From the Editor

Welcome to Afterimage’s March 2026 issue (Volume 53, no. 1).This issue begins with Hantian Zhang’s report on the inaugural Bukhara Biennial, which was mounted under the guise of “Recipes for Broken Hearts,” a fitting theme for our troubled times. The curators asked of the invited artists, “How does one put a broken heart back together?,” and the results in various media, as Zhang shares, “while engaging with the ‘therapeutic turn’ in contemporary art, the event’s . . . offerings functioned as sites of relational aesthetics . . . proposing that healing is a collaborative, socially enacted process.”Our essay and feature section explores the work of two photographers who focus mainly on portraiture. Brian Arnold presents Slovenian artist Branko Lenart, who photographed through political upheaval in Yugoslavia and beyond. Lenart asks interesting and important questions including “What does it mean to see with a camera? How deep were the crimes of fascism? What’s the relationship between politics and portraiture?” and Arnold refers to the photographs as being full of “loving conflicts.” Noa Bronstein interviews photographer Jarod Lew, whose practice highlights the Asian American experience. Bronstein writes that Lew employs an intergenerational approach for his intimate portraits of people and place, which “connect across personal and communal histories that are revealingly underrepresented or misunderstood within broader socio-political contexts” as he “queries the instability of images as records of memory and meaning.” Lew says that his process with his subjects (which include his mother) “allows a new form of trust to be unveiled.”In our first of three research articles, “Bodies on the Line: Documentary and Progressive Politics in the Age of Neoliberalism,” Joshua Glick writes about the late 1980s and ’90s as an “inflection point” for American documentary film. As neoliberalism gained prominence, documentary “engaged with the overlapping crises of the day,” writes Glick—crises that included the government’s neglect of the AIDS epidemic, the erosion of the welfare state, the impact of industrial relocation abroad, the United States’ efforts to secure oil interests in the Middle East, and not least, the deregulation of media industries. Documentary became a “critical means of resisting neoliberal governance” by challenging a conservative political culture, and reflecting on this history “can help expand our infrastructural imaginary today.”In “Embodying Psychoanalytic Healing in Korean Diasporic Identity,” Liz Kim delves into Korean American artist Yong Soon Min’s Defining Moments, a series of photomontages exploring historical trauma. Kim applies psychoanalytic theories of racial melancholia and racial dissociation to this body of work, which constitutes a “visual map of healing”—an approach that expands how psychoanalytic theory could be used in the analysis of artwork about the impact of immigration and of assimilation within the context of art history. Kim writes that Min’s work can be seen as indicating “the transition from a pathological to adaptive dissociation, where the artist recognizes and accepts as inherent the multiplicity of her sense of self as Korean American.”Laura Ivins, in “The Process Cinema Artisan: Comparative Materialities in Celluloid and Digital Filmmaking,” compares celluloid-based and digital glitch art practices, looking at artisanship and materiality, drawing parallels between their materialities, and arguing against the perceived “immateriality” of digital media. Ivins argues that both photochemical film and what she terms “photoelectrical film” (“digital media being the photoelectrical cousins to photochemical film formats”), through experimentations with the physical materiality of their respective media formats, offer critique of extractive capitalism and industrial mass production.In our first review of this issue, Kimberly Hart looks at and listens to Millie Chen and Arzu Ozkal’s SRS (Silk Road Songbook), recently on view at Hallwalls Contemporary Art Center in Buffalo. Approaching the work through the lens of cultural anthropology and area studies, Hart writes that the exhibition, through its depictions of song and landscape, created an alternative vision of the Silk Road, stripping it of Orientalist orientations. Next, Zhiqiang Li reviews Do Ho Suh’s Walk the House at the Tate Museum. Suh, through 3D, textile, and filmed architectural constructions (what Li refers to as “not a secondary documentation” but as “mediated performance”) creates poetic modes of dwelling, demonstrating how scale can mediate identity and memory, and extending the work into both collective memory and national politics in an age of displacement. Our closing piece, Allison Perlman’s review of Patricia Aufderheide’s new book Kartemquin Films: Documentaries on the Frontlines of Democracy, returns us to documentary film practice in the US. As Perlman writes, Aufderheide’s “exceptionally well-researched” book follows the history of the influential but underrecognized film production company, which “rejected the tropes that too often animated documentary practices in the US.” * * *We welcome submissions of all stripes throughout the year. Please visit “Submit” on our website for details or inquire directly about guidelines.We at Afterimage wish you renewal in the upcoming spring season.