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The essay approaches the intimate configurations captured in Kazakhstani artist Lidiya Blinova’s Finger Ornament as a site of artistic expression that reworks local ornamental production, dissolving categories of high and amateur, domestic and public, visual and haptic. In so doing, the essay highlights how the artwork accentuates the conceptual potential of its primary reference: the ornament of textile associated with the pre-Soviet culture of Kazakh nomads. In order to align with the artistic intention to foreground regional creative forms, the essay proposes a speculative turn: adopting a relational reading and an intertextual analysis between the artwork Finger Ornament and traditional textile ornamentation.

C-MAP Africa in Morocco: Reflections from the 2026 Research Trip From February 5 to 11, 2026, members of the C-MAP Africa group from The Museum of Modern Art traveled to Morocco on a research trip that included several cities: Marrakech, Casablanca, Rabat, Tangier, and Tétouan. Over the course of the visit, the group met with…

As if intoxicated with beauty, the letter seeks to surpass its utilitarian role and its function as a conventional sign of the alphabet; it aspires to become a plastic expression . . . and succeeds magnificently. . . Elsewhere, words become obstinate labyrinths in which solids and voids hold each other in balance, where shadow…

In recent years, the practice of the Jakarta-based collective ruangrupa has gained exceptional traction in the contemporary art world. The book How to Pin Down Smoke: ruangrupa since 2000, published in 2025 maps out the genealogy of the animated and complex ecosystem that ruangrupa has cultivated and which has shaped the trajectory of the group’s practice. Carlos Quijon, Jr talks to the volume’s editors to discuss their editorial processes and considerations.

Maya Varma: A lot of your work turns toward the lineages that shape Dalit life and knowledge. When you think about these histories, how do you understand the inheritances you’re carrying forward? What pasts are you in conversation with, and how do you imagine the canon you’re stepping into? Shrujana Niranjani Shridhar: I think we…

On February 1, 1974, the Senegalese newspaper Le Soleil published a shocking headline: “Younousse’s Slashed Painting: A Simple Matter of Scissors.” According to the article, Senegalese artist Younousse Seye (b. 1940) discovered that her painting Mame Coumba Bang (n.d.) had been vandalized as she guided Ethiopian visitors around the second Salon des artistes sénégalais at…

In times of danger, we learn to seek sanctuary—a place of safety and security when the world we know is under attack. Once we have regained our strength, perspective, and a better vantage point for reclaiming what was lost, we must consider when to leave the protective space that has sheltered us from harm. During…

Maya Varma: To begin, I wanted to talk about where you come from. How has Mumbai shaped you as an activist and as an artist? What did the city mean to you growing up? Shrujana Niranjani Shridhar: For me, Mumbai has always been a working-class city. That’s its defining character. Any city that grows because people come…

South Africa’s official record marks 1991 as a significant moment in the nation’s transition from the racially segregated regime of apartheid to a democratic government. Amid political unrest, massacres, and a state of emergency, the year is remembered in mainstream history as the beginning of multiparty negotiations—between the minority National Party, the recently unbanned African…

Beyond formal schooling, Hanoi Children’s Palace extended socialist cultivation into leisure time, reverie, artistic endeavors, and sports training. More than simply school routine, rituals were designed to develop the body and mind of the “new socialist human,” laying the foundation for building socialism in post-independence Vietnam. Taking the ideological history, architecture, and uncertain future of the Children’s Palace as a point of departure within the city’s broader projection of the creative industries as a strategic force, the project sought to examine how the institution’s pedagogical inheritance persists within the textures of everyday life and socialist memory.

In looking at photographs of live models, plaster casts of Greek sculptures, and students on the website (figs. 1a and 1b) of the Sir J. J. School of Art (JJ) in Bombay (present-day Mumbai), one notices how the condition of the body and labor in relation to art is a haunting presence in 20th-century photography. Shot between the…

Evelyn Ashamallah (born 1948) presides over history from her small apartment in Talaat Harb in downtown Cairo. Across the past six decades, she has demonstrated a legacy of constant negotiation…