ARTMargins

Contemporary art across the evolving global peripheries

Category: Volume 12, Issue 1

Print Content / Volume 12, Issue 1

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 by Katarzyna Pieprzak ·

From The Editors

Several of the texts and projects in this new issue of ARTMargins underscore the role of photography and performance in rendering visible our “ways of seeing” and what they occlude: forms of imagining and inhabiting urban space that are suppressed by official discourse, clandestine archives that simultaneously register and obfuscate the humanitarian crimes of the last Brazilian dictatorship, and deaths forgotten or naturalized as part of the AIDS epidemic, among others. The insistence of that which is alternately invisible and reified—illegible and overcoded— runs like a thread through this issue, raising questions about the nature and stakes of the interpretations … Read more

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 by Sean Smuda ·

Memory Zero

The repression of memory as a result of trauma from war and social divisions is often an experience that obscures or intensifies personal histories. This is especially true between generations. The Memory Zero project is an attempt to bridge this gap through drawn impressions from intergenerational family stories collaged with image and text searches to locate their approximate times and places. Together this creates, hopefully, a fuller historical and affective context. For this, I drew from family stories and histories in England and Poland before and after World War l. In this way the personal and historical approximations merge into … Read more

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 by Sandra Skurvida ·

Barbad Golshiri’s Acts of Alterity

In his transdisciplinary practice, artist, writer, and translator Barbad Golshiri interprets from his viewpoint located in Iran the iconic pieces of the European art history, including paintings by Jan van Eyck, Jacques-Louis David, and Kazimir Malevich. Inserting his own artistically inscribed body into the material milieus of these artists, Golshiri activates the present via transfer of the past onto the future, in an attempt to differentiate the script of history. Deleuzian approach of repetition as a means of differencing instigates this interrogation of Golshiri’s Malevich cycle, comprising Quod (2010), which references Malevich’s Black Square (1915); Cura; the Rise and … Read more

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 by Marina Bedran ·

Art of the Counter-Archive: Rosângela Rennó’s Books and the Secret Files of the Dictatorship

This article examines Brazilian artist Rosângela Rennó’s books 2005–510117385–5 and A01 [COD.19.1.1.43] – A27 [S | COD.23], which engage with photographs stolen from public collections in Rio de Janeiro. Both books triggered a conversation about institutional precarity and its effects on national memory and cultural heritage—one that took place a few years before the 2018 fire at Rio de Janeiro’s Museu Nacional, which destroyed much of its invaluable archive of twenty million items and was understood as a national tragedy. It discusses Rennó’s books in light of 1960s and 1970s Latin American Conceptualisms, arguing that they propose new ways … Read more

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 by Vladislav Beronja ·

Yugoslavia with Strings Attached: Boris Kralj’s My Belgrade (2011) and Dubravka Ugrešić and Davor Konjikušić’s There’s Nothing Here (2020)

This article examines the contemporary photographic representations of Yugoslav modernist architecture and its ruins that serve as a counterpoint to the 2019 MoMA exhibition, Toward a Concrete Utopia: Architecture in Yugoslavia, 1948–1980, a project that brought socialist architectural modernism to international visibility. In particular, I focus on Boris Kralj’s photo-diary My Belgrade (2011) and Dubravka Ugrešić and Davor Konjikušić’s photo-essay There’s Nothing Here! (2020) to explore the ruins of Yugoslav socialist modernity not only as an object of aesthetic fascination, but also as an emotionally and politically charged site of collective nostalgia and politicized mourning in the postsocialist now. … Read more

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 by Amelia Jones ·

Chronological Dyslexia: Remembering/Representing/Performing Aids

Exploring two major books on the visual and performance histories of the ongoing and historical AIDS crisis in the US and beyond—Brian Getnick’s edited volume Final Transmission and Avram Finkelstein’s firsthand account, After Silence—this review asks how we have come to contemplate and understand the intensities, losses, and absences of the AIDS catastrophe. Drawing on theories on death, dying, and the cultural expressions around them, the review puts pressure on the particular offerings of these two very different books, ultimately pulling out passionate moments of vulnerability and self-reflexivity in each book as the most effective and powerful ruminations on … Read more

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 by Tomás Maldonado ·

The Abstract and the Concrete in Modern Art

This introductory study analyzes two key texts from the short-lived Argentine collective, the Asociación Arte Concreto-Invención (Association of Concrete Art-Invention, or AACI). Published in 1946 in the same issue of the group’s official organ, they collectively theorize the “co-planar,” the AACI’s key contribution to the history of abstract and concrete painting. While Maldonado’s text offers a historical reconstruction of the genealogy of the co-planar as the culmination of modernist investigations of the plane and the problem of composition, Hlito’s text outlines the understanding of Marxist materialism and dialectics that underpinned this particular take on the task of modernism.

ARTMargins, … Read more

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 by Kathy Yim King Mak ·

Grounding the Global: Pathways to Elucidating Tensions in Chinese Contemporary Art

This article reviews two recent books on Chinese contemporary art, Sasha Welland’s Experimental Beijing (2018) and Jenny Lin’s Above Sea (2019), concerned with the sociopolitical contexts of the 1990s–2000s’ globalizing Beijing and Shanghai respectively. By examining the two authors’ respective methodologies—Welland’s ethnographical field research and Lin’s urban cultural research—, this article interprets how these two books shed light on the role of tensions in the intersectional global-local spaces of Chinese contemporary art. It argues that this field of art history necessitates the employment of non-art historical methodologies, as shown by the two books, in order to locate and make visible … Read more

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 by The Editors ·

Roundtable on John Clark’s The Asian Modern

The book, The Asian Modern, by John Clark (with an Introduction by the Manila-based critic and curator, Patrick Flores) seeks to construct a “cross-Asian” account through a detailed historical and empirical focus on 30 artists spanning Southeast, East, and South Asia, as well as Australia. At the core of the book is the premise that the given place, “Asia,” is the locus for a critique of the normative account of modernism tethered to another locale, identified by Clark as “Euramerica.” These focused geographic arenas provide the basis for novel itineraries, dynamic dispersals, and alternative sightlines that reject the conventional … Read more

Print Content / Volume 12, Issue 1

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Full Access © 2023 ARTMargins and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Introduction to Tomás Maldonado’s “The Abstract and the Concrete in Modern Art” and Alfredo Hlito’s “Notes toward a Materialist Aesthetics”

This introductory study analyzes two key texts from the short-lived Argentine collective, the Asociación Arte Concreto-Invención (Association of Concrete Art-Invention, or AACI). Published in 1946 in the same issue of the group’s official organ, they collectively theorize the “co-planar,” the AACI’s key contribution to the history of abstract and concrete painting. While Maldonado’s text offers a historical reconstruction of the genealogy of the co-planar as the culmination of modernist investigations of the plane and the problem of composition, Hlito’s text outlines the understanding of Marxist materialism and dialectics that underpinned this particular take on the task of modernism.

ARTMargins, … Read more

Print Content / Volume 12, Issue 1

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Full Access © 2023 ARTMargins and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

 by Alfredo Hlito ·

Notes Toward a Materialist Aesthetics

This introductory study analyzes two key texts from the short-lived Argentine collective, the Asociación Arte Concreto-Invención (Association of Concrete Art-Invention, or AACI). Published in 1946 in the same issue of the group’s official organ, they collectively theorize the “co-planar,” the AACI’s key contribution to the history of abstract and concrete painting. While Maldonado’s text offers a historical reconstruction of the genealogy of the co-planar as the culmination of modernist investigations of the plane and the problem of composition, Hlito’s text outlines the understanding of Marxist materialism and dialectics that underpinned this particular take on the task of modernism.

ARTMargins, … Read more