21: Inquiries into Art, History, and the Visual

In Memory of Michael F. Zimmermann (1958–2025)

Ursula Frohne — Tue, 22 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0200

Permanent Effects of Temporary Displays. Review of the exhibition “Dining with the Sultan. The Fine Art of Feasting”, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles (December 17, 2023 – August 4, 2024)

Yasmine Yakuppur — Tue, 22 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0200

Holger Kempkens & Christiane Ruhmann (eds.), Corvey und das Erbe der Antike. Kaiser, Klöster und Kulturtransfer im Mittelalter

William J. Diebold — Tue, 22 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0200

Alessandra Russo, A New Antiquity. Art and Humanity as Universal, 1400–1600

Stephen J. Campbell — Tue, 22 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0200

Tobias Frese, Lisa Horstmann & Franziska Wenig (éd.), Sakrale Schriftbilder. Zur ikonischen Präsenz des Geschriebenen im mittelalterlichen Kirchenraum

Vincent Debiais — Tue, 22 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0200

Mónica Domínguez Torres, Pearls for the Crown. Art, Nature, and Race in the Age of Spanish Expansion

Anna Grasskamp — Tue, 22 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0200

Darren Newbury, Cold War Photographic Diplomacy. The US Information Agency and Africa

Jennifer Bajorek — Tue, 22 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0200

Ignacio A. Adriasola Muñoz, Fragment, Image, and Absence in 1960s Japan

Ayelet Zohar — Tue, 22 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0200

Pamela Karimi, Women, Art, Freedom. Artists and Street Politics in Iran

Verena Straub — Tue, 22 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0200

On Leisure and Limbo

Hanni Geiger — Tue, 22 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0200

Contemporary artworks re-envision the Adriatic littoral as a frictional arena where tourism and migration converge, disrupting commercial images of seamless global connectivity. In installations and photographs by Renata Poljak, Ilir Tsouko, and Šejla Kamerić, beaches, hotels, and pools appear as liminal infrastructures shaped by both mobility and stasis, presence and absence, pleasure and struggle, and gendered dynamics. These non-commercial visuals challenge harmonised leisure imagery and design – envisioned for fluid exchanges, short stays, communication, ease, and equal access – by revealing protracted waiting, invisibilities, and exclusions. Viewed through a dis:connective lens, the coastal sites emerge as dynamic nodes of voluntary and forced movements, questioning commodified maritime regions. Artistic and personal perspectives deconstruct dominant spatial conceptions and simplistic globalisation narratives, including binarised stereotypes of tourism and migration. This analysis contributes to a global art history that recognises the overlooked modern Adriatic Mediterranean as a micro-laboratory of complex globalisation processes.