Christine Ross

An exploration of how contemporary art reframes and humanizes migration, calling for coexistence--the recognition of the interdependence of beings. In Art for Coexistence, art historian Christine Ross examines contemporary art's response to migration, showing that art invites us to abandon our preconceptions about the current "crisis"--to unlearn them--and to see migration more critically, more disobediently. We (viewers in Europe and North America) must come to see migration in terms of coexistence: the interdependence of beings. The artworks explored by Ross reveal, contest, rethink, delink, and relink more reciprocally the interdependencies shaping migration today--connecting citizens-on-the-move from some of the poorest countries and acknowledged citizens of some of the wealthiest countries and democracies worldwide. These installations, videos, virtual reality works, webcasts, sculptures, graffiti, paintings, photographs, and a rescue boat, by artists including Banksy, Ai Weiwei, Alejandro Gonz lez I rritu, Laura Waddington, Tania Bruguera, and others, demonstrate art's power to mediate experiences of migration. Ross argues that art invents a set of interconnected calls for more mutual forms of coexistence: to historicize, to become responsible, to empathize, and to story-tell. Art history, Ross tells us, must discard the legacy of imperialist museology--which dissocializes, dehistoricizes, and depoliticizes art. It must reinvent itself, engaging with political philosophy, postcolonial, decolonial, Black, and Indigenous studies, and critical refugee and migrant studies.

Through the study of exemplary media works and practices - photography, film, video, performance, installations, web cams - scholars from various disciplines call attention to the unsettling of identification and the disablement of vision in contemporary aesthetics. To look at an image that prevents the stabilization of identification, identity and place; to perceive a representation that oscillates between visibility and invisibility; to relate to an image which entails a rebalancing of sight through the valorization of other senses; to be exposed, through surveillance devices, to the gaze of new figures of authority - the aesthetic experiences examined here concern a spectator whose perception lacks in certainty, identification, and opticality what it gains in fallibility, complexity, and interrelatedness. Precarious Visualities provides a new understanding of spectatorship as a relation that is at once corporeal and imaginary, and persistently prolific in its cultural, social, and political effects. Contributors include Raymond Bellour (Ecole des hautes etudes en sciences sociales), Monika Kin Gagnon (Concordia University), Beate Ochsner (University of Mannheim -Universitat Mannheim), Claudette Lauzon (McGill University), David Tomas (Universite du Quebec a Montreal), Slavoj Zizek (Ljubljiana University and University of London), Marie Fraser (Universite du Quebec a Montreal), Alice Ming Wai Jim (Concordia University), Julie Lavigne (Universite du Quebec a Montreal), Amelia Jones (University of Manchester), Eric Michaud (Ecole des hautes etudes en sciences sociales), Helene Samson (McCord Museum), and Thierry Bardini (Universite de Montreal)."

Through the study of exemplary media works and practices - photography, film, video, performance, installations, web cams - scholars from various disciplines call attention to the unsettling of identification and the disablement of vision in contemporary aesthetics. To look at an image that prevents the stabilization of identification, identity and place; to perceive a representation that oscillates between visibility and invisibility; to relate to an image which entails a rebalancing of sight through the valorization of other senses; to be exposed, through surveillance devices, to the gaze of new figures of authority - the aesthetic experiences examined here concern a spectator whose perception lacks in certainty, identification, and opticality what it gains in fallibility, complexity, and interrelatedness. Precarious Visualities provides a new understanding of spectatorship as a relation that is at once corporeal and imaginary, and persistently prolific in its cultural, social, and political effects. Contributors include Raymond Bellour (Ecole des hautes etudes en sciences sociales), Monika Kin Gagnon (Concordia University), Beate Ochsner (University of Mannheim -Universitat Mannheim), Claudette Lauzon (McGill University), David Tomas (Universite du Quebec a Montreal), Slavoj Zizek (Ljubljiana University and University of London), Marie Fraser (Universite du Quebec a Montreal), Alice Ming Wai Jim (Concordia University), Julie Lavigne (Universite du Quebec a Montreal), Amelia Jones (University of Manchester), Eric Michaud (Ecole des hautes etudes en sciences sociales), Helene Samson (McCord Museum), and Thierry Bardini (Universite de Montreal)."

According to the National Institute of Mental Health, more than half of the world's population will have a depressive disorder at some point in their lifetimes. In The Aesthetics of Disengagement Christine Ross shows how contemporary art is a powerful yet largely unacknowledged player in the articulation of depression in Western culture, both adopting and challenging scientific definitions of the condition. Ross explores the ways in which contemporary art performs the detached aesthetics of depression, exposing the viewer's loss of connection and ultimately redefining the function of the image. Ross examines the works of Ugo Rondinone, Rosemarie Trockel, Ken Lum, John Pilson, Liza May Post, Vanessa Beecroft, and Douglas Gordon, articulating how their art conveys depression's subjectivity and addresses a depressed spectator whose memory and perceptual faculties are impaired. Drawing from the fields of psychoanalysis as well as psychiatry, Ross demonstrates the ways in which a body of art appropriates a symptomatic language of depression to enact disengagement - marked by withdrawl, radical protection of the self from the other, distancing signals, isolation, communication ruptures, and perceptual insufficiency. Most important, Ross reveals the ways in which art transforms disengagement into a visual strategy of disclosure, a means of reaching the viewer, and how in this way contemporary art puts forth a new understanding of depression.

Metro pour L'Ecosse covers the Scottish curriculum at S3 and S4, taking into account the requirements for Standard Grade and Intermediate Levels 1 and 2. It follows on from Metro 1 and 2 but can be used as a stand-alone course. It is a clearly structured course that focuses strongly on grammar and gives students plenty of opportunities for practice and revision throughout, to help them face the exams with total confidence. This Rouge book is for General/Credit/Intermediate 2. It includes grammatical progression and clear explanations for pupils; optional primer sections ("Deja vu") at the start of each chaper which revise earlier material; opportunities to practise all four skills; and special sections which focus on key areas such as extended writing and speaking practice.