post Presents: Unsettled Dust—Archives, Epistemologies, Images

These presentations and panel discussion at MoMA brought together four filmmakers and artists who work in expanded documentary modes, using existing footage, archival research, interviews, and scripted narratives to produce imaginative accounts of transnational struggles, solidarities, and interventions. Using moving images, some of these practitioners interrogate the anti-colonial and anti-imperialist movements of the mid-late 20th century, complicating and undercutting any nostalgic revisiting of these fraught histories from the vantage point of the present. Others foreground presence and participation in transformational political and social movements, while at the same time underscoring archival absences, silences, ambivalence, and loss. By bringing them and their works into dialogue at MoMA on June 20, 2023, this post Presents catalyzed a critical cross-cultural conversation around questions of memorialization, translation, failure, and fragmentation.

This edition of post Presents was part of the 2023 C-MAP Seminar: Transversal Orientations III. The 2023 C-MAP Seminar was organized by Nancy Dantas, C-MAP Africa Fellow, Inga Lāce, C-MAP Central and Eastern Europe Fellow, Wong Binghao,
C-MAP Asia Fellow, Julián Sánchez González, Cisneros Institute Research Fellow,
Elena Pérez-Ardá López, C-MAP Coordinator, and Rattanamol Singh Johal, Assistant Director, International Program, with support from Marta Dansie, Department Coordinator, International Program, and Jay Levenson, Director, International Program. It was presented in collaboration with the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Research Institute for the Study of Art from Latin America at MoMA.

More in this theme

Fighting the Authoritarian Machine from the Inside: Tamar Abakelia and Natela Iankoshvili

In this text, curator and writer Nina Mdivani revisits the lives and work of Tamar Abakelia (1905–1953) and her student Natela Iankoshvili (1918–2007). She emphasizes how these two Georgian women artists navigated between undertaking state commissions and finding windows of opportunity to oppose the regime and, in the process, creates a genealogy of Georgian artistic…

Where the Lightnings Have Their Palace: Erna Rosenstein and Global Surrealisms

In this text, Dorota Jagoda Michalska writes about Erna Rosenstein (1913–2004), a Jewish Polish postwar artist. Michalska opens up a transnational perspective, inviting us to look at the artist’s oeuvre through the lens of global surrealisms, connecting her articulations of Holocaust trauma with the work of artists who have dealt with slavery, genocide, exile, and colonial dispossession.

Subscribe to our newsletter

Related Content

Dreaming of Food, Air, and Water: In Conversation with Rajyashri Goody 

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.…

On Vrishchik: A Conversation with Gulammohammed Sheikh 

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…