Counter Revanchist Art in the Global City: Walls, Blockades, and Barricades as Repertoires of Creative Action

Through analyses of public artworks that have taken the form of blockades and barricades since the 1990s, this book theorizes artists’ responses to global inequities as cultural manifestations of counter-revanchism in diverse urban centers.

Leah Modigliani is Associate Professor of Visual Studies at Tyler School of Art and Architecture. She is an artist and scholar with transdisciplinary engagements informed by fine arts, art history, critical geography, urban studies, and politics. Modigliani’s projects arise from a network of concerns including the history of the avant-garde and its relationship to political critique, feminist art and writing, social dissent since 1968, the history of photography, performance and re-enactment as political strategy, and the destructive effects of neoliberal capitalism. At the node of these interrelated subjects is a focus on how individual freedom of expression is destroyed, curtailed, or displaced through socio-economic factors beyond one’s control. Her critical writing can be found in academic journals and contemporary art magazines such as Mapping Meaning the Journal, Anarchist Studies, Prefix Photo, Art Criticism and C Magazine. Her first book, Engendering an Avant-garde: The Unsettled Landscapes of Vancouver Photo-conceptualism, was published by Manchester University Press in 2018.