While traveling with the C-MAP Bombay/Mumbai research group this past March, MoMA colleagues Caitlin Ryan, Ananya Sikand, and I visited the home of photographer Ketaki Sheth in Malabar Hill, Mumbai, where she shared with us a project she was then in the final stages of preparing. On the apartment’s long table, she laid out recently-printed…
The story of how Fatma Charfi’s Aberics came into being exudes a mythological aura. Referred to collectively by the artist as Aberics and individually as Abrouc (fig. 1), the twisted-paper figurines are signature elements that became central components in her work through grief: Watching the horrors of the Persian Gulf War (1990–91) unfold on her…
Jay A. Levenson, esteemed Director of the International Program at The Museum of Modern Art and beloved colleague, friend, and mentor, passed away in Mumbai in February 2026. It is with great sadness that we mark his untimely death. Levenson joined the Museum in 1996 and led its International Program for three decades, playing a…
In creating a mesh by looping and interlocking single strands of wire, Asawa defined an intricate shape without precluding a view of its interior; instead, she foregrounded space itself. The artist had learned the basic premise of looping wire into permeable volumes during an American Friends Service Committee volunteer trip to Toluca, Mexico, where in 1947, she encountered—and briefly studied—a unique wire-basketry technique. While today, thanks to a series of critical analyses from 2006 onward, Asawa’s art sits comfortably within the trajectory of radical innovations of modernist sculpture, the Mexican origin and craft pedigree of her signature looped-wire creations are typically cast in a role subservient to the major narrative of the artist’s singular contributions.
This essay reflects on two encounters with historical records: a trip to West Papua to visit the grave of Arnold Clemens Ap and the Biak Water Tower, and a reading of Moelyono’s archive on the Wonorejo Dam project in East Java. Although these encounters occurred in different places and emerge from distinct historical conditions, both were shaped by the legacies of the New Order (1966–1998), a policy implemented under Suharto (1921–2008).
What does it mean to make work that necessarily includes others? To commit to decades-long collaboration? To submit oneself to change under the influence of nature? These are the questions that underpin the work of the artist collective RongRong&inri, currently based in Kyoto, Japan. In 2000, RongRong (b. 1968, Fujian Province) and inri (b. 1973,…
aqui Thami is a Thangmi woman of the Kiratimma first peoples of the Himalayas. Her practice positions art as a medium of healing in community, grounded in social exchange, participation, and collaboration. Spanning ceremonial interventions, performance, drawing, zine-making, fly-posting, and public intervention, her interdisciplinary work is often self-funded and collectively realized. Her artistic pursuits are…
The Sisi Kwa Sisi Collective was founded in 1983 amid turbulent political conditions following Kenya’s failed military coup in 1982. Etale Sukuro is a cofounder of the group, which was made up of 12 artists, including Kangara wa Njambi (b. 1957), Kabacia Gatu (b. 1951), Gakunju Kaigwa (b. 1958), Mwaniki wa Gachia, Zarina Patel (1935–2024),…
Alongside technocratic and geopolitical frames, other epistemologies exist [for understanding the Mekong]. For riverine communities, the Mekong holds cosmological significance and yields situated knowledge. Animated by spirits, omens, and ritual and narrative traditions, the river continues to be apprehended as a medium of passage, impermanence, and cyclical renewal.
On September 29, 1967, William Rubin wrote to the Ford Foundation after attending a slide presentation by Frank McEwen. McEwen, the founding director of the National Gallery of what was then Southern Rhodesia (today Zimbabwe), had shown images of what Rubin described as “ateliers of native sculptors in Rhodesia—some of them actually out in the…
In speaking about “modern Indonesia,” I am thinking less in terms of chronology or style and more in terms of conviviality as practice: the everyday negotiation of languages, traditions, faiths, empires, merchants, farmers, rulers, and neighbors. The “modern” was—and remains—about relations: how to live together, how to keep conversations open, how to practice care even when histories, hierarchies, and inequalities persist.
Rajyashri Goody (b. 1990) queries food and water politics, Ambedkarite Buddhist practices, literacy and Dalit literature, and mobility and place-making in the context of caste-based violence and Dalit resistance in India. She works primarily with paper pulp, clay, text, photography, and printmaking. What follows is an abbreviated account of Goody’s session with the C-MAP Bombay/Mumbai Group.…
