ARTMargins

Contemporary art across the evolving global peripheries

Monthly Archive: February 2024

ARTMargins Online: Special Issue

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 by Zsuzsa László ·

Regional Resonances: In Search of the Transnational in Central East European Art of the 1970s

East European art scenes have long invited mostly negative comparisons with their West European counterparts. During the Cold War era, external perceptions often blurred the many differences between state socialisms and their related cultural fields. For their part, local artists and art historians in the countries of Eastern Europe criticized such homogenizing accounts, pointing instead to the many, and wide-ranging, Western connections of individual artists or artist groups with the West, as well as their distance from so-called official art. Another question was also rarely asked: whether there was any dialogue between artists working in different state-socialist societies of Eastern … Read more

ARTMargins Online: Articles / ARTMargins Online: Special Issue

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 by Zsuzsa László ·

Dictionaries of Friendship: Transnational Artistic Dialogues in First Person Plural

In 1978, Nick Waterlow, the artistic director of the third Sydney Biennale, “European Dialogue,” visited Budapest and agreed with the Hungarian art historian, László Beke that he would put together an informative exhibition of documents and original works covering the activities of several Hungarian artists. Beke, who was by then an internationally renowned advocate of East European Conceptualisms accepted this task but avoided the burdensome role of a national consultant by involving artists not only from Hungary but also from four other socialist countries. As he stated in the catalogue, he did not attempt to make an objective representation of … Read more

Print Content / Volume 13, Issue 1

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 by Álvaro Luís Lima ·

Socialism in Contemporary African Art: Butchering the End of Time

This introductory essay and accompanying special issue of ARTMargins explore the role of African socialisms in contemporary art. Artists looking at Africa’s radical history face the challenge of responding to a generalized amnesia about the continent’s protagonism on intellectual and political radicalism after 1945. Working with under-researched themes, scarce historical records, and apprehensive oral sources, these artists are often tasked to amplify forgotten pasts while simultaneously critiquing the political contingency of historical investigation in global contemporary art. Global contemporary art—largely shaped by the neoliberal transition that followed the very histories explored by these artists—is often shown in its limitation to … Read more

Print Content / Volume 13, Issue 1

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 by Delinda Collier ·

“We Need a Lighthouse Philosopher”: Filipa César and Louis Henderson’s Sunstone (2018) and the Portuguese Genealogy of Lens-Based Media

This article discusses Filipa César’s and Louis Henderson’s digital film Sunstone (2018), situating it within a history of lenses and lighthouses in Portuguese conquest. It argues that Portugal has been overlooked as playing a key role in shaping the use and conceptual function of lenses in maritime conquest. In particular, the beaming of light from lenses has been overshadowed by the function of light collection in histories written about lens-based media.

ARTMargins, Volume 13, Issue 1, pp. 18-39.

doi:10.1162/artm_a_00371

https://direct.mit.edu/artm/article/13/1/18/120554/We-Need-a-Lighthouse-Philosopher-Filipa-Cesar-and

Print Content / Volume 13, Issue 1

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 by Natasha Marie Llorens ·

Make Me a Picture of the Future: Massinissa Selmani’s 1000 Socialist Villages (2015)

Contemporary artist Massinissa Selmani’s installation 1000 Socialist Villages (2015) explores how a rural land distribution and urban planning initiative in Algeria known as “1000 Socialist Villages” dissipated into rumor. The analysis relies on Djaffar Lesbet’s first-hand accounts of and extensive research on the 1000 Socialist Villages, as his archives and his testimony were crucial to Selmani’s artistic research process. Through close reading of Selmani’s aesthetic references to the classic school notebook used during the socialist period in Algeria (1965–1979) and by drawing on Karima Lazali and Daho Djerbal’s work on literature and history Algeria, the paper argues that Selmani’s installation
… Read more

Print Content / Volume 13, Issue 1

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 by Nadine Siegert ·

The Mythography of Socialism in Contemporary Angolan Art

The period of political socialism (1975–1991) in Angola was relatively short but has left remnants – both as physical and ideological manifestations. These have been also increasingly addressed by artists who revisit and reinvent this political and aesthetic period. This paper looks at contemporary Angolan art’s engagement with the ideological power represented by socialism and at the same time analyzes the mystification and “iconization” of its political leaders. Working with the analytical concept of “mythography” introduced by Boris Groys and based on a number of artworks as examples it argues that artists can be considered as mythographers of socialist history … Read more

Print Content / Volume 13, Issue 1

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 by Ana Balona de Oliveira ·

The Politics and Aesthetics of Liberation: Revolution and Its Aftermath in Contemporary Artistic Practice from and about Lusophone Africa 1

This essay explores the ways in which artistic practices have revisited histories and memories of anti-colonial struggle, socialist revolution, and decolonization in Mozambique, Angola, Guinea-Bissau, and Portugal, while also addressing apartheid South Africa and the global Cold War. The cartography drawn here follows the histories and geographies of anti-colonial and anti-apartheid friendship without losing sight of several forms of imperialism, old and new. This essay examines the archival and historiographical potential of contemporary art in remembering histories of revolution and decolonization, notably those pertaining to cultural production and especially film, in the globalized, neoliberal present. My case studies are distinct … Read more

Print Content / Volume 13, Issue 1

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 by Gemma Sharpe ·

Abstract States: Modernism in Lebanon, Syria, and Turkey

A decade after modernist art history’s tentative embrace of postcolonial modernisms, a new crop of books are leveraging this disciplinary acceptance to examine hitherto shrouded aspects of the field. Anneka Lenssen’s, Beautiful Agitation: Modern Painting and Politics in Syria (2020), Zeina Maasri’s, Cosmopolitan Radicalism: The Visual Politics of Beirut’s Global Sixties (2020) and Sarah-Neel Smith’s, Metrics of Modernity: Art and Development in Postwar Turkey, (2022) offer candid appraisals of postcolonial modernism’s exposure to colonial and nationalist institutions, Cold War cultural networks, and the hierarchical effects of canonical modernism. Reviewed together in this article, these books reveal the distinctive orientations … Read more

Print Content / Volume 13, Issue 1

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 by Dawit L. Petros, Black Athena Collective ·

As the Nile Flows or the Camel Walks

Between 1884–1885, Britain requested a contingent of boatmen – “voyageurs” – from Canada to assist transport troops and supplies through the Nile’s system of cataracts (rapids). The expedition’s cross section of participants included Egyptians, Sudanese, roughly one hundred indigenous subjects from Canada and subjects from across Britain’s empire. Primary sources authored by four participants are central to understanding how the role of travelogues and their accompanying illustrations and photographs combine with discourses of imperialism to establish a foundational framework for the discursive practice of colonialism. Two authors – Louis Jackson’s Our Gaughnawagas in Egypt (1885) and James D. Deer’s The … Read more

Print Content / Volume 13, Issue 1

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 by Polly Savage ·

Introduction to “Cultural Offensive of the Working Classes”

In April 1977, after almost two years in power, the Front for the Liberation of Mozambique (Frelimo) announced their plans for the culture of the new nation. Pitched in military terms, and announced in the document translated for the first time here, the “Cultural Offensive of the Working Classes” drew on Marxist theory to define a revolutionary new culture, and to deploy this culture as a weapon in the ongoing struggle to build a postcolonial, postcapitalist society.

ARTMargins, Volume 13, Issue 1, pp. 139-142.

doi:10.1162/artm_a_00377

https://direct.mit.edu/artm/article/13/1/139/120553/Introduction-to-Cultural-Offensive-of-the-Working

Print Content / Volume 13, Issue 1

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Full Access © 2024 ARTMargins and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

 by Tempo, Polly Savage ·

Cultural Offensive of the Working Classes

In April 1977, after almost two years in power, the Front for the Liberation of Mozambique (Frelimo) announced their plans for the culture of the new nation. Pitched in military terms, and announced in the document translated for the first time here, the “Cultural Offensive of the Working Classes” drew on Marxist theory to define a revolutionary new culture, and to deploy this culture as a weapon in the ongoing struggle to build a postcolonial, postcapitalist society.

ARTMargins, Volume 13, Issue 1, pp. 143-148.

doi:10.1162/artm_a_00378

https://direct.mit.edu/artm/article/13/1/143/120551/Cultural-Offensive-of-the-Working-Classes