Monthly Archive: February 2014

This research is part of a core of broader interests which seek to study the diverse cultural positions in South America and to analyze the tensions between traditional hegemonies and the appearance of new centers of cultural diffusion and management within the region. In this text I develop two lines of investigation: firstly, to pursue existing research into the disputes between Argentina and Brazil over hegemony in the region and, second, to propose an approach to Brazilian cultural intervention in Paraguay. The hypothesis of this work states that Brazilian cultural management in Paraguay during the 1950s sought to catalyze the … Read more

The article considers two art works made in recent years in Angola: the exhibition Lion & Ox, which featured art works by António Ole and Art Orienté objet, and the installation Icarus 13 by Kiluanji Kia Henda. Both draw on twentieth century utopias still present in Angola and refer to Agostinho Neto, the poet who became Angola’s first Marxist-Leninist president. While Lion & Ox explores Angolan nature structured through colonial taxonomies, Icarus 13 tells sci-fi narrative of an Angolan space mission to the Sun, suggesting a shift to a planetary imaginary. What does it mean, in the present conjuncture, to … Read more

This stenogram was recorded at an artists’ meeting that took place in 1951 in Kishinev (as the capital of today’s Republic of Moldova was called in those days). The discussion among the members of the local Union of Artists—a new type of art organization that was implemented in Moldova after the advance of the Red Army westwards—revolves around the organization of their annual art exhibition of 1951. The text discloses some of the major issues and challenges faced by the members of this artist organization during the late Stalinist era.

This article reviews Pamela M. Lee’s Forgetting the Art World (2012) and TJ Demos’s Return to the Postcolony (2013). Reviewer examines the texts’ shared concern with self-reflexive art practices that in different ways work to expose their own conditions of existence with respect to globalization. Both authors, according to the review, engage with art as a privileged medium that is capable of materializing knowledge about globalization and that thereby holds some potential to shape, mediate, or confront its trajectory. After appraising both the originality and limitations of Lee’s and Demos’s approaches, reviewer concludes with an outline of the core issues … Read more

This stenogram was recorded at an artists’ meeting that took place in 1951 in Kishinev (as the capital of today’s Republic of Moldova was called in those days). The discussion among the members of the local Union of Artists—a new type of art organization that was implemented in Moldova after the advance of the Red Army westwards—revolves around the organization of their annual art exhibition of 1951. The text discloses some of the major issues and challenges faced by the members of this artist organization during the late Stalinist era.

Chronicles from Majnun until Layla is a film project structured in three stages: 1.) The Museum of Modern Iranian History (2011–2013), 2.) Layla and Majnun (in preparation), and 3.) The Film (in preparation). Each stage bears its own approach, format, and mode of presentation. The first two stages are conceived as preparation for the third and final stage: the merging moment, which will be in the form of a feature-length, hybrid fiction/documentary film. The film depicts a couple, lovers, visiting a virtual museum of modern Iranian history. The lovers appear both as themselves and as “Layla and Majnun,” characters adapted … Read more

This article discusses the plastic arts’ non-dialectical engagement with materiality, by focusing on figures of depth in three recent artworks in mixed media by artists from the Americas: Artur Barrio’s coffee-grounds installations (2000–08), Jacques Coursil’s avant-garde jazz album Clameurs (2007), and Damián Ortega’s action Moby Dick (2004). All three offer aesthetic experiences of depth that propose an approach to the questions of relation and chaos-monde addressed by Édouard Glissant in terms of plasticity and assemblages—unhinged from anthropocentrism and signification.