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Contemporary art across the evolving global peripheries

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Print Content / Volume 13, Issue 1

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 by Delinda Collier ·

“We Need a Lighthouse Philosopher”: Filipa César and Louis Henderson’s Sunstone (2018) and the Portuguese Genealogy of Lens-Based Media

This article discusses Filipa César’s and Louis Henderson’s digital film Sunstone (2018), situating it within a history of lenses and lighthouses in Portuguese conquest. It argues that Portugal has been overlooked as playing a key role in shaping the use and conceptual function of lenses in maritime conquest. In particular, the beaming of light from lenses has been overshadowed by the function of light collection in histories written about lens-based media.

ARTMargins, Volume 13, Issue 1, pp. 18-39.

doi:10.1162/artm_a_00371

https://direct.mit.edu/artm/article/13/1/18/120554/We-Need-a-Lighthouse-Philosopher-Filipa-Cesar-and

Print Content / Volume 13, Issue 1

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 by Natasha Marie Llorens ·

Make Me a Picture of the Future: Massinissa Selmani’s 1000 Socialist Villages (2015)

Contemporary artist Massinissa Selmani’s installation 1000 Socialist Villages (2015) explores how a rural land distribution and urban planning initiative in Algeria known as “1000 Socialist Villages” dissipated into rumor. The analysis relies on Djaffar Lesbet’s first-hand accounts of and extensive research on the 1000 Socialist Villages, as his archives and his testimony were crucial to Selmani’s artistic research process. Through close reading of Selmani’s aesthetic references to the classic school notebook used during the socialist period in Algeria (1965–1979) and by drawing on Karima Lazali and Daho Djerbal’s work on literature and history Algeria, the paper argues that Selmani’s installation
… Read more

Print Content / Volume 13, Issue 1

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 by Nadine Siegert ·

The Mythography of Socialism in Contemporary Angolan Art

The period of political socialism (1975–1991) in Angola was relatively short but has left remnants – both as physical and ideological manifestations. These have been also increasingly addressed by artists who revisit and reinvent this political and aesthetic period. This paper looks at contemporary Angolan art’s engagement with the ideological power represented by socialism and at the same time analyzes the mystification and “iconization” of its political leaders. Working with the analytical concept of “mythography” introduced by Boris Groys and based on a number of artworks as examples it argues that artists can be considered as mythographers of socialist history … Read more

Print Content / Volume 13, Issue 1

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 by Ana Balona de Oliveira ·

The Politics and Aesthetics of Liberation: Revolution and Its Aftermath in Contemporary Artistic Practice from and about Lusophone Africa 1

This essay explores the ways in which artistic practices have revisited histories and memories of anti-colonial struggle, socialist revolution, and decolonization in Mozambique, Angola, Guinea-Bissau, and Portugal, while also addressing apartheid South Africa and the global Cold War. The cartography drawn here follows the histories and geographies of anti-colonial and anti-apartheid friendship without losing sight of several forms of imperialism, old and new. This essay examines the archival and historiographical potential of contemporary art in remembering histories of revolution and decolonization, notably those pertaining to cultural production and especially film, in the globalized, neoliberal present. My case studies are distinct … Read more

Print Content / Volume 13, Issue 1

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 by Gemma Sharpe ·

Abstract States: Modernism in Lebanon, Syria, and Turkey

A decade after modernist art history’s tentative embrace of postcolonial modernisms, a new crop of books are leveraging this disciplinary acceptance to examine hitherto shrouded aspects of the field. Anneka Lenssen’s, Beautiful Agitation: Modern Painting and Politics in Syria (2020), Zeina Maasri’s, Cosmopolitan Radicalism: The Visual Politics of Beirut’s Global Sixties (2020) and Sarah-Neel Smith’s, Metrics of Modernity: Art and Development in Postwar Turkey, (2022) offer candid appraisals of postcolonial modernism’s exposure to colonial and nationalist institutions, Cold War cultural networks, and the hierarchical effects of canonical modernism. Reviewed together in this article, these books reveal the distinctive orientations … Read more

Print Content / Volume 13, Issue 1

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 by Dawit L. Petros, Black Athena Collective ·

As the Nile Flows or the Camel Walks

Between 1884–1885, Britain requested a contingent of boatmen – “voyageurs” – from Canada to assist transport troops and supplies through the Nile’s system of cataracts (rapids). The expedition’s cross section of participants included Egyptians, Sudanese, roughly one hundred indigenous subjects from Canada and subjects from across Britain’s empire. Primary sources authored by four participants are central to understanding how the role of travelogues and their accompanying illustrations and photographs combine with discourses of imperialism to establish a foundational framework for the discursive practice of colonialism. Two authors – Louis Jackson’s Our Gaughnawagas in Egypt (1885) and James D. Deer’s The … Read more

Print Content / Volume 13, Issue 1

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 by Polly Savage ·

Introduction to “Cultural Offensive of the Working Classes”

In April 1977, after almost two years in power, the Front for the Liberation of Mozambique (Frelimo) announced their plans for the culture of the new nation. Pitched in military terms, and announced in the document translated for the first time here, the “Cultural Offensive of the Working Classes” drew on Marxist theory to define a revolutionary new culture, and to deploy this culture as a weapon in the ongoing struggle to build a postcolonial, postcapitalist society.

ARTMargins, Volume 13, Issue 1, pp. 139-142.

doi:10.1162/artm_a_00377

https://direct.mit.edu/artm/article/13/1/139/120553/Introduction-to-Cultural-Offensive-of-the-Working

Print Content / Volume 13, Issue 1

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Full Access © 2024 ARTMargins and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

 by Tempo, Polly Savage ·

Cultural Offensive of the Working Classes

In April 1977, after almost two years in power, the Front for the Liberation of Mozambique (Frelimo) announced their plans for the culture of the new nation. Pitched in military terms, and announced in the document translated for the first time here, the “Cultural Offensive of the Working Classes” drew on Marxist theory to define a revolutionary new culture, and to deploy this culture as a weapon in the ongoing struggle to build a postcolonial, postcapitalist society.

ARTMargins, Volume 13, Issue 1, pp. 143-148.

doi:10.1162/artm_a_00378

https://direct.mit.edu/artm/article/13/1/143/120551/Cultural-Offensive-of-the-Working-Classes

ARTMargins Online: Book Reviews

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 by Cristian Nae ·

Constantin Flondor. When Eye Touches Cloud

Alina Șerban, ed., Constantin Flondor. Când ochiul atinge norul/When Eye Touches Cloud (Bucharest: P+4 Publications, 2021), 505 pp.

In comparison with other Eastern European countries such as Poland, the Czech Republic, or Hungary, the Romanian neo-avant-garde received international attention relatively late. Nevertheless, for the past ten years, art historical research in Romania has steadily addressed the work of several noteworthy Romanian artists who were engaged in artistic experiments in socialist Romania. Edited volumes covering the activity of artists including Ion Grigorescu, Geta Brătescu, Andrei Cădere, Decebal Scriba and, most recently, Paul Neagu, have been published by international publishers including … Read more

ARTMargins Online: Book Reviews

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 by Constanze Fritzsch ·

The Law of the Underground: The Critique of Gender, Performance Art, and the Second Public Sphere in the Late GDR

Angelika Richter, Das Gesetz der Szene. Genderkritik, Performance Art und zweite Öffentlichkeit in der späten DDR [The Law of the Underground: The Critique of Gender, Performance Art, and the Second Public Sphere in the Late GDR] (Bielefeld: Transcript-Verlag, 2019), 408 pp.

In 2019, German art historian and curator Angelika Richter published her doctoral thesis The Law of the Underground: The Critique of Gender, Performance Art, and the Second Public Sphere in the Late GDR, in the German language. This book is worth reviewing even three years after its initial publication due to its meticulous research and … Read more

ARTMargins Online: Book Reviews

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 by Raino Isto ·

History of Albanian Photography (1865–2000)

Ermir Hoxha, History of Albanian Photography (1865–2000) [Historia e Fotografisë Shqiptare (1865–2000)] (Tirana: Albdesign, 2022), 245 pp.

Ermir Hoxha’s ambitious History of Albanian Photography surveys almost a century and a half of photographic practice in Albania, tracing the ways that foreign photographers pictured subjects in the present-day Albanian territories of Southeastern Europe (beginning in the 19th century) and the development of photographic studios in the Albanian nation-state in the early 20th century. It also chronicles the transformations in photographic paradigms that occurred under state socialism in the country (between 1945 and 1991) and the ways that both documentary … Read more

ARTMargins Online: Artist Profiles / ARTMargins Online: Exhibition Reviews

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 by Katarzyna Ruchel-Stockmans ·

Collaborating with Wind, Water, and Time – Saodat Ismailova

The year 2023 saw two retrospective exhibitions of the work of Saodat Ismailova: Double Horizon at Le Fresnoy-Studio National (February 10 – April 30, 2023), which was the culmination of the artist’s two-year residency at the School of Contemporary Art in Tourcoing, and 18,000 Worlds at Eye Filmmuseum in Amsterdam (January 21 – June 4, 2023), which accompanied the Eye Art & Film Prize the artist received for her work interweaving contemporary art and cinema. A year earlier, the artist left her mark both at the 59th edition of the Venice Biennale, and at the documenta fifteen exhibition in … Read more

Interior of a tram with black moths placed on the seats, windows and the roof.

ARTMargins Online: Exhibition Reviews

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 by Sjoukje van der Meulen ·

European City in a Cultural Upswing: The Art Encounters Biennial in Timișoara

The fifth edition of the Art Encounters Biennial in Timișoara, Romania, took place this year from May 19 to July 16, 2023. Entitled My Rhino is Not a Myth, about forty per cent of the exhibited works were from the region (with more than half of these from Romania) and the remainder from other regions including Africa, Latin America and Southeast Asia. The exhibition was staged in historic and contemporary buildings in two urban areas – the city center and the new residential and business district ISHO in north-eastern Timișoara – with eleven venues in total, if one … Read more

ARTMargins Online: Interviews

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 by Monika Fabijanska, Susan Snodgrass ·

Interview with Monika Fabijanska on Women at War

Women at War gathers the works of twelve Ukrainian artists who employ a variety of media to address the Russian war against Ukraine, from its beginning in 2014 to the full-scale invasion in February 2022, through the lens of gendered experience. The exhibition explores the struggle for Ukrainian independence and women’s equality against the backdrop of the war and its impact on both the national and individual psyche while giving voice to women as narrators of history and agents of change. Curated by Monika Fabijanska, Women at War premiered at Fridman Gallery, New York, in the summer of 2022, and … Read more

Print Content / Volume 12, Issue 3

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Free Content © 2023 ARTMargins and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

 by ARTMargins Editors ·

ARTMargins Print 12:3 Editorial Statement

The writings in this issue all share a preoccupation with the silences, disappearances, and contradictions within historical archives. Across national, regional, and diasporic spaces, they attend to the deliberate acts of remembering and forgetting that accompanied the political, economic, and technological shifts of the postwar era. Often violent, sometimes incomplete, these shifts required and begat different roles for artistic practice. The turbulence and legacies of 1968, the collective traumas of ethno-nationalist wars, or the ongoing struggles of liberation and neocolonialism have led artists in Mexico, Britain, the Balkans, and Palestine to revalue materials, approaches, and commitments to community.

ARTMargins, … Read more

Print Content / Volume 12, Issue 3

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 by Maggie Borowitz ·

“To Make Books Is to Multiply”: Artists’ Books and Feminist Expression in Mexico

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

Print Content / Volume 12, Issue 3

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 by Kylie Gilchrist ·

Revisiting Rasheed Araeen’s Structures: 8bS at Manufactured Art, 1970

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

Print Content / Volume 12, Issue 3

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 by Iva Glisic, Biljana Puric ·

Emergency Aesthetics: The Case of the Four Faces of Omarska

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

Print Content / Volume 12, Issue 3

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 by Tan Zi Hao ·

Bags of Stories: Thinking with Household Casebearers in the Anthropocene

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

Print Content / Volume 12, Issue 3

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 by Birgit Hopfener ·

Complicating Narratives of Contemporary Chinese Art as Global Art through the Lens of Exhibition Histories

This essay reviews two publications on Chinese contemporary art and its relation to the global through the lens of exhibition histories. The monograph Die chinesische Avantgarde und das Dispositiv der Ausstellung. Konstruktionen chinesischer Gegenwartskunst im Spannungsfeld der Globalisierung (The ‘Chinese avant-garde’ and the exhibition as dispositive. Constructing contemporary Chinese art in the global context) authored by Franziska Koch (2016), and the edited volume Uncooperative Contemporaries: Art Exhibitions in Shanghai in 2000, (2020) published in the Exhibition Histories series by Afterall Books. The former seeks to re-write the history of contemporary Chinese art exhibitions from a transcultural perspective with … Read more

Print Content / Volume 12, Issue 3

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 by Alessandra Amin ·

Introduction to “Revolutionary Painting and the Palestinian Revolution,” by Mohammed Chabâa, and “Palestinian Artists and the Biennial,” from Toni Maraini’s “Baghdad 1974: A Summary of the First Arab Biennial of Fine Arts” (Both 1974)

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

Print Content / Volume 12, Issue 3

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Free Content © 2023 ARTMargins and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

 by Mohammed Chabaa, Alessandra Amin ·

Revolutionary Painting and the Palestinian Revolution

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

Print Content / Volume 12, Issue 3

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Free Content © 2023 ARTMargins and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

 by Toni Maraini, Alessandra Amin ·

Palestinian Artists and the Biennial, from “Baghdad 1974: A Summary of the First Arab Biennial of Fine Arts”

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

ARTMargins Online: Exhibition Reviews

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 by Sandro Weilenmann ·

How Do Bodies Resist? Image and Self at Museum Ludwig

Image/ Counterimage at Museum Ludwig Cologne, April 22 – August 27, 2023

Drawing on their excellent photographic collection, Cologne’s Museum Ludwig has dedicated an exhibition to the photographic self-portrait. The show, titled Image/ Counterimage, brings together several key works by the artists Carrie Mae Weems, VALIE EXPORT, Ana Mendieta, Sanja Iveković, and Tarrah Krajnak. Spanning three rooms, it offers an engaging tour of different artistic strategies of staging the female body as a site of resistance. While the former four artists represent established positions regarding photography in the feminist context since the 1970s, the latter introduces a more recent inquisition … Read more

ARTMargins Online: Articles

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 by ARTMargins Online Editorial Collective ·

Ilya Kabakov (1933-2023)

One of the most noted 20th-century artists born in the USSR, Ilya Kabakov, died on May 27, 2023. It is no easy task to pay short tribute to a man of his ingenuity, diligence, discipline, and influence. Rather than publishing a standard obituary, ARTMargins Online editors asked some of the artist’s friends and collaborators, as well as critics and curators, to reflect, below, on his life and work from a personal perspective. The resulting collage of responses formally functions not unlike Kabakov’s own Answers of an Experimental Group (1971). This work compelled Boris Groys, one of Kabakov’s earliest commentators, to … Read more

ARTMargins Online: Exhibition Reviews

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 by Svetlana Boym† ·

Ilya Kabakov: The Soviet Toilet and the Palace of Utopias

This text was first published on the ARTMargins Online website on December 31, 1999. It is being republished in honor of its author Svetlana Boym (1959–2015), and Ilya Kabakov (1933–2023).

At the end of the millennium, it has become fashionable to speak about the “end of history” and the “end of art,” to say nothing about the end of the world. Boris Groys has commented that Soviet civilization was the first modern civilization whose death we have witnessed, and there are more to come.(Boris Groys, “Un homme qui veut duper le temps” in Installations 1983-1995 (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, … Read more

ARTMargins Online: Exhibition Reviews

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 by Marta Marsicka ·

Exotic Cosmopolitanism: Magdalena Abakanowicz at Tate Modern

Magdalena Abakanowicz: Every Tangle Of Thread And Rope, Tate Modern, November 17, 2022—May 21, 2023

Between autumn 2022 and spring 2023, the Blavatnik Building at Tate Modern hosted Every Tangle of Thread and Rope, a solo exhibition of textile works by Polish sculptor Magdalena Abakanowicz. Polish critic Piotr Sarzynski called the exhibition “a celebration of Polish art”—and rightfully so, as Tate’s presentation is one of the most prominent exhibitions of Abakanowicz’s work ever curated—and a unique chance for the international audience to become familiar with the sculptor and the narratives surrounding her work.(Piotr Sarzynski, “Las abakanów w … Read more

Room within the Henryk Stażewski exhibition displaying works of sculpture and graphic design.

ARTMargins Online: Exhibition Reviews

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 by Kristian Handberg ·

New approaches to art and life in the Polish People’s Republic: Henryk Stażewski at Muzeum Sztuki

Henryk Stażewski (1894-1988) had a long artistic run in two different versions of his home country: first as a pioneer of the avant-garde in the Polish Republic between 1918 and 1939 and then his later, but no less experimental career in the communist Polish People’s Republic founded in the post-war world order after 1945. It is the latter that is the subject of the exhibition Henryk Stażewski: Late Style at the Muzeum Sztuki Lodz – to many known as a legendary institution with a pedigree as an avant-garde museum (including the colorful interior of the Neo-Plastic Room for abstract art) … Read more

A model of a wooden labyrinth, in a darkened room, with just the labyrinth light brightly. The wood used to create the labyrinth has been darkened by burning.

ARTMargins Online: Exhibition Reviews

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 by Nicolay Duque-Robayo ·

Unbuild Together: The Uzbekistan Pavilion at the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale

Curated by Lesley Lokko, the 18th edition of the Venice Architecture Biennial is titled The Laboratory of the Future, and this concept serves as the underlying theme for the central exhibitions in the Giardini and Arsenale, as well as the national pavilions scattered through Venice’s six sestieri. Where the biennale at large provided a spotlight on Africa and the African Diaspora, each of the national pavilions individually returned to the language of “the experiment” to consider possible futures. Often contrasting past and present, as in the case of the Uzbekistan pavilion, this language of experimentation and possibility similarly appeared … Read more

ARTMargins Online: Book Reviews

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 by Constanze Fritzsch ·

Moving Images on the Margins: Experimental Film in Late Socialist East Germany

Seth Howes, Moving Images on the Margins: Experimental Film in Late Socialist East Germany (London: Camden House, 2019), 280 pp.

Seth Howes opens his study with a quote from East Berlin filmmaker Cornelia Klauß. Klauß argues that due to their avant-garde-inspired aesthetics the smaller, primarily experimental films in the GDR were a nuisance to the industrialized film production of DEFA (Deutsche Film AG), the GDR’s state-run film and television company. Although these experimental films met with great resistance from the official side and were either banned or denied financial support, Howes describes them as a product of one … Read more