Journal – anna rafanan

Shifting Parameters

August 2025August 2025Art Studies, Writing

For the second issue of Insights, I wrote about Augustine Paredes‘ art, on what it means to sustain a diasporic practice amid displacement and the uncertainty of creating a sense of place. Read more: photographychismisph.com

On the Documentary Value of Art

July 2024September 2024Art Studies

The concept of truth in art has been a subject of debate among art critics, historians, and philosophers for centuries. E.H. Gombrich and Roger Scruton are among the figures who have explored this complex relationship.

On the Location of Identity in Art Practice

June 2024April 2025Art Studies

Often, an artist acts as a mediator between underlying tensions of self and other, belonging between self and community. The forms that emerge are a hybrid of the artist’s sensibilities, aims, and the influence of their environment.

Sharjah Biennial 15 Guidebook

August 2023August 2024Commercial, Writing

For Sharjah Biennial 15, as a content writer for the guidebook, I contributed text for John Akomfrah, Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons, Iftikhar Dadi and Elizabeth Dadi, Brenda Fajardo, mandla, Steve McQueen, Mame-Diarra Niang, and Khadija Saye.

Intimations in Precarity

January 2022April 2025Art Studies

As an initial access, an entry point, I begin with the concept of tahanan, in light of the curation of Sa Tahanan Collective in Dubai, United Arab Emirates.

Alyx Arumpac’s Aswang as Counterspectacle

November 2021June 2024Art Studies

The documentary film genre, through an analysis of Aswang (2019), evokes a reflexivity despite its self-determined spectacularity — a possible critique of the film medium as spectacle.