvoir Son Image Et « Se Faire Un Nom » Dans La Scène Rap Proche-Orientale : L’Exemple De Soundcloud, Thomas Michel

Regards

This article examines the role of the SoundCloud platform in building careers for independent rappers and producers in the Middle East, particularly in Jordan and Palestine. Based on an ethnographic survey conducted between Amman and Jerusalem, the author analyses how artists use this platform to make themselves known, distribute their music, and navigate a digitized musical ecosystem. The study draws on Popular Music Studies and studies of digital platforms to examine three main areas.
The first concerns visibility, through the recommendation tools and playlists offered by SoundCloud, which provide local and international exposure. The second looks at the forms of …

Floridians, Michael Anglim-Lindros

PANDION: The Osprey Journal of Research and Ideas

The purpose of this piece is to explore species present in Florida by depicting native species alongside commonly seen non-native ones. I decided to focus on mammals, specifically those I have personally observed while living in North Florida. By illustrating their unadorned skeletal remains, I hope to inspire viewers to consider the similarities, differences, and relationships among these organisms, as well as the lives they lead on shared land.

The species depicted in this piece are (clockwise from middle) Homo sapiens (human) - non-native; Tadarida brasiliensis (Mexican free-tailed bat); Dasypus novemcinctus (nine-banded armadillo); Sciurus niger shermani (Sherman’s fox squirrel); Odocoileus …

Juntos Hacemos El Cambio Por Nuestros Mares, Alanis N. Davila Marquez

PANDION: The Osprey Journal of Research and Ideas

Notas preliminares

Juntos hacemos el cambio por nuestros mares es una obra de teatro escrita colaborativamente por el curso IDS 1932 (FYE) Teatro para la salud, de la profesora Dr. Nuria Ibáñez y representada por la clase el 3 de noviembre de 2024 en Museum of Contemporary Art de Jacksonville, producida por las profesoras Dr. Maureen McCluskey y Dr. Nuria Ibáñez. La obra reflexiona sobre la relación entre nosotros los humanos y el océano, explorando profundamente cómo nuestras acciones afectan la salud de los ecosistemas marinos y, al mismo tiempo, nuestra propia salud. Al escribir la pieza buscábamos traducir las …

Space For New History: Stony Island Arts Bank, Seb Taylor

Digital Laboratory: Publisher of Internet Journal

The Stony Island Arts Bank (SIAB) in Southside Chicago was designed and founded as a piece of art itself, with the organizational structure being a museum of Black cultural production. This article examines how the institution constructs an epistemology of Blackness through its archival practices, community programming, and spatial claims on the South Side. Founded by artist Theaster Gates through the Rebuild Foundation, the SIAB positions institutional design as an art medium, operating in productive tension with orthodox museum methods. The permanent collections—including the Johnson Publishing Company archives and Frankie Knuckles vinyl collection—function as epistemological records of Black self-documentation unmediated …

Deslenguadas: A Photo Essay On The Performative Remembering Of The Impact Of 1940s Americanization Programs In Northern New Mexico, Yvonne M. Montoya, Fawn-Amber Montoya

International Journal on Responsibility

This photo essay captures the dance performance Deslenguadas by choreographer Yvonne Montoya. Deslenguadas, a dance inspired by a writing of the same name published in Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, is a series of three dances – one duet and two solos. The dances in the series explore the impact the forced loss of the Spanish language had on three generations of one nuevomexicano family from the 1940s to the present day. Through dance, movement, projected animation, and spoken word, the dances explore how each generation internalized racism and shame. At the same time, these generations …

Front Matter, Kris K. Belden-Adams

Art Inquiries

No abstract provided.

A Formidable Female Network: The Role Of Women In William Henry Fox Talbot’S Establishment Of Early Photography, Rose Teanby Phd

Art Inquiries

This paper explores how women assisted William Henry Fox Talbot (1800-1877) to establish his Photogenic Drawing and Calotype photographic processes in Great Britain and Europe. Utilising preserved contemporary correspondence as a primary source of unedited transcribed conversations, the genesis of photography can be revisited from an alternative viewpoint of extensive familial collaboration. Letters between Talbot and his female relatives exposed a sophisticated network of interconnected mid 19^th century social elite, providing multiple opportunities for informal advocacy and timely dissemination of the new scientific art.

Epistolary exchanges from 1839 to 1858 provide new insights into women’s subtle, less visible influence …

Review: The Visionary Art Of Minnie Evans, Cynthia Fowler

Art Inquiries

The Visionary Art of Minnie Evans was a small exhibition of 16 drawings and paintings by Minnie Evans (1892-1987) on loan to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA) from the Cameron Art Museum in Wilmington, North Carolina, which holds a significant collection of her work. Evans was born in North Carolina and spent most of her life in Wilmington. Her artworks are colorful compositions rich with decorative details that illustrate her dreams and visions. But the exhibition attempted to expand our understanding of Evans’s work beyond them. Divided into three categories — “Wilmington Landscapes,” “Spiritual Nature,” and “Visual Culture” …

Exhibition Review - Sung Tieu: 1992, 2025, Lina Alam

Art Inquiries

Over the last decade, we have witnessed the ascendancy, consolidation and mobilization of far-right movements around the world – not least in Germany. The Vietnamese-German artist Sung Tieu lives there and produces mixed-media work on recent histories of state violence, racism, migration and surveillance. In her solo show 1992, 2025 at the KW (Kunst Werke) Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin, Tieu expanded on her previous projects about the 1980 labor recruitment agreement between the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and the Socialist Republic of Vietnam that resulted in nearly 70,000 Vietnamese workers relocating to Germany. Her new body of work …

Review: 60th October Salon - What’S Left?, Rachel Klipa

Art Inquiries

Spread across nine venues and public spaces in Belgrade, Serbia, the 60th October Salon’s concept posed a pressing question: What’s Left? In a moment marked by oppressive capitalism, cultural erasure, and the slow dismantling of socialist ideals, this year’s biennial resisted nostalgia and nationalism. Instead, it probed the emotional and political residues of systems in flux, examining how art can sustain memory, provoke continuity, and imagine new futures in uncertain times.

Redefining Gender And Rural Life In The Pampas: Alessandra Sanguinetti’S The Adventures Of Guille And Belinda Series, Alejandra López-Oliveros

Art Inquiries

At the time of Argentina’s independence, the gauchos (nomadic horsemen) had become the symbol of the nation in its purest form. Celebrated as independent, heroic and strong, and usually portrayed as the sole inhabitants of the Pampa, the idealized image of the gaucho has flooded popular culture and art even today, to the detriment of flesh-and-bone wage laborers of all genders. As opposed to this static image, I propose to examine Alessandra Sanguinetti’s photographic series, The Adventures of Guille and Belinda (ongoing since 1999), which focuses on girls and women in the countryside, pointedly highlights their previous absence. By contrasting …

Conjuring Elizabeth Fulhame: Using Ai To Depict The Invisible Woman From The Dawn Of Photography., Yvette Hamilton

Art Inquiries

Histories of the origins of photography are dominated by men, but the lesser-known contributions of women, such as the British chemist Elizabeth Fulhame, were fundamental to its success. Fulhame’s eighteenth-century chemical experiments directly contributed to the birth of photography, however, she is either totally obscured, or only briefly footnoted, in foundational texts on the history of photography. Her obscuration is heightened by the complete absence of any surviving images of her - she is, quite literally, invisible within a medium whose history privileges the visible.

This paper charts my practice-led research that used AI generative imaging to create speculative portraits …

Review: Luna Luna: Forgotten Fantasy, Jessica J. Stephenson

Art Inquiries

In 1987, Luna Luna, a fairground/immersive art installation, opened in Hamburg, Germany. A decades-long project in the making, it was conceived and realized by André Heller, a Vienna-based avant-garde artist, musician, film-maker, and author favoring multimedia work including circuses, parades, variety shows, firework displays and poetic gardens. Over the course of three months, about 300,000 attendees traversed Heller’s Luna Luna’s exuberant space with performances, music, and rides on art works that took the form of Ferris wheels, carousals, infinity mirror rooms, puppet shows and other theatrics. The works were created by more than 30 artists including notable 20 …

Review - Shahzia Sikander: Collective Behavior, Annie Dell'aria

Art Inquiries

Shahzia Sikander’s work spans traditions from multiple continents, eras, and media. Trained in the traditional miniature painting of South Asia and Persia, yet creating monumental pieces that command space both inside and outside the gallery, this artistic polymath maintains a signature style rooted in sumptuous detail and motifs that drip with layers of meaning. In Collective Behavior, a multi-part, career-spanning traveling museum exhibition of works made over the past 35 years, Sikander’s full array of talent and artistic evolution is on display.

Art Inquiries Volume Xx No 1 2025 - Full Issue, Kris K. Belden-Adams

Art Inquiries

No abstract provided.

Greta Gerwig And Pina Bausch: A Comparative Analysis Of Creative Processes, Ashley N. Reisert

Senior Theses

This paper examines the creative processes of film director Greta Gerwig and dance choreographer Pina Bausch. More specifically, it compares the techniques both artists employ to inspire movement and produce a successful end product. Greta Gerwig’s background in theater provides the impetus behind many of her directorial choices. This paper explores three of her values that have contributed to her success: realistic dialogue, actor connection, and capturing reality. Pina Bausch’s process stems from the performers themselves; she often provides them with prompts, such as questions to inspire movement. Through the analysis of these two influential artists, I have found that …

Dust To Dust, Emma Ask

SPARK Symposium Presentations

"Dust to Dust" is a small group dance composition inspired by Genesis 3:19 and other passages referring to the human experience as that which is Earthly (dust). In this piece, the scripture is used as a framework for telling the story of life and the cyclical nature of being molded and created by God, the interweaving pathways of life in Creation and the eventual return to that which we were created from. In this piece, we are offered a chance reflect on the juxtaposition of the intricacy of our individual lives and the vastness and beauty of the collective human …

Pathos, Fall 2025, Portland State University. Student Publications Board

Pathos

Editor: Adriana Stanzione

Tom Wingfield Is The Villain: A Re-Examination Of The Glass Menagerie, Genevive K. Bevell

SPARK Symposium Presentations

This essay is an exploration of the play The Glass Menagerie, by Tennessee Williams, through a feminist lens that offers a new interpretation of the famous play, supported by evidence from Williams’s own personal history, feminist interpretations of Williams’s work, and the discussion of what a protagonist really is. I argue that Tom, who is traditionally considered the protagonist, operates as an unreliable narrator and, therefore, the antagonist to Amanda and his sister Laura, impeding their happiness and sense of well-being. I propose that The Glass Menagerie is not about a man defying societal expectations or choosing happiness in …

Bartók’S Romanian Folk Dances: A Consideration Of Sound And Movement, Bailey Frame

Theses and Dissertations

Béla Bartók (1881-1945) cared deeply about authenticity in his work. He continually passed by derivative versions, and instead sought the oldest, earliest, most inaugural version of each folk tune to use as that launching point for his compositions. As he collected the Transylvanian folk tunes that would become his Romanian Folk Dances, he disregarded inconveniences like bad weather and exhausting travel, and he doggedly lugged with him a newly invented Edison phonograph. Though it was unwieldy and fickle, the device allowed him to capture folk music in the moment it was created. Not one for sterile auditoriums or music studios, …

Dari Editor Vol. 15 No. 2 (Agustus) 2025, Rahayu Surtiati Hidayat

Paradigma: Jurnal Kajian Budaya

Dengan gembira kami menerbitkan sepuluh artikel dan dua timbangan buku dalam edisi ini; terbitan rekor untuk jurnal ini. Kami berharap dapat menerbitkan banyak artikel dalam setiap edisi. Isi tulisan yang kami terbitkan juga meningkat mutunya baik dari segi penelitian maupun penyajian. Tiga artikel menarik perhatian dengan menunjukkan berbagai karya yang menjadi lambang kejayaan suatu negara dan keguyuban suatu komunitas (Titik Pudjiastuti, Muhamad Alnoza, Nur Aini Setiawati). Tiga artikel lain membahas kehadiran pendatang yang mengubah sistem dalam negara (Dien Rovita Rovita, Mela Maulina Putri, Rudi Ekasiswanto). Tidak kalah menarik empat artikel bertemakan karya sastra (Asri Pratiwi Wulandari, Raka Darmawan, Haikal Haikal) …

Serat Yusuf: Sastra Islam Populer Di Jawa Timur, Titik Pudjiastuti, Mamlahatun Buduroh, Mu’Jizah Mu’Jizah, Rias Suharjo, Turita Indah Setyani, Dwi Rahmawanto

Paradigma: Jurnal Kajian Budaya

Serat Yusup is one of the popular Islamic literary works in Java, especially in East Java. This literary work is a handwritten ancient manuscript written in the form of tembang macapat, in Javanese language, and using Pegon or Javanese script. Serat Yusup which create by the students (santri) is inspired by Surah Yusuf, the 12th Surah of the Quran. As a literary work, its story differs significantly from its inspirational text, and there are so many of it. In relation to this, the question arises: what are the reasons behind the creation of Serat Yusup and why is it …

Keidiomatisan Kompositum Berleksikon Hati Dalam Bahasa Indonesia, Dien Rovita, Sonya Puspasari Suganda, Untung Yuwono

Paradigma: Jurnal Kajian Budaya

A compound (kompositum) is a construction formed through word formation by combining two or more elements to create a new meaning. In Indonesian, compounds can be formed by combining several elements, one of which may be a nominal lexeme referring to a body part. Compound words can be distinguished from other word combinations—particularly syntactic phrases—based on grammatical and semantic criteria. Semantically, compounds can be analyzed according to the degree of idiomaticity in their meanings. Based on this premise, the present study aims to explain the idiomaticity of compounds in Indonesian that are formed by combining multiple elements, one of which …