Dr Mary Ikoniadou

This introduction takes as its central armature Karen Barad’s agential realism to provide a framework for understanding the essays brought together in this Special Issue under the rubric of pictures of conflict. The intention is to move the discussion with regard to picture making forward to more fully embrace the pictorial and the physical, the historical and institutional processes within apparatuses of picture-making. The attempt in ‘Ghost stories’ through the concept of a visual apparatus, is to shed new light and thinking on pictures as material objects; how they act and feed into our subjectivities, experiences and realities and to account for their currency, duration, affectivity and authority beyond transparent representation or symbolic meaning. In order to achieve this, Barad’s agential realism is inflected by insights from Malafouris’s (2013) material engagement theory; W.J.T. Mitchell’s (2005) image theory; Jens Eder and Charlotte Klonk’s (2017) image operations; Mondzian’s (2005) understanding of the economy of the image, as well as the ontological concerns of new German art history and image science exemplified in the work of Hans Belting (1996, 2011) and Horst Bredekamp (2017), for example. In this framework, the worlds pictures create, and the subjectivities they produce, are not understood to precede the phenomena they depict. The picture, as the outcome of the apparatus which produces it, makes an ‘observational cut’ that simultaneously excludes and includes certain elements from its frame. As such, it has to be comprehended as party to processes which are both ethical and political. A fact which is particularly important during times of conflict and war.

'Imagining Greece' is a digital exhibition and online archive that traces the evolution of tourism in Greece from 1945 to 1991. The digital exhibition brings heterogeneous materials together for the first time on a single platform, exposing the dynamic relationship of Greek tourism to the country's economic, social, and cultural life. In doing so, it maps a complex network of stakeholders and experiences. These conditions have nourished the myth of the Greek summer and the ever-evolving culture of holidaying in Greece. The digital exhibition is structured into four thematic sections that correspond to a schematic representation of the traveller's 'experience': from the initial desire to visit Greece (Imagining) to the journey itself and the exploration of numerous destinations (Travelling), followed by the immersive discovery of the country and its people (Discovering), and ending with the traveller's recollections (Remembering). The curation of these four interconnected experiences highlights that a journey is never truly complete but resembles a cycle of repetition and renewal. Similarly, the exhibition and the continuously evolving digital archive offer diverse online experiences and invite multiple interpretations. The exhibition is under the aegis of the Hellenic Ministry of Tourism

This chapter analyses the ways a Greek-language emigres' magazine articulated notions of solidarity with the so-called Third World in the 1960s. Published in East Germany by political refugees of the Greek Civil War, the illustrated magazine Pyrsos expressed the political strategies and imaginings of the Left within and outside Greece. The chapter examines the aesthetic and political manifestations of solidarity, demonstrating that these are rendered visible in the magazine's visuality and intertextuality. It focuses on the magazine's discourse on the Vietnam War to argue that its articulation of solidarity was intellectually and aesthetically entangled with notions of identification and metonymy. In these, the plead for the liberation and democratisation of Greece was ‘inserted' within an anti-imperialist, anti-US, Third-Worldist struggle. In this sense, the chapter unearths the specific cultural histories and highlights the hidden accounts that unfolded from the margins during the Cold War, de-centring established, primarily Western-centric, paradigms of solidarity. By teasing out existing definitions of solidarity, this chapter speaks to the role of political publishing and contributes to scholarship on the visual and aesthetic dimensions of solidarity in the 1960s.

This article explores the notion of belonging in periodical studies, arguing that periodicals have historically functioned as spaces for negotiating and performing belonging. Amid contemporary political rhetoric about borders and belonging, we examine how periodicals have both constructed and contested boundaries of inclusion and exclusion. Drawing on interdisciplinary frameworks from political geography, psychology, and cultural studies, we propose that belonging operates through periodicals in multiple dimensions: material (through physical production, layout, and tactile engagement), temporal (connecting past, present, and imagined futures), spatial (creating real and imagined communities across geographical boundaries), and affective (generating emotional attachments that bind readers together). The special issue presents six articles examining how periodicals foster belonging in institutional and professional communities (regimental journals and film criticism); place-based belonging; activism and resistance (revolutionary soldier newspapers and alternative magazines for marginalized groups). Together, these studies reveal how periodicals simultaneously challenge and reinforce boundaries of inclusion, offering valuable insights into contemporary challenges of polarization and fragmentation in our contemporary sociopolitical landscape.

Pyrsos [Torch] was an illustrated youth magazine published in East Germany in the 1960s by leftist political refugees of the Greek Civil War. In this brief contribution, I will focus on the visual language of the magazine's cover to discuss its high production values, modernist design, use of photography and photomontage alongside its masthead and graphic devices such as the intention to utilise the cover as postcards and posters. The close analysis of Pyrsos' paratextual elements will reveal its complex aesthetic and editorial strategy, inspired by Germany's print history, contemporaneous ideological context at the same time as imagining the refugees' political repatriation to Greece.

Patterns of Migration is an online exhibition which features a collection of objects from across the world alongside the memories and lived experiences of their owners.

In her book, Cosmopolitan Radicalism: The Visual Politics of Beirut’s Global Sixties, Zeina Maasri examines the development of Beirut as a ‘nodal city’ (p. 8), a center for radical publishing in the Arab region during the ‘long 1960s.’ The region’s “global sixties” are defined as the period marked by 1958s anticolonial struggles and Cold War politics, through to Beirut’s place in anti-imperialist and Third Worldist politics and the Palestinian revolutionary project, to the start of the Lebanese Civil War in 1975. As Maasri shows, during this time Beirut encouraged the flow of radical visual and political discourses, shaped translocal aesthetic and political subjectivities, and, in turn, was shaped by them. At the core of the book’s argument is the critical role of the mobility of printed matter—magazines, books, and ephemera—to political relations and, as such, to the development of aesthetic and political subjectivities.

This chapter explores the ways in which Pyrsos (Torch) magazine juxtaposed ambiguous and fragmentary images and texts concerning the Aegean landscape in its attempt to reclaim, perform and construct a left patriotic discourse. The study of Pyrsos is situated amongst the politics, culture and everyday life of the 1960s, and is marked by the intense antagonism between Cold War ideologies. Within this climate, and following Khrushchev’s 'peaceful coexistence', the outlawed Communist Party of Greece (Kommounistiko Komma Elladas, KKE) began to prepare the ground for its legalisation and to propagate the repatriation of the Greek political refugees who had been living in exile across the socialist states of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. Pyrsos was an illustrated magazine, published between 1961 and 1968 in the German Democratic Republic (GDR). It was established by the KKE and was predominantly financed by the International Relations Department of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands, SED) . Its editorial policy and art direction, which for the most part reflected the aims of the KKE, were largely targeted at young refugees in the socialist states. Pyrsos played an important role in the formation of the patriotic discourse amongst the exiled Communist Left. The significance of the formation and circulation of left-patriotic rhetoric, particularly amongst the youth in the socialist states, has so far been under-researched, a lacuna that this chapter intends to fill.

East Germany is marked by entangled genealogies of arrival and displacement speaking to conflicting modernisation projects and their difficult-to-negotiate aftermaths. This particular uneasiness transpires into collective memories, interactions and experiences that continue to connect its multiple diasporic spaces. The aim of this exploratory workshop was to consider historical and contemporary encounters of migrant solidarity that emerged despite and beyond official discourses around international socialist solidarity, or minority politics, as well as everyday experiences of racism in the contested space of “East Germany”.