With the increasingly global nature of artistic production and exhibitions, new questions are arising with regard to the politics of aesthetics. What visual forms, what image formats can do any semblance of justice to the ever more complex global processes of transfer and transformation? This was also the point of departure for a springerin symposium that took place in Vienna in December 2002. Some of the contributions to this symposium are included in this issue in part or in modified form.
The question of an image politics that is adequate to the present situation is answered here in different ways and from a wide range of viewpoints. For instance, Brian Holmes takes a general look at the ambiguous relationship between art and politics, and in the process discovers tactical, and also »playful,« reciprocal utilisations. The Senegalese group Huit Facettes focuses on direct intervention in regions that suffer extreme economic neglect, with visual production being only one activity among many. And Armin Linke, the Milanese photo-encyclopaedist, is working on a sort of monumental picture atlas about the iconography of the present day, of which a small part – photos from a trip to Iraq undertaken with Italian peace activists – is shown here.
This is complemented by articles on locations and crisis regions today where visual regimes encounter political states of emergency. Whether on the West Bank, in Argentina or – going back a bit further in time – in the newly independent Algeria of the early 1960s: all of these places provide examples of the way in which a specific form of image creation confronts the changing realities in an active and considered manner.