Category: Print Content

In 2018, artists La Vaughn Belle and Jeannette Ehlers unveiled I Am Queen Mary on the Copenhagen waterfront, an imposing 23-foot-tall monument to Mary Thomas, a leader of the 1878 Fireburn labor revolt in the Danish West Indies. As Denmark’s first public commemoration of its colonial past, the monument intervenes in the European paradigm of memorialization by foregrounding Black women’s resistance. This essay argues that I Am Queen Mary functions as a “guerrilla monument,” borrowing Alan Rice’s concept of guerrilla memorialization to describe bottom-up acts of remembrance. Drawing on Vincent Brown, Paul Gilroy, Saidiya Hartman, Jennifer Morgan, and Michael Rothberg, … Read more

Informalism emerged in Colombia in the early 1960s as an alternative artistic language and a means of resisting the prevailing artistic status quo. Through the use of everyday materials in highly gestural and textured abstract paintings, artists such as Álvaro Herrán, Miguel Ángel Cárdenas, Leonel Estrada, and Guillermo Wiedemann questioned the very nature of painting and the aesthetic values traditionally associated with it. Their aesthetic approach, however, reached beyond artistic spheres. Reflecting the realities of poverty, chaos, and “underdevelopment,” Informalist abstraction subverted and rejected notions of modernity and modernization that were central to the dominant political ideologies of Colombia at … Read more

This article examines the curatorial practice that Walter Zanini (Brazil, 1925–2013) applied at the Museu de Arte Contemporânea at Universidade de São Paulo (MAC USP), which he directed from its foundation in 1963 until 1978 and which has stood ever since as Brazil’s leading contemporary art museum. I propose that the high impact of Zanini’s curatorial work, based on the idea of “museum as forum,” can be traced through Zanini’s one-page article “New Direction for the Museum of Contemporary Art,” originally published in Portuguese in December 1974. Zanini’s exposure to the idea of the “museum as forum vs. the museum … Read more

This article argues that the legacies of the Bauhaus and Black Mountain College are best understood not through narratives of institutional endurance, but through their conditions of dissolution—what Paul and Percival Goodman termed “transitoriness” in Communitas (1947). Tracing the migration of people and ideas from Germany to North Carolina and ultimately to Gate Hill Coop in Stony Point, NY, the article foregrounds the affective, often invisible labor—particularly by women—required to sustain collective life after collapse. It centers M.C. Richards (1916–1999) as a key interlocutor whose translations of language, philosophy, and pedagogy enabled experimental art practices to take root in communal … Read more

This essay analyzes George Maciunas’s collective migration projects and their relationship with his view of Fluxus as a collective organization. Both of these aspects, migration, and collectivity, were not only essential in Maciunas’s way of thinking but also affected the way he understood the configuration of Fluxus. Over a timespan of twenty years, these projects took various forms, with the colony of artists being one of their many configurations. In doing so Maciunas was using a somewhat anachronistic collective symbol which implied a claim for collective bonding. By developing this aspect of Maciunas’s life, overlooked in the growing bibliography on … Read more

This article re-examines The Artists Village (TAV) as a contemporary artist grouping in Singapore that emerged in response to the country’s rapid urbanization and evolving socio-political landscape in the late 1980s. Rather than viewing TAV solely as a marginal or oppositional enclave, I argue for its reappraisal as a form of critical spatial practice and counter-cartography—a provisional community that negotiated the constraints of a tightly regulated Southeast Asian city-state. Drawing on Henri Lefebvre, Grant Kester, and Joanne Leow, I frame TAV’s early “open studio” practices at Lorong Gambas (1989) as dialogical, para-curatorial gestures that enacted new modes of inhabiting, … Read more

This article introduces an essay by Indonesian art critic Sanento Yuliman (1941-1992) on the historical development of sanggar, from a space to study and learn artmaking to sanggar as a form of artist collective in Indonesia. Written at the height of the authoritarian New Order regime (1966-1998), Yuliman reflected on whether sanggar could serve as a framework for developing artistic practice beyond individual expression by situating them within their communities. His work precedes the contemporary discourse on collectivism, illustrated by the concept of lumbung introduced by ruangrupa in documenta fifteen (2022). Yuliman’s article emphasises collectivism’s social, educational, and practical … Read more

This article considers artworks that recorded the construction of four mega dams in Ukraine, the Caucasus, Central Asia and Siberia between the 1930s and 1960s, which as exemplary hydroforming projects trailblazed the expansion of the socialist developmentalist model to the non-Russian territories of the Soviet Union. As centrepieces of the planned economy, mega dams performed as engines of the expansion of heavy industry, as infrastructural hubs for resource extraction, as drivers of social mobilization, and as markers of the enlisting of nature in the building of the socialist system. State commissioned representations of dam building by Gustavs Klucis, Issak Brodsky, … Read more

This article examines the Turkestan-Siberia Railroad (Turksib) through its visual culture, exploring how film, painting, and print media portrayed its role in reshaping the Kazakh steppe. Analyzing Victor Turin’s Turksib (1929), American maps, Soviet periodicals, and paintings by Victor Ufimtsev and Abilkhan Kasteyev, it investigates how these works framed perceptions of infrastructure and environmental transformation. Situating Turksib within global infrastructural imaginaries and Soviet kolonizatsiya politics, the article interrogates its relation to forced modernization, nomadic sedentarization, and environmental degradation. It argues that Turksib’s visual history aestheticized industrial expansion while desensitizing audiences to its human and ecological costs, solidifying the railroad’s status … Read more

This article examines the temporal narratives embedded in the artistic representations of coal mining in post-war Poland, specifically focusing on the 1950s Upper Silesian region. By analyzing artworks from the period, including heroic socialist-realist representations of miners and practices of non-professional artists, supplemented by the insights from press, popular literature and documentary film, this article highlights how different cultural expressions engaged with both the prehistoric past of coal formation and the envisioned future fueled by its continuous extraction. The discussed visual sources not only recorded the extractive labor of miners but also shaped ideological narratives of socialist progress, negotiating between … Read more

This article examines how socialist realist paintings in Albania depict the transformation of nature during the country’s path to industrialization, revealing both the ideological aspirations and the material realities of socialist modernity. Moving beyond a simplistic reading of these artworks as mere propaganda, the study explores the variation in representations of nature—sometimes tamed, sometimes coexisting, and at times resisting transformation. It argues that these paintings, in their diversity of style and representation, serve as crucial visual records of Albania’s socialist Anthropocene, capturing the ways in which environmental interventions were conceptualized, justified, and emotionally framed within the socialist project. By situating … Read more