Since the 1990s, the Hindi film industry has undergone several transformations in response to socioeconomic and political changes in India. This is particularly a result of how the Indian nation-state and its film industries have entered into the global market. Though popular Hindi cinema has always circulated internationally through informal, ad hoc networks, during most…
A tapestry of interplays between mythology and technology is on display in Ming Wong’s Windows on the World (Part 2), a 24-channel soundtracked video installation from 2014 composed of flat-screen monitors arranged on three levels of long tabletops stacked like freestanding shelves. This work’s corpus of moving images and accompanying on-screen notes are gleaned from the sprawling archives of Cantonese opera film, East Asian science fiction, and TV news about the role of the People’s Republic of China in what has become of the Space Race.
Originally a concept that signifies manuscripts in which new layers of writing have been added atop of an effaced original writing, of which traces remain, the palimpsest has evolved into a methodology through which one critically examines a historical phenomenon as embedded in the cycle of inscription, erasure, and re-inscription. I employ the palimpsest as a methodology to reassess the material ethos of Vietnamese lacquer and its place in prominent canons in Vietnam’s art history, thus opening opportunities for its rewriting.
A work of openness and inscrutability, Salah Elmur’s Missing and Lost People’s Day (2021) commemorates a terrible moment in Sudan’s recent history: the massacre on June 3, 2019, when security forces opened fire on a peaceful protest in Khartoum. Hundreds were killed, injured, or arrested. In this painting, which Elmur made during a residency in…
Bombay cinema looms large over media and cinema studies in India even though the history of the Bombay film industry is more recent than the history of film culture in the Subcontinent. The Bombay film industry as we know it today consolidated during the 1950s in the wake of the massive political and economic restructuring…
Untitled (Soldiers at Rest) (2003) belongs to a body of work which resulted from Vietnamese American artist Dinh Q. Lê’s long-term archaeological investigation of the visual culture of the American War (known as the Vietnam War in the United States), via a traditional Vietnamese weaving technique. Lê learned the latter from his aunt who, when he was a child in Vietnam, wove grass mats, and he later adapted this traditional craft for his own purposes.
This essay by art historian Gabriela Germana Roquez delves into the significance of landscape in the art of the Sarhua community in the Peruvian Andes and the Shipibo-Konibo people in the Amazon. Through her analysis, Germana Roquez illuminates how these artworks depict, embody, and summon the landscape, emphasizing the active role of the natural world…
In 1907, Oskar Kokoschka (1886–1980) was commissioned to create an illustrated fairy tale for the children of Fritz Waerndorfer, founding member and financial supporter of the Wiener Werkstätte, Vienna’s premier design workshop. In Die träumenden Knaben (The Dreaming Boys, 1917), Kokoschka produced a haunting narrative poem about the awakening of adolescent sexuality, set on distant islands, far removed from modern city life and bourgeois society. His meticulously crafted text draws on familiar tropes from classical and contemporary literature, including works by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Viennese writer Peter Altenberg. While nostalgia is an essential trope of the Romantic period, Kokoschka’s work subverts this emerging canon. His work transforms what should have been a Romantic-style evocation of nostalgia and passes traditional wisdom through myth into a critical dismantling of such a gesture. The designs in the artist’s lithographs exemplify the prevalent decorative style of fin de siècle Vienna, showcasing his adept integration of various “primitivist” trends in European art. This is evident in Die träumenden Knaben’s cloisonné-like outlines, unconventional perspectives, and flat color planes.
This two-part essay introduces the exhibition Bali, Background for War: The Human Problem of Reoccupation, an exhibition curated by anthropologist and cybernetics pioneer Gregory Bateson at The Museum of Modern Art in 1943. Bali, Background for War was an important exhibition of Southeast Asian modern art history and occupies an exceptional place in the Museum’s institutional history. This second essay traces the wide-ranging infrastructural implications of Bateson’s exhibition from the unrealized Wartime Regional Materials Unit at MoMA to the landscape of foreign capital flows and cultural infrastructure that contributed to the canonization and conceptualization of a Southeast Asian modern art during the Cold War.
In the mid-1980s, over the course of three years and across three continents, feminist artist Everlyn Nicodemus (born 1954, Kilimanjaro, Tanzania) gathered together women to discuss their everyday experiences. From these conversations, which took place in Skive, Denmark; Kilimanjaro, Tanzania; and Calcutta (now Kolkata), India, she produced a series of seventy-five paintings and related poems that…
A wartime exhibition curated by anthropologist and cybernetics pioneer Gregory Bateson, Bali, Background for War opened at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in late summer 1943 and then traveled to universities and museums across North America. Bali, Background for War was an anthropological exhibition of Balinese modern art and culture conceived as a technology for producing a necessary subjectivity in the American infantry and civilian administrators who would oversee the “reoccupation” of Japanese-captured territories, such as Bali. The exhibition sought to cultivate the ability to recognize cultural patterns so as to foster understanding of “those habits of thought and behavior” characteristic of a particular people.
Jean-Michel Atlan (1913–1960)—who signed simply as Atlan in his works—is most often considered a representative of lyrical abstraction, an art movement that took root in Paris after World War II. Born in the Casbah of Constantine to a Jewish Berber family…
