Sarah Lookofsky is a writer, curator and art historian who served as Associate Director of MoMA’s International Program. She currently works as dean of the Academy of Fine Art at Oslo National Academy of the Arts (KHiO). Prior to working at MoMA, she was a faculty member and the instructor for curatorial studies at the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program. A regular contributor to a variety of periodicals and books, she served as the arts editor of DIS Magazine and was the general advisor for the 9th Berlin Biennale organized by the DIS collective. She is a board member of apexart in New York. She has curated exhibitions for numerous international venues, including Kunsthal Aarhus, apexart, Art in General, Smack Mellon, Stacion Center for Contemporary Art, and Gallery Miroslav Kraljević, and has taught at the University of California, San Diego and the New School. She holds a BA in Film and Media Studies from the University of Copenhagen and a Ph.D. in Art History, Theory and Criticism from the University of California, San Diego.
Sarah Lookofsky, former Associate Director of the International program at MoMA, rumintes on the presentations and conversations held on Day One of the 2022 C-MAP seminar. Lookofsky calls out the contradictions of art’s embeddedness with various ecologies, rehearsing her own writing-thinking as produced by a “dumpy dialectic.”
In an effort to consider the variegated impacts of COVID-19—a virus with a global reach—post interviewed Zdenka Badovinac about how the pandemic has affected conceptions and practices of programming, civic engagement, and care.
Is the globe of globalization the same as the globe of global warming?
Cultural theorist Mieke Bal discusses her writing devoted to Nalini Malani’s Shadow Plays, multi-dimensional artworks that draw from different cinematic technologies and disparate repositories of images.
Karl Clauss Dietel conceived a motorcycle in the GDR in 1967. As a result of its flexible design principles, it still runs today.
“Where do our arts stand with regard to the consciousness that is blossoming in the Arab nation?” This question was posed in 1956 in a questionnaire on “Art and Arab Life” that was circulated to artists in Lebanon, Iraq, Egypt, and Syria in a special issue devoted to the arts of the Arab world of the Beirut-based, pan-Arab journal al-Adab, which was established in 1953 as an outlet for politically engaged thought and cultural analysis.
In Morocco in the mid-1960s, the National School of Fine Arts in Casablanca offered a new cohort of avant-garde thinkers—including artists Farid Belkahia, Mohammed Chebaa, and Mohammed Melehi—a platform for developing new models of decolonized, integrated artistic practice. Such an agenda is set forth in this position statement written by Chebaa on the occasion of the three-person Belkahia, Chebaa, and Melehi exhibition at the Mohammed V Theatre gallery in Rabat.
The texts below are entries taken from the 1933 guest book from the first solo exhibition of the work of Zulfa al-Sa‘di (1905–1988), a young Palestinian female artist, held in the Palestine Pavilion at the First National Arab Fair, organized in Jerusalem under the auspices of the Supreme Muslim Council.
MoMA’s C-MAP research program developed an extended focus on historical alliances such as Bandung, the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), pan-Africanism, pan-Arabism, and other south-south, east-east, and Third World nexuses. This conversation addresses such pasts, and their reverberations in the present, as they appear in Mohaiemen’s media-based practice.
Artists can be activists but can art be activism? C-MAP presents a forum at the Museum of Modern Art with Coco Fusco, Oleksiy Radynski, and Ram Rahman—artists who have all engaged with activist practices—who discuss relations between art and politics in Cuba, Ukraine, and India.
As part of an ongoing collaboration between the Jaipur Literature Festival and MoMA, this post Presents discussion “Patriot Games: Contextualizing Nationalism” explores nationalism around the world, with panelists Urvashi Butalia, Bouchra Khalili, Bruce Robbins, Eyal Weizman, and moderator Marie Brenner.
The roundtable discussion focuses on international networks that decenter, complicate, or even bypass Western-centric models.
