This special issue of Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia, on the topic of gender and its intersections with art history, emerges and extends from numerous discussions held during the Gender in Southeast Asian Art Histories Nelson, Clare Veal and Stephen H. Whiteman, with invaluable support from numerous staff at the Power Institute and elsewhere in the University of Sydney. While we were inspired by the symposium in Sydney, this issue is emphatically not a conventional conference proceeding discussed there.

This paper comprises a review of The Museum of Emotion, an exhibition of works by the French-Algerian artist, Kader Attia, which was held at the Hayward Gallery, London, February–May 2019. The show charted Attia’s interdisciplinary practice from the past two decades, which has dealt broadly with transnational histories of colonialism, violence, oppression and dispossession. As the Museum of Emotion demonstrated, in Attia’s works these histories are not confined to the past.

The paper looks at erasure and abstraction as forms of phenomenological trace in the art works and processes of artists, filmmakers and composers. It begins with Lady Macbeth’s guilt, manifested in the imaginary washing of recurring blood spots, exemplifying the act of erasure and memory within the psychological self.

ISSUE is an international peer-reviewed art journal focused on exploring issues in contemporary art and culture. This annual publication is an inter- and trans-disciplinary journal that carries a curated set of scholarly articles, essays, interviews and exhibitions on disciplines ranging from contemporary art, design, film, media, performance and cultures. The eighth volume of ISSUE is themed, Erase.