Editorial | Winter 2025
Welcome to FIELD’s Winter 2025 issue. We are pleased to feature the second half of Sreejata Roy’s two-part study of recent engaged and community art practices in India (the first half appeared in our Fall 2024 issue). Sreejata’s essay explores three innovative projects developed since the 1990s by women attempting to reclaim public space, including DIAA (Dialogue Interactive Artists Association) in Bastar, founded in 1997 by Mumbai-based artist Navjot Altaf, the Hamdasti Collective in Kolkata, founded by Sumana Chakraborty in 2014, and Blank Noise, founded in Bangalore in 2003 by Jasmeen Patheja. This issue also includes Oliver Noble’s examination of the role of utopia in the work of British artist Stephen Willats. Willats has developed an innovative body of collaborative, community-oriented art over the past five decades, much of which involves site specific installations developed with public housing residents.[1] We are also pleased to include Sascha Crasnow’s account of her experience teaching contemporary Palestinian art history at the University of Michigan in the midst of the Gaza genocide. Sascha sought to activate art historical study to create a pedagogical space in which the experience of the ongoing trauma in Gaza could enter into dialogue with the history of Palestinian art. Gaza protests, of course, have become a touchstone for conservative attacks on freedom of speech and dissent on U.S. campuses, and Sascha’s essay inspired us to release a Call for Papers for essays exploring the myriad forms of censorship and repression that have accompanied the rising tide of neo-fascism in the U.S., Europe and beyond (see “Latest News” on the main page of FIELD). We are also delighted to include three short reports in this issue that will inaugurate an ongoing series edited by FIELD editorial board member Greg Sholette. The essays serve to update and expand the double issue of FIELD that Greg edited in Winter/Spring 2019 (Issues #12 and #13), which surveyed engaged art practices developed in response to the global rise of authoritarianism. Our current issue features Oliver Ressler, examining troubling developments in Austria under the far right FPÖ (Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs), Marco Baraville writing on the situation in Italy under the Meloni government, and the related appointment of Pietrangelo Buttafuoco as president of the Venice Biennale, and Cristina Pratas Cruzeiro and Raquel Ermida exploring the growing normalization of far-right politics in Portugal.
Grant Kester
FIELD is available at: www.field-journal.com.
[i] For more on Willats’s work see: Grant Kester, “Starting from Zero: Stephen Willats and the Pragmatics of Public Art,” (Afterimage, May 1992). https://www.academia.edu/15580157/Starting_from_Zero_Stephen_Willats_and_the_Pragmatics_of_Public_Art_Afterimage_May_1992_
