Research involving fashion theory, or the consumption and use of fashion products, requires a study into material culture as the communication of symbolic values. Within the study of fashion, material culture is defined as a meaning-making process developed through the exchange of symbolic values embedded within fashion objects (Crane & Bovone, 2006).

This book chapter looks at the cultural history of the Singapore Arts Festival from 1959 to 2017. It studies the role of the arts festival in nation building and the formation of Singapore's cultural identity as a multicultural and multiethnic enterprise. Through a close study of key moments, the chapter establishes the relationship between state enterprise and cultural rootedness, and social access and political agency as key engines of artistic development in postcolonial Singapore.
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The article examines examples of live performance art that explore themes related to the genre of science fiction, and argues that in significant ways they make concrete and actualize the narratives of sci-fi. Works by artists including Stelarc, Eduardo Kac, Hayden Fowler, Fakeshop, Orlan, Norman White and Laura Kikauka are simultaneously political gestures, technical feats, and embodied art processes that both look forward to becoming the future and actualize a version of it in the present, live in front of us.

The article examines the interactions between the various modalities - poetic text, live stage performance, sound design and video projection - in a 2013 theatrical production of T.S. Eliot's poem The Waste Land (1922). It particularly focuses on the creation of the sound design for the performance and how this relates to the themes and sensibilities of the poem, its inherent sonorities, and what Eliot called "The Music of Poetry" (1942).

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A 5000-word excerpt of a novel-in-progress devoted to global climate change and its concentration in Canada's contentious Alberta tar sands.

Citation:
Whetter, Darryl. "Scraping Off the Velvet." The Fiddlehead, no. 270, 2017, pp. 72-82.

Diverse art practices have, since time immemorial, sought to establish a visceral link with the viewer's insides in order to problematise order and disorder, normativity and aberration, totem and taboo, as even a cursory glance at Ghirlandaio's portraits of decay, Bruegel's depictions of disease, the Viennese Actionists' performances with animal carcasses or Athey's ritualistic work with HIV-positive blood, shows. In all these works, the defilement, the disgust, and the horror are intentional, strategic - even ideological.

The inclusion of Sur (soē เซอร์) reality as one of nine key themes in the 2012 exhibition Thai Trends: From Localism to Internationalism, curated by Apinan Poshyananda อภินันท์ โปษยานนท์ (b. 1956), reinforced the inclusion of 'surrealistic' works as a part of conventional histories of Thai artistic modernism. While the phonetic resonances between Sur and its English counterpart 'surrealism' might suggest European origination, Apinan's framework hinged on the nationalist premise of the uniqueness of Sur within the Thai context.