The Politics of Spatial Transgressions in the Arts

This book is an anthology of the varied strategies of spatial transgressions and how they have been implemented through the arts as a means to resist, rejuvenate, reclaim, critique or cohabitate. The book is divided into two sections – Displacements and Disruptions. The first section discusses the ramifications of the spatial displacements of bodies, organizations, groups of people and ethnicities, and explores how artists, theorists and arts organizations have an attentive history of revealing and reacting to the displacement of peoples and how their presence or absence radically reconfigures the value, identity, and uses of place.
In the second section, each author considers how aesthetic strategies have been utilized to disrupt expected spatial experiences and logic. Many of these strategies form radical alternative methodologies that include transgressions, geographies of resistance, and psychogeographies. These spatial performances of disruption set into motion a critical exchange between the subject, space and materiality, in which ideology and experience are both produced/spatialized and deconstructed/destabilized.​

Gregory Blair is an artist, writer and educator based in Evansville, Indiana. His research incorporates interdisciplinary art practices, mobility studies, cultural geography, environmental aesthetics, continental philosophy, ecocriticism, and philosophies of place. His first book, Errant Bodies, Mobility, and Political Resistance, was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2018.

Noa Bronstein is a curator and writer based in Toronto, Canada. Her practice mainly focuses on investigating issues concerning place and space-making, and thinking through how artists disrupt and subvert systems, including those registering across social, political, and economic structures. Noa has held several positions in the arts, including Executive Director of Gallery 44 Centre for Contemporary Photography, inaugural Senior Curator at the Small Arms Inspection Building, and Project Manager at the Art Gallery of Ontario. Noa is currently the Executive Director of Gallery TPW.