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In interview, the artist Ulrike Ottinger discusses her film Johanna d'Arc of Mongolia (1988; illus.). Following a summary of the plot, which involves a group of European women kidnapped by Mongolian tribeswomen while travelling on the Trans-Siberian railroad, Ottinger further defines the main characters and sections of the film, sheds light on her sources of inspiration, and outlines her stance on feminism and other theories with which her work has been associated. She also recounts her experiences of Mongolia and Mongolian nomadic people, recalling the challenges of shooting there, and of collaborating with a multilingual crew and with the Chinese authorities, and explains that she has since returned several times to make the 8-hour documentary Taiga (1992) and another film chronicling her own journey from Berlin through Odessa to Istanbul, entitled South-East Passage (2000; illus.), both of which will appear at Documenta XI in Kassel, Germany (2002).

This is a time of transitions for Art Journal-of welcomes, farewells, thanks, and final thoughts. It is my pleasure to welcome Patricia Phillips, currently Dean at SUNY New Paltz, as the incoming executive editor of Art Journal. Well known for her extensive writing and curating on public-art issues, Patti brings an exciting vision of new ideas that will greatly enrich our work. We are thrilled that she is devoting her talents to Art Journal and anticipate terrific developments ahead.

As I write, media pundits are debating the relative power of two iconic images-a civilian father and young son seen crouching behind a wall as the son is shot and killed, and a soldier thrown from a window and stomped to death by a crowd. Each is horrific, tragic, and brutal. Each was repeatedly shown hundreds if not thousands of times in media throughout the world. In October of the year 2000 the dead Palestinian child and the dead Israeli soldier each carry the weight of signification of a seemingly intractable ethnic conflict. In neither case could a viewer know the identity of the victim just from the visual evidence. Their identities were open until fixed by externally added information which created a binary coding that pushed toward a choosing of sides. But with whom is one's allegiance? Which one is \"ours\" and which \"theirs\"? In this time of the transnational pancapitalism and \"global\" identity discussed by Catherine Bernard in \"Bodies and Digital Utopia,\" how are we even to understand the question?

This issue is structured around the conversation and the interview, formats situated between written and spoken language that make possible a fluid combination of analysis with anecdote. \"The cricket test,\" described by curator Okwui Enwezor as a part of his colonial inheritance as a Nigerian youth in a British boarding school in 'Lagos, posed the question: \"Who does the Asian or the Afro-Caribbean root for when the West Indian team plays England?\" It is a question based on a nativist presumption that each would instinctively root for \"their own.\" Yet, as Enwezor explains, \"The postcolonial experience ... has an unsettledness ... in the very notion that there can be any continuous sense of identification with a specific cultural identity.\"

A series of blurred images painted by Gerhard Richter reference news photographs of the infamous prison deaths of members of the Baader-Meinhof organization; Rainer Usselmann points out that their death date, October 18, 1977, though indelibly iconic for Germans, may hold little meaning for those outside the context of its origin. As I write in the United States in January 2002, our iconic date still seems beyond the limitations of such specificity of context. Everything is still unavoidably referential, whether intended or not. In this issue we include articles that can be seen as direct reactions to September 11, 2001 and, in some cases, they were updated to reference those events. But everything here was initially written and chosen for publication before that became our new historical marker.

September 11, 2001 was a line of demarcation that constructed recent history in a linear progression from Before to After. I write this statement After. All else in this issue was written long Before four commercial airplanes and their unwitting passengers were used as weapons of mass destruction in New York, Washington, and western Pennsylvania. The need to identify the significance of that date speaks to the dilemma of the quarterly publication. Our response to world events is, of necessity, historical, rather than immediate. But we can no longer read something from Before without the intrusion of that date and its aftermaths-still so precariously ongoing. Thus I mention the mundane specificity of today's date, October 30, 2001, because as you read, it has the potential to resonate with new developments, new contexts, and other points of encounter that I cannot anticipate. Many of our authors asked to revise their words. Unfortunately, deadlines did not allow for that. In future issues we will address recent events more directly. As with the 1967 photo of Tokyo in the smog that was on the cover of the Fall 2001 issue, which eerily anticipated images of smoke rising from the ashes of lower Manhattan, changed context can offer new relevance well beyond specific authorial or editorial intentions. In examining the meanings of the Muslim woman in black who wears the chador, enacted as a terrorist by the Iranian artist Shirin Neshat, Igor Zabel could not know the intensity of response these images and his analysis may now provoke.

In his impassioned letter about the role of culture, written in the aftermath of the devastating earthquake in Turkey, Vasif Kortun asks: \"What are the possible roles that contemporary visual culture can play in a time like this?\" And he poignantly adds, \"If you have tents you can send, please let me know. But at least as important, I look forward to your ideas about healing in whichever form it may come.\"

At this cultural moment, as we ricochet between diasporic diffusions and intense national affiliations, issues of translation take on special urgency. In the ongoing press of mass immigration, refugeeism, and displacement, the complexities of translation and its concomitant misunderstandings are a constant source of both energy and confusion.

Expiring Body, an exhibition of work by Marina Abramovic, was held at the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia, from December 4, 1998, through February 6, 1999. Performing Body, a lecture/performance, was presented on December 4, 1998, at the Philadelphia Convention Center in conjunction with the exhibition. The following interview took place December 3, 1998, before the conflict in Kosovo began.

As I write this, the news is filled with victorious announcements of the completion of the Human Genome Project. Science, triumphant in its control of knowing, through mapping, is positioned as conquering hero, clutching the booty of battle, mastery of the innermost territories of life. As Critical Art Ensemble describes it in \"Body Invasion: Critical Cultural Practice,\" their contribution to the \"Biocollage\" forum, it is \"the greatest colonial initiative perhaps ever, full scale body invasion at the molecular level.\"