Monthly Archive: June 2024

The article explains the situation of performance artists in Poland during the transition period before and after 1989. Then it focuses on the first large performance art festival in Poland after 1989, Real Time Story Telling. It was organized in Sopot and Gdańsk in 1991 by Galeria Działań and curated by the outstanding artist and art theorist Jan Świdziński. The article explains the idea of the festival and briefly describes the curatorial activity of the invited international performance artists. The article also outlines the international network of connections between performance art festivals, which depended on the personal relationships between artists … Read more

The article explores the film theory written by the Japanese avant-garde artist Murayama Tomoyoshi (1901–1977). Murayama authored a robust yet understudied body of film writing, in the 1920s and 1930s. Although he had a prolific and stable activity related to film—in criticism, theory, screenplays, and even directing—he held an ambivalent opinion about the medium. For him, film could never fulfill art’s political task due to what he saw as the ontological restrictions of the medium: its supposedly incorporeal and incessant display of images. However, he kept repeatedly returning to film, based on the fascination with a certain vitality that he … Read more

Three recent volumes on the economic, infrastructural, and international networks of modernism reveal the extent to which notions of development have shaped the trajectory of modernist art practice outside the Western world, and Sarah-Neel Smith’s Metrics of Modernity: Art and Development in Postwar Turkey (2022) considers how efforts by the Turkish state to join the new global political economy in the 1950s prompted artists and art administrators to synthesize the language of economic development into artistic discourse and institutional infrastructure. Devika Singh’s International Departures: Art in India After Independence (2024) situates modernist artistic practice in India in the Nehruvian decades, … Read more

The rise of Duterte’s authoritarian regime, and a series of violent dispersals to peasant-led mobilizations, prompted counter-mapping workshops in protest camps and rural communities. These workshops evolved out of the need to gather and visualize shared experiences and collective aspirations of the basic sectors-peasants, indigenous groups, and workers-who bear the brunt of oppression in a neocolonial society such as that of the Philippines. Additionally, these mapping sessions have become a potent method in exposing rights abuses, land grabbing, extractive industries, development aggression and other forms of violence perpetrated by centralized bodies. Moreover, the goal of the workshop is to find … Read more

This article introduces the first translation of the text “Ñandutí: Crossroads of Two Worlds” by Josefina Plá, pioneer of Paraguayan art and literature. The text offers an overview of this figure’s life and politics, in the context of the development of Paraguayan modernism in the 1950s and in the early years of General Alfredo Stroessner’s military dictatorship (1954–1989). Particularly, I address her involvement in the First Week of Paraguayan Modern Art as co-founder of the Arte Nuevo group and the close relationship with peers like Olga Blinder and Livio Abramo. Plá’s historical study of Ñandutí – lace is typically made … Read more