Volume 4, Issue 1: Document/ary

Refract’s fourth volume explores the entanglements between the document and the documentary as sources of information and forms of visual culture. Derived from the Latin docere (to instruct, to teach), the document can be a pedagogical tool, a disciplinary measure, or a literary and legal form that ascribes value to people and property and gives shape to cultural beliefs called laws. And yet, the document defies boundaries—it is at once literary, sociological, scientific, and historical while also being a material object with affective qualities.

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Cover image; light colored, braided hair.

Amalia Mesa-Bains and the Archive: An Interview with the Artist

Amalia Mesa-Bains and Madison Treece

A black and white photograph of a circular, floral wreath with a ribbon.

Memory Matter(s)

Silvia De Giorgi

Oil painting of St. Denis preaching to a crowd of people while angles and a seated male figure float above them.

Denis Diderot’s “Salons” as Art Conservation in Eighteenth-Century France

Delanie Linden

Cover image; light colored braided hair.

Neustadt a.d. Aisch

Marla Elisabeth Heid

Cover image; light colored, braided human hair.

The Struggle of Memory against Forgetting: Afterlife and Memorialization of Imagery Surrounding South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission

Madeleine Bazil

Juxtaposition of a man in a uniform hugging a woman and a man in a suit hugging another man

Tito/Tata: Fiction and Factuality in Documentary Photographs of the Father Figure in Communist Yugoslavia

Paula Muhr

The Somatic and Textural Language of Patricia Belli: Recrafting Social and Political Bodies in 1990s Nicaragua

Lesdi C. Goussen Robleto

Grandmother’s Garden, Artist Statement

Amy Reid

Customs and Border Protection Officer standing at the U.S.-Mexico Border.

Review of An-My Lê: On Contested Terrain

Rachel Klipa

A Catalog of American Things

Marisa J. Futernick

I’m New Here: Black and Indigenous Media Ecologies: Curatorial Statement

Tao Leigh Goffe and Tatiana Esh

Swirling black and white lines surround the text “Mexico 68” and five circular Olympic rings in the center of a logo design.

Olympic-Scale Subversion: Poster Art, Architecture, Performance, and the Afterlives of Mexico 1968

Nathan J. Goldberg

A trail of black, gray and white papers beginning with a paper that reads PERMEABLE PREAMBLE.

Authoritative Forms

Sayward Schoonmaker

A blue-tinted map demonstrates the flow of the Moscow Canal running from the Ivankovo Reservoir to Moscow.

Thinking of Water as a Material Witness: An Attempt to Fill the Voids in the Archive of the Moscow Canal (1932–37)

Nastia Volynova

Ground Maps of an Unknown Prospect

Elpitha Tsoutsounakis

Synthesizing a Dual-Definition of Façade in the Western Palaces of the Yuanming Yuan: Art, Politics, and Place-making in the Garden of Perfect Brightness

Stella Gatto

A black-and-white photograph of the Johannesburg city skyline, overlaid with the text, JOZI RHAPSODY.

Jozi Rhapsody: Tracing a City’s Legacy through Time

Ncomi Nzimande

A color photograph of a woman in a short black dress and heals paints the border wall from black to sky blue.

Documenting Gender’s Signs: Site, Performance, and the US-Mexico Border in Contemporary Art

Margeret Allen Crocker

VOICES OF VISUAL STUDIES

Visualizing Precarity and Security: Mona Hatoum’s Drowning Sorrows and Guadalupe Maravilla’s Walk on Water

Catherine S. Ramírez