Trench Art: Black Humor, War Debris, Mud, and Peach Pit

9 February 2026
Trench art refers to objects and handmade artifacts created during wartime, often using leftover materials such as bullets, shell casings, mud, wood, or even fruit pits. These works blur the boundaries between survival, memory, and artistic expression. Mary Walling Blackburn’s Wound, Whittle, and Peach examines these marginal forms through historical and theoretical perspectives, highlighting how they reflect black humor, informal economies, and embodied ways of confronting violence. This post presents a partial Persian translation of Mary Walling Blackburn’s Wound, Whittle, and Peach for Farsi readers; the original English text is available separately via the reference below.
Author(s)

Sevana Boghossian
Related Articles

Craft Against Fine Art: The History of a 150-Year Resistance
In the mid-eighteenth century, Charles Batteux, in his treatise Les Beaux-Arts réduits à un même principe," drew for the first time a precise and hierarchical boundary between the arts created “solely for pleasure” and those that pursue “utility” alongside—or instead of—pleasure. This seemingly theoretical distinction in fact laid the foundation for one of the most enduring debates...
1 December 2025

The Suitcase as a Signifier of Displacement: The Artist Between Work and Movement
This text examines the suitcase as both a material object and a symbolic figure within the experience of migration, exile, and displacement—an object that, from the nineteenth century onward, gradually became a defining sign of forced travel and acquired a stable presence in artistic and museological narratives in the twentieth century. Focusing on the historical trajectories of Mar...
4 January 2026

On Art Activism
This text is a Persian translation of the article “On Art Activism” by Boris Groys, published in issue 56 of the journal e-flux in 2014. Groys examines art activism through the concept of aesthetization, critically rethinking the relationship between art, politics, and design. Situating his analysis within philosophical and historical debates that extend beyond modernity and narrati...
27 January 2026
Insert Comment

* Indicates required field