ARTMargins

Contemporary art across the evolving global peripheries

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ARTMargins Online: Book Reviews

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 by Raino Isto ·

Notes on Contemporary Art in Kosovo

Katharina Schendl, ed., Notes on Contemporary Art in Kosovo (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2018), 128pp.

Notes on Contemporary Art in Kosovo is a slim volume collecting eight short essays and two interviews focused on Kosovo’s art scene. Published as part of the tranzit.at (the Vienna-based branch of the transnational contemporary art network tranzit.org) Glossary series, the book’s stated goal is to provide the grounds for understanding how the contemporary art scene in Kosovo shaped itself beginning in the ‘90s decade. The texts included in the volume span the last twenty years,(In a few cases, it is unclear precisely when and … Read more

ARTMargins Online: Interviews

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 by Mario Asef ·

Touching the Void: A Conversation Between Clarissa Thieme, Jan Verwoert and Mario Asef

This podcast was created on the occasion of Clarissa Thieme’s solo show Can’t you see them? at Errant Sound Berlin, November 2019.(In collaboration with Library Hamdija Kresevljakovic Video Arhiv, Sarajevo. Video 8 footage by Nedim Alikadic, Sarajevo, Grbavica, May 2, 1992. The exhibition was the second in a series of exhibitions presented under the title Visual Approach to Sound, which aims to reflect on sound from the perspective of visual art. For this series, visual artists are invited to present works that are based on the forms and methods of visual art, but which also include a central … Read more

Installation view

ARTMargins Online: Exhibition Reviews

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 by Olga Stefan ·

Mattis Teutsch: Avant-Garde and Constructive Realism

Mattis Teutsch: Avant-Garde and Constructive Realism, Scena9, Bucharest, September 12, 2019 – October 25, 2019

János Mattis Teutsch, the Hungarian-German-Romanian painter from Brașov, was characterised in 1920 as “the first who has the audacity to present to the Romanian public works in an expressionist style.” (Sigmund Maur, Rampa newspaper, October 21, 1920.) Mattis Teutsch was associated with the likes of Kandinsky, Marc, and Klee both in actual exhibitions, and in discussions of his artistic and conceptual calibre. His legacy today, however, is something of a battlefield, and the explanation for this lies in the seemingly incongruent bodies of … Read more

ARTMargins Online: Book Reviews

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 by Mechella Yezernitskaya ·

Being Together Precedes Being: A Textbook for The Kids Who Want Communism

Joshua Simon, ed. Being Together Precedes Being: A Textbook for The Kids Who Want Communism (Archive Books, 2019), 392 pp.

Being Together Precedes Being: A Textbook for The Kids Want Communism is the culmination of a series of exhibitions, symposia, seminars, screenings, interviews, and publications co-organized by iLiana Kokianaki, Vladimir Vidmar, Oleksiy Radynski, Vit Havranek, Patrice Sharkey, Kuba Szreder, and Joshua Simon throughout 2016 and 2017 in response to the 99th anniversary of the Russian Revolution. The year-long series of events – hosted by the Museums of Bat Yam (MoBY), Bat Yam, Israel; the Visual Culture Research Center, Kyiv; … Read more

ARTMargins Online: Exhibition Reviews

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 by Stephanie Lebas Huber ·

Theater of Operations: The Gulf Wars 1991–2011

Theater of Operations: The Gulf Wars 1991–2011, MoMA PS1, November 3, 2019–March 3, 2020

Coinciding with the turn of a new decade, the trove of artistic responses to the West’s lengthy military presence in Iraq currently amassed at PS1’s warehouse-sized venue focuses a new lens on recent history. Theater of Operations: The Gulf Wars 1991–2011 is overwhelming in scale yet rich in material, brimming with perspectives that peel back the layers of this protracted, two-part conflict from the not-so-distant past, which now threatens to resurface. Many of the voices represented in the exhibition hail from places other than Iraq: France, … Read more

Installation view of Sammy Baloji’s exhibition Extractive Landscapes.

ARTMargins Online: Exhibition Reviews

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 by Biljana Purić ·

The Extractive Landscapes of Sammy Baloji

Sammy Baloji: Extractive Landscapes, Stadtgalerie Museumspavillon, Salzburg, July 25 – August 17, 2019 

A landscape that has been transformed by human intervention retells the story of the complex power play between different interests and concepts of reality. Such a landscape is never neutral, but rather constantly negotiated and explored, suggesting various interpretations and conclusions. Colonial expansion represented lands outside of the ‘civilized’ European framework as spaces in dire need of cultivation, civilization, and ultimately exploitation, their inhabitants included. Such attitudes continue to affect people in former colonies and beyond. Their material realities have permanently changed by the consequences of colonial … Read more

ARTMargins Online: Exhibition Reviews

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 by Myclef Laun ·

Are We Doomed to Suffer Discourse Over Revolution?

Steirischer Herbst 2019: The Grand Hotel Abyss, Graz, Austria, September 19 – October 13, 2019

This year’s iteration of Steirischer Herbst —the annual arts-and-theater festival held in Graz since 1968—took its title from György Lukács’s metaphor the “Grand Hotel Abyss.” Lukács, the Hungarian Marxist philosopher, aesthetician and literary critic, used the term pejoratively. The title in its original usage was aimed at the Frankfurt School’s inclination for theory over action during the interwar period. According to Lukács, the likes of Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, and Jürgen Habermas represented an intellectually decadent elite locked in a hotel only to be smashed … Read more

ARTMargins Online: Book Reviews

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 by Amy Bryzgel ·

The Art of Contestation: Performance Art in Slovakia

Andrea Bátorová, The Art of Contestation: Performative Practices in the 1960s and 1970s in Slovakia (Bratislava: Comenius University, 2019), 219pp. 

The Art of Contestation: Performative Practices in the 1960s and 1970s in Slovakia is the long-awaited English-language monograph by Andrea Bátorová, the result of her extensive research and writing on performance art.(Bátorová’s PhD dissertation was published in German as Aktionskunst in der Slowakei in den 1960er Jahren : Aktionen von Alex Mlynkárčik (Berlin, Münster, Germany: LIT Verlag, 2009).) In it, she covers the work of key artists from Slovakia’s performance scene, during the heyday of its activity: … Read more

ARTMargins Online: Book Reviews

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 by Cristian Nae ·

Networking the Bloc: Experimental Art in Eastern Europe 1965-1981

Klara Kemp-Welch, Networking the Bloc: Experimental Art in Eastern Europe 1965-1981 (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2019), 480PP.

Authoritative, yet written in a colloquial tone in keeping with the human connections it delves into, Klara Kemp-Welch’s long-awaited book Networking the Bloc: Experimental Art in Eastern Europe 1965-1981 offers an insightful account of experimental art in Eastern Europe during the Cold War period. Its main intention is to “challenge the idea that experimental artists in the Soviet bloc operated in isolation,” by examining how people, objects, and ideas connected and circulated across the countries behind the Iron Curtain. The evidence gathered … Read more

ARTMargins Online: Interviews

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 by Cristina Baldacci, Marysia Lewandowska ·

“Era ora!”: Cristina Baldacci and Marysia Lewandowska discuss Lewandowska’s It’s About Time

Art historian Cristina Baldacci and artist Marysia Lewandowska discuss It’s About Time (translated into Italian as ‘Era ora!’), her Special Project in the Pavilion of Applied Arts (curated by Ralph Rugoff) for the 58th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia. Based on records of meetings held by the Mayor of Venice (Riccardo Selvatico) between 1893 and 1895, the project focuses on the absence of women from art history, taking the Biennale as a case in point.

As part of her project, Lewandowska invited a group of Italian women practitioners(L. Cavorsi, G. Damiani, V. Facchin, A. Ongaro, … Read more

Red Discussion 2

ARTMargins Online: Exhibition Reviews

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 by Maja Ćirić ·

Parole, Parole (As a Counter-Hegemonic Gesture): Red Discussion No. 2 (Pavilion of the Republic of North Macedonia; Maja Ćirić)

Parole, parole(The reference is to the famous Italian duet performed in 1972 by Mina and Alberto Lupo about appealing yet hollow, empty words.) (As a Counter-hegemonic Gesture): Red Discussion No. 2, part of Subversion to Red by Nada Prlja for The Pavilion of The Republic of North Macedonia

The number of professionals in the fields of the arts and humanities who are capable of critically reflecting upon the planetary condition appears to be small. Fewer still are those who express any critical, communal, or selfless interest in connecting the legacy of the arts and humanities to the … Read more

ARTMargins Online: Exhibition Reviews

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 by Patryk P. Tomaszewski ·

From the Eastern Bloc to the Bronx: Early Acquisitions from the Art Collection

From the Eastern Bloc to the Bronx: Early Acquisitions from the Art Collection, Derfner Judaica Museum and the Art Collection at the Hebrew Home, Riverdale, New York (May 5-August 25, 2019)

Writing in 2009, Polish scholar Piotr Piotrowski suggested that we recognize multiple, coexisting art historical canons. Focusing on the postwar period, Piotrowski sketched out a series of interweaving histories, at once looking at the broader picture while also considering the political heterogeneity of specific states within the Soviet-dominated region.(See Piotr Piotrowski, In the Shadow of Yalta: Art and Avant-Garde in Eastern Europe, 1945-1989 (London: Reaktion Books, 2009).… Read more

Documentation of performance

ARTMargins Online: Interviews

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 by Margarita Delcheva ·

The Glitzy World We All Think We Want: An Interview with Zornitsa Stoyanova

Zornitsa Stoyanova is a performance artist working between the United States and Bulgaria. Currently based in Philadelphia, Stoyanova performs under the name Here[begin] Dance, and her practice involves the creation of large-scale props in front of her audience. Her work explores an amalgamation of genres, blending choreography, performance, song, and shadow play. This summer, Stoyanova took part in Etud and Friends, a dance and performance festival held in Sofia and one of a growing number of multidisciplinary events that seeks to bring together local and transnational artists and performers working in a variety of disciplines.

While Bulgaria hosts multiple dance … Read more

ARTMargins Online: Exhibition Reviews

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 by Karolina Majewska-Güde ·

The Matter of Art Biennale Symposium Who are We Talking with? What Can Institutions (Un)learn from Artists?

Who are we talking with? What can institutions (un)learn from artists? Prague, 17-18 May 2019

In contemporary critical artistic and curatorial discourse,  the word “organization” is often accompanied by the word “future”. Through the practice of self-questioning and self-positioning, the institution of the biennale recently also became a vehicle for critical investigations focused on envisioning the future beyond a global administered society. Several interesting biennales were initiated in Central and Eastern Europe where, according to Vít Havránek, for a long time “we had believed that democracy and capitalism were two separate processes and that aesthetic differentiation was a mirror image … Read more

ARTMargins Online: Exhibition Reviews

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 by Hilary R. Whitham ·

After the End: Timing Socialism in Contemporary African Art at Wallach Art Gallery

After the End: Timing Socialism in Contemporary African Art, Wallach Art Gallery, Columbia University, New York City, June 15 – October 6, 2019

Philosopher and Columbia University faculty member Souleymane Bachir Diagne’s 2013 book The Ink of the Scholars: Reflections on Philosophy in Africa situates the afterlife of socialism in sub-Saharan Africa after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989 in terms of “a search for itself.”(Souleymane Bachir Diagne, The Ink of the Scholars: Reflections on Philosophy in Africa. Dakar : CODESRIA, Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa, 2016.)

Taking Diagne’s framing … Read more

Volume 8 Issue 3

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 by ARTMargins ·

Thresholds of the Visible. Activist Video, Militancy, and Prefigurative Politics

The formation of a Peoples’ Assembly and occupation of the city of Oaxaca (Mexico) in 2006 has been widely considered a rebirth of the Commune and was also one of the first widely video-recorded uprisings of the 21st century. As media practice, activist videos approximate an identity of creative art/work and socio-political change but also warrant consideration of their formal aspects. How do stylistic choices help or hinder reflecting on the not-quite-here-yet of prefigurative politics? In contrast with video art, graffiti, and performance protest, activist videos overwhelmingly adhere to evidentiary forms. Carefully edited, they invite viewers to view crowdsourced … Read more

Print Content / Volume 8 Issue 3

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Subscription Required © 2019 ARTMargins and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

 by Katarzyna Pieprzak ·

Whitewash as Affective Platform: Art and Politics of Surface in the Work of Yto Barrada and Hassan Darsi

Whitewash when read through affect is a site of fleeting documentation, a temporary archive of becoming, an ephemeral glimpse into what might become, different. By reading slowly and carefully the work of contemporary artists Yto Barrada and Hassan Darsi, this article hopes to show how their attention to whitewash in urban Morocco is about registering and producing a moment of as-yet-unrealized possibility and potential ontological transformation. From the creation of potemkin worlds for passing dignitaries to the presentation of a worker’s body slowly whitewashing a decaying building in a neoliberal authoritarian city, Barrada and Darsi document whitewash as the space
… Read more

Volume 8 Issue 3

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 by ARTMargins ·

Regioning Differences: Translation and Critical Cartography

The remapping of  cartographies of knowledge, the reorientation of genealogies of comparison, the zoning of what might be through of as “the great unthought” (associated by N. Katherine Hayles with “the cognitive nonconciousness”), all have been fully underway for quite some time in critical and curatorial practice. Literary theory has also been much taken up by the cartographic turn.

Print Content / Volume 8 Issue 3

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Subscription Required © 2019 ARTMargins and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

 by Lindsay Caplan ·

Contingency Plans: Art Collectives, Shared Pseudonyms, and Theories of Collectivity

This review considers Jacopo Galimberti’s Individuals Against Individualism: Art Collectives in Western Europe (1956–1969), 2017, and Marco Deseriis’s Improper Names: Collective Pseudonyms from the Luddites to Anonymous, 2017 and the theories of collectivity that inform them (multitude, inoperative community, and transindividuality). While Galimberti looks at how collaborative practices model new strategies for collective action, and Deseriis examines forms that allow multiple actions and ideologies to flow through them, they authors share a desire to move beyond representation to model, enact, and realize real change in the world. Taken together, these two books afford us the opportunity to evaluate the critique … Read more

Print Content / Volume 8 Issue 3

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Free Content © 2019 ARTMargins and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

 by Hiba Kalache ·

Encounters—Ongoing

The series of drawings, Encounters – ongoing stems from chance meetings on leisurely road trips around the mountains of Lebanon. The drawings act as markers of my conversations with landowners, farmers, and people directly working in the fields. The formal particularities of drawing, and specifically the use of ink washes, allows for an approach that is both intuitive and intentional. This approach reproduces the spontaneity of these accidental or brief exchanges with people who have a vested interest in Lebanese land. Each conversation is represented by a simple tree branch, or a fragment of a (flowering) plant, belonging to the … Read more

Print Content / Volume 8 Issue 3

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Free Content © 2019 ARTMargins and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

 by Angela Harutyunyan ·

Introduction to Arman Grigoryan’s “What is Hamasteghtsakan Art” (1993) and “What is Hamasteghtsakan Art” (1996)

The document presents two separate articles with the same title –“What is Hamasteghtsakan Art” – by artist Arman Grigoryan and art critic Nazareth Karoyan, published in Armenia in 1994 and 1996 respectively. Translated from Armenian and introduced by Angela Harutyunyan both articles have been formative for the development of contemporary art in Armenia. While presenting diverging views on the meaning of hamasteghtsakan (translated as collectively created), the concept was circulated as a definition for a broad range of post-medium artistic practices in late Soviet and post-Soviet Armenia. These practices formed an oppositional discourse to both Socialist Realism and Armenian National … Read more

Print Content / Volume 8 Issue 3

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Free Content © 2019 ARTMargins and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

 by Arman Grigoryan and Nazareth Karoyan ·

What is Hamasteghtsakan Art

The document presents two separate articles with the same title –“What is Hamasteghtsakan Art” – by artist Arman Grigoryan and art critic Nazareth Karoyan, published in Armenia in 1994 and 1996 respectively. Translated from Armenian and introduced by Angela Harutyunyan both articles have been formative for the development of contemporary art in Armenia. While presenting diverging views on the meaning of hamasteghtsakan (translated as collectively created), the concept was circulated as a definition for a broad range of post-medium artistic practices in late Soviet and post-Soviet Armenia. These practices formed an oppositional discourse to both Socialist Realism and Armenian National

… Read more

ARTMargins Online: Exhibition Reviews

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 by Chiara Marchini ·

Revolt She Said: Decolonial and Feminist Perspectives on 1968 at District Berlin

Revolt She Said: Decolonial and Feminist Perspectives on 1968, District Berlin and Alpha Nova & Galerie Futura, September 2018 – January 2019.

In European and especially German history, 1968 marks the beginning of far-reaching critical engagement on the part of students and established intellectuals with the rise and fall of fascism, and its continuities in postwar societies. The ensuing protests—carried out by students, sometimes in cooperation with trade unions, notably in France—aimed to shake up not only politics and state institutions, but also social mores and gender roles. On a global scale, 1968 stands for the … Read more

View of the exhibition

ARTMargins Online: Exhibition Reviews

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 by Tomasz Basiuk ·

Karol Radziszewski: Queer Archives Institute at Berlin’s Gay Museum

Karol Radziszewski: Queer Archives Institute, Schwules Museum, Berlin, June 20 – September 23, 2019

From June 20 to September 23, 2019, Berlin’s Schwules Museum [Gay Museum] hosted an exhibition of queer archives from Eastern Europe collected and presented by Karol Radziszewski, Polish artist, activist, and founder of the Queer Archives Institute (QAI). The QAI is among the most extensive and most visible of a number of queer archives recently founded in Poland and in other Central and East European countries, where celebrating and memorializing non-heteronormative lives and cultural production remains a novelty, perhaps even a rarity. Historically, these countries differed … Read more

ARTMargins Online: Exhibition Reviews

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 by Kathleen Reinhardt ·

Conscious Inability: Gabriele Stötzer’s Archive at Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst, Leipzig

Conscious Inability: The Archive of Gabriele Stötzer, Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst Leipzig (GfZK Leipzig), March 3, 2019 – March 2020.

Conscious Inability: The Gabriele Stötzer Archive at the Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst Leipzig (GfZK Leipzig) takes a long deserved in-depth look at the work of Gabriele Stötzer (also Gabriele Kachold, *1954), one of the central representatives of feminist art in the late GDR. Conscious Inability: The Gabriele Stötzer Archive is a long-term research and exhibition project: over the course of one year, from March 2019 to March 2020, three exhibitions will highlight different aspects of Stötzer’s artistic practice and political … Read more

ARTMargins Online: Exhibition Reviews

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 by Sven Spieker ·

Eastern European Pavilions at this Year’s Venice Biennale: Parsing the Contemporary

ARTMargins Online asked writers and critics close to the journal to respond to several Eastern European national pavilions at this year’s Venice Biennale. Our interest was in parsing the way in which pavilion curators approached the problem of nationhood and representation in a region caught between the Socialist past and an uncertain present marked by nationalism and neo-liberal economic policies. This series of responses is supplemented by an interview with Berlin-based artist Maria Loboda.

Read more… 

 

ARTMargins Online: Interviews

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 by Karolina Majewska-Güde, Maria Loboda ·

“I Follow the Work Into the Rabbit Hole.” An Interview with Maria Loboda

Maria Loboda is a Berlin-based visual artist who works interdisciplinarily, creating installations that combine objects, linguistic elements, plants, audio recordings, illustrations, drawings and photographs. She was invited to participate in the 58th International Art Exhibition of Venice Biennale, curated by Ralph Rugoff, with three works created in 2017. In the Arsenale, Loboda’s shows the multimedia installation Lord of Abandoned Success (L’Argile Humide). In the Central Pavilion in the Giardini, two digital prints from the on-going series Zero Dynasty – Zero Dynasty II and V are being shown, and in the Bookshop Pavilion Stirling, her work Young Warrior in … Read more

ARTMargins Online: Articles

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 by Dorota Michalska (Oxford, Warsaw) ·

Roman Stańczak, Allegories of Flight. Polish Pavilion at the 58th International Art Exhibition—la Biennale di Venezia, 2019

Roman Stańczak’s installation Flight for the Polish Pavilion at the Venice Biennale at once invites and defies final interpretations. The massive sculpture occupying the entire pavilion was created by violently splitting in half a private aircraft, and then sewing it back together inside out. What at first glance could be regarded as a direct reference to the Smoleńsk airplane catastrophe in 2010—dramatically polarizing Polish society, and eventually leading to the victory of the nationalistic, right-wing party Law and Justice—proves to encompass more complex meanings and references. In fact, the work can be perhaps best described as an allegory in the … Read more

ARTMargins Online: Articles

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 by Kriss Ravetto-Biagioli ·

Masters on Masters: When the Biennale Goes Meta (Russian Pavilion; Kriss Ravetto-Biagioli)

There is nothing unusual about famous gallerists curating national pavilions at the Venice Biennale, but it is another thing to have Mikhail Piotrovsky (the director of the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg) curate his country’s pavilion by inviting artists to engage with the history of the museum and its collection, thus turning the Biennale pavilion into a commentary on the Hermitage.  Piotrovsky has orchestrated a complex metacommentary on the relation of the national pavilion to Russia’s “national treasure” that houses the works of many of the world’s Renaissance and Baroque masters—French, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, and Flemish.

The Russian Pavilion … Read more

ARTMargins Online: Articles

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 by Uroš Čvoro ·

Heart, Hands, and a Shovel: Danica Dakić’s Zenica Trilogy (Pavilion of Bosnia and Herzegovina; Uroš Čvoro)

Reflecting on the national pavilion of Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) in the context of a Venice Biennale titled “May You Live In Interesting Times”, it is impossible to not think of a BiH joke-curse from the 1990s: “May you see your house on CNN.” This joke captures the paradox of global visibility that accompanies regions that have been subject to conflict and crisis.(On art that uses humour to respond to crisis, see Uroš Čvoro and Chrisoula Lionis, “When the Periphery Laughs: Humor and Locality in Contemporary Art from Greece and Bosnia and Herzegovina,” Cultural Politics15:2 (2019), 223-243. ) … Read more