Theodor Adorno once remarked that, “…every work of art is an uncommitted crime.” This book is a tribute to political artists who deviate from the mainstream and create art that engages with questions of societal oppression, survival, and resistance. It draws on interviews with transnational artists whose work is representative of emerging trends in art, visual culture, and political aesthetics. These are a new generation of transnational artists whose creative praxis, sensibilities, influences, and frames of reference derive from multiple national, religious, and cultural genealogies, and an ambivalent relationship to Western and European nationalisms. Courageously, these racialized, Indigenous, and migrant artists straddle the divides of many categories of identity in regards to gender, sexuality, and ‘race,’ and challenge the silently imbibed worship of whiteness, heteronormative patriarchies, and colonial settler ideologies of “home.” These exceptional artists enter into uncomfortable dialogues, creatively. Inspired by their visionary praxis, this book is an uncommitted crime, attempting to smuggle the ideas of inspiring artists into a site of intellectual imagi/nation. Artists whose works are explored in this book include: Andil Gosine, Syrus Marcus Ware, Elisha Lim; Amita Zamaan and Helen Lee; Shirin Fathi; Kara Springer; Rajni Perera; Joshua Vettivelu; Brendan Fernandes; Kerry Potts and Rebecca Belmore.

Tara Atluri has a PhD in Sociology and has taught classes in gender studies, visual cultures, politics, and media studies at scholarly institutions throughout the world. She has also held several research fellowships at universities throughout Europe and Asia. As an artist and performer, she has participated at exhibitions and events such as the Edgy Feminist Arts Festival in Montreal, Quebec, and the Feminist Arts Conference held in Toronto, Ontario. Her work has been published in scholarly anthologies and iacademic journals as well as on a number of blogs. Her most recent book, “z?d?: Sexual Politics and Postcolonial Worlds, was published in 2016. She is an active in #WhyLoiter? and other social movements in the Indian subcontinent, throughout the Global South and transnationally. She currently lives in Toronto

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