Guest Editors Special Section: Visual I...

This special issue builds on the understanding that pictorial and visual intervention has become increasingly central to the way societies enact, re-enact, and process their tensions, identities, and values. Pictorial media and visual performance initiate, deepen, convey and transform conflict in contemporary democratic societies, but also in the informal public spheres emerging in one-party societies such as China or and in illiberal democracies (“democraturas”) such as Russia. Art and popular visual culture mediate solidarity and constitute a community spirit, revive democrarcy and expand our sense od reality. Pictorial media, artistic expression and the creation of a visual presence in the streets and via new social media serve activists and political actors to stage distrust toward elites, to represent claims, but also to make counter-expertise visible and to denounce shortcomings and undesirable developments. In the political process pictorial media and visual performances become sites of controversy and debate about society and about political initiatives, about what is right and wrong, pure and dirty, good and evil by combining a productive agency with a representational effect. They can tip reigning certainties into crises and produce events as well as stirring the production of further, different images. Finally, they provide fantasy creations in which the subject can view and examine itself anew and often expose elements and tendencies that remain un-articulated in what is explicitly discussed in public negotiation.