An-My Lê On Contested Terrain is the first comprehensive survey of the Vietnamese American artist, published on the occasion of a major exhibition organized by Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh. Drawing, in part, from her own experiences of the Vietnam War, Lê has created a body of work committed to expanding and complicating our understanding of the activities and motivations behind conflict and war. Throughout her thirty-year career, Lê has photographed noncombatant roles of active-duty service members, often on the sites of former battlefields, including those reserved for training or the reenactment of war, and those created as film sets. This publication includes selections from her well-known series Viêt Nam, Small Wars, 29 Palms, and Events Ashore, in addition to never-before-seen images, including recent photographs from the US-Mexico border, formative early work, and lesser-known projects. Essays by the organizing curator Dan Leers and curator Lisa J. Sutcliffe, as well as a dialogue between Lê and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen, address the ways in which Lê's quiet, nuanced work complicates the landscapes of conflict that have long informed American identity. Copublished by Aperture and Carnegie Museum of Art

When American forces arrived in Vietnam, they found themselves embedded in historic village and frontier spaces already shaped by many past conflicts. American bases and bombing targets followed spatial and political logics influenced by the footprints of past wars in central Vietnam. The militarized landscapes here, like many in the world�s historic conflict zones, continue to shape post-war land-use politics. Footprints of War traces the long history of conflict-produced spaces in Vietnam, beginning with early modern wars and the French colonial invasion in 1885 and continuing through the collapse of the Saigon government in 1975. The result is a richly textured history of militarized landscapes that reveals the spatial logic of key battles such as the Tet Offensive. Drawing on extensive archival work and years of interviews and fieldwork in the hills and villages around the city of Hue to illuminate war�s footprints, David Biggs also integrates historical Geographic Information Systems (GIS) data, using aerial, high-altitude, and satellite imagery to render otherwise placeless sites into living, multidimensional spaces. This personal and multilayered approach yields an innovative history of the lasting traces of war in Vietnam and a model for understanding other militarized landscapes.

The definitive account of one of the most important battles of the twentieth century, and the Black River borderlands’ transformation into Northwest Vietnam This new work of historical and political geography ventures beyond the conventional framing of the Battle of Điện Biên Phủ, the 1954 conflict that toppled the French empire in Indochina. Tracking a longer period of anticolonial revolution and nation-state formation from 1945 to 1960, Christian Lentz argues that a Vietnamese elite constructed territory as a strategic form of rule. Engaging newly available archival sources, Lentz offers a novel conception of territory as a contingent outcome of spatial contests.

Small Wars brings together three interconnected series by photographer An-My Le. In "Viet Nam," Le returns to the country she left in her teens and attempts to reconcile memories of her childhood home with the contemporary landscape; in "Small Wars," she engages a small community of Vietnam War reenactors; and in "29 Palms," she documents the preparations of marines in the California desert as they undergo training for the recent conflict in the Middle East.

A critical history of site-specific art since the late 1960s. Site-specific art emerged in the late 1960s in reaction to the growing commodification of art and the prevailing ideals of art's autonomy and universality. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, as site-specific art intersected with land art, process art, performance art, conceptual art, installation art, institutional critique, community-based art, and public art, its creators insisted on the inseparability of the work and its context. In recent years, however, the presumption of unrepeatability and immobility encapsulated in Richard Serra's famous dictum "to remove the work is to destroy the work" is being challenged by new models of site specificity and changes in institutional and market forces. One Place after Another offers a critical history of site-specific art since the late 1960s and a theoretical framework for examining the rhetoric of aesthetic vanguardism and political progressivism associated with its many permutations. Informed by urban theory, postmodernist criticism in art and architecture, and debates concerning identity politics and the public sphere, the book addresses the siting of art as more than an artistic problem. It examines site specificity as a complex cipher of the unstable relationship between location and identity in the era of late capitalism. The book addresses the work of, among others, John Ahearn, Mark Dion, Andrea Fraser, Donald Judd, Renee Green, Suzanne Lacy, Inigo Manglano-Ovalle, Richard Serra, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, and Fred Wilson.

Contested Terrain provides a cutting-edge, comprehensive and innovative approach to critically analysing the multidimensional and contested nature of security narratives, justified by different ideological, political, cultural and economic rationales. This is important in a complex and ever-changing situation involving a dynamic interplay between local, regional and global factors. Security narratives are constructed in multiple ways and are used to frame our responses to the challenges and threats to our sense of safety, wellbeing, identity and survival but how the narratives are constructed is a matter of intellectual and political contestation. Using three case studies from the Pacific (Fiji, Tonga and Solomon Islands), Contested Terrain shows the different security challenges facing each country, which result from their unique historical, political and socio-cultural circumstances. Contrary to the view that the Pacific is a generic entity with common security issues, this book argues for more localised and nuanced approaches to security framing and analysis.

This catalogue accompanies a touring exhibition held at Museum Folkwang, Essen, Germany on March 4-May 29, 2016, at Martin-Gropius Bau, Berlin, Germany on June 11-September 18, 2016, at High Museum, Atlanta, Georgia on October 16, 2016-January 8, 2017, and at St Louis Art Museum, St Louis, Missouri in Fall 2017.