Summer 2012, Volume 3, No. 2

Toronto-based Kotama Bouabane's most recent photographs depict a surreal theme park just outside of Beijing called The World. Promoted with the slogan "See the entire world without ever leaving Beijing," it features over 100 immediately recognizable international monuments. Experiencing explosive growth, China is portrayed as a country inescapably influenced by globalization. Bouabane's images depict a place hybridized between the signs and ideologies of the East and West.

Daniela Comani’s photo-based practice addresses several key preoccupations, but often seeks to show viewers where women are not in 20th-Century history, in the Western world’s literary canon and in organs of the popular media. For example, take the cleverly (and, in many cases, humorously) subversive New Publications (2008) series, which consists of 52 archival pigment prints. Here, Comani has taken the covers of iconic western literary masterpieces distributed evenly across English, French, German and Italian, and reverses the gender assignments within each title.