These numbers were way too high, and we had such little time. Yet the trip offered a glimpse of a robust artistic history and a vibrant contemporary art scene in the cities of Colombia. It was also the beginning, our first steps toward planting a seed of curiosity at MoMA and building what we hope will be the long-lasting relationships. Since our return, that seed has not stopped growing.

Listed below are blog entries by the chosen members of the group, reflecting on their experiences.

In the following months, post will publish short interviews conducted with the scholars, artists, and curators who visited MoMA in 2016 to help us with our research. You can access them here.

Blog posts from the travelers

Lugar a Dudas

By Marta Dansie

Lugar a Dudas, which translates as “room for doubts,” is an artist-founded, artist-run, nonprofit, alternative art space in Cali, Colombia. It’s a gallery, which includes a street-facing public-art exhibition space; an artist residency program; and a cinema club that screens films almost daily to help promote many independent films made in Cali. It hosts talks and workshops as well as programs for school groups, produces publications, and publishes prints. In short, the organization runs an impressive range of programs to engage audiences locally and internationally.

Photographer Oscar Muñoz, whose work is in MoMA’s collection, founded Lugar a Dudas in 2005 and continues to direct it. He was also a founder, in the 1970s, of Colombia’s first independent art space, Ciudad Solar, which eventually disbanded as Cali was engulfed in violence in the 1980s. He explained that he started Lugar a Dudas to address an imbalance in Cali’s art network, which, he reports, currently has six art schools but only a few art galleries and therefore extremely limited opportunities for artists to work and exhibit. At the same time addressing a national imbalance, Muñoz was eager to help decentralize the Colombian art world, since most art institutions and organizations exist in Bogotá.

Everyone working at Lugar a Dudas is an artist. Muñoz’s partner, Sally Mizrachi, is a designer and coordinates the center’s programs. Víctor Albarracín is an art critic and founder of his own art collective, located in Bogotá, who has been in residence at Lugar a Dudas for almost a year. Iván Tovar, who is in charge of residency programs, works as a curator and artist (we saw Antiespacio, one of his hutlike sculptures made of rejected bricks from a local factory, at the 44th Salón Nacional de Artistas in Pereira). Breyner Huertas, the center’s website designer and communications manager, publishes miniature artist books under the pseudonym Hermes Acosta and received an honorable mention at the 2016 ArtBo fair for his photography.

The documentation center is at the heart of the organization and its largest gathering space. Juan Guillermo Tamayo, who is in charge of the center, hosts students and researchers in a library that is open-shelf and open to the public. He runs the genius Fotocopioteca, where essays from art theory, recommended by artists and others, are translated into Spanish, often for the first time, and made available as hard copies, downloads from a drive in the wall, and also on the organization’s website. I fell in love with the documentation center’s current exhibition of typeset posters (in the style of the much-lamented Carteles Horche), which use rebus-style clues to guide you to text contained in publications on the documentation center shelves, a colorful addition by Martin La Roche, a Chilean artist based in the Netherlands.

Residencies in a large house around the corner from the main space cost approximately 2,500,000 Colombian pesos or 850 US dollars for two months and offer artists and/or curators a private room with a work table as well as access to the common roof garden and even a small swimming pool.

A Multilayered and Rare Opportunity

By Yasmil Raymond

This report will never be complete nor does it pretend to be entirely accurate. But whatever is captured in the next sentences was written to give words to a multilayered and rare opportunity to visit Colombia during an exceptional historical moment of a potentially feasible peace agreement. There is no manual that tells curators the appropriate method of engagement on a research trip to a country that has recently experienced a civil war. It has been estimated that in Colombia, in the past fifty years, more than two hundred thousand people have died and five million people have been displaced from their homes. (It is hard to imagine what it must be like to visit artists in Afghanistan, Egypt, Iraq, or Syria but we can try.) In Colombia, the evidence of the past decades of warfare and devastation is not physically evident in its cities, but the overall silence and the empty sidewalks and squares are indicative of a trauma that is not easily “solved” with signatures. At the center of the normality we experienced during our visit was the stunning realization that artists are not speaking openly about the current political situation, or addressing the social indignation that has altered their culture. Once you realize what this omission might mean, you understand that the process of peace and reconciliation in Colombia has yet to begin.

The road from the airport to Medellín is a telling metaphor for the strong will of the city. The mountainous terrain is demanding and requires maneuvering, but eventually through patience and determination, we made our way along narrow and curvy roads into the valley. There is a palpable ambition in Medellín that is manifest in the recent urban renewal: the development of an efficient cable-car network and pristine subway systems. Our tour of Medellín was led by two visionary architects: Ricardo Vásquez and Emerson Marín. Among the many highlights was our visit to one of the UVA (Unidades de Vida Articulada) projects, a citywide endeavor that, in the spirit of Brazil’s phenomenal SESC (Serviço Social do Comércio) projects, takes water towers and turns them into community centers. The focus of this mission is socio-educational and recreational, and people seem to value it. We experienced another example of Medellín’s imaginative edge at Casa Tres Patios, a nonprofit organization where artists partner with educators to invent creative new methods for teaching children and young adults. Its founder is the American artist Tony Evanko. There is a heart beating in this space, a sense of urgency that was visible in the faces of the couple dozen of people we saw there rehearsing their lesson plans and teaching techniques. We also had the opportunity to meet the team at MAMM (Museo de Arte Moderno de Medellín), and to hear firsthand about the radical work of painter Débora Arango, which had been curated by Emiliano Valdés.

Not to be forgotten amid all the experiences in Medellín was Erika Diettes’s exhibition at the Museo de Antioquia, a solemn investigation into the trauma of the war. Her impeccable installation is unsettling and visceral, but equally courageous and necessary for those who have seen death and destruction. The rich history of the Museo of Antioquia precedes the tenure of its chief curator Nydia Gutiérrez. Opened in 1881, the museum is the second oldest in Colombia, and it houses an important collection of modern art as well as wonderful murals by Pedro Nel Gómez, who was inspired by the Mexican muralists. Gutiérrez was a gracious and generous host and guided us through the exhibitions. In one of the galleries, we came across an extraordinary series of watercolors by a self-taught artist by the name of Abel Rodriguez, a member of the Nonuya people, from the Caqueta River region. The selection was from his series Chagra, and it depicts both luscious rain forests and areas devastated by deforestation. The tour of the museum ended with an interesting display of some of the works included in the 1968, 1970, and 1972 Coltejer Art Biennials. It was gratifying to come across an exceptional painting by the Argentine artist Sarah Grilo (MoMA recently acquired a Grilo canvas from 1965) and a mesmerizing metal sculpture by Édgar Negret, in his signature red paint. We got to see more terrific examples of Negret’s floor works in Cali and Bogotá. MoMA owns an early sculpture from 1954 titled Sign for an Aquarium (Model) but nothing from the pinnacle of his career.

For decades, my imaginary of Colombia has been shaped by the lucid narratives penned by Gabriel García Márquez and Héctor Abad Faciolince, and this trip didn’t diminish the veracity of their accounts. As always, works of art have that unsettling ability to tip emotive charge into extreme discomfort. We began our stay in Cali with a visit to the studio and home of Rosemberg Sandoval. Sandoval is an internationally acclaimed performance artist and his work is included in MoMA’s collection. I can imagine that experiencing his actions would be infinitely more powerful than seeing black-and-white documentation of them—or related props and artifacts. However, the pictures of his 1985 action on the statue of Simón Bolívar across from the Palace of Justice (on the eve of the rebels’ attack) were charged with defiance and desperation. The hour-long visit to Sandoval’s home reeled with dignity, vigilance, and a peculiar inventiveness. His work is unapologetic, visceral, and consciously “badly” made, qualities that I admire and a position that seems to be undervalued by the younger generation of artists we encountered throughout our trip, who are so eagerly concerned with quality and craftsmanship. Later, in Bogotá, we saw some of Sandoval’s objects made from scraps of glass, and even his tabletop pieces, intended for domestic settings, have an edge and a certain monstrosity that rubs against notions of taste and civility.

In contrast to Medellín’s determination, Cali is a combination of warmth, sensibility, and modesty. The city might lack infrastructure, but it seems to enjoy a fearless sense of lucidity as the institutions and studios we visited reflect a particular self-awareness and extraordinary command of the basic conditions necessary to display art and generate forceful aesthetics. We learned about the hugely impressive synthesis of theory and practice happening at the artist-run space Lugar a Dudas (founded by the artist Oscar Muñoz and graphic designer Sally Mizrachi) and shared a relaxing lunch alongside the team of artists and writers running its ambitious residency, library, lecture, and film programs. Another interesting phenomenon seems to be germinating at the Museo la Tertulia under the leadership of its chief curator Alejandro Martín Maldonado. It was at this museum that we had the chance to see two exceptional exhibitions, one on the work of Beatriz González, and another on the year 1971, when Cali hosted the Pan American Games. All the works on view were from their collection, among them Antonio Caro’s important installation Aquí no cabe el arte (Art does not fit here) from 1972. (Later, in Bogotá, we had the opportunity to briefly meet Antonio Caro. His early work is difficult to find, but he is an artist that we should consider for MoMA’s collection.) The team at Museo la Tertulia allowed us to use their facilities to meet with the daughters of photographer Fernell Franco, and to organize a viewing of groups of works only available for museum collections. Seeing Fernell’s photographs was among the highlights of the trip for several of us. Fernell’s work recently entered the collection of the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía and the Tate, but it is still not represented in MoMA’s collection. Although Fernell was a self-taught artist, he is considered one of the leading figures in photography in Colombia; having had an extensive career as a photojournalist, he exhibited his large-scale series throughout the 1970s and 1980s.

From Cali, we headed to Pereira to see the 44th edition of the Salón Nacional de Artistas. The exhibition was not short on ambition or diversity. Though there are too many examples to mention here, artworks by Barış Doğrusöz (printmaking), Rabih Mroué (video), Ming Wong (video), Wilson Díaz (painting), Ethel Gilmour (sculpture), and Tatyana Zambrano y Roberto Ochoa (sculpture) were among the most memorable. It was unclear if the exhibition was well received by the artistic communities in the neighboring cities of Cali and Medellín, but we sure felt its effort to approach a wide range of forms and aesthetics without being pretentious. The director Rosa Ángel and guest curators staged an impressive synthesis of practices and nationalities. This exhibition was the only instance we experienced in which artworks by national and international artists had been brought together.

Bogotá was our last stop. The revival of the artistic scene there seems to be driven by the opening of a number of commercial galleries and the establishment of the art fair ARTBO in 2004, a program sponsored by the Chamber of Commerce of Bogotá. We were lucky enough to learn about a range of alternative spaces run by artists and architects throughout the city, and we listened to individual presentations by a handful of artists whom professor Lucas Ospina graciously gathered together for us at the Universidad de los Andes. It is indisputable that the work that José Roca and his team are doing at FLORA ars+natura has been pivotal to this rebirth, and we were fortunate to meet several of the artists participating in their residency program (and to experience the delicious food prepared by one of his daughters). However, the unforgettable moments still took place in the privacy of individual studios. A charming Nicolás Paris allowed us into his home-studio and shared insights into his investigations of geometry, nature, and pedagogy. His ongoing project centers on an emancipatory pedagogy that encourages students to self-initiate the “lessons” through games and other techniques that stimulate exploration. It was particularly interesting to see how Paris has integrated his studio practice into his life, expanding the team to include other artists and architects, teachers, and researchers; together, they seem to be reinventing the nature of collaboration and authorship.

Similarly, another inspiring conversation took place during our visit to the home-studio of architect Simón Hosie Samper. He spoke to us about his multidisciplinary practice and his experience building La casa del Pueblo (community library) in Guanacas Cauca. Samper’s research and collaboration with the indigenous people of Cauca brought a totally new dimension to social architecture. His project seems to have generated a critical discourse not only in the field of architecture but also among artists through his interrogation of the place of native cultures within Colombian society. And last but not least was the visit to the home-studio shared by Gabriel Sierra and Delcy Morelos. It took twelve years for Sierra and Morelos to build this sanctuary for their work and life, and it is definitely worth it. Due to the unexpectedness of our visit, the artists were not fully prepared but managed to show us fragments of their most recent projects. In February, Sierra will be mounting a solo exhibition at the Secession in Vienna, on the back of his acclaimed project at Kunsthaus Zürich and The Renaissance Society in Chicago.

Sierra’s work can come across as somber with a no-fuss formalism that seems to spring from a political exigency that favors the mundane over legibility. On Friday, our last day in the city, we did a rushed walk-through of the Museo de Arte del Banco de la República, which included a thrilling display of their Neo-Concrete collection with exceptional works by Ary Brizzi (Argentine, born 1930), Rogelio Polesello (Argentine, 1939–2014), Yutaka Toyota (Japanese, born 1931), Julio Le Parc (Argentine, born 1928), Carlos Cruz Diez (Venezuelan, born 1923), and an unforgettable juxtaposition of an Édgar Negret sculpture from 1967 titled Edificio (Building) and Louise Nevelson’s Rain Garden Zag II from 1977.

Ten days in Colombia, 29 studio visits, eight museums, nine galleries, ten independent spaces, six private collections, and two delayed flights, left us physically unable to carry on but also offered plenty to ponder. In retrospect, the overall impression of this first visit can be summarized by one of Nicolás Paris’s proposals for art: “A classroom for error: the incorrect, options how to fail, possible ways to make mistakes.”

Discovering Feliza

By Starr Figura

In Colombia, probably the biggest revelation (among many) for me was the work of Feliza Bursztyn (1933–1982). Our group had the opportunity to visit her home and estate in Bogotá. The property includes a modest front garden and the tiny apartment that was her first home and studio, as well as three adjacent buildings purchased by her second husband, Pablo Leyva: a small house, another building where her library and archives are currently stored, and a much larger, garage-like studio. Leyva’s son, the artist Camilo Leyva, now uses that large space for his own work, and he also manages Bursztyn’s estate. Examples of Camilo Leyva’s sculptures mingled comfortably with those of Bursztyn, whose art has always been a touchstone for his own. Bursztyn’s sculptures were resting unceremoniously here and there, the large ones occupying sections of the floor and the smaller ones placed on makeshift surfaces and tables, or inside crates or cardboard boxes.

What impressed me about Bursztyn’s work is its combination of visceral toughness, poetic sensitivity, and sly, irreverent humor. In 1961 she began using scrap metal, twisting, crushing, and welding it to create sculptures large and small. In 1967–68 she made her first kinetic artworks, a series of steel constructions that she called Las histéricas (The hysterics), by welding long, thin ribbons of metal into circular, springlike configurations; attached to motors, they vibrate noisily, even aggressively. There is a suggestion of playfulness in them, but also of confrontation, disruption, and violence.

In Colombia, Bursztyn is revered as a key artist of the postwar period, a pioneer whose sculpture broke new ground in the 1960s and helped pave the way for avant-garde practices in more recent decades. Her work is highlighted in the collections of museums such as the Museo Nacional de Colombia and the Museo de Arte del Banco de la República, and can be found in galleries such as Alonso Garcés, all of which we had the good fortune to visit during our trip (although, regrettably, her major works were temporarily not on view at the museums). Despite this renown in her own country, Bursztyn is all but unknown in the United States. Hopefully this will change, not only because her work represents a high point in the history of Colombian art, but also because it can be seen as part of an artistic current that crested internationally in the 1960s. Bursztyn’s work is often compared to that of César (with whom she studied in Paris) and Jean Tinguely, but it may resonate even more potently with the work of a number of women artists—Lee Bontecou, Louise Bourgeois, Eva Hesse, Alina Szapocznikow—who also found their own strong and slightly eccentric voices by creating disturbingly subversive and unorthodox sculptures during that same heady, transformative decade.

The Art of the Book

By Milan Hughston

Our group’s visits to museums and artists’ studios confirmed how important artist’s books are to Colombia’s flourishing art-publishing history, both modern and contemporary. The rich tradition of drawing and the profusion of beautifully rendered sketchbooks quite naturally find their way into the production of artist’s books and editions.

Our C-MAP group was fortunate to be able to see work by three Colombian artists participating in the forthcoming project being published by MoMA’s Library Council. The Library Council is a group whose annual membership supports activities of the Library and Museum Archives. A special benefit is the semiannual publication of a limited-edition artist’s book that often brings together the work of an artist and a writer.

In early 2017, the Library Council will publish The Valise, which includes work by seven Latin American artists inspired by the text of Argentinian writer César Aira. Aira’s text follows the dramatic journey of a nineteenth-century German artist through the mountains and pampas of Chile and Argentina. Three of the artists included in this collective project are from Colombia; and we made studio visits to two of them, Johanna Calle and Nicolás Paris, as well as saw an exhibition by Mateo López at Casas Riegner gallery.

We were lucky to be accompanied on these visits by the editor of the Library Council publications, May Castleberry, who was in Bogotá working with the artists on final details for the publication. Our studio visits with Calle and Paris allowed us to enter their worlds in an intimate and personal way, to closely observe their past work, and to see how their more recent work for The Valise has taken them on new journeys—in terms of traditional production and also new media and formats, all contained inside a Duchamp-inspired “valise” that reflects the themes of journey and travel.

Both Calle and Paris are known for their meticulous and detailed work, particularly in drawing, and each of them is well documented and represented in MoMA’s collection.

Calle’s contributions include a series called Morphine Landscapes, which incorporate intricately typed letters that frame the images, functioning as a kind of typed poem imagining the drug-addled German artist on his journey. Her second piece uses a series of anonymous photographs taken by a photographer in the 1940s that depict the Colombian Andes, again echoing the themes of travel and adventure.

Paris’s work incorporates architecture, objects (including a glass bulb with a local seed floating within it), and drawings. The body of work as a whole reflects the themes of travel, exploration, time, and teaching, all of which find their ways into most aspects of Paris’s art practice.

At Casas Riegner gallery in Bogotá, the group visited Mateo López’s latest solo exhibition, Ciudad Fantasma (Ghost City). This exhibition included examples of the intricate folded and printed pieces that López has created for his participation in The Valise. These comprise twenty-four letter press and woodcut prints that reflect the “geometry of the object” and interpret the artist’s recent trip through the Darién Gap, a wild area straddling the borders of Panama and Colombia that remains one of the least-traveled areas in the Western Hemisphere. In conclusion, it’s very appropriate that our CMAP “journey” through Colombia mirrored the focus of the forthcoming Library Council publication, incorporating discovery, collecting, and learning. All of these traditions are timeless.

Colombia Coca-Cola

By Sarah Meister

Early in the evening of our last night in Colombia we had the opportunity to meet with Antonio Caro, who for more than four decades has been a key protagonist in Colombian art circles. We met at La Oficina del Doctor, an intimate book-space nestled within Caro’s gallery, Casas Riegner, in Bogotá. This struck me as fitting, given that one of Caro’s most iconic works Colombia, painted in Coca-Cola’s distinct looping script, had become a leitmotif during our travels throughout Colombia. We first encountered a version in Medellín at the Museo de Antioquia (executed in 2007; Caro’s first version is dated 1977) and saw several others in public and private collections. My favorite was an embroidered apron hanging in Nicolás Paris’s studio—not only because we all so enjoyed that studio visit!

This work succinctly points to the complex network of relations between Caro’s native country and my own through this symbol of American capitalist enterprise, produced in a variety of formats and editions that irreverently mimic a marketing strategy. But no matter the scale or material, Caro imbues each version with subtle imperfections (a missing dot over the i or irregularity in the lettering), nodding to broader political and human conditions, perhaps, but certainly to the hand of an artist whom Luis Camnitzer has described admiringly as a “visual guerilla.”

As a photography curator, I can’t resist mentioning a select few of the most meaningful photographic encounters, wishing I had the time to write about each and every one of them. There were several artists working with photography whom we knew we wanted to see the minute our C-MAP group decided we would be visiting Colombia. We had acquired a few works from Miguel Ángel Rojas’s series Faenza in 2015 (see the acquisitions here), but it was a rare treat to be welcomed by the artist at his home in Bogotá and to have a leisurely opportunity to trace the broader trajectory of his career through the work installed there.

Fernell Franco (1942–2006) was another artist whose work we have been following actively for years, and we enjoyed an afternoon in Cali with his two daughters, who have thoughtfully tended to his legacy.

Perhaps slightly less well-known, but equally significant is Jorge Ortiz, who had a few works included in Pablo Gómez Uribe’s unassumingly revolutionary exhibition This House Isn’t Worth Anything: What Is Really Worthless Is the Lot at Galería de La Oficina in Medellín. We were fortunate, on our last day, to have been in Bogotá for the opening of “Bernal, Ortiz y Cano: un cuerpo para el arte” at the Fundación Gilberto Alzate Avendaño (thanks to Alexa Halaby for the tip, and for so much else). This was a great opportunity to develop a sense of Ortiz’s broader career, with work dating from 1978 to 2016 whose material presence is remarkably difficult to capture through reproduction.

Back in Medellín, also at La Oficina, we had a chance to speak with Jesús Abad Colorado about his work, also lesser known outside of Colombia, which compellingly presents activism and art in equal measure.

Though I can’t pick favorites, it is always a thrill to learn about work that one simply wouldn’t encounter in midtown Manhattan. The first of these discoveries was tucked into a small gallery at the Museo de Antioquia (not far from Caro’s Colombia): an impressive panorama by Jorge Obando (1894–1982) of thousands of people gathered for the inauguration of the Atanasio Girardot stadium in Medellín (1953).

And on our final day, at the Museo de Arte del Banco de la República in Bogotá, we came across the work of Luis B. Ramos (1899–1955), whose series El hombre y la tierra from the 1930s was represented with an assortment of modestly scaled vintage prints.

These were contemporaneous with many of the oil paintings hanging in the same gallery and spoke to a distinctly local, quotidian experience. It’s no surprise that the least familiar achievements are those that flourish outside the international art scene, but it does underscore the importance of traveling to see beyond established narratives.

A Thought About La Tertulia

By Thomas J. Lax

Located on the Cali River, directly in front of what feels like the city’s center of skateboarding and cruising culture, Museo La Tertulia presented a set of thoughtful and original exhibitions organized by their relatively new chief curator Alejandro Martín. Cali/71 looked introspectively—but refreshingly without navel-gazing—at the city’s critical history of activism, cultural and otherwise, that not only led to the formation of its important art collectives, but also to massive changes at the museum itself. The combination of agitprop and formal approaches to political engagement by a range of artists including Barbara Jones, Luis Caballero, Jesús Rafael Soto, and many others, seen on the heels of the stunning upset in the United States of the Democratic Party candidate by a fascist, white supremacist, was a stunning reminder of the potential of art and culture to interfere with the work of hegemonic consolidation.

Singing for the Absent

By Luis Pérez-Oramas

The very first scene of the video Centro Espacial Satelital de Colombia, by the art collective La Decanatura, depicts a mother cow slowly, even lovingly, stroking with her tongue a newborn calf, presumably her own. The landscape is pastoral and magnificent in its Arcadian calm, but for two uncanny architectural presences: two monumental satellite towers dating from the 1970s.

The place is known as the Centro Espacial Satelital de Colombia (Satellite Space Center of Colombia) and, like many similar sites throughout Latin America, it was opened in the 1970s, specifically on March 25, 1970.

The video, introduced by two black-and-white photographs of the towers, was authored by a collective of young Colombian artists, La Decanatura (Elkin Calderón and Diego Piñeros), and presented among many works in the National Salon of Artists in Pereira.

I still have this video in mind. It is one of the strongest, most moving art pieces I have seen in recent months. It obliquely touches upon some of the issues that I have been personally interested in, both as a curator and as a poet. The experience of seeing it actually drew me to the writing of some verses, maybe a poem, as well as to the memory of some old, haunting readings, and to general thinking about the purpose (or purposelessness) of an initiative such as a trip by MoMA curators to Colombia within the frame of our Contemporary and Modern Art Perspectives initiative, C-MAP.

Were we bound there with the expectation of discovering some (hidden) masterpieces? Do we really care about the history of a country such as Colombia—or for that matter about any other (relatively small) country in the Americas, or in the world? What is our position, as employees of a dominant, mainstream art institution, vis-à-vis the struggles and celebrations of national communities that are not planned to be part of the fairy tales embodied by our geniuses and artistic heroes? Could an institution such as MoMA be generous? Could an American, or for that matter international, curator working in the very axis of art power produce a critical perspective outside of a logic of power-will? What is a powerless art? A powerless Modernity: does it exist?

After the cow has caressed her newborn calf with her tongue, the video proceeds to show the rainy surrounding landscape of the very old Leal y Noble Villa de Santiago de Chocontá, in Cundinamarca.

Suddenly, sparingly, a group of children, all bearing musical instruments and wearing white costumes, which we presume were the uniforms of the technicians who worked at the Satellite Space Center, come out from those monster towers into the open field. They start playing a moving song, a lullaby. They caringly play that music while it slowly rains. In another shot, they play inside the abandoned towers, uncannily, against the silence of a failed Modernity.

They may be playing their music in search of a voice that they have lost, or the voice that they are losing as they become adults, and they look for the place of infancy, where they come from, that place that we all have abandoned: that site of absence projected into the future, uncertainly.

The Satellite Space Center is no longer useful, no longer “modern.” Beside its ruins of modernity, the landscape continues, beyond itself, following the same secular, ever-evolving pace of cows, trees, tempests, veals, harvests, lightning storms. A verse by Alberto Caeiro, one of Fernando Pessoa’s heteronyms, reads, “Os pastores de Virgílio, coitados, são Virgilío, / E a Natureza é bela e antiga (Virgil’s shepherds, poor guys, are Virgil, / And Nature is beautiful and ancient).”

The Banda Sinfónica Infantil de Chocontá (Children’s Symphonic Band of Chocotá) ends its lullaby outside the satellite towers as the rain recedes. Each child turns away, one at a time, and goes inside. The day is ending. From above, from a hill maybe, we see the landscape of Chocontá entering the darkness of the night, gray mirrors of water slipping toward the horizon.

Few days, too many places: Medellín, Cali, Pereira, Armenia, Bogotá. A country emerging from a century of wars, from innumerable lost. A community rethinking itself, projecting for the first time, as a possible achievement, a future of peace. Artists getting together, making art there, where it was not possible to make art before. Is there a more exciting encounter? Do we need to expect there, as good old colons, the illusory greatness of art, the fiction of genius, the phantom of masterworks to feed our insatiable, Saturnine capitalization of the modern . . . instead of—Agamben’s dixit—just the upcoming, ordinary community?

I will keep with myself, for years, this brief encounter with La Decanatura’s view of Chocontá, the lullaby addressed to the absent, the dove’s coo intended for those who have not yet come as a testimony of something that, for the most, I think contemporary art has unfortunately lost.

We have lost an ambition. An ambition that consists of addressing those who are no longer with us, or those who have not yet (be)come. This deep ambition of temporal projection, of resilience against the precariousness of the present time; this will against the preterition of the absent; this illusion of making connection with that which we were, or with those who were, or with that which is the place from whence we come, and never were, was the driving ambition of art, at least since its intellectual regime was theoretically established in the Western world. It has been one of the most recurring figures of transcendence, that human impulse. That is what seems to have been lost in a world of art that only satisfies itself with the present; that aims only to be contemporary; that surges in cowardly silence against all forms of anachronism; that satisfies itself with a contempt of politics consisting in neutralizing it in its very mediocre scenes of representation; that feeds itself with its own commercial fetishizing, with its own, imperturbable economy. That conforms itself with its own present being, as if the darkness of the present or the uncertainty of the future were nonexistent; that satiates itself with its own fashions, happy to not be anything more than what it is, as all fashions, ceaseless, expiring from the anodyne exhaustion of its consumers. It is against that world that the kids of Chocontá are singing.

Listen to Colombia

By Giampaolo Bianconi

One of the most striking threads through our recent visit to Colombia was that of sound and its deployment as a tool to produce and question both standards of scientific investigation and understandings of nature and culture. Institutions of varying scales across Colombia are united by the strength of their spaces dedicated to sound art created toward these ends—works that ultimately reflect one of the strongest themes in contemporary Colombian art: an all-encompassing focus on territory as an umbrella under which both art and politics are articulated.

In Medellín, the newly expanded Museum of Modern Art (MAMM) contains a gallery called Lab 3, a space designed to showcase sound installations. On view during our visit was a biologically driven piece by Leslie García and Paloma López, titled Micro-ritmos. Powered by soil samples collected from different parts of the city, Micro-ritmos transforms organic bacteria into a constantly shifting light and soundscape. García and López are Mexican artists who have worked extensively in alternative spaces, radio, and experimental sound rooted in organic systems. Throughout our time in Colombia, we came to realize that the pattern of working with organic material is part of a broader focus on the issue of territory in Colombian art and politics. As a watchword, territory encompasses concerns with landscape, real estate, extraction of natural resources, organic animal and plant material, and more.

At the National Salon in Pereira, one of the standouts was Carlos Bonil’s Fonoarqueologia y otras conexiones con el Amazonas (2016). In this sound work comprised of a listening station on blonde wood, visitors were invited to hear sounds like those derived from field recordings of the Amazon. These “recordings” were, however, in fact reproductions, produced in a studio using special instruments and techniques. By implicating the construction of human-made sound with the scientific endeavor of field recording, Bonil allows his listeners to question the supposed distinction between nature’s purity and industry’s artificiality. This theme was repeated at FLORA ars+natura, a space in Bogotá dedicated to exhibiting nature-related artworks and cultivating artists demonstrating a keen awareness of nature. Alberto Baraya and Sylvia Jaimes’s worked with an archive of birdsongs from Cornell University, collaborating with a team of singers and musicians to re-create these natural sounds from scratch for a piece entitled Gallada Lab (2015–16). Gallada Lab was presented in a dedicated sound gallery at FLORA, a room used throughout the year to host a rotating series of sound installations.

While artists use sound to question the authenticity of nature itself, other institutions in Colombia use immersive sound toward more didactic ends. At the Museo del Oro, a dramatic sliding door lead to a gallery that houses glass walls behind which illuminated golden relics were presented. Sound recordings of rituals that once incorporated these artifacts were presented with musical punctuations of light that animate the objects. At the National University of Colombia, an exhibition tracing the history and contemporary manifestations of shamanistic rituals in indigenous communities in Colombia featured a completely dark space in which a sound bath of recordings of ceremonies played on a loop. In both exhibition venues, theatrical presentations of recorded sound were being used to convey experiences of anthropological knowledge.

In each of these institutional and extra-institutional contexts, sound is presented as an aesthetic experience contiguous with other mediums. From my perspective as part of MoMA’s Department of Media and Performance Art, this was an inspiring constellation of spaces fostering sonic experiments with thoughtful depth.

3 days in Bogotá

By May Castleberry

For the last two years, I’ve had the pleasure of working with three artists from Bogotá—Mateo López, Johanna Calle, and Nicolás Paris—on a collective project called The Valise.¹ Joining the C-MAP group in Bogotá for three days in November certainly expanded my outlook on Colombian art. I was particularly interested to see works that helped me understand the context for the Colombian contributions to The Valise—works that reflect an affinity for travel, history, and bookmaking, and that draw upon Latin America’s rich tradition of graphic design, typography, and illustration.

When I first visited Bogotá in 2014, I went to the Luis Ángel Arango Library with López and Paris. While there, we looked at nineteenth-century atlases, entomological drawings, and expeditionary volumes, and it was clear that some of these objects, which López and Paris have been looking at for years, influenced their works for The Valise. In any case, all three artists appreciated the suggestion that their contributions might evoke earlier journeys or explorations of South America.

The C-MAP trip introduced me to some of the institutions and collections of older works that have inspired the Colombian artists participating in The Valise, as well as to some of their contemporaries, colleagues as well as rivals, who also employ graphic techniques, albeit in different ways. For example, after hearing of my project, the kind curator of art at the Museo Nacional de Colombia showed me a gallery filled with heroic paintings of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century conquest. Then he took me to an adjacent gallery and showed me a satirical reproduction, by José Alejandro Restrepo, of a nineteenth-century print of a supposedly paradisiacal tropical scene. This work, an interesting contrast to that of Calle, Paris, and López, sends up the colonial idea of the “picturesque.” The next day, I saw some of Restrepo’s incisive videos at Espacio El Dorado; despite the shift in medium, these pieces still incorporate text and photographic illustration in a layered way, recalling the artist’s harshly powerful work as a printmaker.

I saw echoes of the artwork we’ve commissioned in multiple places. Knowing of López’s love of the informational poster, I was struck by a large, early twentieth-century color chart in Beatriz Gonzáles’s studio—one of the only pieces of décor/art/information hanging there (other than her own work). I saw collaged, collapsed, altered, and/or blurred typography, and texts as images in almost every collection we visited. This only added to my impression that Calle, a master of such mediums, is a singular innovator rooted in a long Latin American lineage. In fact, typography appeared where I least expected it! At the studio of Miguel Ángel Rojas, we saw miniaturized photographs of illicit acts, bunched together to form letters and words. Conversely, Doris Salcedo, an artist clearly on the “maximalist” end of the typographic imagination, showed us her studio filled with dozens of massive concrete plinths, cut with water-filled alphabetical letters that form the names of would-be immigrants to Europe who had drowned in the Mediterranean en route.

More practically, I saw López’s gallery, Casas Riegner, and they proposed that we might show our project in La Oficina del Doctor at the time of the Bogotá Book Fair. I’ve begun to think about libraries in which we might place The Valise, or to whom we might give the extra, offset-printed pamphlets we’ve made in conjunction with it. For example, we will have 150 extra copies of a small pamphlet, designed and created by Nicolás Paris (and including a poem of his authorship), about Colombian leaves that have been marked by leaf-mining insects—perhaps of interest for the Flora library?

A Big, Healthy Nose

By Jerónimo Duarte Riascos

Perception, when it becomes habitual, also becomes automatic. Take, for instance, your nose: you know it is there and yet you don’t really see it anymore. Unless, of course, you change your habitual perspective: close one of your eyes and your nose (or at least part of it) “appears.”

Russian formalism, notably Viktor Shklovsky, proposed that this process of fighting the habitual, of seeing anew, is called defamiliarization—and he identified it as one of art’s core effects. But art is not by any means the sole defamiliarizer. So, I think, are time and space, something that became apparent to me during (and after) our recent C-MAP trip to Colombia.

C-MAP Latin America’s recent focus on Colombian modern and contemporary artistic practices—which included around twenty study sessions on the country’s art, history, and culture and was the reason for MoMA’s recent trip to Bogotá, Cali, Medellín and Pereira—was, for me, a defamiliarizing moment. In a way, I saw my nose again and realized how much it had grown.

Born and raised there, I moved to the United States (space) a good number of years ago (time). I return to Colombia a lot, usually in a rush, always trying to do and see too many things in too short a time. In November 2016 I went back, again in a rush. But this time I was joined by a group of colleagues, most of whom were traveling to Colombia for the first time and whose objective was, after having spent more than a year researching its art, history, architecture, key figures, and particularities, to gain a better understanding of the artistic scene of the country.

We experienced a very intense ten days, complying with the stereotypical Protestant ethic: early mornings, late nights, and few (too few!) breaks in between. We visited artists, museums, independent spaces, galleries, collectors, schools, exhibitions, universities. I felt like a proud local, though a defamiliarized one, showing them things that were also new to me. Because despite the cliché, things are changing in Colombia—quite radically. Not only politically, of course, with the much-discussed and recently signed peace treaty with FARC, but also behaviorally.

There is optimism and brains and creativity. And a very encouraging desire to work together. This was clear to me throughout the whole time in Colombia and during most of our visits. But I want to underscore two events, in particular: a brunch with representatives from some of the most interesting and exciting independent spaces in Bogotá, and a class (of sorts) that we took at Universidad de los Andes.

Brunch was held at Espacio Odeón, where we met not only with Odeón’s team but also with teams from La Agencia, C a m p o, and Miami. The spaces these groups are creating are, it seems to me, the basis for a community of experimentation and thus the impetus for a self-critical and fertile scene. I felt a bit jealous seeing this scene from afar—I know that some of my colleagues, who have no particular connection to Colombia, felt the same way, and so I think it is safe to conclude that it was not (only) a case of homesickness. Odeón, La Agencia, C a m p o, Miami, and the more than sixty flourishing independent spaces existing in Bogotá alone, invite you to belong and that is perhaps one of the reasons why they have successfully lured new publics into their spaces, projects, and experiments.

After brunch we left for class. The whole MoMA group sat quietly and in orderly fashion to hear a group of artists, who had graduated from Universidad de los Andes or were otherwise affiliated it in some way, discuss a diversity of paths enabled by artistic education. The group was so diverse and the conversation was so engaging that we ended up staying for a couple hours more than initially anticipated. You know it’s a good class when students refuse to leave and instead linger in the classroom trying to get a bit more of what has been given.

After class, as we continued on with our full schedule, my feeling of defamiliarization intensified with every new conversation. My conclusion: a pleasure, and an unparalleled opportunity to (re)discover my big, healthy, full-grown nose.

Photos from the trip

Medellín (Nov 10-12)

Cali (Nov 13)

Pereira (Nov 14)

Bogotá (Nov 15-18)

The post Growing Seeds of Thought: 10 Days in Colombia appeared first on post.

Art without a Passport

By Sara Bodinson

I’ve never taken for granted the ability to travel internationally; to the contrary, I’ve relished the many opportunities I’ve had to experience different parts of the globe. But as we embarked on our C-MAP trip to Warsaw (my first visit) and Berlin, I admit I did not anticipate that travel and restrictions on the freedom to do so would be such a common thread in the art we encountered. Travel was restricted during the second half of the twentieth century in Central and Eastern Europe as a result of the Cold War, martial law, and economic instability, among other circumstances. This, of course, had a direct effect on many of the artists, impacting their artistic strategies and choice of materials as well as the dissemination of their work. What surprised me was that the subjects of travel and movement—of people and things, across borders and seas, voluntary and forced—still loom so large for the new generation of artists working in the region.

Our first stop after landing in Warsaw was Zofia Kulik’s home and studio, where she showed us her digital and physical archives of decades of work as well as mock-ups of her more recent large-scale photo collages. Later in the trip, we saw an exhibition at Žak | Branicka in Berlin of KwieKulik’s work (which Kulik made in collaboration with her former husband Przemyslaw Kwiek) called The Monument without a Passport. Made during the period of martial law in Poland (1981–83), when citizens were not allowed to travel outside of the country—or, in many cases, even between cities—this body of work explores the restrictions explicitly. The exhibition included everything from barely discernable passport photos to photographs documenting performances in which Kulik’s head and feet were restrained, evoking her inability to move freely.

The next day, we visited The Travellers: Voyage and Migration in New Art from Central and Eastern Europe, an exhibition at the Zachęta National Gallery of Art, curated by Magdalena Moskalewicz (a former C-MAP fellow). The exhibition featured work in a variety of media by nearly thirty contemporary artists addressing “travel in a region where freedom to travel was, until recently, a luxury available to the very few.” We heard from artist Janek Simon about Alang Transfer, an installation of dozens of signs and images salvaged from retired ships—some of which had traveled the world for decades—and sold at auction. This comprised an incongruous and, at times, humorous combination of imagery, languages, and visual systems.

While there, we also heard from Radek Szlaga about Transatlantic, made in collaboration with Honza Zamojski, after their journey, in 2012, on a cargo ship from Belgium to the United States. After just a few days, the two became disenchanted with the ship’s food, ran out of reading material, and grew bored of playing basketball, and they began to long for the convenience, connectivity, and communication so readily available to them in their everyday lives on land. They presented elements of their journey in a multimedia installation including video, plants, a self-published newspaper, and a bunk bed.

When we visited the 9th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art, I was drawn to Halil Altindere’s latest rap-video-with-a-political-message called Homeland (no doubt a reference to the television show of the same name, which has been widely criticized for being Islamophobic). The lyrics (voiced by Mohammad Abu Hajar, a Syrian rapper now based in Berlin) and staged footage look at the experience of the forced migration of refugees—an increasing reality in both Turkey and Germany, where the video was filmed. Berlin’s former Tempelhof airport—just a few kilometers from the Biennale venues—has recently been transformed into a refugee camp and it serves as a central backdrop in Altindere’s video. In one of many simultaneously poignant and absurd scenes, refugees wearing orange life jackets run along a beach, while nearby, a group of presumably European women in athleisure wear strike yoga poses as they passively look on.

Looking back over my photos of the trip with a few months’ hindsight, I was struck by one image I took during the group’s visit to Edward Krasiński ‘s studio, in Warsaw, where he lived and worked from the 1970s till his death in 2004. Though Krasiński was reluctant to discuss the meaning of his trademark use of the blue Scotch tape with which he lined walls, works of art, furniture, and other objects, he once commented: “The tape has ascribed meaning to itself. Once it came into being, it was then free to do anything, to frolic. The meaning is inherent in the tape; I inspired only its spirit.” To me, this freedom to frolic—in this case, around a small globe turned on its head and suspended in time and space many years after he placed it there—is a small, but powerfully optimistic symbol of what it can mean to freely travel the globe.

An Illustrated Look at Artists’ Archives in Warsaw, Łódź, and Berlin

By Michelle Elligott

Our trip to Warsaw, Łódź, and Berlin began with a magical evening.

After arriving from New York, we went directly to meet with artist Zofia Kulik at her home and archive. Being in her presence, at that place, brought her work to life.

She shared with us her process of working with her archive, which is divided into three parts: documentation of her collaboration with Przemysław Kwiek as KwieKulik, encompassing more than two hundred events; materials related to other artists and galleries; and contextual materials including her library.

It is not just the archive’s usefulness in documenting the past that is of interest, but also its power and potential to shape the future. Kulik is constantly working in and on her archive, and it serves as source material for her current work. Furthermore, she has promised her collection to the Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw, which intends to install it in the galleries, as a work of art, and not simply to preserve it as a research collection.

Our next visit was to the Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw, where I was eager to learn more about this novel and intriguing approach of exhibiting the Kulik Archive as an entity. There, we benefited from presentations by Joanna Mytkowska and Marcel Andino Velez about the history of the museum’s programs and building project. Robert Jarosz provided an in-depth description of the extensive work they have done to borrow or acquire, digitize, and publish online significant artist archives, including those of Eustachy Kossakowski and Alina Szapocznikow. They all look forward to thinking through the possibilities and the challenges of the future Kulik Archive acquisition and installation, and I eagerly await their results.

Of course, no visit to Warsaw is complete without a stop at the enchanting and captivating studio of Henryk Stazewski and Edward Krasinski. It was like a warm homecoming, as we had visited their studio six years before, on our first C-MAP voyage to Warsaw, when for me, it was the absolute highlight and revelation of the trip. In fact, following that expedition, each member of the team was asked to propose potential future acquisitions. I presented Krasinski, and I am pleased to note that since that time, some half a dozen works have been acquired by MoMA.

Another highlight was in Łódź, where, at the Muzeum Sztuki, I had the good fortune to spend a few hours delving into their archives and speaking with their rockin’ (literally, as in a former punker) archivist, Maciej Cholewiński. Our conversation was recorded, and the video is available here on post.

For me, the most important and meaningful part of our C-MAP trips is the opportunity to meet and speak with the artists themselves and to review and discuss the archives and ephemera that record the history of their production. We had the opportunity in Berlin to meet with Polish artist Ewa Partum at Galerie M + R Fricke. There, Partum regaled us with anecdotes about her compelling and provocative work, as well shared documents from her archive, including those related to her Galeria Adres (meaning Address Gallery, as it was for a time located in her apartment), which promoted ephemeral and mail art practices in the mid-1970s.

These are but a few highlights from a trip that was filled with great encounters with both art and artists.

Highlights from Warsaw to Berlin

By Juliet Kinchin

An unexpected highlight of the trip was an unscheduled visit that several of us made to a new experimental space for contemporary art in the Starak Family Foundation, at the start of our stay in Warsaw. On view was an exhibition of Henryk Stazewski’s monochromatic paintings and metallic reliefs of the 1960s–1970s, displayed against floating planes of color that locked them into the interior space. Adding color in this way was a high-risk but effective strategy on the part of the curators that I found sympathetic to the spirit of Stazewski’s statement on the title wall: “A work of art should neither blend into the surroundings, nor decorate or facilitate anything. It should dominate them artistically.” Nearby was a related exhibition of more Op art black-and-white paintings of the 1970s by Ryszard Winiarski. As someone fascinated by design as an artistic and spatialized practice, I found these installations a thought-provoking start.

A recurrent theme in several of our visits was the rethinking of and response to Communist culture by contemporary artists, for instance the Piktogram “Bureau of Loose Associations” in Warsaw, or the Blockchain Visionaries installation at the Berlin Biennale, presented in the former building of the East German State Council—a largely untouched Communist monument replete with its original stained glass, mosaics, and mural program. It was fascinating to talk with Christoph Tannert about the exhibition he was developing with Eugen Blume, Voices of Dissent: Art in the GDR 1976–1989, which opened in July at Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin. The Hero Mother exhibition at MOMENTUM of Kunstquartier Bethanien exhibited art by post-communist women rethinking heroism in the context of twenty Communist countries, and touching on issues of gender, nationalism, citizenship, and migration. We visited two private foundations in Berlin, the Sammlung Boros and Julia Stoschek Collection, which have reconfigured concrete-bunker architecture of the Cold War era to dramatic effect.

Toward the end of our trip, it was a pleasure to share with colleagues the small treasure house of twentieth- and twenty-first-century product and graphic design culture–the Museum der Dinge in Berlin. The core of this collection is formed by the archive of the Deutscher Werkbund, an association of designers, industrialists, and politicians concerned with industrial design, founded in 1907. In charting the trajectory of design reform on both sides of the postwar divide between East and West Germany, the displays reveal much continuity in the design culture, and an exhibition of East German magazines is a reminder of how vibrant graphic design could be even in the more hardline cultures of the Soviet bloc. It was also a fascinating opportunity to view the museum’s installation of the Frankfurt Kitchen designed in 1926 by Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky prior to my installation of it at The Museum of Modern Art, New York this fall.

1 – WARSAW

Haunted by History

By Ksenia Nouril

The “specter of communism” is still haunting Europe. Albeit cliché, these words penned by Karl Marx in his 1848 Communist Manifesto came to mind when I was in Warsaw, where I felt like I was experiencing a serious case of déjà vu. While Warsaw has rapidly developed into a twenty-first-century, globally networked city since the end of Communist rule in 1989, it has held on tightly to the trappings of its past. The specter of communism is most visible in much of the city center’s architecture, including but not limited to the Marszałkowska Housing District, the Palace of Culture and Science, and Defilad (Parade) Square, all of which are designed in the Socialist Realist style.

The Palace of Culture and Science was built between 1952 and 1955, by order of Joseph Stalin, in the style of the Soviet Union’s “Seven Sisters”—neoclassic structures characterized by single tall towers and elaborate ornamentation. Today, it continues to host a variety of social and cultural organizations, including a cinema, a theater, a technology museum, a restaurant, a bar, and the newly reopened Galeria Studio. Founded in 1972 along with Teatr Studio, the gallery was host to exhibitions and amassed one of the first collections of modern and contemporary art in Poland, numbering hundreds of objects. In 2016, the avant-garde legacy of Galeria Studio was revived (although it never officially closed) with the exhibition From the Archive of Studio Gallery, organized by its new director, Dorota Jarecka, and curator Barbara Piwowarska. They gave us a tour of the exhibition, which traced the gallery’s history and included the designs for the adjacent theater’s remodeling by Oskar Hansen, most famous for his theories of Open Form.

The continued operation of this building has allowed contemporary Warszawiacy (Varsovians) to engage with its history. The resuscitation of the palace as a vital cultural institution, like it was in its heyday, is just one example of the historical turn that has swept Warsaw and other post-communist cities over the last two decades. By historical turn, I mean a looking back on and mining of official and unofficial, individual and collective, real and imagined histories culled consciously and conspicuously from the past and then applied to the present using primary and secondary sources, including artifacts, archives, and reconstructions.

This historical turn was evident already in the year 2000, when Anda Rottenberg, whom we met during this trip at Galerie Isabella Czarnowska in Berlin, curated the exhibition Szare w kolorze, 1956–1970: Kultura okresu gomulkowskiego (Gray in color, 1956–1970: Culture from the Gomulka era) at Zachęta National Gallery of Art. Mounted in honor of the museum’s centennial, this retro exhibition resurrected several key interiors of the period associated with postwar modernity in Poland, such as milk bars and jazz clubs, and made them fully functional and accessible to museum patrons. I first read about this wildly popular exhibition in the book Warsaw (London: Reaktion Books, 2003) by David Crowley, with whom we also met, but I had not had the opportunity to speak to Anda about her experience.

At the Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw (Muzeum Sztuki Nowoczesnej w Warszawie), we found an institution operating out of the famous Emilia, a former furniture store that is a prime example of the brutalist architecture of the socialist period, while it is in the process of building a new structure, designed by Thomas Phifer of New York, across the street on Defilad Square to house the museum as well as a theater complex. Though, as of writing (October 2016), this building is in the processed of being torn down for redevelopment in Warsaw’s bustling center city.

Today, the neon sign that once lit the facade of Emilia can be found at the Neon Muzeum, located across the Vistula in Warsaw’s Praga district. This atypical museum is dedicated to the documentation and preservation of these remnants of Cold War Polish culture.

Capturing the Archive with Zofia Kulik

By David Senior

A few months prior to our visit, I did a brief email interview with Zofia Kulik about her activities in the 1970s as both an artist and an archivist. With her partner, Przemysław Kwiek, she was involved in performance activities as KwieKulik, and together, they founded their own institution, the Studio of Activities, Documentation, and Propagation (PDDiU), which actively archived documentation of KwieKulik performances as well as the work of a network of other local and international artists and art spaces. In the interview, Kulik made clear that this archive was meant to be generative, that is, to serve as source material for new work. In her words, “The archive seemed to be for us similar to the clay-plasmatic structure easy for transformation and re-arrangements.” Another aspect was that the archiving of new art practices was not a priority of state institutions: KwieKulik’s labor in accumulating materials was a response to an understanding that they would not be preserved otherwise. Kulik mentioned, “We had a quite deep conviction that something important would be lost if it was not captured by a camera, tape recorder. . . So, in our case, documentation was a weapon against permanent ‘discontinuity’ in art history.”

KwieKulik’s archiving activities were generally conducted in their small apartment in Warsaw. Kulik has maintained this archive over the last forty years and is in agreement with the Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw, which will acquire it. During our research trip, we were able to have a look in its current location at Kulik’s home in a suburb of Warsaw. The materials are well housed in archival folders and, from a quick glance, contain a broad survey of the international artists and artist-run spaces that were focusing on new types of art production and experiments in publishing and correspondence art in the 1970s and 1980s. I noted a folder for Franklin Furnace, which was founded in 1976 in New York as a performance space and archive, and also a folder for Other Books and So, an Amsterdam bookstore run by the Mexican artist Ulisees Carrión, which distributed artists’ publications.

This phenomenon of artist as archivist has been a recurring theme in C-MAP’s research of artists’ networks in Central and Eastern Europe. Contexts and scenarios for these archives are varied, but we have found there to be an overarching narrative of individuals compelled to collect and preserve documentation of art exhibitions and events. The motivation has often been a direct response to the dearth of opportunities for these materials to be preserved in state institutions. In fact, these archives are housing materials often full of oppositional perspectives that may have been, at the time they were made or collected, difficult or even dangerous to publically disperse.

Hitting the Ground Running: An Illustrated Studio Visit with Zofia Kulik

By David Platzker

Every C-MAP trip is an adventure. Though the intent of the program is to expand our curatorial vision beyond the confines of our collective knowledge base—to give aid to our critical need to expand the scope of “our” modernism by seeing works firsthand within the context of their creation, meeting with artists, critics, historians, and museum professionals we would have limited access to otherwise—occasionally these trips are curious in and of themselves. This trip began with a quaint handwritten boarding pass.

After arriving in Warsaw, we immediately embarked on a trip to visit with Zofia Kulik in her studio and home in the northwestern outskirts of the city. Kulik is best known for her powerful photography-based work and lexicon of intricate uses of human forms and objects composed within stark design frameworks. While reviewing her works and listening to her speak about them—and the highly considered craft in the production of her photographs—it became increasingly apparent that her background in sculpture and performance lent a logical pathway to her meticulously crafted silver gelatin prints. The choreography of her darkroom work, which she shared through her archives, was breathtaking to see.

In the image above, Kulik is presenting, to Christian Rattemeyer, a stenciled template with advent calendar–like windows, which was used to produce a single frame of the multi-panel photographic work. Here Kulik is pointing to where the element was utilized within a small reference image for The Splendor of Myself.

We also saw notebooks of her raw photographs, which she draws upon in an encyclopedic manner, occasionally returning to singular images in differing works over a span of years.

After seeing how Kulik builds her images with great precision and many templates, it came as no surprise that her darkroom procedures are equally well managed, like a well-conceived performance executed with split-second timing.

As a prominent and very active member of the Warsaw artistic scene, Kulik has corresponded with a wide range of Polish and international artists since the 1970. Her incredible, highly organized archives are a testament to these relationships, not only documenting her own participation in exhibitions, publications, and performances but also relaying a connectivity between global artists irrespective of national boundaries.

2 – ŁÓDŻ

Snapshots from a fast-moving train: Łódź

By Jon Hendricks

Like lumps of fresh, unmolded clay, we were hurled with unremitting force at one cultural amazement after another, barely having time to take a deep breath, and realign our brain cells to all that we encountered. Our visit to Łódź was one among many whirlwind days. Some of the group had visited Łódź previously, and we had had the invaluable association with Jarosław Suchan, the director of the city’s Muzeum Sztuki, both on previous trips to Poland and in New York. Suchan is a man of contagious energy and brilliance, eager to share his insights on art and vision for a major art center in the middle of Central Europe. He, Department of Modern Art head Daniel Muzyczuk, Department of Modern Art Collection head Paulina Kurc-Maj, and their colleagues Anna Saciuk-Gąsowska, Maria Morzuch, Katarzyna Sloboda, Maria Franecka, Joanna Sokołowska, Paweł Polit, and Łukasz Zaremba greeted our group, upon our arrival, at the trendy ms1 café, where a delicious lunch had been prepared for us to share, giving us the opportunity and time to meet and be reacquainted. The ms1 café, in one of the renovated spaces in the original building, is a gathering spot for Łódź, serving great food in a contemporary atmosphere that evokes the early 1930s, when the museum first opened in 1931. We were showered with conversation and also presents of museum publications and tote bags.

After lunch, part of our group visited the museum’s archives, located in ms1, with archivist Maciej Cholewiński. I chose instead to revisit the fabulous Neoplastic Room with the other members of our group. We were led through the spaces by Suchan. The installation is so fresh and actual—a treasure chest of Neoplastic art given to Łódź with all of the hopefulness and idealism of the early twentieth century. We also visited Daniel Buren and Edward Krasinski’s installation and Igor Krenz’s 2000 video work Prostowanie skrzywienia (Straightening out the curve), which reference works in the Neoplastic room.

We were also very fortunate to meet the Hungarian artist Tamás Kaszás, who was in the process of installing his major exhibition Exercises in Autonomy (June 3–September 25, 2016). Kaszás is one of the new Futurists exploring the post-collapse and destruction of late twentieth-century Eastern European societies and cultures. After Poland, we went to Berlin, where we encountered a number of artists in the Berlin Biennale who shared these concerns and were also exploring a number of ways across many media to express their post-cataclysmic aesthetics. Kaszás’s work is raw and smart, filled with energy about his ideas and vision.

Following our time at ms1, the two MoMA groups reunited, and we walked the few blocks to ms2 for a flyby visit to the fully modernized and installed main museum building. We got glimpses of masterworks like Krzystofa Wodiczko’s Pojazd (Vehicle, 1971–73). We also saw two striking paintings by Fernand Léger; video work by Douglas Davis; major works by Ewa Partum: Legalność przestrzeni (The Legality of space) installation photographs (1971) in Freedom Square, Łódź; some great photomontages by Teresa Rudowicz (1928–1994); and so much more on four floors—or were there ten floors? We all wished that there was more time. I very much liked ms2’s innovative installation design, which breaks the white-cube paradigm and encourages exploration of areas within the spaces, allowing unexpected sight lines.

Leaving ms2, we rushed to the legendary Wschodnia Gallery, founded in 1984, which has a history of supporting progressive artists not only from Łódź, but also from other parts of Poland and other countries. The space was very sparse, with a Minimalist work, perhaps a reaction to the Muzeum Sztuki’s luxuriant installations and holdings. Two of the gallery’s artists briefly spoke with us, and Adam Klimczak, cofounder of the Wschodnia Gallery, talked at length about the gallery’s history in front of a marvelous thirty year–anniversary photographic chart of events at the gallery. Unfortunately, it was impossible to transport ourselves back in time to experience what must have been very artistic and vital activities in Łódź. Hopefully, we will have opportunities in the future to see the gallery’s substantial archives.

During our trip to Poland, we were constantly reminded of the importance of archives, from our arrival and visit to Zofia Kulik’s home, to the presentation at the Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw, about their extensive archives, to the Muzeum Sztuki’s archives, and finally to the Wschodnia Gallery’s archives, which we heard about but did not see. The idea of archives is holding on, surviving, not letting the fragile moments slip through uncaring fingers—all the more important in transitional times. The established is usually saved, while the ephemeral, the naughty, the provocative, the unpopular is so often lost—discarded, destroyed, and forgotten, or never known. We must be very grateful to Klimczak and others who have made enormous efforts to preserve records of their important work and activities.

The Pleasure of Business

By Erik Patton

Midway through the trip, before heading to Berlin, the group traveled to Łódź, Poland (population 760,000) to visit the Muzeum Sztuki (MS), which opened in 1931 and now has an extensive collection of twentieth- and twenty-first-century art. Other members of the C-MAP Eastern Europe group had visited previously—and having heard about MS’s accomplished collection and robust exhibition schedule, I was very much looking forward to visiting for the first time.

While at MS, I met with my exhibitions counterpart to discuss planning procedures, timelines, budgets, and facilities. We toured MS’s two locations, ms1 and ms2. Located in the Poznański family palace, ms1 is home to the museum’s renowned Neoplastic Room and two floors dedicated to showing modern and contemporary art, and ms2, located in a renovated nineteenth-century weaving plant, consists of six vast levels.

Ms1’s annual visitation is twenty thousand and the building consists of five thousand square feet of gallery space dedicated to the permanent collection and loan exhibitions. The main exhibition on view at ms1 was Neoplastic Room: Open Composition, along with a suite of smaller contemporary loan exhibitions.

Ms2’s annual visitation is sixty thousand and the building consists of forty thousand square feet of gallery space dedicated to the permanent collection and loan exhibitions. The main exhibition on view at ms2 was Atlas of Modernity: The 20th and 21st Century Art Collection, which opened in January 2014, and highlights the MS’s vast permanent collection.

What a treat it was to see Daniel Buren’s homage to Henryk Stazewski; the fabled Neoplastic Room; and my personal favorite, Alina Szapocznikow’s Goldfinger, a sculpture with gold-patinated cement and cart parts.

3 – BERLIN

Before Brexit: A Meeting Between Bridges

By Roxana Marcoci

A couple of weeks before the result of the United Kingdom’s European Union referendum was announced, I visited Wolfgang Tillmans’s non-profit space Between Bridges. This is an exhibition and event space, formerly founded in Bethnal Green, London, now in Keithstrasse, Berlin, which provides a discursive platform for political engagement as much as artistic creativity.

Tillmans was born in West Germany in 1968, shortly after the Berlin Wall was completed, when the country was still divided by the Cold War. He studied in Britain, soon becoming a chronicler of contemporary social movements and the youth generation, shooting pictures for music, fashion, and culture magazines such as i-D and The Face. In 2000, Tillmans became the first non-British artist to be awarded the Turner Prize. Between 2009 and 2014 he was a trustee of the Tate, and in 2014 he became a member of the Royal Academy of Art. His stature in England was amplified by his activist work. Over the past thirty years, his work has been a poignant exploration of what constitutes an image, and how that image functions in different contexts—aesthetic, activist—and proliferates technologically and socially.

In June, on view at Between Bridges, was an installation titled Meeting Place, which focused on Tillmans’s pro-EU anti-Brexit campaign. It featured a series of video projections of public speeches and pacifist collective gatherings, showing episodes in which people stood together in situations of crisis. The video program was compiled by independent curator Marianna Liosi and Between Bridges. A selection of political posters combining expressive images with bold texts conceived by Tillmans urged citizens to register to vote in the EU referendum: “Say you’re in if you’re in.” “No man is an island. No country by itself.” “What is lost is lost forever.” Envisioned, in the artist’s own words, “as an attempt to open a space for dialogue about the current political climate,” the exhibition constructed a context conducive to intellectual exchange in which art experimentation matched a strong commitment to urgent political and civic questions.

A Conversation with Ewa Partum

By Ana Janevski

Before settling in Berlin in 1982, Ewa Partum was very active on the Polish artistic scene with her linguistic actions and installations, poetic objects, films, and performances. The C-MAP group met with the artist in her gallery, M+R Fricke, where we had the opportunity to see some of her films and photographs as well as part of her archive and to talk with her, gallerists Marion Fricke and Roswitha Fricke, Polish feminist scholar Ewa Majewska, Polish art historian Karolina Majewska-Güde, and Partum’s daughter Berenika Partum.

The film Active Poetry. Poem by Ewa (1971), in which the artist scatters the paper letterforms that make up the words in one page of James Joyce’s Ulysses into non-artistic spaces, was being projected in the gallery. The actual letters were also displayed. Fricke told us that the artist continues to perform this piece, scattering other letters in many different spaces and contexts, including museums and biennales. We learned that the inspiration for this work came from socialist propaganda material. This action instigated a discussion about Partum’s performances in public spaces and what they meant in the context of socialist Poland in the 1970s. Majewska pointed out that while many critics state that there was no public art in Eastern Europe in that period, Partum’s performances belie that claim. She cited the artist’s installation Legalność przestrzeni (The Legality of space, 1971) in Freedom Square in Łódź, where the artist installed prohibitory and other regulatory signage, both real and fictional. The artist told us that actually her first public performance was in 1965, when she was still a student at the State Higher School of Fine Arts in Łódź (now Łódź Fine Arts Academy). During her vacation at the seaside in Sopot, she wanted to paint but then instead decided to lie down on pieces of blank canvas, on some of which she outlined her body; to some of the images, she added accessories, like sunglasses and boots, and then she even made an installation with the canvases. We were able to see photos of these actions, which she entitled Presence/Absence (1965). The question of documentation came up, and the artist revealed that the documentary photos were taken by her friend, in the presence of bewildered tourists, with a very simple camera.

Particularly fascinating was hearing about Partum’s gallery Adres, established in 1972 in the Łódź branch of the Association of Polish Artists and Designers. The name of the gallery, which translates as “Address,” is associated with the mail art tradition that developed in Poland in the 1970s as part of the international artistic exchange network. Materials related to Adres activities were exposed in vitrines at M+R Fricke, along with the rest of the artist’s archive. When Partum was forced to leave her gallery space, she moved it to her apartment. There she organized a film festival, whose motto was film as idea, film as film, film as art. Material related to this festival, including the program of the first festival, was also on display. The list of names of the invited filmmakers was pretty impressive: Robert Filliou, Ben Vautier, Maurizio Nannucci, Jozef Róbakowski . . . The artist talked more about her interest in her own series of short films Tautological Cinema, intended as a structural analysis of the medium itself.

We spent lot of time talking about Partum’s photographic cycle Self-identification, in which the artist’s nude body is inserted in the social life of a Polish city in 1980. “My problem is a problem of all women” was another of the artist’s mottos.

Back in the GDR

By Jay A. Levenson

Christoph Tannert, the artistic director of Künstlerhaus Bethanien, delivered a fascinating illustrated lecture on the exhibition he was preparing with Eugen Blume, head of the Hamburger Bahnhof museum, entitled Gegenstimmen: Kunst in der DDR 1976–1989, which has since opened at the Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin. “Gegenstimmen” translates “Voices of Dissent,” but the original German connotes the idea of “counter-voices.” The show picks up from an exhibition that the two curators organized in 1990 in Paris. Remarkably, it took more than twenty-five years to secure a venue for the project in Germany, even though the subject appears to be one that should find a ready audience there.

Tannert explained, very convincingly, that the lack of interest within Germany in researching the art of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) has to do with a national emphasis, encouraged by the federal government, on integrating the two halves of the country, which has led to a tendency to discourage evidence of the stark differences between the two cultures. Underground artists in the east have been undervalued since the reunification of Germany, and critics have often declared the official party artists to be more interesting to study.

In fact, as Tannert explained, there was a significant underground movement in the visual arts, even though in East Germany, it was never as radical as parallel movements in other Eastern-bloc countries. Although the East German artists often did not think of themselves as dissidents, and sometimes did not even see themselves as political, their work documents an intellectual resistance to the authoritarian culture, which deserves to be better known today and is particularly relevant in a period when Russian politics have once again become a divisive issue in Eastern Europe.

Though Tannert’s lecture style was understated, there was an urgency to his remarks that suggested to me his perception of the dangers inherent in attempts to forget the realities of GDR-period repression, especially for the generation that has come of age in Germany after 1990. Hopefully the show and its accompanying catalogue will lead to a reevaluation within the country of this significant period of dissident art.

You can read a illustrated transcription of Tannert’s lecture here.

Retracing the Steps of KwieKulik

By Paulina Pobocha

In the late afternoon on Saturday, June 4, the last day of our C-MAP trip, we visited several galleries on Berlin’s Lindenstrasse, among them Žak | Branicka, where the exhibition KwieKulik: The Monument without a Passport was on view. The show presented a modest but powerful selection of works spanning Przemysław Kwiek and Zofia Kulik’s KwieKulik collaboration, from 1971 to 1987, which focused on the pair’s criticisms of state oppression. Made in Poland during the Communist regime by two avowed socialists whose revolutionary ideas for art and life, paradoxically, proved too extreme for that system, the works on view complicate and challenge basic assumptions about artmaking in Poland during this period. As our colleague at the Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw, Łukasz Ronduda, pointed out, “KwieKulik were a classic example of Žižekian ‘subversion through identification’ . . . trying to realize their ideas in too literal a fashion, [they] were treated particularly harshly by the regime, which did not identify with its own rules.”

The works on view in Berlin were richly complex, mesmerizing, and so very absurd, particularly a series of photographs titled Ameryka. Begun in 1972, these images show a young, smiling couple in a variety of pleasant though largely unremarkable situations—strolling through a park on a winter’s day; at a party toasting to the camera; standing in front of a lush, wooded expanse, etc. Named after the eponymously titled Polish-language magazine published by the United States Information Agency and distributed in Poland by the US Embassy, KwieKulik’s Ameryka is a rejoinder to the idealized images contained within the pages of the original publication. As the photographs attest, people in Poland experienced the same freedoms as those in the West—or at the very least and, in fact, a similar ability to stage reality. The act of representation, no matter how benign, is inherently deceptive, Ameryka tells us, and rarely is it benign. This is underscored by KwieKulik’s own history. Although the Ameryka photographs include images of the couple in front of the Cologne Cathedral in Germany (1983) and in Banff, Canada (1985), the artists’ movements had indeed been curtailed. In 1978 they did not receive passports and could not leave Poland to exhibit their work abroad as a result of the government’s having deemed an earlier project of a “low ethical, ideological, and artistic value.” The decision was appealed during the following year. In 2016, when many political conversations across Europe and United States are centered on issues of movement and migration, opening borders or erecting walls, and aggressively identifying an “other,” these photographs prove to be surprisingly prescient and unwittingly urgent—reminding us of the ease with which reality can be bent out of shape.

4 – AND MORE

Lecture at Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius

By David Senior

As part of my C-MAP trip in June, I traveled to Lithuania at the invitation of the Contemporary Art Centre (CAC) in Vilnius. The CAC has, since 2009, created a public space called the CAC Reading Room. This space houses a library of books and magazines on Lithuania and international contemporary art. Their mission has been to create a working collection of international publications that the local population might not otherwise have the chance to encounter and consult. The reading room staff regularly adds new titles, particularly in the subject areas of cultural theory and philosophy, and also maintains a growing collection of artists’ books and other experimental publications. MoMA Library had sent a donation of experimental journals and magazines (duplicates from our Millennium Magazines exhibition in 2011) after my last visit to Vilnius, in 2010, and a small section of the room is devoted to that donation. The Reading Room also functions as a public work space for local academics, artists, and writers. When I was there, the room was populated by several “readers,” working at tables with books from the collection or just from their laptops. The Reading Room also hosts readings, lectures, and book launches as part of their public program. I was there in the context of this public programming and gave a lecture one evening on the history of artists’ publications. It’s a lively space, with a small cafe adjacent to it that serves a meeting place for the local community of artists, designers, and curators.

During my stay, I visited the Lithuanian Art Museum to revisit a set of photomontages by Mindaugas Navakas, which is installed in the Vilnius National Gallery of Art’s (NGA) permanent display. These works are part of a series of proposals for public sculptures. In each print, examples of Navakas’s sculptural objects are superimposed onto images of iconic buildings and cityscapes in Vilnius. The original prints were shown in an exhibition at the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic Architects’ Union in 1986, but the show was only open for one hour before it was shut down. The artist subsequently self-published a book of the images in 1988 with the title Vilnius Notebooks. Navakas published a second volume in this series in 1995 with the title Vilnius Notebook 2, and he gifted a copy to MoMA when we visited him in 2010.

In a recent exhibition catalogue, published in conjunction with a large retrospective of his work at the Lithuanian Art Museum, these socially provocative gestures intended for the urban sphere, are compared to Claes Oldenburg’s proposals for public monuments (which the artist created in the mid- to late 1960s and that were published in his book Proposals for Monuments and Building 1965–1969 in 1969), which also function as a kind of send-up of the monumental in public space. It seems that further connections could be made to other artists in Central and Eastern Europe who, around the same time, were manipulating the socialist urban landscape by co-opting the idea of the monumental in official state architecture. I think of Tadeusz Kantor’s proposal for a giant-chair sculpture, which was presented at the important Wrocław ’70 Symposium. The organizers of this event had promised that the proposals would be realized, but Kantor’s idea was deemed too much of a provocation to the Polish state program of constructing socialist monuments. Another similar example of socialist fantastic architecture is Julius Koller’s Ping-Pong Monument, in which a photograph of a hand holding a Ping-Pong paddle upright is collaged onto an image of a Czech urban landscape. In revisiting Navakas’s compositions at the NGA, I thought again about the connections between his works and those of Kantor and Koller, and I imagined a show made from these and other examples of fantastic architecture in Central and Eastern Europe under socialism. (If someone has already made one, I don’t know about it!)

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Reports by trip participants

Tagore in Bangalore

By Sarah Suzuki

Sprawling and choked with traffic, though lushly verdant, Bengaluru (formerly Bangalore) is likely best known as an international IT hub. So perhaps it is a bit surprising to discover that the city is also a rising artistic center. It is home to Suresh Jayaram’s No. 1 Shanthi Road, a multifunctional art space and residency program that just marked its tenth anniversary. Not far away, Sunitha Kumar Emmart oversees the eponymous Gallery SKE, one of India’s most innovative contemporary art galleries, which is housed in a fairy-tale cottage with gingerbread trim. And in 2000, Bengaluru was selected as the site for the third location of the National Gallery of Modern Art, joining branches in Delhi and Mumbai. In 2009 the former Manickyavelu Mansion, a colonial-style manor built in the 1930s and sited on several green acres, opened following a renovation of the existing building, and an addition to house supplementary gallery space and an art reference library. In the airy, domestic-scale spaces of the historical building, I found a surprisingly rich display of works by three members of the esteemed Tagore family: Rabindranath (1861–1941), and his nephews Gaganendranath (1867–1938) and Abanindranath (1971–1951). Each of these artists made a distinct and exceptional contribution to India’s modernist tradition, but it is quite rare to find examples of their work to study in person.

A brilliantly talented polymath who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913, the poet Rabindranath was credited with reviving Bengali literature and music, and charted a new pedagogical course for artists at Kala Bhavana in Santiniketan, where students were encouraged to loosen the tight reins of studio academicism in favor of observation and a life integrated with nature. His own work tended toward studies of vaguely mysterious figures. Abanindranath was a founder of the Indian Society of Oriental Art, and sought to incorporate traditional Eastern methods, materials, and ideals into contemporary practice. In creating what would come to be known as the Bengal School, Abanindranath sought to rediscover nationalist themes and subjects that predated the colonial period. His brother Gaganendranath was interested in a similar kind of synthesis, but he pushed his formal experiments toward a Cubist syntax, with fractured facets and partial planes, in a visual style that was uniquely his own. The Tagore name echoes throughout any study of India’s recent history of art, and in Bengaluru, one can discover the many moods and moments of its artists’ oeuvres.

North_West_South_East

By Rattanamol Singh Johal

In my new role as MoMA’s C-MAP fellow for Asia, which I assumed in January 2016, my first assignment was to plan the annual group trip to India and Bangladesh—with only a couple of weeks to organize travel for a group of seven people from six museum departments (Media and Performance Art, Architecture and Design, Drawings and Prints, Painting and Sculpture, Library and Archives, International Program). The nearly two-week itinerary was to include visits to artist studios, museums, galleries, the India Art Fair, and the Dhaka Art Summit. Though I am tempted to offer a blow-by-blow account, I trust that the collective publication of the group’s individual reports on post will achieve that end. This, then, is a collection of short snippets—highlights, if you will—from each city.

New Delhi, India’s capital, is also arguably the country’s busiest hub of art-world activity. The city’s network of institutions range from the imposing state-run museums and academies to prominent galleries dealing in modern and contemporary art, small nonprofit spaces, and a range of cultural activities supported by foreign embassies and foundations. In the midst of this, there is also a private museum founded by Kiran Nadar, which is housed in a largely unoccupied (in terms of commercial establishments) shopping mall. It is here that Dayanita Singh had set up her Museum Bhavan, or “Bureau of Museums” (bhavan loosely translates as ‘building,’ but often connotes an institutional site for the activities of state bureaucracy). The artist’s intervention took place through a series of specially designed wooden structures—boxes, columns, screens—that housed selections of black-and-white images from her vast photographic archive. These “mini-museums,” which she constantly arranged and rearranged as she conversed with invited interlocutors, appeared thematically organized along a logic largely governed by subject-matter associations—for example, the “museum of little ladies,” the “museum of chairs,” etc. Over the course of the afternoon we were there, the “museum of erotics” slowly emerged as the result of a dialogue between Singh and Shanay Jhaveri, observed by a small group composed primarily of art-world insiders.

Our next destination was Goa, known for its extensive coastline dotted with beautiful beaches and its lush hinterland scattered with sleepy villages. The current state of India’s metropolitan areas, riddled with issues of uncontainable population growth, pollution, astronomical living costs, and insufficient infrastructure, has pushed many artists, across different generations, to relocate either full-time or for part of the year to Goa. Indeed, one wonders how long Goa can sustain this inflow, given its already bustling tourist economy, but for now it offers a lifestyle that is scarcely available elsewhere in India. Nikhil Chopra, whose career I have been following for nearly a decade, chose to relocate here from Bombay with his family. This shift has transformed his practice significantly, adding to it something of the roles of a mentor, pedagogue, catalyst, and institution builder (though he would probably never label himself as such!). Chopra, along with Madhavi Gore and Romain Loustau, transformed a Portuguese-era hotel into the Heritage Hotel: Art Spaces, a residency-cum-exhibition space for young and emerging artists working in performance. This is an important initiative for a number of reasons, not least of which are the region’s sparse landscape for performance-art pedagogy and residencies as well as the unusual event (at least in India) of an established, mid-career contemporary artist’s devoting substantial time, attention, and resources to nurturing a younger generation.

Bangalore, a city that has grown exponentially over the past two decades owing to a booming information technology industry, is also home to an alternative art scene with strong leanings toward experimental film, media, sound, and photography. Our relatively brief visit here introduced us to number of unfolding trajectories, beyond the practices of well-established artists such as Sheela Gowda and Pushpamala N., emphasizing the need to return when we have more time on our hands. I found it particularly useful to understand the sustaining influence of Srishti—a private institute of art, design, and technology—which was set up in 1996. A number of artists experimenting across media, including Ayisha Abraham, Shai Heredia, and Abhishek Hazra, currently teach at this relatively young institution. Here, again, it seems that a platform for interaction among different generations of practitioners has been incredibly generative.

The final stop on our trip had us flying east to Bangladesh whose capital city was once again playing host to the biannual Dhaka Art Summit. This platform promised to bring together art and artists from across the subcontinent and farther afield, presenting a very ambitious series of exhibitions (six at my last count), panel discussions, a writing workshop, and a film program on the premises of the Shilpakala Academy (the state academy of fine art). The consolidation of all the summit’s activities across one venue allowed visitors to easily engage with most of the programming offered. One exhibition that stands out in my mind, titled Rewind, was curated jointly by Sabih Ahmad (Asia Art Archive), Amara Antilla (Guggenheim Museum), and Beth Citron (Rubin Museum) with Diana Campbell Betancourt (the Summit’s artistic director). The small show presented a gathering of little-known late-modernist works from across the region, revealing diverse engagements and interests in textiles and tapestries (Rashid Choudhury, Monika Correa), painting (Zahoor ul Akhlaq), printmaking (Krishna Reddy, Safiuddin Ahmed, Anwar Jalal Shemza), photography (Lionel Wendt), and projected image (Nalini Malani, Akbar Padamsee). A research publication or catalogue would have greatly enhanced the understanding and reception of the exhibition’s historical implications (and, undoubtedly, also bolstered the marketability of the works/artists included). As a broader observation, it seems that almost every exhibition at the Summit contained the kernel of an extended presentation in a museum-like setting accompanied by a publication and programming. In its current format, with a limited three-day run (we are told the next one will go ten days) and the need to move works and people across tense international borders, this is understandably both logistically and financially difficult. That said, the research outcomes, speculations, and possibilities for further exploration laid out by each of the exhibitions are rich and compelling.

Art-Driven Adaptive Reuse in Several Indian Cities

By Jennifer Tobias

During recent C-MAP visits to Mumbai, Delhi, Goa, Bangalore, and Kochi, I noticed how artists and gallerists are adapting neglected and abandoned structures for use as studio, exhibition, and performance spaces. This caused me to wonder about preservation policies in India, and artists’ unofficial role in relationship to them.

I learned that various public and private institutions address preservation, but also that there’s no national mandate for buildings less than one hundred years old. At the city level, initiatives vary. As a result, preservation and adaptive reuse are often the results of enlightened self-interest as much as organized planning. And that’s where the art community comes in. Several examples encountered during 2015 and 2016 C-MAP visits to India are discussed below.

Along Mumbai’s Marine Drive I noticed beautiful Art Deco buildings in various states of repair (Mumbai is said to be second only to Miami, Florida, in its number of Art Deco buildings).¹ Regarding their preservation, it seems that in Mumbai, as in many cities, public initiatives and private developments form what is a patchy safety net. At the international level, the district was proposed for UNESCO World Heritage site status in 2013 (Delhi’s Old City was chosen instead),²while on the local level, artist groups are starting to incorporate Deco preservation into their missions.³

New Delhi has its own architectural identity, and adaptive reuse patterns reflect it. Yet like Mumbai, economic growth and a swelling urban population are driving much of the demolition and rebuilding, often destroying significant modern architecture in the process. A case in point is the planned demolition of the Hall of Nations and Nehru Pavilion by Raj Rewal and Mahendra Raj at Pragati Maidan (1972). Recent efforts to save these endangered icons of Indian modernism demonstrate complex social and legal forces at work.⁴ As a representative from the Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage (INTACH) put it: “More than the fact that there is difficulty in wrapping one’s head around the idea of modern architectural heritage, it is the bureaucratic apathy that is causing trouble.”⁵

The C-MAP group also visited Bangalore, a thriving, tech-driven city. One writer claims that the city has more alternative spaces than traditional galleries, positing that “in the absence of government infrastructure or commercial enterprise, artists and art students have taken on the responsibility of leading Bangalore’s art scene.”⁶The group visited an exuberant example: 1Shanthiroad, a collective founded by artist and historian Suresh Jayaram and designed by architect Meeta Jain.

In Goa, the group visited the Heritage Hotel: Art Spaces, a one-hundred-year-old Portuguese-style villa turned hotel turned artist residency space founded by artists Romain Loustau, Madhavi Gore, and Nikhil Chopra. Artists from all over the world come here to share seven studios, several bedrooms—and a cat. Pleasant shared spaces have been adapted to facilitate interaction among residents but also with the community beyond, which is invited to visit during the program’s regular open studio days.

Of all the sites visited, the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, an ongoing project to integrate architecture of the past into the city’s present and future, is the most expansive example of artist-driven adaptive reuse. Kochi is a historical port town on India’s tropical southwest coast. Long a center for international trade (especially of spices), the built environment strongly reflects the city’s heritage, especially in its Portuguese, Dutch, and British colonial architecture. The biennale is sited within historic venues in or near the Fort Kochi heritage area, from the maritime warehouses known as “godowns” to public parks to former military barracks to empty houses. To visit is to feel thoroughly oriented in place and time, and to experience art in ways that strongly resonate with it.

Aspinwall House, built in the 1860s as a waterfront warehouse and now serving as the biennale’s anchor space, makes this immediately apparent. In this context, Sheela Gowda and Christoph Storz’s installation Stopover (2012) is especially resonant. The pair collected and installed more than one hundred wet-grinding stones in a central, symmetrical room that opens onto a small pier. Such stones were once used domestically to grind spices and other ingredients for cooking. Usually embedded in the floor, they were standard fixtures in Indian homes built well into the early twentieth century, but are now being abandoned.

As an installation the stones represent once unmovable objects set in motion by irresistible global forces. One is left to guess at the next site for the stones, the fate of the building, and the future of the biennale as a global force. In this way Stopover and Aspinwall House vividly manifest the spirit of art-driven adaptive reuse that is bringing new life to historic but marginalized structures in Indian cities.

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Following in the footsteps of MoMA’s founding director, 10 members of C-MAP’s Central and Eastern European group spent five memorable days in Moscow in June 2015. The trip complemented the group’s growing interest in Russian art over the past year. While in Moscow, we visited 13 institutions—museums, private foundations, and commercial galleries—and had meetings with dozens of individuals, including artists, writers, collectors, archivists, educators, curators, and museum professionals, who narrated a deep and rich history of modern and contemporary Russian art, with particular emphasis on artistic movements since 1960. Highlights included attending the inaugural opening of the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, designed by Rem Koolhaas; meeting with Zelfira Tregulova, the director of the State Tretyakov Gallery; visiting the studio of artist and unofficial-art magazine editor Igor Shelkovsky; and touring the late 1920s house of avant-garde architect Konstantin Melnikov. Five days were barely enough time. Between meetings and tours, the group took in breathtaking sunsets over the Moscow River, ate delicious traditional Russian meals of pelmeni (meat-filled dumplings) and borscht, and walked the city’s streets, marveling at the eclectic mixture of Neo-classical, Constructivist, and Brutalist architecture. While getting stuck in traffic on the overcrowded boulevards and bridges is an integral part of the Moscow experience, we did not miss the chance to explore the elaborately designed, extremely clean and efficient Moscow Metro. The group returned to New York with about 50 books to add to MoMA’s library and with recordings of interviews that we conducted with artists in Moscow. They will be published soon, here on post.

Barr visited Moscow at a pivotal time in the history of the city and the Soviet Union—just 10 years after the Russian Revolution and only a few years before Socialist Realism was decreed as the official style of Soviet art and literature. The C-MAP Central and Eastern European group has increased its research and programming of Russian art at an equally critical time. Russia today is at the center of several international conflicts, and the effects of this involvement can be felt in art and culture in Moscow. Maintaining C-MAP’s commitment to understanding the historical imperatives and changing conditions of an increasingly global art world, the group will continue its studies of Russian art.

Ksenia Nouril

0. PROLOGUE

Views of Moscow

Moscow Musings

By Jon Hendricks

Many years ago, I bought an artwork in Denmark by Stanley Brouwn. It is titled Path and was “a project for USSR.” It is 600 x 70 centimeters, graphite on acidic paper that is now crumbling and tearing in spots. Brouwn drew two parallel lines that extend for a while from the left of the sheet, then jut up a bit, and finally continue onto the right toward the end of the paper. What a stunning work for the world’s largest nation! A six- meter “path.” There is no location indicated for this path and no indication of what the path is to be made of, but I sure would like to walk on this “path” in either direction—left to right or right to left; north to south or east to west.

For a number of years our C-MAP group at MoMA has been studying and traveling to Central and Eastern Europe, but somehow avoiding Russia. RUSSIA! The land of Constructivism, Agit Prop, Stravinsky, Gogol, Pavlova, Nijinsky, Goncharova, Popova, Rozanova, Stepanova, Udaltsova, Larionov, Malevich, Tatlin, Kandinsky, Puni, Berliok, Mayakovsky, Rodchenko, Gabo, El Lissitzky, Suetin—the land of ideas and innovation, hopefulness, and vision.

We are studying the post-war avant-garde. Each country has its own vocabulary, its own needs for a new art that is defined by that culture and its peoples. We can’t be judges—only observers. If we can be open and not prejudge or artificially compare, we have a chance of seeing and learning. As La Monte Young told me in a different context: “Listen and observe. ”It’s hard to do. We find what we are looking for, but we have trouble uncovering what’s in front of us.

So we went to Moscow for five days, more or less, and took a fleeting stroll, about the length of Stanley Brouwn’s Path, in Russia. We saw old and very old art, and new art. We met extraordinary artists, thinkers, curators, art historians, and museum directors. Let me say, Moscow is an extremely beautiful city that cares greatly for its past, for its architectural history, but it is also a city moving into its future. I was very impressed by its care for memory, perhaps obscuring some, but presenting it all the same.

We went looking for insight into parallels to our own avant-garde of the 1960s and ‘70s, and to those of other Central and Eastern European countries that we had been studying, discovering what we, as an institution, had missed and overlooked. Could we find enlightenment in five days? Could we see or at least sense what was not on our itinerary? We met some great artists, but then had to move on, hardly having time to catch our breath or for the artists to express their ideas. We spoke English and hardly gave a second thought to the fact that almost all those we met spoke English back to us. We asked to see what we wanted to see but were hardly open to what might appear by chance or accident.

To be continued . . . .

Jon Hendricks
New York City, August 27, 2015

1. CENTER OF MOSCOW

Meeting with artist Igor Shelkovsky

By Magdalena Moskalewicz

It took us a while to find the way to the studio of Igor Shelkovsky among the entrances to local stores on Gogolevsky Boulevard, across the street from the Cathedral of Christ the Savior. After we finally found the right door and made our way to the 4th floor, we were welcomed into a large, bright space by a tall, strong man with white hair, intensely blue eyes, and an elegant demeanor. The studio was filled with Shelkovsky’s work: small-scale geometric wooden sculptures, mostly white, were resting on numerous tables, on shelves, and directly on the floor. The walls were crowded with other wooden structures, this time flatter and black, and abstract paintings of various shapes, each filed with stripes of white, green, red and blue—the artist’s proposition for a new Russian flag, as we learned later. Among this abundance of art objects, on the table closest to the entrance, lay a pile of papers: documents, bound photocopies, and original publications with the familiar Cyrillic letters “a-Я” immediately recognizable on their covers.

These were the eight issues of the art magazine A-YA that Shelkovsky published in Paris from 1979 to 1986, the primary reason for our visit. At a time of limited information exchange between East and West, every issue of this periodical—published in 3000 copies in Russian and English, with an insert of French-language summaries—provided a unique source of knowledge about the Russian contemporary art scene. It was A-YA that first acquainted Western audiences with the work of artists such as Ilya Kabakov or Eric Bulatov, and the critic Boris Groys.

Without much prompting, Shelkovsky began telling us how the magazine was produced. The contents of A-YA were based on materials smuggled out of the Soviet Union by various trusted travellers to the West. An underground editorial office was active in Moscow, in the person of Alexander Sidorov, who conducted the initial selection and made sure the texts and images reached Shelkovsky in Paris. (Sidorov appeared in the magazine under the pseudonym Alex Alexejev, to avoid prosecution.) A-YA cost 10 francs in France, where it was circulated via subscription, while another collaborator and compatriot, Alexander Kosolapov, distributed it in New York. Most importantly, however, Shelkovsky presented it for free to anyone traveling to the USSR, where A-YA was extremely popular in the art circles. While the culture of literary samizdats was flourishing in Moscow at the time, art-focused magazines were virtually non-existent when Shelkovsky was leaving for France in 1976. A-YA filled that void. That’s what’s incredible about the magazine: It wasn’t simply a publication about Soviet contemporary art made for the Western audience. The first of the set of goals stated in the first issue’s editorial was, in fact: “To acquaint Russian artists —in and outside Russia—with each others’ work.” The authors and the primary readers of A-YA were largely the same Russian crowd, but their own periodical could only reach them after a huge detour, via France.

Our host told us that the KGB made sure to inform all the known Moscow-based contributors that they were engaging in a dangerous, capitalist enterprise funded by the CIA. (In fact, Shelkovsky had to fundraise and sell other artist’s works to fund the periodical, after the initial funding, from a private collector, fell though just after the first issue.) But Igor Shelkovsky lost his Soviet passport only after he released the special literature issue, published only in Russian, which came out after A-YA #6 (without a number of its own). Socialist states of the former Eastern Europe are known for having imposed much stronger censorship on the written word than they did on visual arts, and this case was no exception. “The government wasn’t that interested in images or music,” Shelkovsky explained. “It wanted to control the thoughts of the people.”

The last issue of A-YA was published in 1986, and Shelkovsky got his passport back during Perestroika. When years later he released an almanac of the magazine—all 8 issues bound together—the 1,000 copies sold out immediately. Today, Shelkovsky credits A-YA with raising art consciousness in the Soviet Union in the 1970s and 1980s. “You have to understand,” Shelkovsky explained to us, “my generation of artists did not know anything about Russian art. We did not know anything about Western art. We started from nothing.”

Visit to the Konstantin Melnikov House

By Juliet Kinchin

During a previous visit to Moscow, I peered through a fence and overgrowth at this avant-garde masterpiece, which, like so many other Constructivist buildings of the late 1920s, was obviously in a sad state of disrepair. Today, the stucco exterior is still cracked and patched, and wrangles over the Melnikov estate and archive are evidently still ongoing, but there has been a turn for the better since the city took over the day-to-day care of this precious architectural structure. Ambitious plans to preserve, research, and publicize the property are under way. And what a joy finally to get inside! Expertly guided by the director, Pavel Kuznetsov, and architectural custodian Elizabeta Lihacheva, who since childhood has been familiar with the house and the Melnikov family, we were given privileged access to all its nooks and crannies.

This extraordinary manifesto of modern living, like the contemporaneous Rietveld-Schröder House in Utrecht, is modest in scale and located on an otherwise unprepossessing street. The environs have changed since Melnikov’s day. The neighboring church on which Melnikov deliberately trained a view from his interior is now long gone, and with it the visual echo of the Melnikov’s interlocking cylindrical volumes with those of a traditional ecclesiastical structure. From the roof terrace it is hard to imagine away the overbearing presence of a pumped-up block of luxury apartments next door. But Melnikov’s radical exercise in economic construction—using as few bricks as possible and piercing the exterior with strange hexagonal windows—still holds its own. The peppering of windows combined with the dramatic glazing of the double-height studio above the entrance really opens up the internal spaces. At the same time, one can see why El Lissitzky had a problem with this somewhat Art Deco spin on Constructivism—perhaps feeling that Melnikov had been overexposed to decadent forms of modernism at the 1925 Paris Exposition Internationales des Arts Decoratifs et Industriels Modernes while erecting the USSR pavilion there. Inside, the curved exterior walls create oddly shaped spaces, but one can sense the underlying grasp of an engineer’s or craftsman’s intuitive understanding of the technical and load-bearing aspects of the design and features, like the hand-built Constructivist stove. It was fascinating to see a couple of the windows opened up.

The house was one of the few homes that remained private in Soviet times. It was preserved by Melnikov’s son, Viktor, also an artist, who died in 2006. Even knowing this, I was unprepared for the extent to which the contents have survived, all now bearing inventory tags: solid bourgeois furniture (including a kitchen cabinet given as a wedding present by Melnikov’s in-laws); a mauve Art Nouveau carpet that set the color scheme of the double-height studio; the white wool dress coat Mrs Melnikov acquired in Paris and two of Melnikov’s beautifully preserved hats; a clunky, rusting film projector in the basement, so redolent of the avant-garde fascination with film; a bust of Homer above the telephone in the stairwell. Thankfully, such artworks and furnishings from two generations have not been purged in a futile attempt to recreate an aura of “authentic” purity. In line with revisionist views of modernism, the curators are keen to emphasize the combination of avant-garde and traditional elements at work; they do not hesitate to describe the Melnikovs as coming from god-fearing, bourgeois-peasant stock. The term “iconic” seems doubly relevant in view of the house’s spiritual aura—the glowing yellow walls of the bedroom, apparently once gilded, give one the impression of walking right into an icon painting or Russian Orthodox interior. At the same time, the yellow and blue triangles on the ceilings of the boy’s and girl’s rooms reminded me of Vilmos Huszaàr’s designs for children’s rooms and the strong links between De Stijl and Russian Constructivism. Documents and vintage photographs from a recently discovered trove in the house are integrated in the displays throughout. It was exciting to see the house at a time of such rich new discoveries.

Visit to Galerie Iragui

Artist Nikita Alekseev at Galerie Iragui

Meeting with artist Yuri Albert at Stella Art Foundation

By Sara Bodinson

On the third day of our Moscow visit, the group ventured to the Stella Art Foundation, which was established to promote cultural exchange, support Russian art and young artists, and establish a contemporary art museum. There we met Yuri Albert, an artist from the second generation of the Moscow Conceptual School, to see an exhibition of his work. Aptly titled I Need To Tell You So Much with My Art, the exhibition featured several works that, in Albert’s words, continue his investigation of several related questions: What is the content of abstract painting—or any works of art, for that matter? What does an artist mean or what is he or she able to tell through abstraction? What do viewers see in it?” In the main gallery hung several large white canvases with prompts written at the bottom stating, in Russian and English, “After viewing this picture, please sign and date it.” Already quite full of signatures—including a slash that one woman insisted represented her signature—the canvases playfully and critically evolved into a collectively authored work.

Another gallery featured a work comprised of more than a dozen small, black paintings that at first glance appeared abstract. Upon closer inspection (and in just the right light), sighted visitors could see that the canvases were printed with braille. Albert said the texts were excerpts from Vincent van Gogh’s letters describing his paintings to his brother, but that only blind visitors would be able to know this. He said that he develops many of his works with an ideal audience in mind. However, he noted that in this and many of his other works, any audience is missing some aspect of the work and its meaning: sighted visitors cannot read the braille descriptions, but visitors who are blind cannot see Van Gogh’s original paintings.

After leading us through the exhibition, Albert presented an overview of his work beginning in the 1970s, including one work in which he advertised his availability to perform chores or other small domestic jobs for people he knew. Participants filled out a work request and then, using photography, documented him executing the task.

Tour of the Moscow Museum of Modern Art (MMOMA)

By Magdalena Moskalewicz

The library of the Moscow Art Museum is a researcher’s dream and is newly accessible to the public. It is housed in an all-white, perfectly orderly room filled with tall bookshelves that glow with the colorful covers of the volumes they hold. Our visit to the library completed our tour of MMOMA, which started with the exhibition Fortune Museum, a show celebrating the museum’s 15th anniversary and featuring works from the collection. Initially conceived to focus on art from Western Europe and the U.S., MMOMA now includes contemporary art from Russia in its programming and acquisitions, a policy change that was reflected in the exhibition. In Fortune Museum we saw works by Igor Shelkovsky, Irina Korina, Vadim Zakharov, and Haim Sokol, who were among the artists we met in Moscow. Other artists, such as Boris Orlov, Igor Mukhin, and Olga Chernysheva, were familiar to us from their works in MoMA’s collection. The exhibition was introduced by poetic phrases hidden in fortune cookies given out at the entrance, but we were doubly fortunate to have as our guides the show’s curator, MMOMA director Vasili Tsereteli, and his team. We toured the galleries and impressive open storage spaces, learning about the museum’s history and mission from Tsereteli, grandson of the museum’s founding director, artist Zurab Tsereteli. We enjoyed lunch with our hosts in MMOMA’s café, where monumental bronze reliefs depicting erotic mythological scenes are framed by colorful modernist mosaics designed for the museum by Zurab Tsereteli, who is currently president of the Russian Academy of Arts.

Visit to the Ostengruppe Studio

By Juliet Kinchin

Meeting with artists Dmitri Gutov and Haim Sokol and scholar Ekaterina Degot

Tour of the Multimedia Art Museum Moscow (MAMM)

By Sara Bodinson

One morning the group visited the Multimedia Art Museum Moscow (MAMM), a state museum founded in 2010 to introduce Russian audiences to both contemporary art and multimedia technologies. We saw a diverse array of exhibitions, including the first Robert Capa retrospective in Russia as well as exhibitions of war photography, fashion photography, and solo exhibitions of work by Herb Ritts and Joseph Kosuth. We were guided by Anna Zaytseva, chief curator and deputy director of MAMM, who, prior to her tenure at the museum, worked with Joseph Backstein on the first few iterations of the Moscow Biennial. She highlighted her work with contemporary artists to activate the museum’s atrium, which cuts through several floors of galleries, where recently Rebecca Horn had developed an installation visible from all floors.

We then retreated to the office of MAMM director Olga Sviblova to look at some of the museum’s rich holdings from the museum’s collection of photographs, including a number of vintage prints by Alexandr Rodchenko and Max Penson.

Meeting with artist Taus Makhacheva and curator Joseph Backstein

2. GORKY PARK AND AROUND

Scenes from the Garage Museum Opening

Archives exhibition at the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art

By Michelle Elligott

The Sixties: Points of Intersection, a project by Garage Teens Team

By Sara Bodinson

One of the highlights of the inaugural exhibition program at Garage Museum of Contemporary Art’s new building was The Sixties: Points of Intersection. This beautifully designed and engaging exhibition was the result of two years of research conducted by the Garage Teens Team. This group, comprised of high school seniors and first year university students interested in contemporary art, attends lectures, visits exhibitions, writes, and hosts tours. For this project, they focused their research on the study of five characters from the period of the Khruschchev Thaw: Nonconformist, Student, Worker, Woman, Scientist, Architect. Of these characters, the teens wrote, “We were guided by two ideas: first, this selection really conveys the spirit of the era; and second, the era itself chose them as its heroes.”

In collaboration with the Multimedia Art Museum of Moscow, the teens produced a video that posed questions about their own relationship to the 1960s through the lens of these characters. Their insights were informed by interviews they conducted with people who had experienced the 1960s and by researching these characters through music, literature, and films from the decade. Each character had its own display of related resources and ephemera, smartly designed to match each persona. Throughout the run of the exhibition, representatives from the Garage Teens Team led tours of the exhibition in Russian and English.

Scenes from theTeens Team’s exhibition at the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art

Meeting with artist Olga Chernysehva

By Ksenia Nouril

While in Moscow, we met with the artist Olga Chernysheva and were able to ask her questions about her film The Train (2003), which is part of MoMA’s collection. Reflecting on why she made the film, Chernysheva said, “I really wanted to see the train as a technical material, as a machine . . . like an organism . . . a living being.” Over several months, she shot hours of footage, walking through train cars with a hand-held camera. What she told us that was most surprising is that the film was almost never made. “I had all of this material, but I didn’t know what to do with it,” she said. Then on one of her journeys, she crossed paths with the rhapsodist (bard) who features prominently in this seven-minute film. He appears almost out of nowhere—down on his luck, traveling the rails reciting poetry for spare change. Chernysheva was fascinated by this man, who, she claimed, “saved” her film. She was impressed by how he humbly bridged high art and everyday life through his recitation of an early and little-known poem by the Russian writer Alexander Pushkin on a crowded commuter train. Capturing this moment was very important to Chernysheva because “The Train is not about traveling, but about being. For me traveling is about moving from point A to point B, but the film is about looking around at where you are. Even after the train leaves the picture, we remain.”

Tour of Fallen Monuments Park in Gorky Park

Meeting with artist Andrei Monastyrski

Tour of the Tretyakov Gallery on Krymsky Val

By Magdalena Moskalewicz

At the Tretyakov Gallery on Krymsky Val, or the New State Tretyakov Gallery, which is the part of the larger State Tretyakov Gallery dedicated to art of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, we met with director Zelfira Tregulova and curator Kirill Svetlyakov. Upon entering the permanent collection, we were stunned by the colors in the paintings of the early 20th-century Russian neoprimitivists. Yes, we had all seen works by Mikhail Larionov and Natalia Goncharova in books and slides, and some of us had actually encountered one or two of their paintings in museums, but the richness of color that hit us in the first two rooms of the New Tretyakov left us breathless. We were lucky to have Svetlyakov as our guide, as he introduced each work and told us about the early reception of this group of painters, known collectively as the Jack of Diamonds and later as the Moscow Cezannists. Surprisingly, four rooms farther on, even the celebrated Black Square, by the group’s most prominent member, Kazimir Malevich, seemed to be full of color: red and green tones lurked behind the fading black surface, which was covered with a web of craquelure.

In the room where Malevich’s later, figurative work was shown, Svetlyakov explained that after 1932, the museum’s avant-garde holdings were hidden away in storage. Within just a few years, Socialist Realism had replaced avant-garde painting and sculpture both in artists’ studios and in Soviet exhibition halls. This dramatic, imposed shift in artistic orientation was apparent in the exhibition’s narrative. Stepping from one room into the next—from the intimate scale and intellectual focus of Constructivist pieces to the inflated glory of pretentious but technically ingenious canvases of the Socialist Realists—felt like landing on a different planet.

Meeting with artists Igor Makarevich and Elena Elagina

By Ksenia Nouril

Artists Igor Makarevich and Elena Elagina, key figures of the Moscow Conceptual School, joined us at the New State Tretyakov Gallery. They guided us through their special project Analysis of Art, which was installed in the galleries dedicated to Socialist Realism. This placement within the history of official Soviet art was strategic, although we found it very ironic, since the artists are well known for their work in unofficial art circles of the 1970s and ’80s. In the first room of their exhibition, we saw works from their series Mushrooms of the Russian Avant-Garde. Combining mysticism and modernism, this series remixes many recognizable works, such as Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International (1919–1920) and Malevich’s Black Square (1915), which we had just seen on our tour of the New Tretyakov. The installation also made direct reference to the centenary of the Black Square. In the second room of their exhibition, Makarevich and Elagina interspersed several vitrines featuring materials and apparatuses of other artists and other craftsmen. Particularly clever are their conceptual plays on words. For example, the stenciled Russian letters УНОК appear in a floating frame filled with rice, or “рис” in Russian. While “УНОК” is a nonsense word—perhaps referencing the famous Russian avant-garde school UNOVIS—the two words together make up the word “рисунок,” or “drawing.” By means of this subtle engagement with language, Makarevich and Elagina introduce a self-reflexive meditation on the life and work of artists.

Scenes from Igor Makarevich and Elena Elagina’s exhibition at the Tretyakov Gallery on Krymsky Val

Meeting with artists Dima Vilensky and Olga Egorova of the group Chto Delat? and scholar Ilya Budraitskis

By Magdalena Moskalewicz

“Education is impossible without entertainment,” asserts the collective Chto Delat?, with a nod to Bertolt Brecht. On a windy afternoon we met with Dmitry Vilensky and Olga Egorova, two of the 10 artists and activists who make up this group, which formed in St. Petersburg in 2003. They began by explaining that Chto Delat? models its artistic and political inquiries on the Brechtian triangle of speculation and critique, aesthetic pleasure, and political engagement. Their work is often embodied in films, actions, and newspapers. Today, it is circulated largely via the Internet, but before the era of widespread digital connectivity, the collective engaged a lot with radio.

Chto Delat? means “What is to be done?” or “What to do?” Although the name is usually associated with Lenin’s famous pamphlet of the same title, Vilensky and Egorova told us that it actually comes from a 19th-century novel by Nikolai Chernyshevsky, from whom Lenin borrowed it in the first place.

Together, we watched excerpts of Chto Delat?’s Tower Songspiel (2010), the final piece in a video trilogy of socially engaged musicals that addresses current political issues with the theatrical means employed by Brecht. The music was still reverberating in our heads as we left for lunch, where we discussed the role of art activism in Russia today. Ilya Budraitskis’s essay on the topic, which provided the basis for our conversation, is published soon on post.

Meeting with artist Vadim Zakharov

Meeting with artist Arseniy Zhilyaev and scholar Keti Chukhrov at the Strelka Institute

3. OUTSIDE MOSCOW

Visit to Regina and XL Galleries at Winzavod

By Ksenia Nouril

Winzavod, or the wine factory, is an epicenter for contemporary art in Moscow. Built in the late 19th century as a brewery, the complex later served as a winery and since 2007 has been home to numerous galleries, design boutiques, educational spaces, and cafes. We visited Regina Gallery and XL Gallery there and met with several artists. At Regina, Anna Parkina showed us a selection of her iconic collages, which were composed from colored paper and photographs, as well as her more recent collaged sculptures, in which she applied the same technique to abstract, three-dimensional forms. Viktor Alimpiev shared one of his films with us. Having seen his meticulously orchestrated works at various international biennials, we made the most of this opportunity to ask him questions about his process and production. On view at Regina were 60 portraits of Moscow artists, curators, dealers, and collectors by Alexey Kallima, who is best known for his light-hearted, brightly-colored, large-scale, neo-expressionist paintings. At XL Gallery, Irina Korina spoke to us about her major works, including Chapel, which she made for the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 2013. While her installations and sculptures address serious and even controversial social and political issues in post-Soviet Russia, Korina has not lost her sense of humor. For a past project, she made and wore a larger-than-life head of the Russian writer Leo Tolstoy. She appeared in this full-body costume at the Lenin Library in Moscow as well as outside Moscow at Tolstoy’s estate, Yasnaya Polyana, where she attracted crowds with her performative sculpture.

Visit to the V-A-C Foundation (VICTORIA — The Art of Being Contemporary)

Visit to the Smirnov and Sorokin Foundation Studios

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Since the 1950s, there has been an active production of experimental film, animation, and video art in Asia. Yet, much of this work has not been consistently conserved or shared with the public due to the lack of accessible archives or organized collections dedicated to its preservation and dissemination.

The conference “The Archival Impulse: Collecting and Conserving the Moving Image in Asia” took place on September 10, 2015 in the The Celeste Bartos Theater at the Museum of Modern Art. Co-organized by Asia Art Archive in America, Collaborative Cataloging Japan, and MoMA’s Contemporary and Modern Art Perspectives (C-MAP), it brought together archiving initiatives that have emerged in recent years across Asia, presenting an opportunity to rethink and share methods, philosophies, and challenges to archiving moving image and time-based media works. The event is divided into three panels.

In the first panel Developing Collections, Hiroko Tasaka, Farah Wardani, Fang Lu, and moderator Stuart Comer introduce collection strategies and compare archiving techniques at their respective organizations in Japan, Singapore, China, and New York. Keeping in mind the different regional contexts, the panel will explore the following issues: What was the impetus behind the development of these collections? What are the urgencies to which these collections respond? How do these collections expand upon existing art historical narratives? Complicating these questions is the complex nature of moving image and media works, which often blurs the boundary between disciplines and requires ongoing reevaluation of the organizational categories within institutions. Hiroko Tasaka introduces the collecting practice at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, covering 19th century film and film production, film history of Japan and Asia, and international artists of today. Recognizing the discontinuities and missing links in the field of Southeast Asian art historiography, Farah Wardani discusses the collection strategies taken at the National Gallery Singapore Resource Centre, where she serves as Assistant Director. Fang Lu talks about how Video Bureau, an artist-run video archive founded in 2012, structures the archival process, and how this project is situated in the Chinese contemporary art world.

Archiving is never just about collecting and safeguarding materials; it is also about how to share and circulate these materials, and bring them into a rhizomatic network of knowledge. With the rise of digital modes of access, archiving initiatives are faced with a plentitude of possibilities, as well as new challenges, such as the privatization and commodification of information. In the second panel, Opening the Digital Vault, archivists Sen Uesaki, David Smith, Alf Chang, and moderator Ben Fino-Radin explore the transition from a static physical archive to a digital infrastructure that is open, nonlinear, web-like, and constantly evolving. They will also share their experience in emerging technologies, examining different ways to effectively digest, preserve, and distribute media works in the digital age. Taking a cue from the discussions on collecting practices in the first panel, Sen Uesaki reexamines the physical and digital natures of archival and artistic material by questioning its physical existence in the first place, exploring its function as information. David Smith discusses Asia Art Archive’s digital presence and the motivations behind its current restructuring efforts, looking at the relationship between the archivist, the collections, and the public. Alf Chang will introduce the history and archive of ETAT, an ongoing experiment started from 1995 to create an autonomous platform for sharing, interaction, and preservation.

In the third panel, Transforming Stories, Mariam Ghani, Go Hirasawa, Huang Chien-Hung, and moderator Jane DeBevoise discuss research projects that develop out of archival materials. Pointing to diverse sources of information, from personal archives to commercial and state-sponsored media production, these projects represent efforts to expand and add nuance to ways of thinking about history, politics, and collective memory. Mariam Ghani will present What we left unfinished, a long-term research, film, and dialogue project centered around five unfinished films commissioned, produced, and canceled by various iterations of the Afghan state. Go Hirasawa introduces his research, preservation, and curatorial projects focusing on two Japanese filmmakers—Masao Adachi and Motoharu Jonouchi—in order to examine how established narratives about certain works or artists may be reconsidered and reconstructed. Huang Chien-Hung presents Liu Asio’s documentary project that traces the life of an anti-communist hero, proposing a possibility to think of a topological Asia, an Asia not based on geography, nations, or races, but on interrelations between events, media, persons and the production of images.

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