«…the only thing left to eat is the truth». Image, Text and Artivist Critique in Shaun Tan’s "Tales from the Inner City"

Abstract

The work of Australian visual artist and writer Shaun Tan is characterized by productive fusions of text and image powering his politically charged artistic practice – a practice of artivist intervention to mobilize what Neumann and Rippl (2020) call «Verbal-visual configurations». This article explores the forms and functions of verbal-visual configurations in Tan’s work. I close-read two episodes from his recent visual narrative Tales from the Inner City (2018), with a particular focus on how «intermedial strategies» are employed to address pressing issues in the so-called Anthropocene: power relations, anthropocentrism, and human exceptionalism. I suggest that Tales from the Inner City enables a productive argument about textual-visual resistance repertoires, and I analyze the “intermedial aesthetics” sustaining this artivist intervention.

Keywords

• Intermediality
• Environmentalism
• Anthropocene
• Visual Narratives
• Visual-Literary Activism
• Artivism