Category: Volume 12, Issue 3

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

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

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

Household casebearers are a genus of moths primarily distinguished by the spindle-shaped cases they carry and live in throughout their larval life. The cases, woven from household dust, typically comprise an array of materials from textile fibers to dead insect parts. As they thrive in domestic spaces in tropical climates, they are commonly viewed as a domestic pest. Anthropocentrism as such has led to a fundamental imbalance of knowledge concerning these creatures: we are more knowledgeable in their capacity for damage than we are in understanding how they live, even as we cohabit with them very closely, at home. In … Read more

In 1974, Moroccan cultural journal Intégral published a special edition on the first Arab biennial of visual arts, which had just taken place in Baghdad. The two documents translated here come from this special edition, and both of them deal with the Palestinian presence at the landmark exhibition. Moroccan artist Mohamad Chebaa and Italian-Moroccan art historian Toni Maraini each consider Palestine an ideal arena for the development of decolonial “combat art,” but express disappointment with its pavilion’s emphasis on folk idioms over images of armed struggle. The introduction to these documents situates them in relation to Moroccan and Palestinian discourses … Read more