ARTM Online Content

This Past Must Address Its Future: Uses of African Noncontemporaneity in Contemporary Art from the French Borderscape

In the last two decades, key sites in the European borderscape—the “jungle” of Calais, the dense patchwork of settlements around Melilla and Ceuta, myriad migrant or refugee camps along Europe’s Mediterranean coastline and in the major train stations of its capital cities—have become art factories. In these spaces, artists from a range of backgrounds are making new work, much of which seeks to challenge the exoticist and primitivizing tropes that, in Europe, have characterized the representation of im/migrant presences at least since the official colonial period. Among the most conspicuous and intractable of these tropes have been those connected with … Read more

What Does Art History Have to Say About a Lebanese Sasquatch? The Body of Decolonial Struggle in Amanda Boulos’s Art

This paper focuses on several works by the Palestinian-Canadian painter Amanda Boulos that communicate the shared desire of both Palestinians in the diaspora and Indigenous peoples of Canada to move beyond the normative identities of settler colonialism. Through co-ordinated social historical, formalist and iconographical readings of Boulos’s work, I propose a shift in the discourse on global contemporary art, from postcolonial figures of the oriental, the subaltern and the hybrid to strategies of representation such as transformation, ambiguity and queering – a shift intended to foster alliances amongst members of BIPOC communities, against the divisive politics of settler … Read more

Southern Lights: Octavio Paz’s “Glimpses of India” and the Art of Relation

This article analyzes the articulation of south-south relation in Octavio Paz’s In Light of India (1995) and A Tale of Two Gardens: Poems from India, 1952-1995 (1997), works of prose and poetry that traverse the antipodes of Mexico and India. These works emphasize partial viewing, repeated comparison, and cultivated sense-perception. They model a poetics of the glimpse, an effect of the play of light and shadow and a privileged mode of seeing for Paz. To glimpse is to see without clarity, control, or complete knowledge. It is to find oneself in the other. Paz’s writing anticipates twenty-first-century projects that relate … Read more

Introduction to “Art, Signs, and Cultures” (1977)

This document, translated from the original French, is an edited transcript of a conversation between the Senegalese painter Iba Ndiaye, the French art historian Jean Laude, and a moderator, Roger Pillaudin. It took place on the occasion of the Festival des arts et cultures africaines in Royan, France (March 1977), and was later broadcast on the radio channel France Culture. What stands out in the conversation is the way Laude seeks to negate Ndiaye’s cross-cultural experience and background, and arguably his very legitimacy as a contemporary artist. Laude’s insistence on adhering to neat categories (linguistic, national, artistic) in engaging with … Read more

Art, Signs, and Cultures: Iba Ndiaye and Jean Laude in Conversation with Roger Pillaudin

This document, translated from the original French, is an edited transcript of a conversation between the Senegalese painter Iba Ndiaye, the French art historian Jean Laude, and a moderator, Roger Pillaudin. It took place on the occasion of the Festival des arts et cultures africaines in Royan, France (March 1977), and was later broadcast on the radio channel France Culture. What stands out in the conversation is the way Laude seeks to negate Ndiaye’s cross-cultural experience and background, and arguably his very legitimacy as a contemporary artist. Laude’s insistence on adhering to neat categories (linguistic, national, artistic) in engaging with … Read more

Ch’ixi Epistemology and The Potosí Principle in the 21st Century

The author focuses on the project exhibition, “The Potosí Principle,” curated by Alice Creischer, Max Hinderer, and Andreas Siekmann Initially installed in Madrid in 2010 and then traveling to Berlin and La Paz, the show cut across the institutionally defined and often rigorously guarded boundaries between curatorial practice, aesthetic expression, and scholarly research to explore global capitalism’s dynamics from the perspective of the Spanish colonial empire and its distinctive imagery. However, despite the exhibition’s creative installation techniques and revisionist history, it generated a considerable scandal when a self-organized group of La Paz-based artists and scholars committed to anticolonial practices accused … Read more

On the Aspirations of Architecture and Design in 20th-Century South Asia

This review compares The Museum of Modern Art’s exhibition “The Project of Independence: Architectures of Decolonization in South Asia, 1947-1985” (2022) to Farhan Karim’s Of Greater Dignity Than Riches: Austerity and Housing Design in India (2019). These two examples’ distinct approaches to architecture and design in twentieth-century South Asia are conditioned by their respective formats and scopes. Both the exhibition and the book draw attention to the ideas, ambitions, and aspirations undergirding architecture and design in the region, and as expressed by agents including architects, designers, bureaucrats, construction workers, intellectuals, and critics. They do so, however, towards variant critical ends … Read more

Erratum: The Persistence of Primitivism and The Debt Collectors

Elizabeth Harney’s “The Persistence of Primitivism and the Debt Collectors” (ARTM 11:3), p. 105-125 (https://doi.org/10.1162/artm_r_00327) contains an error. Joshua I. Cohen’s The “Black Art” Renaissance: African Sculpture and Modernism across Continents (Oakland: University of California Press, 2020) is incorrectly titled The Black Renaissance: African Sculpture and Modernism across Continents. We regret the mistake.

ARTMargins Online, Volume 12, Issue 2, pp. 124-124.

doi:10.1162/artm_x_00358

https://direct.mit.edu/artm/article/12/2/124/116472/Erratum-The-Persistence-of-Primitivism-and-The

Experimental Cinemas in State-Socialist Eastern Europe

Ksenya Gurshtein and Sonja Simonyi, eds., Experimental Cinemas in State-Socialist Eastern Europe (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press B.V., 2022), 334 PP.

Experimental Cinemas in State-Socialist Eastern Europe contains thirteen essays that address film production between the 1950s and the late 1980s in the national contexts of state-socialist countries outside the former U.S.S.R.: Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and Yugoslavia. The aim of the book is to fill the gap in English-language literature on postwar experimental filmmaking in Eastern Europe, which is still mostly constituted by studies focusing on experimental film culture in individual countries. The book’s transnational perspective gives

Read more

“This is What the Current Government in Russia Would Like to Ban”: Interview with Vladimir Paperny

Cinema, Culture, and the Spirit of the Times (NLO: Moscow, 2023), a new publication by the late film historian Maya Turovskaya and Los Angeles-based culturologist Vladimir Paperny, presents a thoughtful comparative analysis of the Soviet and Hollywood film industries. We are publishing an exclusive translation from one of the book’s key chapters below. Maya Iosifovna Turovskaya (1924–2019), a legendary figure in the world of film and theater criticism who passed away in 2019 at the age of 95, left behind an extraordinary legacy. Her work on the iconic Soviet documentary Triumph Over Violence (dir. Mikhail Room, 1965) offered groundbreaking comparisons … Read more

Exchange of Ideologies: Ninotchka, 1939 — Circus, 1936

Below–and in conjunction with Sasha Razor’s interview with Vladimir Paperny, which we publish concurrently–we present a translated excerpt from a recently published book Paperny co-authored with noted late Russian film historian Maya Turovskaya, Cinema, Culture, and the Spirit of the Times (NLO: Moscow, 2023). Turovskaya and Paperny began their comparative study of US and Soviet cinema with two comedies: the mildly anti-Soviet Ninotchka and the strongly pro-Soviet film CircusNinotchka (1939), directed by Ernst Lubitsch, is a romantic comedy about a stern Soviet envoy, Nina Ivanovna “Ninotchka” Yakushova, who falls in love with a charming Parisian, Count Leon … Read more

Globalizing the Avant-Garde

Review of the conference organized by the European Network for Avant-Garde and Modernism Studies (EAM) in Lisbon, September 1–3, 2022

Since 2008, the roving biennial conferences of the European Network for Avant-Garde and Modernism Studies (EAM) have promoted the study of the avant-garde and modernism in Europe in a wide temporal and disciplinary framework, setting leading themes such as “High and Low“ (2010 Poznań), “Utopia” (2014 Helsinki), or “CRiSiS” in 2020. The mission statement and communications of the Network have always stressed the transnational aspects of avant-garde practices and indicated that Europe is to be considered in a global setting. … Read more

Exhibition view

Revolutionary Romances: Into the Cold – Alternative Artistic Trajectories into (Post-) Communist Europe

On October 13, 2022, the Albertinum at the Dresden State Art Collections hosted an international conference entitled “Revolutionary Romances: Into the Cold – Alternative Artistic Trajectories into (Post-)Communist Europe.” The conference sought to question the simplistic East-to-West “defection” narrative of the post-war art worlds, and to explore the multiple alternative directions of travel by artists during the Cold War. Participants discussed why artists working in and beyond the West decided to enter the communist space, and considered the unexpected results of these subversive movements.

Following the conference, Christopher Williams-Wynn, a PhD candidate at Harvard University and one of the conference … Read more

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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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

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

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 OnlineRead more

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 OnlineRead more

An image of the book cover, which features a statue of Abraham Lincoln with a person in red curled up in the statue's lap asleep.

Monumental Cares: Sites of History and Contemporary Art

Mechtild Widrich, Monumental Cares: Sites of History and Contemporary Art (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2023), 256 pp.

The presence and absence of monuments, their authenticity and role in public discourse is the main topic of Mechtild Widrich’s new book, Monumental Cares. We live at a time when this issue has gained more than academic importance, as monuments are central to the politics of caring—caring for community, history, and justice. Being familiar with Widrich’s previous work, I have already utilized it in a critical situation.  About a year ago, I participated in a public debate at Vancouver’s Urbanarium,Read more

The Canary Archive installation view comprising a large metal cage with TV monitors. The floor is covered with newspaper pages.

The Canary Archives by Chto Delat: Testimony of the Russian ‘Des-Astre’

In March 2022, shortly after Russia had attacked Ukraine, the Chto Delat (What is to be done?) collective produced an artwork entitled Canary Archives in response to the shock of the military escalation.(Chto Delat, “Canary Archives 2022,” http://chtodelat.org/category/b7-art-projects/installations/canary-archives-2022-2/ Accessed January 31, 2023) While work on the project – comprising a four-channel video installation and a newspaper issue – had commenced earlier, the invasion was the catalyst for its statement. The filming and written elements were revised substantially as a consequence of the outbreak of war. Today, more than one year later, the relevance of the work has become … Read more

Recrafting Futures: Feminist Practices of Material Engagement

Arts, Crafts, Affects: Documenting HerStories and Worldbuilding, public seminar at Estonian Academy of Arts, Tallinn, November 25-26, 2022

There are many ways to present an artwork to the public and sometimes, as in the case of research-driven practices, an exhibition is a limited that can often present only the brief, final effect of the many processes and collaborations that go into creating the work. Art—however research-based, relational, dematerialized, participatory, or ephemeral it might be—usually functions within institutional frameworks that require it to be “shown” in order to be shared. In contrast, practices associated with craft relate to a different tradition … Read more

exhibition view

Thinking Pictures: Conceptual Art from Moscow and the Baltics

Although fewer than two decades have passed since its opening, the Kumu Art Museum, located in Estonia’s capital city Tallinn, is widely acknowledged for its critical exhibitions that often highlight the nation’s traumatic past. Earlier this year, the museum showed Thinking Pictures: Conceptual Art from Moscow and the Baltics, curated by Anu Allas (professor at the Institute of Art History and Visual Culture of the Estonian Academy of Arts), Liisa Kaljula (curator at the Kumu Art Museum), and Jane A. Sharp (curator at the Zimmerli Art Museum and professor in the Department of Art History at Rutgers University, New Jersey, … Read more

Exhibition view, blue

Investigating Intimacy: Adina Pintilie’s project for the Romanian Pavilion

At the 59th edition of the Venice Biennale, Romania is represented by the artist and filmmaker Adina Pintilie with the project You Are Another Me­A Cathedral of the Body. Curated by Cosmin Costinaș and Viktor Neumann, the project consists of a multi-channel video installation at the Romanian Pavilion, and a virtual-reality extension hosted by the New Gallery of the Romanian Institute for Culture and Humanistic Research.

Through the representation of intimacy and sexuality, the artist confronts and overcomes the concept of the normative, standardized, and performative body, while investigating its relationship with current conversations on gender … Read more

Małgorzata Mirga-Tas: Re-enchanting the World, Polish Pavilion at the 2022 Venice Biennale

The Polish Pavilion at the 59th International Art Exhibition in Venice this year featured the vibrant textile installation Re-enchanting the World by Polish-Romani artist Małgorzata Mirga-Tas. The project was curated by Wojciech Szymański and Joanna Warsza and selected by a jury within a competition managed by the Zachęta – National Gallery of Art in Warsaw. The Polish contribution to this year’s biennale is unique and the first of its kind, being the first-ever national pavilion represented by a Romani artist. Although there have been several editions of the Roma Pavilion in Venice since 2007 – events and exhibitions dedicated to … Read more