Jaider Esbell: Fissures between Worlds
Madeline Murphy Turner analyzes recent artworks by the late Jaider Esbell, a pioneering artist, enabler, and advocate of Indigenous perspectives, environmentalism, and land rights.
On Looking and Longing: Seeing Women in Mama Casset’s Modernist Photography
In this essay, Giulia Paoletti deftly explores the photographic portraits of Senegalese photographer, Mama Casset, where female sitters are not mere objects of a male gaze, but rather present themselves as viewing subjects who dare to look.
Screening Program: Notes from the Ground
The program showcases moving image works by contemporary artists from Ukraine. Created between the Maidan revolution, which was followed by Crimean annexation and occupation of Donbas in 2014—and the full-scale Russian invasion launched on February 24 of this year—the works in the program take the viewer through the country’s urgencies and contradictions, the streets and fringes of its cities, and the experiences of its inhabitants.
Before the Invasion: Conversation with Vasyl Cherepanyn
The conversation with Vasyl Cherepanyn, head of the Visual Culture Research Center (VCRC) in Kyiv, took place several days before Russia’s invasion in Ukraine, reflecting on the local art scene and political situation, forced to be left unfinished abrutply.
Memories of Chagga Country: Sam Ntiro
By way of Men Taking Banana Beer to Bride by Night (1956), a painting featured in our “One Work, Many Voices” series, which focuses on individual artworks chosen from MoMA’s collection, art historian Gabriella Nugent highlights the role of memory in Ntiro’s practice. She argues that these memories are a product of distance and thus complicate the frameworks of art history.
Zenta Logina: Universes Apart
Zenta Logina (1908–1983) was a Latvian artist at work during the Soviet occupation. Her paintings, reliefs, and sculptural objects developed in a singular manner, as she broke away from the accepted framework of visual arts codified by the regime and crossed into the realm of contemporary art as we define it today.
Ojeikere: Fleeting and Captured Moments
In 1970, Johnson Donatus Aihumekeokhai Ojeikere, otherwise known as J.D. ‘Okhai Ojeikere (Nigerian, 1930–2014), made Fro Fro, the point of departure of this short text. Storyteller and lens-based artist Jumoke Sanwo reads this image, produced during Nigeria’s nationalist drive and considers Ojeikere’s subjects and their unapologetic defiance.
In living we draw out the light
The first of its kind on post, this interactive commission sees artists S. Yi Yao Chao and Poklong Anading and curator Chương-Đài Võ responding to three archival collections at Asia Art Archive and, more broadly, approaches to artmaking in Southeast Asia.
Climate Imaginaries and Black Blobs: A Conversation with Rita Süveges
Curator Veronika Molnár discusses questions of industrial agriculture, techno-optimism, and the fossil energy infrastructure with the artist Rita Süveges, also touching upon the pervasive role of the current right-wing political regime in Hungary’s contemporary art scene.
Rearranging the Eros of Material Life: Specular Composition in the Annals of Archipelagic Modernism
Art historian Simon Soon analyzes the texts and images in Syed Sheikh Syed Ahmad al-Hadi’s two-volume novel Hikayat Faridah Hanom (The Story of Faridah Hanom), published in Penang in 1925 and 1926, which notably repurposed photographic images from magazines.
Safia Farhat’s Hybrid Creatures in Civic Spaces
As the entrepreneurial co-founder of the Société Zin, a modernist design company, Safia Farhat (Tunisian, 1924–2004), contributed to the visual aesthetics of civic space during the formative period of Tunisian socialism and state feminism. Jessica Gerschultz introduces Farhat’s key role in sustaining a mural tradition for Tunisian modernists.
Eastern European Coloniality without Colonies
Social theorist and researcher Jan Sowa and curator Joanna Warsza examine the place of Central and Eastern Europe in discussions of colonialism, postcolonialism, and decolonization, and consider examples of recent art and curatorial projects in this dialogue.