Monthly Archive: October 2014

Aiming to contextualize Turkish artist İsmail Saray’s artist book Leonardo da Vinci (1976), this text centers around the artist’s educational formation and the early years of his artistic practice between the years of 1973–1980, when he was based in Turkey. Tracing key moments in this period including his participation in the Paris Biennial of 1977, the Yeni Eğilimler [New Trends in Art] exhibition of 1979 in Istanbul as well as his guest appearance in the exhibition Sanat Olarak Betik [Book as Art] organized by the conceptualist artist collective Sanat Tanım Topluluğu. This essay also gives a glimpse of the conditions … Read more

This essay is a review of the Iran Modern Exhibition, which took place at the Asia Society in New York from September 6, 2013, to January 5, 2014. The show was the first major international retrospective of Iranian art of the 1960s and 1970s. While shedding light on the featured art from a period that is lesser known outside of Iran, this essay mainly elaborates on the curatorial strategies at work in the exhibit.

This essay reviews the book Contemporary Chinese Art: Primary Documents edited by Wu Hung and published by the New York Museum of Modern Art in 2010, as part of an ongoing series aiming to introduce art critical texts produced in non-mainstream art locales to an English-speaking audience. Gathering a large number of translated critical essays, the book outlines the production of Chinese Contemporary Art since what is normally accepted as its onset in the late 1970s. This essay argues that this process of definition, legitimized by the prominent publisher of this book, amounts to a form of canonization performed at … Read more

In Four Encounters with Sculpture, Rayyane Tabet combines found material and short diary entries to explore four encounters with places, objects, and events. The project attempts to question sculpture as concept and material.

This essay examines Michelangelo Antonioni’s Chung Kuo Cina (China) (1972), a documentary made in and about the People’s Republic of China during the height of the Cultural Revolution. Detailing the documentary’s controversial reception and analyzing Chung Kuo’s emphasis on visual reality in opposition to the PRC’s official socialist realism, I argue that Chung Kuo constituted a critical cross-cultural project, while providing a unique portrayal of quotidian life in Maoist China.

Aiming to contextualize Turkish artist İsmail Saray’s artist book Leonardo da Vinci (1976), this text centers around the artist’s educational formation and the early years of his artistic practice between the years of 1973–1980, when he was based in Turkey. Tracing key moments in this period including his participation in the Paris Biennial of 1977, the Yeni Eğilimler [New Trends in Art] exhibition of 1979 in Istanbul as well as his guest appearance in the exhibition Sanat Olarak Betik [Book as Art] organized by the conceptualist artist collective Sanat Tanım Topluluğu. This essay also gives a glimpse of the conditions … Read more

At nearly the same late-1980s moment, two of the most important artists of India’s twentieth century, Tyeb Mehta (1925–2009) and K. G. Subramanyan (b. 1924), turned to the goddess as a subject for painting. Although Mehta and Subramanyan represented different strands of Indian modernism, they had both hitherto largely limited themselves to secular subject matter. This essay accounts for the significance of their goddess turn by discussing it as an example of late style, as theorized by Edward Said. It finds in these paintings the intransigence, anachronism, and negative intervention championed by Said, but also a critique of the secularism … Read more

This roundtable article investigates the “critical archive” as a material concept in the fields of artistic production, art historiography, curatorial practice, and criticism. We invited twelve critics, artists, art historians, and curators to respond to a series of questions related to the idea of the archive as a critical agent in the field of art. The roundtable examines different historical and institutional permutations of conceptions of a (self-) critical archive and its possible impact on our understanding of the relationship between art and historical evidence.