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.…
This essay attends to some of the ways in which artists have mediated (and sometimes remediated) their interactions with curators as well as to their understandings of the curatorial. It surfaces a less familiar view of artists’ experiences of curation as often fraught, even while such engagements may also be enabling and even nourishing.
Morocco’s first fine arts school, L’Institut national des beaux-arts (The National Institute of Fine Arts; hereafter INBA), is located in Tetouan—a city in the northern region known as the Rif (fig. 1). The school was founded in 1946 by the Spanish colonial government as La Escuela preparatoria de bellas artes (The Preparatory School of Fine…
Gulammohammed Sheikh (b. 1937) is an artist, pedagogue, and writer known for his prolific career across practices that include curating and publishing. Sheikh taught art history and painting at the Faculty of Fine Arts at the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda—the foremost institute for avant-garde practice during the post-Independence period—for almost three decades, spearheading an…
The Triangle Network is a global network of artists and visual arts organizations that supports professional development and cultural exchange among artists, curators, and other arts professionals worldwide. It was initiated in 1982 by Anthony Caro and Robert Loder in New York City with the first Triangle Artists’ Workshop, and over the next two decades,…
Bagus Pandega assembles various electronic components, musical instruments, found objects, and 3-D-printed custom parts and software into artworks that combine and generate kinetic, acoustic, and light elements in a modular way: Each of the constituent components can be replaced, modified, or exchanged to form another iteration. Despite the technical marvel of his installations, Pandega’s approach to artistic practice remains fundamentally DIY—an artistic ethos that intentionally bypasses industrial standards. Pandega has adopted this “maker” mentality—rooted in Indonesia’s 1990s media landscape—to reexamine the collision between society and nature, as seen in The Diasporic Mythology.
Two white shirts and a black top. One long-sleeve, two short-sleeve. Two bald heads and a crowned shrub of twists. Relaxed wrists and palms caressing a near-empty wine glass, some hands submerged in pockets, and another gently placed on a hip. Pressed cotton, embroidered lace. A ring, a watch, a necklace. Three radiant gazes. Mbulelo…
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.
