While an ethnographic turn has indeed taken place in contemporary art practice, this is not necessarily the case with scholarly research in contemporary art. This is especially surprising considering the conditions under which research on contemporary art production takes place.The particular processuality of the artworks does not allow for an exclusive use of established methods in art history, but requires additional approaches. This paper calls for an ethnographic turn in art scholarship that complements established approaches with methods and research questions derived from social anthropology and sociology, such as participation, observation, and qualitative studies in social and aesthetic production, reception and perception.Artists working in the ethnographic modality normally seek social interaction, but scholarly analysis hardly considers the actual exchange taking place during the art project and both its social and aesthetic implications. In order to keep up with new artistic practices, art scholars need to adopt empirical approaches that go beyond the exhibition space and other sites of art mediation and take instead the factual social and aesthetic processes and impacts in the 'field' into consideration. These processes occur both during the project period and in its aftermath in both the artist's life as well as the life of the people or groups involved. Drawing attention to these social interactions and interpretations is necessary not only in the analysis of projects by 'northern' artists in 'southern' contexts, but in any art practice that involves and aims at social exchange.

Compared to other disciplines and despite its central role in research practices, the concept of the “archive” has received insufficient critical attention in anthropology until recently. Anthropologists working in collaboration with artists and curators have experimented with forms of archive/archiving, raising important questions about both the collaborative and processual nature of archives. They thereby challenge ideas about the “archive” as a static repository of history. This special section begins with the premise that archives, prone to decay, dissolution, and rearrangement, are permanently in process. This perspective enables us to engage with cleavages and links between past knowledge and future imagination, as well as the role of representation and the anarchive. Our interest is not limited to objects, but also addresses the idea of the body (or collective bodies) as archives of experience, and the archive’s potential for collaborative artistic and ethnographic practices. We ask: What forms of collaborative work does the archive offer? In what ways can the collective sensibility of the archive be explored? What can we gain from a process‐based notion of the archive? What implications does this have on the role of the archive in art and anthropology, and for the practices related to it in particular?

This special issue of Visual Anthropology takes a close look at (un)sighted migratory archives and archives of migration. Acknowledging migration as part of social practice and collective memory, it highlights the relevance of migratory archives for individual and collective subjectivities. With a transversal perspective across the fields of art, anthropology and social activism, the contributions analyze the complexities of power relations, spatial and temporal dynamics, media practices, and meaning production involved in the making, maintaining, contemplation, appropriation, destruction and loss of such archives. Rethinking methodological and theoretical approaches, these engage with archives as spaces of encounter and resistance in a liminal zone of visibility and invisibility. THE CIRCULATION OF IMAGES AND ARCHIVES OF MIGRATIONAlthough scholarly discussions and theories have challenged static and hegemonic notions of the archive in recent decades (

Visibility and invisibility are fundamentally social categories that reflect and shape social acknowledgement, acceptance and interaction. The relevance of inter-visibility between urban dwellers as a mode of negotiating social tensions, racism or genderrelated aggressions becomes apparent in particular situations in public space.Performance artists in Johannesburg such as Anthea Moys and Athi-Patra Ruga relate to these situations by performing well-elaborated roles in specific social and territorial settings. They bring somewhat invisible discourses, ideas, and notions of normativity into social visibility. Johannesburg is a city marked by enormous political and social shifts, accompanied by a strong persistence of normative ideas partly deriving from the former segregationist politics during apartheid. In rendering these mental topographies visible through their artistic practice, the performance artists offer moments of renegotiation on diverse levels of social (in)visibility and unlock spaces for potentially new modes of perception and public agency. (In)visibility in African CitiesRecent social theory has emphasized the relevance of visibility as a profoundly social category that marks territorialities, that functions as a device for social and political control, and that constitutes notions of the public. Studies in urban African contexts have highlighted this fact, emphasizing that the field of the invisible, by contrast, is a field beyond official mechanisms of control. AbdouMaliq Simone (2002), for instance, addressed the social and at times also political power of informal urban practices that appear from and take place in the realm of the invisible, while Filip de Boeck (2002 and2005) demonstrated the meaning of the "invisible city" as social imaginary that helps to cope with an urban context of infrastructural and political neglect, as is the case in Kinshasa. Invisibility, in both examples, means invisibility to those who are supposed to control and govern the city, or to those who adhere to a rationalist understanding of visibility as the only proof of truth or the real. For both authors, the invisible is socially as true as the visible. While the invisible often remains as invisible to the observer or researcher as it is to other social actors, he or she can learn more about it by analyzing discourses and interpreting practices related to this invisible world. Hence, the invisible is as much part of social reality as the visible, but it often escapes our attention, because it is not as obvious as the visible world, and, relatedly, because it often is mediated by discourses, images or acts that, themselves, first need to be analyzed and understood.The invisible does not belong to an "other" world; it is not the opposite of everyday life but rather forms an intrinsic part of it. Andrea Mubi Brighenti (2010) convincingly demonstrated how the interplay of the visible and the invisible belongs to everyday practices in society at large and to political and economic powers in particular.As he emp...

The urban everyday Today, African cities seem to be everywhere. No longer bound to physical space, they seem to move across the land, transforming it into an endless cityscape of houses, shacks and streets. Streams, lakes and lagoons are turning into backwaters where all kinds of domestic works are conducted. There seem to be few places where life is less attractive than in the boundless urban everyday. It has become increasingly difficult to distinguish urban life-worlds from the countryside-so vast are the surfaces that urban worlds cover today. Cities like Lagos, Douala, Kinshasa, Addis Ababa, or Johannesburg do not extend into what was once called a hinterland-they rather penetrate it underneath the surface and, in a striking parallel to the state, the Etat rhizome (Bayart 1989), they pop up in unforeseen places. Perhaps, la ville rhizome, "the city with branched rhizomes," characterises the current state of urban sprawl in Africa better than models based on the Western historical experience. In any case, urban ways of living are no longer tied to the well-contoured