post | notes on art in a global context

Regina Vater’s Ecofeminist Rituals of Waste and Renewal, 1983–88

In recent years, the Brazilian artist Regina Vater (born 1943) has gained renewed attention for her contributions to Latin American and Latinx feminist art histories of performance. However, her artistic explorations of ecology and the environment are virtually unexamined. This essay considers these subjects in Vater’s work through an analysis of several site-specific, participatory events that together address ecological themes of waste and renewal.

Gillian Sneed

Asia | A Global Museum

Epistemic Humility: Conversation with Members of KUNCI Study Forum & Collective

This conversation took place via email from December 2020 to February 2021. Though participants had already been acquainted for a long time before this, they began their exchange with casual personal introductions.

Wong Binghao, Syafiatudina, Ferdiansyah Thajib, KUNCI and Nuraini Juliastuti

Africa | Art and the Political: The 1960s and 1970s

Inji Efflatoun en prison (1959-1963) : peindre l’inrenouvelable

Inji Efflatoun fut une peintresse et une militante marxiste et féministe égyptienne. De juin 1959 à juillet 1963, elle fut emprisonnée par le régime nassérien en raison de son appartenance au parti communiste. Au cours de ces années, elle continua à peindre. Célébrés dès les années 1960, et aujourd’hui recherchés sur le marché de l’art, les tableaux de cette période sont souvent considérés comme les plus importants de son œuvre.

Nadine Atallah

Africa | Art and the Political: The 1960s and 1970s

Inji Efflatoun in Prison (1959–1963): Painting the Unrenewable

Celebrated as early as the 1960s, and highly sought-after on the art market today, Egyptian painter Inji Efflatoun’s production during her four years of incarceration by the Nasserite regime is often considered the highlight of her oeuvre.

Nadine Atallah

Central & Eastern Europe | One Work, Many Voices

Jüri Arrak: Interpreting Visual Archetypes in Estonia

This essay looks at The Illusionist (1977), a print by Estonian artist Jüri Arrak in MoMA’s Drawings and Prints collection, and explores the larger context of the artist’s practice.

Elnara Taidre

Asia | Transnational Histories and Non-aligned Networks

Mediating cultures and contexts

Global South collaborations, site specificity, public engagement, cultural mediation, translation, and the politics of the environment—these are but some of the many facets of curator Đỗ Tường Linh’s research and practice.

Wong Binghao and Đỗ Tường Linh

The Americas | Art and the Political: The 1960s and 1970s

Letícia Parente’s Video In (1975) in Context

Widely distributed in recent years and now in MoMA’s collection, the two-minute video depicts Parente entering a closet and hanging up her sweater without first removing it from her body.

Paulina Pardo Gaviria

Central & Eastern Europe | Art and Gender

Entering the Elusive Estate of Photographer Zenta Dzividzinska

In the 1960s, Zenta Dzividzinska was one of the few women photographers in Riga whose work was highly regarded in the local and international photo club culture. Her collection of images capturing the daily life of three generations of women living in a small house in the country, have remained largely unknown until recently.

Alise Tifentale

Asia | Art and Gender

Hello, My Name Is Tamarra

Artist and community organizer Tamarra reflects on the personal experiences, emotional complexities, socio-political events, and pilgrimages to non-binary communities across Indonesia that motivated Tamarra’s name change.

Tamarra

Africa | One Work, Many Voices

Remembering and Forgetting in Sue Williamson’s For Thirty Years Next to His Heart

On view in the David Geffen Wing until October 25, 2021, this text considers the passbook, recorded and framed by Sue Williamson, as an object that has survived to bear testimony to the presentness of the past.

Nkgopoleng Moloi

Asia | Contemporary Crisis and Dissent

Modify Your Dissent: A Performance on the Streets of Yangon

Eschewing assumptions about the absence of artistic and political agency under so-called “undemocratic” circumstances, Chaw Ei Thein and Htein Lin’s public performance Mobile Market / Mobile Gallery speaks to the prevalence—and symbiosis—of art and political action in Burma.

Simon Wu

The Americas | Art and the Political: The 1960s and 1970s

Having a Coke with Marisol and Frank O’Hara

This text brings together Marisol’s sculpture Love and Frank O’Hara’s poem “Having a Coke with You” to explore their shared investigations of the personal in a capitalistic landscape, queer eroticism, global Cold War politics, and stoppered versus flowing communication.

Delia Solomons