This issue brings together reviews and essays exploring identity, memory, resistance, and political truth.
Jean Bundy’s book review, Indigenous Tattoo Traditions: Humanity through Skin and Ink by Lars Krutak (Princeton, 2025) is about how and why, ‘for more than 5,000 years’ Indigenous tattoo artists worldwide, painfully cut and poked imagery into the skins of their communities.
Enxi Liu’s film review, Prisoners of Time: Within the Crystalline and Suspended Image, interprets, “Beginning by Georgian director Dea Kulumbegashvili, and Atlantics by Franco-Senegalese director Mati Diop…. Both reveal a deep truth about how trauma and injustice can make the now itself a prison.”
Will Fredo Furtado’s essay, Not for Sale: How Black and Indigenous artists are rewriting the rules of the art market surmises, “The art markets’ interest in art and culture from the Global Majority in the past decade has been welcomed…yet not often questioned or challenged.”
Amrutha Pradeep’s essay, The fires rise as the paint dries theorizes, “We live in a world today where the information of war, destruction, or violence is no longer a shocking but a usual occurrence….The art world provides something that is becoming more and more scarce…a place to feel.”
Carmen Ferreira de Terenzio’s essay, Future Ruins: Luis Paredes’ Photographic Archeology asks, “What would you do if a fire consumed your life's work, your archive of photographs, your negatives?....Twenty-one years after a fire destroyed much of his photographic archive, Paredes has transformed destruction into…‘visual essays exploring themes of the future’ from the charred remnants.”
Heather E. Dunn’s exhibition review, Political Truth through the Eyes of New York City Artists, discovers, “Current conflicts related to immigration are brought to light.... [while] Themes of war, women’s rights, and political protest, against the Trump administration... pulse through the show.” Curator Zachary Frater derives the show’s title ‘The Truth As I see It’ from a quotation by social activist Audre Lorde (1934-1992).