Contemporary art across the evolving global peripheries
Print Content / Volume 11, Issue 1-2
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by Spieker S, Holert T. ·
Note: This double issue of ARTMargins consists of two sections. First comes a special issue, edited by Sven Spieker and Tom Holert (“The Heresy of Didactic Art”), followed by a section where we offer four new research articles on topics aligned with other editorial priorities (pp. 126-225).
ARTMargins, Volume 11, Issue 1-2, pp. 3-9.
doi:10.1162/artm_e_00312
https://direct.mit.edu/artm/article/11/1-2/3/111799/The-Heresy-of-Didactic-Art
Print Content / Volume 11, Issue 1-2
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by Krauss A, Thajib F. ·
Following from a series of conversations that have been taking place sporadically between us11 in the past years, the current contribution serves as another opportunity to address ways of living multiple institutional lives. In our respective contexts, these pertain to different types of institutions, ranging from art school/academy, to university, to art or cultural organization/collective. Here we explore ways of traversing the boundaries and frictions between radical classroom practices and the institutional processes and frameworks that we speak and act within and against in the context of European higher arts education; all these environments are deeply entrenched in coloniality. We … Read more
Meghan Forbes, ed., International Perspectives on Publishing Platforms: Image, Object, Text. New York and Oxford: Routledge, 2019, 268 pp.
Periodicals have traditionally been a favorite format of artists when it comes to experimenting on the blank page. There are several reasons for this, one of them being that magazines create communities even if their members are almost invisible to one another, dispersed as they may be over regional, national, and even continental geographies. Moreover, because of their time-limited nature, which is—a priori—ephemeral or, at least, specific to a certain time span, magazines tend to offer greater freedom for … Read more
Print Content / Volume 11, Issue 1-2
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by Karambeigi P. ·
Since the passing of the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990, museum reformers have struggled to comply with the federal codes for accessibility. This essay accounts for the ambitions and limitations of these debates around access in the museum that were caught in the double bind between public expectation and private market forces, ultimately giving rise to a particular type of bottom-up reform organized around parametric gradients and attitudinal shifts. It does so by juxtaposing manuals for museum educators from the 1990s with artworks by New York City–based artists such as Carolyn Lazard, Jordan Lord, and Park McArthur who all … Read more
Print Content / Volume 11, Issue 1-2
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by Rodenbeck J. ·
From 1972 to 1977 the West German artist Marianne Wex (1937-2020) undertook an extensive photographic research project that eventually was published as a book: Let’s Take Back Our Space: “Female” and “Male” Body Language as a Result of Patriarchal Structures (1979). Both visual analysis and homeopathic demonstration of the patriarchal state’s performative effect on somatic physical expression, the book is as much a work of renegade feminist sociology as it is a work of photo-conceptualism. This essay performs an archaeology of Let’s Take Back Our Space, reading it in the context of contemporaneous aestheticopolitical discourses, including feminist autodidacticism
ARTMargins… Read more
Print Content / Volume 11, Issue 1-2
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by Ridlen T. ·
Daniel Muzyczuk and Tomasz Załuski (eds.), Galeria Wschodnia. Dokumenty 1984-2017 / Documents 1984-2017 (Łódź: Galeria Wschodnia, Fundacja In Search Of, Muzeum Sztuki w Łodzi, 2019), 916 pp.
Looking at politics through the lens of alternative galleries is by now an established method within Polish art history. It has allowed for the emergence of vital comparative perspectives, both in the regional context (as demonstrated by Piotr Piotrowski’s oft-cited article “How to Write a History of Central-East European Art?”) and on a national level (e.g. Marcin Lachowski’s Awangarda wobec instytucji, or Luiza Nader’s Konceptualizm w PRL).(Piotr Piotrowski, “How to … Read more
Print Content / Volume 11, Issue 1-2
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by Hornyik S. ·
The introductory text interprets Eszter Bartholy’s article about Miklós Erdély’s exhibition Hidden Green. Bartholy’s article is based on an interview with Erdély, and contain direct and indirect quotes from one of the most significant Hungarian neo-avant-garde artist. The introductory text describes how Erdély’s own interpretation of his exhibition Hidden Green is present in Bartholy’s article. Bartholy’s analysis of Hidden Green sheds light on the way that Erdély combines ars poetica and art theory, while directly reflecting on utopia and on the social function and significance of art. While the text about Hidden Green seems like the interpretation of an exhibition, … Read more
Print Content / Volume 11, Issue 1-2
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by Bartholyì E, Orbán K. ·
Erdély spread hay over approximately four-fifths of the 12 × 5 m floor of the Budaörs Cultural Center. He left the remaining one-fifth near the entrance uncovered. The door, illuminated by a spotlight, was painted black along with the adjacent area in order to prevent reflections of the spotlight. The space was dominated by a homogeneous green light.
ARTMargins, Volume 11, Issue 1-2, pp. 102-105.
Print Content / Volume 11, Issue 1-2
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by García D. ·
This short text is structured in two parts. The first one defines a significant part of my artistic practice as finding a way to represent thought, to transmit the action of thinking, this being done by means of short notes, diagrams, drawings, and sketches in a notebook. The second part defends an idea of art as accessible and necessary for everyone, pedagogical not in the sense that it “should” transmit knowledge but in the sense that it constructs a society where learning is pleasure.
ARTMargins, Volume 11, Issue 1-2, pp. 106-123.
Print Content / Volume 11, Issue 1-2
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The articles in the second section of our double issue focus on art practices from Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union, and Palestine. Each in their own way, these authors discuss art and film practices that complicate the process by which we establish genealogies, trace histories, and narrate historical developments, intervening in linear trajectories and pointing to possible alternatives.
ARTMargins, Volume 11, Issue 1-2, pp. 124-125.
doi:10.1162/artm_e_00307
https://direct.mit.edu/artm/article/11/1-2/124/111808/From-The-Editors
Print Content / Volume 11, Issue 1-2
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by Jakovljević B. ·
Within the span of only four years, two books on the same subject and with almost identical titles were published on two sides of Europe: Hans Prinzhorn’s Artistry of the Mentally Ill (Berlin, 1922) and Pavel Ivanovich Karpov’s Creativity of the Mentally Ill (Moscow, 1926). Whereas the first book was recognized as one of the key steps in the “discovery” of the psychotic art and its eventual mainstreaming, the second one quickly fell into obscurity. Its author perished in Stalinist purges of the 1930s, together with a number of his colleagues from the Russian Academy of Artistic Science (RAKhN, 1921-1931),
Print Content / Volume 11, Issue 1-2
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by Burris G. ·
This article explores the connections between dreams, cinema, and Palestine. Drawing upon the work of Ghassan Hage, the author argues that dreams and cinema should not be valued only for their connection to resistance and that these phenomena can sometimes reveal unoccupied spaces, even in occupied Palestine. The author then turns to two documentary films: Mohammad Malas’ The Dream (1987) and Mais Darwazah’s My Love Awaits Me by the Sea (2013). Whereas the former film documents the dreams that haunt Palestinians at night, the latter investigates those dreams that follow them throughout the day. Through these dreams, both films stage … Read more
Print Content / Volume 11, Issue 1-2
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by Nicholas MA. ·
This essay argues for a radical reassessment of Moscow Conceptualism to incorporate the underappreciated Nest, the group of artists Gennady Donskoy, Mikhail Roshal, and Victor Skersis active in Moscow from 1974 to 1979. The Nest’s emphasis on models of shared artistic investigation, audience autonomy, and unconstructed aesthetic response helped reshape Moscow Conceptualism in the late 1970s and early 1980s, making their experience essential to understanding both the era and the works of particular artists they influenced, including Yuri Albert, Vadim Zakharov, Nadezhda Stolpovskaya, and others. The Nest’s focus on alternative media and new genres, particularly on unstructured performative works, helped … Read more
Print Content / Volume 11, Issue 1-2
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by Rounthwaite A. ·
As a young artist active in socialist Zagreb in the 1970s, Željko Jerman subjected photographic prints and negatives to destructive techniques such as scratching, scribbling, and intentionally poor development. Jerman’s work was heralded by curator Radoslav Putar as an attempt to “cross the boundaries and overcome the limitations of classical photography,” but also met with dismissal from less open-minded critics due to its rejection of traditional aesthetics. This article shows how through his destructive tactics, Jerman enacted a formal “death” of the photograph, while also taking death as a central philosophical and representational theme at the level of the image. … Read more
Print Content / Volume 11, Issue 1-2
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Mohammadreza Mirzaei’s “Introduction to Jalal Al-e Ahmad’s “To Mohassess, For the Wall’ “ (ARTM 10:2), p. 120 (https://doi.org/10.1162/artm_a_00296) contains an error. The line “For example, neither the work of Behjat Sadr nor Mohsen Vaziri Moghadam’s Sand Paintings …” should read, “For example, the work of Behjat Sadr as well as Mohsen Vaziri Moghadam’s Sand Paintings… .” We regret the mistake.
ARTMargins, Volume 11, Issue 1-2, pp. 226.
Sven Spieker: Please outline your view of the curator in the 21st century. What are this curator’s major commitments and constraints? Also does the “curator-from-Eastern Europe” concept retain any specificity for you, or not?
Boris Kostadinov: The war that’s raging in Ukraine right now is showing us beyond any doubt that we live in a fluid world, a world in which definitions—not only of what is meant by art, historical time, as well as culture, political and economic geography—are bound to be thoroughly rethought and redefined. The 21st century is no longer what it was until yesterday—basking in … Read more
Daniel Grúň (ed.), Subjective Histories: Self-historicization as Artistic Practice in Central-East Europe, Bratislava, Veda, 2020, 320 pp.
The image on the cover of the book Subjective histories: Self-historicization as Artistic Practice in Central-East Europe shows an empty escalator. Its constant up and down movement might visualize the quest that all the texts in this book seem to share: to highlight the parallels between different artistic activities before 1989 and their meaning from a present point of view. The cover photograph (by Peter Sit) is from a performance by Slovak artist Matej Gavula, together with APART Collective, called Sunday, … Read more
In March 2022, the General Assembly of Budapest announced the winning team of the juried competition for the public memorial, Memory of Rape in Wartimes: Women as Victims of Sexual Violence, a unique memorial project that aims to address the difficult history of violence against women during wartime. The winning proposal, Memory of Rape in Wartimes, by Slovakian-Hungarian artist Ilona Németh, architect Gabi Mészáros, and poet Anikó N. Tóth, is to be realized in 2023. Hedvig Turai recently spoke with Ilona Németh about their project.
Hedvig Turai: To set up a memorial to wartime victims of rape is … Read more
“The grave is better than not knowing”: this is how Kumrije Jahmurataj expressed her sorrow while anxiously awaiting news of her missing husband, Smajli, who to this day remains unaccounted for after the 1998-99 Kosovo War. Jahmurataj was interviewed as part of research conducted by The Humanitarian Law Center Kosovo (HLC Kosovo), a non-profit organization that was first established during the social upheaval of 1997, before the war began. In the post-war context, HLC Kosovo has played a key role in
The AMO interactive Eastern European Art Periodicals Map (2022) is the result of four years of research by Camilla Salvaneschi (IUAV, Venice); Susan Snodgrass (AMO); and Sven Spieker (AMO), and it has benefited from the generous help of several others.(Ian Gabe Wilson, who conducted invaluable initial research, and Russell Coon (pielabmedia.com), who designed the map.) Its goal is to demonstrate intellectual affinities between currently active art-focused periodicals published in the region, revealing in the process the material conditions of art writing and art publishing in Eastern Europe today.
The Eastern European Art Periodicals Map recalls Irwin’s East Art … Read more
Belinda Kazeem-Kamiński is an interdisciplinary artist mainly using archival and museal material for artistic research in photography and video. Late last year, Kazeem-Kamiński received the Camera Austria Award for Contemporary Photography by the City of Graz. A solo show of her work was also recently on view at Kunsthalle Wien. While in Vienna, Michael Laundry spoke with Kazeem-Kamiński about how her work creates space to think about Black feminism, representation, and post-colonial theory. In this interview, Laundry and Kazeem-Kamiński discuss the her use of slide shows, artist books, photography, and video in the dissection of the white gaze on Black … Read more
The Earth is Flat Again / Ziemia znów jest płaska, Muzeum Sztuki, Łódź, September 24, 2021 – February 27, 2022
The impetus to rethink the role of the museum characterizes the overarching exhibition program of the Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź, Poland, which historically emerged in the 1920s from the international modern art collection of the Polish avant-garde “a.r.” group and its members, such as artists Władysław Strzemiński and Katarzyna Kobro. The ideas of the “a.r.” group as well as other radical proposals from the beginning of the 20th century to redefine the concept of the museum are currently … Read more
With the upcoming 59th International Art Exhibition in Venice on April 23, Maria Lanko, Lizaveta German, and Borys Filonenko—the curators of artist Pavlo Makov’s project Fountain of Exhaustion. Acqua Alta for the Ukrainian Pavilion—have found themselves in a difficult situation that has made it impossible for them to continue working on the exhibition. On March 8, 2022, the organizers of the pavilion announced that “despite the ongoing war, the team managed to evacuate the fragments of [Makov’s] artwork from Kyiv” and will be able to present it at the upcoming Venice Biennale.(“Ukrainian pavilion will make it to La Biennale … Read more
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In support of artists, scholars, and all people forced to flee Ukraine because of the Russian invasion of the country, the editorial collective of ARTMargins Online is compiling a growing list of resources (primarily art- and research-related), including residencies, fellowships, internships, and emergency funds. We will continue to update this list as we become aware of new opportunities and resources. Please let us know of additional resources by contacting us through this online form.
For Scholars
Corinna Kühn, Medialisierte Körper: Performances und Aktionen der Neoavantgarden Ostmitteleuropas in den 1970er Jahren (Vienna: Böhlau, 2020), 324 pp.
Corinna Kühn’s Medialisierte Körper: Performances und Aktionen der Neoavantgarden Ostmitteleuropas in den 1970er Jahren deals with selected performances and actions from Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, and Poland during the 1970s. Her focus lies on the dimension of documentation through photography and video. She is interested in how artists communicated with imaginary or future spectators through the deliberate use of images or even the manipulation of techniques of filming or photographing. The book approaches the topic through detailed analyses of works by Endre
ARTMargins Online: Interviews / ARTMargins Online: Special Issue
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by Uroš Čvoro, Mladen Miljanović ·
Banja Luka-based artist Mladen Miljanović has had a long-standing interest in monuments and practices of remembering, from his The Garden of Delights (2013), an installation that emulates tombstone engravings created for the Bosnia and Herzegovina national pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennale, to his Draft for a 20 Minute Monument (2019), in which nine disabled men and war veterans sit for 20 minutes on a discarded pile of stones. This conversation, part of our Special Issue on Contemporary Approaches to Monuments in Central and Eastern Europe, was occasioned by his upcoming exhibition Realtime Monument at Budapest acb Gallery (March … Read more
Print Content / Volume 10, Issue 3
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by ARTMargins Print Editorial Collective ·
Ten years ago, the printed version of ARTMargins joined its sister publication, ARTMargins Online. The idea of the three founding editors— Sven Spieker, Angela Harutyunyan, and Octavian Esanu—was to create an innovative art historical journal with a broad remit that would offer some measure of correction to the euphoria surrounding globalized art at the time, and that would include contributions from the perspectives of artists, scholars, and critics. Would this hybrid publication model, which was somewhat unusual for an academic journal, be acceptable to its future publisher and readers? More importantly, would it find a place among already-existing publications that … Read more
Print Content / Volume 10, Issue 3
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by Boghiguian A. ·
The heads of states met at the end of World War I to sign the Versailles treaty in 1919 in the Palace’s hall of mirrors. This was at the time when Europe was infected with the Spanish flu pandemic that lasted until 1922. The project is a visual narration of the conjunction of these two historical events that have uncanny reverberations in the present: the Versailles treaty has charted the path towards present-day geopolitical crises, and the Spanish flu can be seen as a prelude to the COVID pandemic and its response.
ARTMargins, Volume 10, Issue 3, pp. 192-201.… Read more
Print Content / Volume 10, Issue 3
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by ICEbox Collective ·
Taxonomy of Breathing is a socially conscious, multidisciplinary art project that investigates our current societal moment through the lens of
breath—its vulnerability to restriction, and its power of transformation. The fragility of the body—with breath as its essential element—is
a manifestation of our environment, our historical moment, and our political and social context. It is at once foundational and aspirational, embodied, and symbolic.
ARTMargins, Volume 10, Issue 3, pp. 202-206.
doi:10.1162/artm_a_00306
ARTMargins Print is pleased to announce the publication of the Volume 13, Issue 2. A recurring idea in the current issue is difference and contradiction. While art historiography has often treated artistic styles and movements as integrated and consistent wholes, with bookended beginnings and closures, and treated artists as equally stable authorial voices rooted in their respective dispositions, art practice for the most part is marked by contradiction rather than consistency, challenging us to capture the dynamism that contradiction and difference produce in art.
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