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With its vast network of canals, Thailand’s capital Bangkok once earned its nickname as ‘Venice of the East’ during the nineteenth Century. Although many of the ‘khlongs’ (canals) have long been fi...

This article focuses on the Athens Polytechnic, an emblematic site that has been the epicentre of historical ruptures during which it has been extensively graffitied. It is based on a corpus consis...

This article examines the crisis of informal urban imagery as an indicator of a crisis of urban communication. It refers to the situation of the late 2010s–20s when the saturation of the city with ...

In the imaginary of nation-states, and in much (forced) migration and border studies, the wall is the metaphor par excellence of ‘hardened, securitised’ and, ultimately, ‘violent borders’ (Jones 20...

This paper explores the graffiti and street art produced during the 2017 postal plebiscite for same sex marriage in Australia, including activists’ creative visual responses to the hate speech that proliferated in urban and suburban areas during this highly charged period. The paper has a particular focus on the wholesale erasure of street art and graffiti bearing political messages in support of, or against, marriage equality. Communities increasingly exert stewardship over the public visual landscape, and may engage directly in buffing graffiti or street art deemed offensive, or defending and restoring work deemed valuable. This analysis draws on repeat photography and video materials showing a series of attempted erasures of pro-same sex marriage murals by so called religious ‘activists.’ These materials show both the active challenges from passersby these erasures attracted, and the buffers’ defense of their actions, which affords a unique level of insight into the divisive social dialogue of this period.

The cultural commons which foregrounded an aesthetically pleasing and affective commitment to Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement’s comprised, in addition to urban graffiti juxtaposed with posters a...

Graffiti is an important theme for our understanding of subcultural urban space and the ‘shadows’ of the city. This paper examines their spatial concentration in Holesovice district of the Czech ca...

Urban art is a relatively recent artistic realm whose salience has grown during the previous decade. In the Lisbon Metropolitan Area, the emergence of urban artists and the consolidation of this ar...

This interpretive visual report interacts with repertoires of graffitied messages photographed at two university campuses in Hong Kong after skirmishes laced with tear gas and fire between students...

Unauthorised posters stuck on public walls and street furniture contribute to a sense of place in ways that transcend their usual characterisation as unwanted graffiti and visual pollution They are a common sight in Newtown-Enmore, a destination precinct of Sydney, Australia In September-October 2020, at a time when COVID-19 restrictions were easing, I found that many of the fly-posters in this district related to COVID-19 either directly or indirectly While some advertised entertainment venues, most were political, their messages ranging through leftist, anarchist and conspiracy theorist propaganda This visual essay documents not only the posters themselves but also evidence of public engagement with them It captures a two-way battle that was being waged, with people ripping some posters down or writing over them, and in return, bill posters pasting up new notices condemning the defacers The effect of this heightened flyposter activity was to bring about change to the local streetscape in a remarkable but subtle way [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of Visual Studies is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use This abstract may be abridged No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract (Copyright applies to all Abstracts )

Graffiti and its ancillary forms have been used for a wide variety of purposes including ornamentation, territorial demarcation, commercial announcements and political contestation. This visual ess...

Socio-spatial politics characterise the city and the subcultures that reside within her. This paper is centred on the visual tensions and dialogues embedded in the graffiti which shape and transfor...

During the course of 2020 there have been plenty of restrictions on human rights, but there has also been what might be described as ‘artistic anarchy’. Particularly in the period of March–June 202...

This essay offers a new perspective on the creative origins, aesthetic qualities, and socio-cultural significance of Tom Wilson’s newspaper comic, Ziggy. More specifically, I point out the ways in ...

Graffiti culture has expanded rapidly since its inception in the 1970s, and is now an established practice. Graffiti is part of the visual culture of many societies, and constitutes the visible par...

Unraveling the entanglements of fetish and secrecy bound up in the graffiti on the Palestinian face of the Israeli Separation Wall, this article analyzes the proliferation of defacements of the Aus...

This research studies the discursive ways in which male student graffiti at Midlands State University reveal ethnic tensions between the Shona and Ndebele of Zimbabwe. The study is carried out in a...

Gender expressions in a person’s daily rituals or representations in the media are critical in understanding gender relations. Studies on representations have generally focused those presented in t...

Painting Publics: Transnational Legal Graffiti Scenes as Spaces for Encounter is beautiful. It is a joy to see color photos, many of which were taken by the author, throughout the book allowing the...

Based in Argentina, La Asociacion de Mujeres Meretrices de Argentina (Ammar), an organization that advocates for sex workers’ protection of labor rights, launched a Banksy-style graffiti campaign t...

In September 2019, I attended the CIMU (Ciudad Mujeres) festival, celebrating woman-identifying writers and street artists, at the National Autonomous University of Mexico in Mexico City. During th...

Caitlin Frances Bruce’s ​Painting Publics: Transnational Legal Graffiti Scenes as Spaces for Encounter​ explores scenes of publicity and public making through visual culture. Bruce draws upon and e...

This work examines the discursive bases to Hong Konger identities by using a repertoire of anti-mainland and pro-democracy graffiti that impose alternative, counter-geographies onto space. Given th...

While big spatial data is certainly useful as a means of getting to know a place, to get closer to actually understanding a place, the rigorous and sometimes slow process of conducting on‐the‐groun...

The goal of this article is to analyse the distribution of American movies in Italy in the central part of the twentieth century (1930–1996), using methods derived from both social sciences and qua...

In this paper, we seek to further understand Gert Biesta’s pedagogy in the interest of publicness. Through an analysis of street art in Melbourne, Australia, we re-think pedagogies in the interest ...

The creation of graffiti in bathrooms is a common practice in colleges and universities in China and abroad. This private form of expression provides a unique way to understand young adults in cont...

This essay analyzes the grammar of military graffiti in Nigeria to uncover the mindless posture with which the military deploys it to assert their power, identity, and temporal orientations in ways...

The Saint graffiti on the northern-most bluff of Cudtheringa (Castle Hill), Townsville, forms part of a decade-long sequence of paintings on rock by non-Indigenous male groups. The sequence compris...

One of the aspects that distinguishes the investigation and conservation of rock art in Australia, the Americas and parts of Africa from other parts of the world is the intrinsic link between rock ...

The politics of graffiti and street art are often described in binary terms: criminalization of graffiti enhances its oppositional potential; its legalization destroys its counter hegemonic essence...

This essay investigates how two graffiti artists, whose works challenge political power structures and incorporate symbols associated with Islam, have negotiated with, and been impacted by, their p...

This article analyzes communication in and on the May 1968 movement in France as found in graffiti, slogans, and a committee’s newsletter, and contrasts it with a 1998 book on 1968 publishe...

The international symbol for squatting originated in Amsterdam in late 1979. Its origins and particular meaning are less clear. This article investigates several possible influences on the design o...

Zero tolerance policies against graffiti are rooted in moral panic and ‘broken windows’ theory, forging connections between illegal interventions in the city and social disorder. While these connec...

Graffiti has long been a topic of study for social scientists. The unique medium of graffiti allows the writer relative autonomy, and may offer insight about deviance in society. The presen...

During the Second World War Germany established its southern front or Sudwall, running from the Spanish to the Italian borders and following the Marseille coastline, as a defensive line against an Allied invasion. The defenses served the Wehrmacht, who occupied the area from 1943, and to this day remnants of the military bunkers and forts can be seen in Marseille, on the white rocky coast of the Calanques and on surrounding islands, such as the Iles du Frioul. Unlike the Atlantic bunkers in Brittany and Normandy, the history of the Sudwall is not well known.My series of photographs seeks to unearth these fortifications, which, because they are built of concrete, are virtually integrated into the rocky landscape of the coast. Were it not for the colourful graffiti and images that adorn them, they would vanish into the landscape, like camouflaged soldiers. I am not interested in a study of anthropomorphic forms, but in the form of the landscape itself as an environment for the bunkers, which through...

The paper provides a comparison of political graffiti in Rome and Buenos Aires. It examines ten photographs in each city and explores their properties through a detailed and intensive process of de...

In recent years, a vibrant literature on urban informality has emerged in urban geography. A key claim of this literature is that informality is not only present in cities in the Global South, and ...

Monument Avenue, a national historic landmark in Richmond, Virginia, has long been famous for its grand portrait monuments honouring local Civil War “heroes.” In 1996, the memorial landscape change...

For decades Hip Hop cultural practices have been disparaged for allegedly inciting and being responsible for the eruption of urban violence. This assumption, likely built upon pre-existing biases r...

This article studies illicit street art and graffiti subculture among women in Helsinki, taking feminist subcultural theory into account. In previous studies of illicit street art and graffiti, women’s participation has been overlooked partly due to lack of data and through the tendency of seeing them as one unified marginalised group. Through ethnographic fieldwork, using edgework as the methodological approach, and interviews with eight women painting street art and graffiti in Helsinki, this article presents a critical perspective on how these women negotiate their positions in the subcultures from different positions. Particularly, it examines the performed gendered distinctions between street art and graffiti, and the negotiations of subcultural subjectivity.

The piece takes as its inspiration Jacques Derrida’s article ‘Like the Sound of the Sea Deep within a Shell: Paul de Man’s War’ (1988) through which Simic understands her choice of the sea as her own ‘unforeseeable appeal’, a ‘matter of responding and of taking responsibilities’ (Derrida and Kamuf 1988: 595). The writing is also provoked by Emma Cox and Marilena Zaroulia’s conversation ‘Mare Nostrum, or On Water Matters’ in ‘On Sea/At Sea’ edition of Performance Research which touches on the image of Aylan Kurdi, a Syrian boy, found dead on the beach in Bodrum, Turkey in September 2015. The writing opens with the author’s sense of loss and belonging to her birth country of Yugoslavia explored in her performance work Blood & Soil: we were always meant to meet… (2011, with Jennifer Verson). The piece looks at a series of contemporary artistic responses to the migration crisis and children’s deaths at sea. These include Ai Weiwei’s crude re-enactment of Aylan Kurdi’s death, graffiti artists Justus Becker (a.k.a. Cor) and Oguz Sen (a.k.a. Bobby Borderline), Khaled Barakeh’s censored photographic images of drowned children on Facebook, Franko B’s carefully carved marble sculpture and the work of British-Iraqi hip-hop artist and political activist Kareem Dennis, better known as Lowkey. The writing closes with a remembering of Jill Greenhalgh’s performance Las Sin Tierra: 7 Attempted Crossings of the Straits of Gibraltar seen at Transit IV: Roots in Transit theatre festival in 2004, Holstebro, Denmark. This article discusses the unforeseeable appeals, many of which include an appropriate sense of failure and shame, when thinking about the sea as artists and academics.

Upon its release, American Graffiti (George Lucas, 1973) was much admired by critics and audiences alike. Yet, in subsequent years, the film became known for its supposed “flattening of history,” and celebration of patriarchal values. This article demonstrates that such a judgement owes much to Fredric Jameson’s historically contingent work on postmodernism, which argues that American Graffiti constitutes the paradigmatic nostalgia film. In contrast, using close textual analysis, I demonstrate that American Graffiti provides a more complex construction of the past, and of gender, than has hitherto been acknowledged. Far from blindly idealising the early 1960s, the film interrogates the processes through which the period and its gender relations come to be idealised. This article has consequences not only for our understanding of Lucas’ seminal film, but also for the American New Wave, and the “nostalgia” text.

Polyorganosilazanes (PSZs) are innovative materials which can be used to develop thin coatings of potential interest where corrosion protection, anti-graffiti and ease to clean properties are reque...

In this article, we examine graffiti abatement policies and programs in three West Coast U.S. cities: Portland, San Francisco, and Seattle. Through this analysis, several similarities in the graffi...

Dhaka has been, of late, the subject and setting of a number of graphic narratives, comic books, and street art. This essay examines how these visual texts engage with the larger networks of the ci...

Graffiti has impressively remained a cool esthetic for the best part of fifty years. This is a consistency in fashion-ability only bettered by sunglasses. Given the global popularity, commercial us...