Author: Russell Coon

Snapshot Dialogue: Boris Kostadinov (Berlin) and Kamen Stoyanov (Vienna/Sofia)

As part of its 25th Anniversary Celebrations, ARTMargins Online hosts a series of short dialogues between critics and curators from Eastern Europe and one or several artists. With these “snapshot” conversations, we want to shed light on the challenging political and economic conditions under which artists and other producers of culture in the region operate today, yet we also aim to highlight the amazing vibrancy, resilience, and resourcefulness of its art scenes. We begin the series with a conversation between Berlin-based curator Boris Kostadinov and Kamen Stoyanov (Vienna and Sofia). The conversation was recorded in Vienna on September 13, 2024.… Read more

On-Site in the City: Comparative Urban Aesthetics in Asia at the turn of the 21st Century

Compelled by dramatic urban transformations in cities across Asia that have been ongoing since the late 20th and into the 21st century, artists in this region have engaged the built environment in innovative new ways. These artists move beyond simply depicting the city in earlier photojournalist, documentary, and modernist approaches to incorporate the effects of the specific sites they investigate into their modes and processes, and often even in their artistic materials. Emerging from local and interregional contexts within Asia, these creative approaches are in dialog with Western urban aesthetic forms and traditions yet also depart from them by incorporating … Read more

The (Calli)graphic Regimes of Contemporary Vietnamese Art

In 1990s Hanoi, Vietnam, many contemporary artists navigated the written form as crucial to the logic of the pictorial field. These included Vũ Dân Tân (1946-2009), Trương Tân (b. 1963), and Nguyễn Văn Cường (b. 1973), among others. I examine these artistic experiments as integral to what many have hailed as the emergence of contemporary art in Vietnam, linked to the early effects of globalization and the impetus to freely engage with questions of selfhood following over forty years of a socialist realist mandate. However, I also suggest the significance of site to these practices, in particular the postsocialist graphic … Read more

Banal Cities: The Constructed Urban Landscape in Contemporary South Korean Photography

This article analyzes South Korean photography of the 21st century that reconstructs urban landscape to critically reflect on the country’s continuing spatial transformation. Focusing on two photographers, Park Chanmin and Keum Hyewŏn, it explores the connection between photographic representations of urban spaces and actual spaces. In doing so, they contribute to a compelling dialogue that can be traced through South Korean photographic practices of the earlier generations and connects with those of adjacent East Asian countries. Taking the concept of banality, which is characterized by a preoccupation with the mundaneness of life under capitalism, a turn away from the spectacular, … Read more

The Aesthetics of “Northern Remnants” in Video Art from China

Since around the turn of the 21st century, contemporary multimedia artists and filmmakers from China have employed the moving image as a tool to capture temporalities shaped by urban-industrial decline in northern China. A counterpoint to massive economic prosperity within the Pearl River Delta, fueled by investments in new technologies and globalizing industries since Deng Xiaoping-era reforms, northern manufacturing zones have witnessed the dismantling of labor-driven forms of socialized production. Throughout the north, once thriving factory complexes and surrounding locales have been reduced to a ghostly shell of their former selves. Artists Wang Bing (b. 1967), Wang Mowen (b. 1989), … Read more

An Aperture Toward Abstraction in Tejal Shah’s Moving-Image Works

This article explores the moving image practice of the India based queer artist Tejal Shah. Acknowledging their preeminent status as a queer artist and activist whose media works have been exhibited widely in urban locations since the early 2000, this approach opens with a Chingari Chumma/Stinging Kiss (2000), a video work completed in collaboration with Anuj Vaidya. In this reading, we note their investment in queer subculture tied to an equally intimate rehearsals with the archive of popular Indian cinema. The second move of this articles is reserved for their five-channel video installation Between the Waves (2012). Attending to its … Read more

Decolonization, Heritage, And Problems of Forgetting

As art historians and curators have attempted to foreground African artists in the name of decolonization, there has been a certain forgetfulness of previous postcolonial attempts to reckon with colonial knowledge production. Questions around the relationship between political decolonization, postcolonialism, decoloniality, and current demands to decolonize have come to the fore in recent years. Nugent addresses these concerns as they relate to African art through two studies: Pierre-Philippe Fraiture’s Past Imperfect: Time and African Decolonization 1945–1960 and Ferdinand de Jong’s Decolonizing Heritage: Time to Repair in Senegal. Both books intervene in such instances of forgetting by looking to the … Read more

My Beautiful Picture Book

The influx of tourism capital in its post-war years has seen the terraforming of Sri Lanka’s natural, socio-political, and cultural landscapes. Among its many neo-Orientalist implications is the marginalization of traditional professions, transforming them into performative roles. Examples include stilt fishermen who now fish primarily to serve the tourist gaze. And the persistent invisibility of structural violence and the exoticization of indentured labor in the tea industry, a colonial remnant that continues to thrive. More recently foreign entrepreneurs, posing as tourists, have exploited Sri Lanka’s economy by acquiring long-term property leases, thereby pricing out locals and fostering new forms of … Read more

Introduction to “Back to the Site: Documentary as I Understand It”

Wu Wenguang’s article ‘Back to the Site: Documentary as I Understand It’ is one of the first attempts to theorize the Chinese concept of xianchang, or working on site. A location-based practice common to filmmakers and experimental artists, xianchang evolved in 1990s China both as a reaction against Socialist Realist aesthetics, and as an attempt to recuperate their socially engaged potential. This introduction explores Wu’s understanding of the distinct spatial, temporal, and everyday qualities of xianchang, while locating the emergence of on-site practices in relation to the period’s rapid socio-economic changes, particularly the challenges and opportunities presented by … Read more

Back to the Site: Documentary as I Understand It

Wu Wenguang’s article ‘Back to the Site: Documentary as I Understand It’ is one of the first attempts to theorize the Chinese concept of xianchang, or working on site. A location-based practice common to filmmakers and experimental artists, xianchang evolved in 1990s China both as a reaction against Socialist Realist aesthetics, and as an attempt to recuperate their socially engaged potential. This introduction explores Wu’s understanding of the distinct spatial, temporal, and everyday qualities of xianchang, while locating the emergence of on-site practices in relation to the period’s rapid socio-economic changes, particularly the challenges and opportunities presented by … Read more

“Real Time Story Telling”: A Performance-Art Festival in the Context of International Networks during the Transitional Period in Poland before and after 1989

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 Problem with Film: Murayama Tomoyoshi’s Variations on the Visible

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

Constellational Modernisms: “Socialist Humanism” and “Contextual Art” in Ion Bitzan and Wanda Mihuleac’s Graphic Art of the 1970s

Art exhibitions acted as facilitators of transnational encounters among artists during the Cold War. This article analyzes the emergence and local circulation of two art critical concepts which described adaptations of art practices and techniques associated with Pop art and conceptual art in Romanian graphic arts of the 1970s as an expanded artistic medium. Focusing on the way Romanian artists Ion Bitzan and Wanda Mihuleac adjusted their experimental art practices to suit different audiences in state-supported exhibitions such as the Romanian Pavilions in Venice or the Ljubljana Graphic Arts Biennale, as well as in other large-scale exhibitions organized in Romania … Read more

Developmental Dilemmas

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

Militant Mappings: A Template Toolkit

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

Modern Art, Indigeneity, and Nationalism in Paraguay: An Introduction to Josefina Plá’s “Ñandutí Crossroads of Two Worlds”

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

Ñandutí: Crossroads of Two Worlds: The Lineage and Magic of Ñandutí

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

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

“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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ARTMargins Print 12:3 Editorial Statement

The writings in this issue all share a preoccupation with the silences, disappearances, and contradictions within historical archives. Across national, regional, and diasporic spaces, they attend to the deliberate acts of remembering and forgetting that accompanied the political, economic, and technological shifts of the postwar era. Often violent, sometimes incomplete, these shifts required and begat different roles for artistic practice. The turbulence and legacies of 1968, the collective traumas of ethno-nationalist wars, or the ongoing struggles of liberation and neocolonialism have led artists in Mexico, Britain, the Balkans, and Palestine to revalue materials, approaches, and commitments to community.

ARTMargins, … Read more

“To Make Books Is to Multiply”: Artists’ Books and Feminist Expression in Mexico

In the late 1970s and early 80s, artist’s books exploded in Mexico City. The impetus for this explosion has often been located in the artistic practice of the experimental artist Felipe Ehrenberg and the bookmaking workshops he offered beginning in 1976. While Ehrenberg was undoubtedly influential, this essay reexamines the history of this period—a so-called Golden Epoch of independent publishing in Mexico––in order to recuperate the significant role that feminist-aligned artists played in advancing the medium of the artist’s book. In particular, I examine early editions produced by the artists Magali Lara and Yani Pecanins. Both prolific producers and staunch … Read more

Revisiting Rasheed Araeen’s Structures: 8bS at Manufactured Art, 1970

In May 1970, Rasheed Araeen’s work “8bS” appeared in Manufactured Art, a group exhibition dedicated to artistic engagements with industrial processes and advanced technology. Araeen’s contribution, like many of his 1960–70s works, comprised lattice-like structures that engaged forms and techniques common to his professional training as a civil engineer. Like the Minimalist object, “8bS” deployed the grammar of productive techniques to structure artistic form, breaking with the compositional principles of formalist modernism and moving towards art beyond objecthood. Yet Araeen’s contribution to Manufactured Art suggests that Araeen’s structures also avoided the limitations of the Minimalist object’s negative mimesis of technological … Read more

Emergency Aesthetics: The Case of the Four Faces of Omarska

This article examines how contemporary artists from the Western Balkans have sought to engage with the legacy of ethnonationalist violence. While attempts to examine and openly discuss war crimes that occurred in this region during the 1990s have largely been undermined by populist politics in successor states, the domain of art has provided a critical platform for disrupting the official erasure of these atrocities. This investigation focuses on the Four Faces of Omarska art collective, whose members examine the war crimes that occurred following the break-up of socialist Yugoslavia by studying the transformation of the Omarska site in north-western Bosnia … Read more