Interview with Jarosław Suchan, director of the Art Museum (Museum sztuki) in Lódz (Sven Spieker). Recorded on August 25, 2009 at the museum. Suchan is an art historian, critic and curator. He has been the museum’s director since 2006. Suchan discusses his plans for the future of Museum sztuki, one of Europe’s most important modern art institutions.
Sven Spieker
Sven Spieker is a founding editor of ARTMargins. Spieker specializes in European modernism, with an emphasis on the Eastern European avant-gardes, postwar and contemporary literature and art, especially in Eastern and Central Europe. Spieker's publications include Destruction (ed., MIT Press/Whitechapel 2017); The Big Archive: Art from Bureaucracy (MIT Press, 2008; Korean translation, 2013); The Imprints of Terror: The Rhetoric of Violence and the Violence of Rhetoric in Modern Russian Culture (ed., with Anna Brodsky and Mark Lipovetsky, Vienna, 2006); Bürokratische Leidenschaften. Kultur- und Mediengeschichte im Archiv (ed., Kadmos, 2004). Spieker teaches at the University of California, Santa Barbara (USA) and lives in Los Angeles and Berlin.
The extraordinary scale of the antiracism protests that took over U.S. cities and spread rapidly around the globe beginning in May has conferred a sense of urgency to struggles against the injustices that pervade our societies. In this spirit, this issue of ARTMargins presents Alioune Diop’s “Art and Peace,” written on the occasion of the First World Festival of Negro Arts, in Dakar, Senegal, 1966 (republished here for the first time), with an introduction by Lauren Taylor. A central figure in the Négritude movement, Diop was aware that “real peace” entails justice. The featured articles in this issue include Caterina Preda’s reconsideration of the establishment of Socialist Realist art in Romania, and Meghan Forbes’s focus on the Czech avantgarde of the interwar years, including a plea to acknowledge the significance and originality of Czech Dada. Iftikhar Dadi and Elizabeth Dadi’s Artist Project Jugaad tackles informality as the determinant mode of labor in the periphery of capitalism, while this issue’s review article presents Ghalya Saadawi’s take on Chad Elias’s book Posthumous Images: Contemporary Art and Memory Politics in Post–Civil War Lebanon (Duke University Press, 2018).
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