ARTMargins

Contemporary art across the evolving global peripheries

Tagged: transnational

ARTMargins Online: Articles / ARTMargins Online: Special Issue

—

 by Alina Șerban ·

In and Out of the Box: Leaps in East/East Dialogues Through the Transnational Activities of Constantin Flondor

A short glance at the East/East dialogues within the timeline of Romanian art of the 1970s and 1980s allows us to identify existing (in)formal cross-border exchanges which foregrounded geopolitical alliances and sporadically connected Romanian artists with like-minded spirits. In the artistic context of the 1970s and 1980s, the state institutions were responsible for foreign cultural agreements and the organization of research trips and touring exhibitions, as well as establishing cultural cooperation with other socialist countries. The assumption that traveling within the Bloc was possible without much difficulty does not always hold true since opportunities were mostly accessible to artists and … Read more

ARTMargins Online: Articles / ARTMargins Online: Special Issue

—

 by Hana Buddeus ·

Photography: The Lingua Franca of Performance Art?

As Michelle Henning points out in her book Photography: The Unfettered Image (2018), “from its inception, photography was a means to set images free, to allow them to go traveling, to transfer, to be projected, translated, fragmented, reconstituted and reversed, to be reimagined and re-embodied.”(Michelle Henning, Photography: The Unfettered Image (New York: Routledge, 2018), p. xi.) How does this perspective contribute to understanding the medium beyond its treatment in art museums, which usually emphasize uniqueness and authorship? How does highlighting the concept of images as “migratory, journeying, wandering and vagabond”(Henning, p. 8.) alter our approach towards … Read more

ARTMargins Online: Special Issue

—

 by Zsuzsa László ·

Regional Resonances: In Search of the Transnational in Central East European Art of the 1970s

East European art scenes have long invited mostly negative comparisons with their West European counterparts. During the Cold War era, external perceptions often blurred the many differences between state socialisms and their related cultural fields. For their part, local artists and art historians in the countries of Eastern Europe criticized such homogenizing accounts, pointing instead to the many, and wide-ranging, Western connections of individual artists or artist groups with the West, as well as their distance from so-called official art. Another question was also rarely asked: whether there was any dialogue between artists working in different state-socialist societies of Eastern … Read more

Print Content / Volume 9 Issue 2

—

Subscription Required © 2020 ARTMargins and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

 by Brynn Hatton ·

On Impossibility: Finding Vietnam in a Jordanian-Soviet Film Archive

In 2014, an abandoned collection of over 900 16mm and 35mm film canisters was uncovered in a storage locker in Amman, Jordan. Initial findings show that the films were likely exported from Russia to Jordan between the late 1960s and early 1990s as part of a Soviet cultural exchange program, and among them are are a number of propaganda films made to highlight relations between Vietnam, Russia, and concurrent political struggles in the Arab Middle East. Work on the archive continues despite recent restrictions on researcher access levied by state custodians. This essay positions the entire archive as an aggregate … Read more