The exhibition Bodys Isek Kingelez: City Dreams was on view at The Museum of Modern Art through January 1, 2019. This essay by Sarah Suzuki was originally published in the exhibition catalog Bodys Isek Kingelez, available in the MoMA bookstore.

The words and commentaries that I write express the vision that inhabited me even before I started the piece. First comes the name (the title) of the piece; secondly I wait for the vision to come; then I make it real. I never make preliminary drawings. The vision gives me all I need, even the shape and the colors. . . . I am a designer, an architect, a sculptor, engineer, artist.—Bodys Isek Kingelez

Bodys Isek Kingelez is one of the unsung visionary creators of the twentieth century. A lifelong resident of what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Kingelez developed a notably individualistic style that is beholden to no obvious artistic precedents. Beginning in 1978 with his very first artwork, the result of a feverish session with “some scissors, a Gillette razor, and some glue and paper,”¹ his oeuvre took a unique form, in sculptures of mixed paper and other ephemeral materials that suggest miniature architectural structures. Dazzling in color and decoration, the works grew in scale and complexity over time, from models of individual buildings to intricate cities complete with roadways, billboards, and public monuments.

Kingelez was a formidable figure. Remarkably self-assured, he believed of his work that “since time immemorial, no one has had a vision like this,”² and he aimed to be a force for good in the world, hoping, he said, that “architects and builders worldwide can try to learn from my perceptions so as to help the forthcoming generations. I’m dreaming cities of peace. I’d like to help the Earth above all.”³ He was a complicated person, at turns outgoing and reserved, and the making of his work was all-consuming; to some, he seemed most comfortable in the fantastical world of his own creation. Beauty was a paramount concern, not only in his art but also in his dress, and while he didn’t go to the theatrical lengths of Kinshasa’s famous dandies—the label-loving sapeurs—his personal style reflected the perfection he aimed for in his sculptures: “The shirt, jacket, and shoes need to be harmonious,” he declared.⁴ This holistic attitude and desire for harmony aligned with his aspiration to make the world a better and more beautiful place through his work.

Kingelez’s practice, though unquestionably appealing to curators, critics, and art historians, has presented them a maddening challenge. In collapsing the boundaries between sculpture, architecture, and design, it eludes the categorization and classification on which institutional collections rely, and in its lack of known art historical precedents, it evades the genealogy that we love to document and trace.⁵ As a result, although Kingelez has been included in some of the most important visual art exhibitions of the last forty years—the groundbreaking Magiciens de la terre in Paris in 1989; The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa, 1945–1994, a paradigm-shifting show that opened in Munich in 2001; the acclaimed documenta 11 in 2002; and biennials in Johannesburg, Dakar, and São Paulo, among others—very little has been written about him and his work. This study is an initial step in correcting the dearth of literature on Kingelez, and it is my hope that it will lay the groundwork for future efforts.

As an American curator delving into the work of a contemporary African artist, I have referred to the scholarship of important cultural thinkers of the last decades. Okwui Enwezor and Chika Okeke-Agulu have set forth a number of considerations for the conceptual framing of the term “contemporary African art.” They argue that the connective tissue of this “malleable” category is composed of the political and economic events that have shaped the continent, emphasizing the impossibility of considering aesthetic or conceptual strategies without taking into account postcolonial realities.⁶ Enwezor has reiterated the importance of historical context in understanding the work of such artists: “In speaking of Africa today we need to ask how the struggles of independence, the problems of the national sovereign state, the expanding definition of national culture, citizenship, and cosmopolitanism (which are partially linked to economic malaise, social obsolescence, and political destabilization) define subjectivity.”⁷ In thinking through his approach to an art historical study of the black diaspora, Stuart Hall likewise has asserted the importance of working in a way that is “‘historical’—that is, with proper attention to chains of causation and conditions of existence, to questions of periodization and conjecture—not just celebratory of a general and undifferentiated ‘black presence.’ I have been concerned to give it specificity; but also to read it both in its connection with, and difference from, other histories.” He underscores the importance of attempting to “make connections between works of art and wider social histories without collapsing the former or displacing the latter.”⁸ In his review of the various strategies taken in analyses of African contemporary art, John Picton has suggested that the more successful approaches have focused on artists rather than attempting to identify or construct silos into which they might fit.⁹ I take these to be calls for contextualization and specificity, so I will begin with the artist himself and explore his moment and milieu with an eye toward some of the histories, events, ideas, and experiences that likely shaped his practice. My aim is to inform the reader about who Kingelez was, how and in what context he made his work, what that work consists of, and how it has been received.

From Kimbembele-Ihunga to Kinshasa

Kingelez was born on August 27, 1948, in the village of Kimbembele-Ihunga, approximately 370 miles southeast of the city of Léopoldville (now Kinshasa), the eldest of the nine children of agricultural laborers Maluba Abraham Kingelez (1908– 1968) and Isek Mabo Bendele (born 1931).¹⁰ He was baptized Jean-Baptiste, though as an artist he would primarily use “Bodys Isek Kingelez” when signing his works, styling the name in myriad ways, sometimes eliding letters, introducing hyphens, and playing with capitalization. This name honors the artist’s ancestry: Bodys was his grandfather’s name, and Isek descended from the matrilineal side.¹¹ His surname has deep and meaningful roots in the region. In the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, the small kingdom of Kakongo, on the Atlantic coast, was an important commercial center for the slave trade and for trade in resources such as ivory and copper, frequented by the Portuguese, English, French, and Dutch, among others. Kakongo’s capital city was Kinguele, a homonym for Kingelez.¹²

Kimbembele-Ihunga was and would remain a potent influence on Kingelez, who later acknowledged the importance of his birthplace, saying, “Every artist on earth achieves self-expression through the most deep-rooted origins of their nature.”¹³ It was the subject of several sculptures—including the luminous Kimbembele Ihunga, his first work to accumulate a mass of buildings into a large, elaborate cityscape— and it remained a beacon of his past and an emblem of his hope for the future. “The town of Kimbéville flourishes,” he wrote in a remarkable text that conflates the real village with his own fantastical simulations of its past, present, and future. “People flock here because the wind blows in off the sea and the mountains, refreshing its complex beauty in which all the heightened colors join forces constantly to create an environment where everyone can feel at home.”¹⁴

Taught in his village by the Belgian Catholic missionaries who almost exclusively oversaw the local schools until 1960, Kingelez was a top student, and he later credited his early education with establishing a critical skill: “I learned calligraphy, which is so useful today in my work, from the Belgian fathers.”¹⁵Many of his sculptures feature hand-lettering in a variety of styles, and his unique penmanship, both in all-caps printing and in tight, looping cursive, is a distinctive feature of his manuscript texts. The priests who taught him hoped that he would follow in their footsteps and join the clergy, and though that didn’t come to pass, religion played an important role in his life.¹⁶

Church architecture is a recurring motif in his practice, as evidenced, for example, in a small, early untitled work that soars upward in three peaked tiers. Topped with a shining silver star, its facade is marked by multiple crosses in silver and gold, and its eaves are adorned with tiny foil bells. Kingelez often cited a divine inspiration for his practice—“No one could beat the strength of God that worked in me,” he said¹⁷—and, with a typical lack of modesty, he classed his own occupation in relation to the glory of Creation: “God has shown us that He himself is an artist. He painted the mountains, he painted the plains. . . . It is our duty to follow in his example. He who follows His example, he who paints as He does, will be blessed. And that’s why I am a small god.”¹⁸ In 1970, after receiving his high school diploma, Kingelez left his bustling village for the booming metropolis of Kinshasa. He was twenty-two years old.

Authenticité and a Civic Imagination

Already, at this young age, Kingelez had experienced an era of tremendous change. Enwezor has pointed to decolonization as one of the principal events of the twentieth century, and Kingelez found himself directly in the middle of this incredibly complex moment, straddling the colonial and postcolonial periods.¹⁹The territory that is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo had been settled for nearly ninety thousand years when the European explorer Henry Morton Stanley arrived in the 1870s, under the aegis of King Leopold II of Belgium. Leopold claimed the land as private property, ushering in a horrific period of violent domination of the land and its people—including forced labor, widespread disease, and punitive mutilation—that did not cease upon the territory’s annexation as a Belgian colony in 1908. After decades of struggle, the independent Republic of the Congo was declared on June 30, 1960, by Patrice Lumumba, the country’s first democratically elected prime minister. Fatefully for the young nation, Lumumba was arrested and then murdered just a few months later by a band of political rivals headed by Joseph-Désiré Mobutu, the chief of staff of the Armée Nationale Congolaise. With support from Western governments, including that of the United States, Mobutu seized power in 1965; he would remain the president and self- declared “Father of the Nation,” eventually enjoying despotic, near-divine status, until his military dictatorship was overthrown in 1997.

In the late 1960s, Mobutu instituted a series of new policies designed to promote nationalism and cultural “authenticity” (a doctrine officially termed authenticité in 1971). He required that his fellow countrymen and -women adopt Bantu names, and he himself became Mobutu Sese Seko Kuku Ngbendu wa Za Banga, usually shortened to Mobutu Sese Seko, a moniker often translated as “the all-powerful warrior who, because of his endurance and inflexible will to win, will go from conquest to conquest leaving fire in his wake.”²⁰ Léopoldville, Congo’s capital city, was renamed Kinshasa in 1966, and in 1971 Mobutu renamed the country and its major river Zaire. Covering a range of traditional African leadership roles, he identified himself as both king and chief, statuses he underscored through his customary accessories: an elaborately carved walking stick and a leopard-skin cap. He developed a new style of national dress known as abacos (a shortening ofà bas le costume—essentially, “down with Western dress”)²¹—and promoted economic and political independence as symbols of national pride and identity. In the words of Zaire’s former Commissioner of National Orientation, Sakombi Inongo, these doctrines should be understood not “as a reaction against the old colonizers and even less a vengeance, but as a positive affirmation of ourselves.”²² Mobutu also emphasized self-affirmation: “Authenticité has made us discover our personality by reaching into the depths of our past for the rich cultural heritage which was left to us by our ancestors. We have no intention of blindly returning to all ancestral customs; rather, we would like to choose those which adapt themselves well to modern life, those which encourage progress, and those which create a way of life and thought which are essentially ours.”²³ It was in an atmosphere of pride in Zaire and hope for its future that Kingelez arrived in the newly renamed capital.

An extraordinary early sculpture, 1980’s Kinshasa: Cité du 24 Novembre de l’Authenticité Africaine, exemplifies the way in which Kingelez’s work was shaped by post-Independence politics, suggesting the young artist’s excitement about the nation’s direction. A tableau of multiple structures, including a church and an elaborate, multistory building with several wings, the sculpture is certainly the precursor to his later cities.²⁴ The date named in the title—the day on which Mobutu seized power in 1965, an occasion of celebration throughout his reign—is hand-lettered on a sign that soars above the rooftops. Closer to ground level, but still elevated, is a small, black-and-white photograph of Mobutu in military garb mounted on a wreathlike placard above a banner reading “La République du Zaïre.” A medallion celebrates the iconic torch-bearing fist of the Zairean national flag, alongside a reference to Mobutu’s political party, the Mouvement Populaire de la Révolution (MPR). Circling the medallion is the phrase “Zaïre Alinga Mosala,” a traditional saying that, roughly translated, means “Zaire loves to work.²⁵It was connected to salongo, a policy introduced by Mobutu that mandated civic participation and productivity in the name of “hard work and national self- reliance.”²⁶ A group of four small hangars to the right of this signage, designated the “Artist’s Village,” points to another facet of authenticité, the desire for “the return of traditional art objects to Zaire so as to inspire contemporary artists.”²⁷ All together, this complex small sculpture suggests an enthusiasm for Mobutu and his efforts in shaping Zaire. It was an endorsement of authenticité and salongo from an artist who believed strongly in civic responsibility—always orienting his own work to the collective rather than the individual (one never finds a private residence among his projects)—and who, in his own words, “devotes his daily life to excellence.”²⁸ No other work would make such explicit reference to Mobutu’s regime, though Kingelez’s political engagement continued to manifest itself in sculptures that imagined a world untainted by corruption, greed, and economic disparity.

Kingelez would go on to make numerous works whose titles suggest the administrative, political, or governmental functions necessary for a successful democratic state. The handsome trapezoidal form of 1992’s Reveillon Fédéralevokes a kind of temple to democracy, with at least eight doorways marked in multiple languages, offering many ways to enter, and adornments referring to local fauna: a leaping zebra (reclaimed from a box of matches) and a horned impala. Kingelez wrote of this work in lofty terms, explaining his choice of palette: “The red and yellow symbolizes victory and absolutely reminds us of ‘the Martyrs’ blood’ that ran through the meanders of this fight for pure freedom.”²⁹

The symbolic meaning of color was as carefully considered by Kingelez as it had been by Mobutu. The first iteration of the president’s flag was blue with a yellow star and a red diagonal stripe, with red symbolizing the blood of the people’s sacrifice; yellow, prosperity; blue, hope; and the star, unity. Following the adoption of authenticité in 1971, a new Constitution of Zaire was issued in 1974. Article 4 decreed: “The emblem of the Republic is a light green flag, ornamented in the centre with a yellow circle in which a right hand is holding a torch with a red flame.” Hope was embodied by light green; unity by the circle, whose color represented Zaire’s extensive natural resources; and the nation’s revolutionary spirit by the torch-bearing arm, its red flames an honor to its martyrs. This approach to color and the use of the flag as a potent symbol of nationhood and pride were practices Kingelez would turn to throughout his career.

Air Force, made in 1991, recalls Zaire’s military, the group from which Mobutu rose, and specifically the Force Aérienne Zaïroise, which had been active since about 1961. Though sober in coloration, seen from above the work is a riot of black, red, and white stripes; it is topped with a sign bearing an icon that recalls the Belgian flag. The structure’s handsome facade is marked by a tidy grid of round windows and four-pointed stars set in relief. Of the star, one of the most prevalent motifs in his work, Kingelez wrote, “It’s . . . the ultimate symbol of wisdom which has a double origin. The first, the spiritual origin, in the form of a star, represents humanity. The star is born as displayed in the sky. It’s a magisterial symbol for which All Powerful God The Creator communicated to His people on earth. The second is the material origin of the star. It’s the representation of equilibrium on earth.”³⁰

Medical infrastructure was also a key element of Kingelez’s civic necessities. Suggesting the campus of a sophisticated medical center and marked with signs calling for silence, The Scientific Center of Hospitalisation the SIDA, also of 1991, was constructed in part of reused paper packaging from a malaria medication. Epidemiological history suggests that 1970s Kinshasa was the epicenter of the first epidemic of HIV/AIDS (SIDA in French); by the mid-1980s, when Mobutu banned the subject in the press, six to eight percent of the population was believed to be infected. Around the time Kingelez made the work, the World Bank committed resources to Zaire’s newly established National AIDS Control Program, which brought condoms, screening kits, and a testing laboratory to Kinshasa, the only such facility successfully established by the program.³¹

Kingelez and Kinshasa: 1970s and ’80s

Before conceiving of a career as an artist, Kingelez struggled to define his professional aspirations, considering various vocations inclined toward civic engagement. He had the idea of being a magistrate, but dismissed the notion because, he said, “I realized I was too strict and impartial to judge people suitably.”³² He also thought of becoming a member of the government, one of the “university-trained technocrats and senior civil servants” with whom Mobutu staffed his government, “to help build a better world.”³³ In Kinshasa, he attended the University of Lovanium, where he focused on economics but took classes in a wide range of subjects, including, he later reported, “business, French correspondence, indus​trial and business accounting, [and] industrial design.”³⁴ In time, he would put all of these skills to excellent use: his French in the drafting of the extraordinary, poetic texts that often accompany his works; the accounting skills in running a tremendously successful sole proprietorship; and his knowledge of design principles in the construction techniques that underlie his sculptures.

Kingelez has often been described as a self-taught artist or an autodidact, even though he was a university graduate with a background in industrial design, and spoke five languages.³⁵ It is true that he did not attend art school or a formal artist’s training program; such opportunities were limited, even though, as the former Belgian colonial capital, Kinshasa had long been one of the country’s centers of cultural production.³⁶A rise in Christian missionary activity in the 1930s had resulted in increased Western-style educational opportunities for colonial subjects in Congo, including, in some cases, the creation of art schools or experimental art workshops.³⁷ The Académie d’Art Populaire Indigène, also known as “Le Hangar,” was established in 1946 by Pierre Romain-Desfossés in Elisabethville (now Lubumbashi). As its name suggests, it sought not to inculcate Western aesthetic ideas but rather offered a free workspace and access to materials, with the only guiding principles that the artists follow their own creative impulses and not repeat themselves.³⁸ In a rather paternalistic process, Romain- Desfossés administered an entrance exam for potential new students, asking them to depict certain subjects. From the results, he determined the artist’s area of speciality, either easel painting (which was considered prestigious) or decorative painting (a marketable skill, used in hotels or for public signage).³⁹ Alternately, the École Saint-Luc, established by Belgian missionary Marc Wallenda in Gombe- Matadi in 1943, offered a multiyear cycle of art instruction in sculpture, the most widely practiced art form in the region at that time, as well as drawing, casting, and other disciplines, with a focus on Western-style academic realism and naturalism. Wallenda’s school relocated to Léopoldville in 1949, where it expanded, offering courses in painting, ceramics, and architectural drawing, and eventually, in 1957, metamorphosed into the city’s Académie des Beaux-Arts⁴⁰These differing strategies eventually led to a seeming schism between the country’s esteemed contemporary artists: those who produced “authentic” work like the patterned, flora- and fauna-filled drawings of Pilipili Mulongoy (1914–2007) versus those who worked in a figurative, more academic style based in part on Western models, like N’damvu Tsiku-Pezo (1939–1997), whose mural commissions adorned several presidential buildings.⁴¹ In the 1970s, the situation was further enriched by the rise of the peintres populaires, or “popular painters,” including Moké (1950–2001) and Chéri Samba (born 1956), many of whom had a background in commercial sign painting, and whose colorful, figurative work, inspired by daily life, created a new paradigm for contemporary Congolese art. Neither trained in nor belonging to any of these prevailing tendencies, Kingelez stood resolutely apart right from the beginning of his career.

In the mid-1970s, he took a position as a secondary-school instructor. By his own account, he was quite good: “They said I was an excellent teacher, as all my students passed the bac[calaureate exam].”⁴² Meanwhile, the city continued to grow and shift around him. The population had swelled to approximately 1.3 million, a number that would grow to 3.4 million by 1990 and 5 million ten years later. As Mobutu’s early championing of the new nation slid steadily into despotism and self-enrichment, the country entered a long period of political and economic instability, further undermined by the policies of the International Monetary Fund, which continued to provide loans to Zaire despite evidence of high-level corruption and insupportable debt, and by inflation and tax hikes that devalued wages. These failings were transforming Kinshasa into “a city where students do not study, workers do not work, ministers do not administrate,” in the words of poet and journalist Lye Mudaba Yoka, a contemporary of Kingelez’s. It was, however, a place of “great creativity and improvisation,” he said. “To the outsider, the perception is chaos. For me it is not chaos at all. We’ve developed an informal system. And within this informal system, there’s an organization.”⁴³ Indeed, the music scene was thriving and gaining worldwide renown, the flamboyant self-expression of the city’s sapeurs was attaining international acclaim, and the peintres populaireswould soon be included in museum exhibitions around the world.

In the rapidly changing milieu of late-1970s Kinshasa, young Kingelez found himself feeling restless and unfulfilled: “I understood that I couldn’t reach my goals as a teacher,” he later said. “I needed to stake out more brilliant options.”⁴⁴ In 1978 he terminated his teaching career without knowing what would come next. “I drew up a list of ideas in my little room. Then a muddled confusion set in me and lasted for more than a month. It was at this time that I became obsessed with the idea of getting my hands on some scissors, a Gillette razor, and some glue and paper. It felt like fate when I finally did procure this particular material, and things became clearer then. I put together a little house without quite understanding the meaning of it all. And this is what stopped the fatal hemorrhaging.”⁴⁵ The drama of this event would be typical for Kingelez. He described the desire to make art as almost an illness, a pain that was alleviated by creation. He said of his process: “I can’t stand any sound, not even a mosquito. I’m more aggressive with my kids. It’s like I’m ill.”⁴⁶His family concurred. His second wife, Madeleine Mupanga, told him, “You’re awful when you’re creating a work of art. You’re agitated, you’re not happy with yourself. If your work isn’t going as planned, you’re touchy.”⁴⁷

Following the creation of this first sculpture, there was a quick succession of events: Kingelez made a second work, titled Musée National, which a neighbor helped him transport to City Hall, where—given its subject matter—the administrator suggested that he take it to the Institut des Musées Nationaux du Zaïre (IMNZ, now the Institut des Musées Nationaux du Congo). The institute had been established jointly as a cooperative enterprise (in name, if not in practice) by the Belgian and Zairean governments in 1969–70; it was launched with enthusiastic support from Mobutu, who viewed the traditional art of the region—the institute’s focus—as powerful and persuasive cultural capital. The director general, Frère Joseph-Aurélien Cornet (1919–2004), a Belgian missionary and art historian who spent nearly thirty years in the country, was the person to whom Kingelez hoped to present the work, but before reaching Cornet, he was subjected to a gauntlet of interrogation.⁴⁸ One after another, a series of museum staffers suggested that the work, with its remarkable level of invention and accomplishment, could not be his, and that he had surely stolen it. In a misguided attempt to prove Kingelez a liar, they challenged him to make another work on-site, while they watched. Kingelez produced the sculpture Commissariat Atomique under these conditions, and the staff, so impressed by his artistic skills and the dexterity with which he manipulated his materials (and chagrined, perhaps, at their gross error), offered him a job as a “technicien restaurateur,” repairing works in the museum’s collection.⁴⁹

By the time Kingelez started his new job, the collection of the IMNZ was estimated at between thirty thousand and thirty-eight thousand objects, built by modest transfers of works from the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Tervuren, Belgium, along with an extensive program of local expeditions and acquisitions.⁵⁰ Over the next six years, Kingelez worked on objects ranging from wooden sculptures to ceramic vessels. The job gave him access to supplies and materials, the opportunity to ponder what made certain artworks and artifacts worthy of collection and consideration, and, as he later noted, the chance to hone his technical ability: “These ruined statues led me to the pinnacle of my skills.”⁵¹ He took characteristic pride in the excellence of his work despite his lack of formal conservation or restoration training. “My perfection,” he said, “was such that I was even mistaken for a forger. I never learned the metier but how little this mattered; I came from a traditional village where everyday I used to watch the men making masks or working at the forge. There was no need to learn, then, what I used to see all the time.”⁵²

It was during this period that Kingelez likely experienced the first significant interest in his work. While Kinshasa did not have a strong network of commercial galleries, exhibition spaces, artist residency programs, and museums, the city’s French and Belgian cultural centers supported a number of artistic activities, and anecdotes and archival materials suggest that organizations like these were instrumental in helping Kingelez make his work more visible.⁵³ Around 1981 the architect Christian Girard traveled to Kinshasa in the employ of the French government for a series of urban-planning projects, and a colleague there suggested that he might be interested in meeting a man who was making what he called “strange models.”⁵⁴ Girard visited Kingelez at the IMNZ, where he recalls seeing a shelf full of sculptures in the restoration office: miniature administrative buildings, churches, and amusement parks.

What is extant of that remarkably rare early work dem​on​strates that even at this nascent stage of his career, Kingelez had already developed many of the hallmarks of his mature style. The palette is predominately monochrome—a function of the paperboard and cardstock varieties that were most readily available—but it is accented with brilliant bursts of color from found paper and packaging materials. An untitled sculpture from 1980 suggests that his ideas about how a work is conceived, composed, and constructed were then well established, as was his system of cataloguing the objects. The untitled sculpture immediately suggests an architectural form—a contemporary urban building. A symmetrical but dynamic rectangular prism, marked on the front face by ten rows of precisely hand-cut openings backed with white tissue, sits atop a series of flared fins cut from blazing orange cardstock. Triangular additions of gray translucent plastic protrude from its sides. The structure is topped with a skeletal sphere made of strips of black paper; its shape recalls the universal symbol for atomic energy, an icon Kingelez depicts in many works. In this, he was likely inspired by something close at hand: TRICO I, the African continent’s first nuclear reactor, had been installed in 1959 at Kingelez’s alma mater, the University of Lovanium. Established with Belgian funds in 1954 and initially overseen by Jesuit missionaries, the university aspired to be one of the continent’s premier educational institutions, and it was the first in the country to provide a course of study for doctors, architects, and civil engineers.⁵⁵ In 1972 TRICO I was succeeded by TRICO II; the campus, now part of the University of Kinshasa, still hosts the research reactor and the Centre Régional d’Etudes Nucléaires de Kinshasa.⁵⁶The country also contains the world’s richest uranium mine, the source of the material used to produce the atomic bombs dropped by the United States on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.

This untitled sculpture includes an early example of the system Kingelez used to number his works throughout his career. In this instance, a round paper medallion, positioned prominently on the base of the object, bears the hand-lettered information “BODYS-KIS J. 58-27-11-80,” signifying a work, number 58, made on November 27, 1980. Kingelez numbered every work he made, and he claimed that he made over three thousand.⁵⁷ Girard noted that when he visited the artist in 1982, the sequential numbering was already over two hundred; a 1980 work numbered 58 confirms the plausibility of the system, if not the later total.⁵⁸ Kingelez worked in a museum, so he knew that the cataloguing of artwork was critical. He had likely seen a lack of information confound and frustrate his colleagues as they struggled to date and attribute an object. He was also intimately familiar with the IMNZ’s methodology for numbering the works in their collection: each object bore a unique identifier, composed of the last two numbers of the year it was acquired, plus the number of the lot or series and the position of the work within the lot.⁵⁹ Kingelez’s use of this highly visible system of signing and numbering his sculptures ensured that the attribution of his work would never be at issue and positioned it, with both optimism and foresight, as if it were already part of an institutional collection.

Among the few published accounts of this early period of Kingelez’s career is an article written by Girard and Jacques Soulillou, a critic, art historian, and cultural attaché who spent years running French cultural centers in Cameroon and Nigeria, among other assignments. In the October 1984 issue of the journal autrement, in a brief rundown of artistic activities in African capitals—from embroidery and photography to polychrome sculpture—they refer to three of Kingelez’s early works by title (Maryland University USA, Le Ministère Belge de la Guerre, and Le Palais Modeste d’Espagne de l’Antique Marine Commerciale) and attest to the serious and substantial nature of his activities, which they describe as “architecture in paper.”⁶⁰ A small black-and-white photograph of Kingelez’s Kinshasa: Cité du 24 Novembre de l’Authenticité Africaine bears a caption that erroneously identifies the work as made by “a Brazzavillois who works in an adminstrative office.”⁶¹ The authors testify to his unshakable belief in his talent and his project, noting that he “claims the title of artist with vehemence, and waits for nothing more than universal recognition.”⁶²

Designer, Architect, Sculptor, Engineer, Artist

In a later text, Girard recalled that on first seeing Kingelez’s work, he was struck by its similarities to the architecture of Michael Graves, an American associated with postmodernism, perhaps because Kingelez’s designs, like Graves’s, embrace ornament and decidedly reject the modernist edict that form must follow function.⁶³Girard assumed, likely correctly, that Kingelez had had no direct contact with work by Graves or with other buildings in the postmodern style, since he didn’t travel outside Zaire until 1989. “I had never seen any other city,” the artist later said, looking back at the moment he began his artistic practice. “For me, Kinshasa was The City; I had never seen any other, not even in photos. I had never traveled before. I neither read nor looked at magazines.”⁶⁴There were, however, many rich local architectural sources for him to draw on, from the Art Deco buildings of the colonial era that still lined the streets of Kinshasa, to the ambitious structures of the post-Independence period, and it is clear that the sculptures Kingelez began making feverishly in the early 1980s—which he soon dubbed “extrêmes maquettes”—had their precedent in the urban fabric around him.

Mobutu was personally invested in the power of archi​tecture, which he harnessed to glorify his rule. In 1966 he opened the Presidential Domain of Nsele, an idealized shadow city in suburban Kinshasa built to host foreign dignitaries and international delegations interested in developing agricultural or trade programs with the country.⁶⁵ In 1975 the British writer V. S. Naipaul likened Nsele to a luxury resort, with amenities such as air conditioning and, according to one report, gold-plated bathroom fixtures.⁶⁶ Among the palaces Mobutu built there was a pagoda, designed and constructed by Chinese personnel already working at the site and intended to connect his reign to the splendor and power of the Chinese imperial dynasties. He also built a complex of pagoda-style buildings in his hometown, Gbadolite, deep in the country’s northern rain forest. During his reign, he completely redeveloped Gbadolite, transforming it into an outpost of opulence and luxury that has been referred to as “Versailles in the jungle.”⁶⁷ He built an airport (with an extended runway to accommodate intercontinental jets, including theConcorde), boulevards, banks, hospitals, and a Coca-Cola bottling plant, as well as multiple presidential homes, including an undulating multistory villa with an Olympic-sized swimming pool, known as the Palais des Bambous.⁶⁸

One of the principal designers of the presidential complex at Gbadolite was the Tunisian-born French architect Olivier-Clément Cacoub (1920–2008). He was also responsible for high-profile projects in France and for the post-Independence leaders of North and sub-Saharan Africa, including palaces in Ivory Coast, Cameroon, and Tunisia. Known as the “architecte du soleil,” for his penchant for warmer climes and his loose, playful style, Cacoub approached his projects with an organic freedom—“I make architecture like I make gestures,” he said⁶⁹—and a reformist spirit: “In effect, our era has definitively broken away from sad and somber offices with their narrow windows and their oppressive conference rooms. Light, sobriety, and functionality have made their way into our offices, our factories, our courtrooms, our laboratories.”⁷⁰

Cacoub’s codesigner on the Gbadolite complex was Pierre Goudiaby Atepa (born 1947), a Senegalese architect known for projects throughout the African continent but most notably in Dakar. In 1973 Goudiaby presented a thesis on the ideal African city. Its first key feature, he said, is that it must be “profoundly African. The second, that it is turned toward an assured modernity. The third, that it is a solar city.”⁷¹ Known for buildings with improbable, sweeping contours, like his pyramidal headquarters for the Banque Centrale des États de l’Afrique de l’Ouest in Dakar, Goudiaby draws on myriad sources, from the handmade cloth his mother used to sell, to the baobab tree and the calabash, to Doric columns: “The Romans stole ideas from the Greeks, the Americans stole from the Europeans. Now it’s our turn. I use whatever I want and make it African.”⁷² This attitude toward architecture, unanchored by Western conventions, is clearly reflected in Kingelez’s constructions.

Although few locals outside the upper echelons of government had the opportunity to see Cacoub’s work at Gbadolite, another of his projects was a prominent landmark in Kinshasa. The Tour de l’Échangeur (alternately known as the Monument to Patrice Lumumba, the Monument to National Heroes, and the Limete Tower) was planned to be among the tallest buildings in Africa; construction began in 1971, but it was never fully completed. Commissioned by Mobutu, the tower— four soaring columns topped by a structure designed to house observation platforms and a restaurant—was centrally located in the industrial neighborhood of Limete and visible from a great distance in all directions. Certainly Kingelez knew this futuristic monument, impractical in form but limitless in possibility, and it was evidently the model for his own skyward-thrusting work, Approche de l’Échangeur de Limete Kin of 1981.⁷³

In 1972 Cacoub was commissioned to design an international trade center for Kinshasa, the Centre Commercial International du Zaïre, an effort to position the city at the center of the African business world. It was envisioned as a complex of office towers, meeting halls, a six thousand–seat conference center, and a thousand-room hotel, but only the first twenty-story tower was completed before the project was abandoned.⁷⁴ Cacoub’s model shows two trapezoidal buildings of different sizes, a skyscraper, a series of disc-shaped structures staggered at different heights, and an undulating, S-shaped tower set into a horizontal plane. Kingelez moved to the city shortly before the plans for the development project were announced to great fanfare; in its fantastical forms and iconoclastic layout, the model bears a striking similarity to the sculptures he would later build.

The connection between Kingelez’s work and the practice of architecture has been discussed by several writers and curators. Ismail Serageldin has placed it in a category he identifies as “architectural sculpture,” which is free, he writes, from architecture’s responsibility to “retain a social and functional role, whether built with or without architects. . . . Architectural sculpture is liberated from such restrictions and can push form, texture, and color far into the realm of the imaginary, as it does in [Kingelez’s] hands.”⁷⁵ Writing about Kingelez’s 2001 sculpture Köln, commissioned by Museum Ludwig, Cologne, Marjorie Jongbloed has likewise made the case for hybridity: “Kingelez’s models are architecture, painting, and sculpture in one. They are hermetically sealed and impossible to enter; they have no inner life. In this regard, they only refer to architecture.”⁷⁶ As to Kingelez’s intentions, a friend of the artist commented, “Kingelez is not an architect and does not wish to be considered one. He is surprised when you ask him if he wants to see his works actually built.”⁷⁷ Dan Cameron has intuited rightly that “the point is not so much that Kingelez plans someday to be able to build these structures, but rather that the act of imagining them and bringing them into existence, albeit through maquettes, represents an almost fervent idealism which over time will invariably have its impact on the types of visions that other, less poetic city planners may bring to bear on the future of other African cities.”⁷⁸ That is to say, Kingelez is not an architect but rather the creator of a new and hybrid form. Drawn both from airy flights of imagination and the solidity of reality, his work proposes an idealized vision for the future, one that architects, city planners, and builders may one day be inspired by.

Global Visions

On June 30, 1969—Zaire’s Independence Day—Mobutu, with King Baudouin of Belgium as his guest, inaugurated the first Foire Internationale de Kinshasa (FIKIN).⁷⁹ Held on what would become a permanent fairground in the neighborhood of Limete, not far from Cacoub’s tower, the international trade and culture fair featured the participation of more than twenty countries and hosted nearly 600,000 people during its three-week run. The fairground’s designer was the Congo-born, Belgian-trained architect Fernand Tala-Ngai (1938–2006), who would go on to design other municipal buildings in Kinshasa in the 1970s and ’80s, including a residence for Mobutu (the Palais de Marbre, on Mount Ngaliema), the Supreme Court building, and the Hôtel de la Monnaie, with its scalloped base and brise soleil–gridded facade connected to an existing building by a bridge of four-pointed stars.⁸⁰ According to reports, the fairground was like an ideal mini-Kinshasa, featuring amenities such as new drainage systems, paved roads, public toilets, and copious parking, along with beer gardens and cafes, copper-roofed exhibition halls, national pavilions, and demonstrations of the latest in mining technology and energy development.⁸¹ An amusement park was added the following year, including a carousel, a roller coaster, and a tunnel of love. A photograph from the period shows dozens of flags waving in the wind over landscaped grounds, with national pavilions (and Cacoub’s tower, still under construction) visible in the distance. These pavilions, a staple of world’s fairs, created something akin to a United Nations, with each sponsoring country showcasing the resources, technologies, cultural traditions, and specific histories it contributed to the global story. Newly arrived in Kinshasa, Kingelez was likely among the hundreds of thousands of residents who visited FIKIN in its early years, and it is enticing to think that his encounter there with an array of international cultures and styles, set within a cheerful, orderly microcosm of the larger, sprawling city, influenced his later work.⁸²

Kingelez’s sculptures are filled with evocations of nationally or geographically specific architectural tropes from outside Africa, like the tiered Asian-inspired forms in Palais d’Hirochima, of 1991, which the artist described as a homage to Japanese culture and a salve for the memory of the “intolerable tragedy imposed by the Americans in 40–45.”⁸³ In addition to the fairground, the marvels of Nsele, and the architectural landmarks designed by Cacoub, Kinshasa featured a diverse range of building styles. A group of buildings nicknamed the hollandaises, or “Dutch houses,” had been erected in the Gombe neighborhood around 1925 for the use of colonial functionaries temporarily based in Kinshasa;⁸⁴ they are evoked in Kingelez’s 1991 sculpture Belle Hollandaise, with its swooping gables. Its central grid is backed with Christmas wrapping paper featuring a celestial Santa driving a train full of toys across the night sky, surrounded by gift-giving cherubs and bare- bottomed putti, evocations of the North Pole that may have been prompted by Kingelez’s experience in the chilly northern Netherlands the year it was made.⁸⁵ The title of the work might also refer to wax hollandais textiles, the colorful, patterned wax-printed fabrics that have been designed, manufactured, and exported by the Dutch for African consumption since the mid-nineteenth century.⁸⁶ Vlisco, the most prestigious producer of wax hollandais, has its flagship store in Kinshasa; it continually updates its roster of patterns, incorporating references to contemporary culture, from car brands to political figures.

With U.N., Kingelez made a direct tribute to the United Nations, whose peacekeeping presence had returned to Congo in 1999 after a long hiatus, and whose blue-helmeted personnel were a common sight in Kinshasa. He created the work for Dialogues de paix, a 1995 exhibition in Geneva that celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the United Nations and aimed to include artists from fifty countries on five continents.⁸⁷ Kingelez, who visited Geneva to deliver his work in person, recalled, “It was at the time of the war in Yugoslavia. We stood up for peace, artists from all over the world, but I was the most famous one.”⁸⁸ His contribution was in some ways a striking departure from his earlier sculptures, and he referred to it as “an expansion” of his work.⁸⁹ U.N. has a decidedly asymmetrical overall form: a tall tower with a protruding arc and flared foot at left is paired with a fluted half-circle at right. And the tower’s surface, unusually, has been impressionistically hand-colored and overlaid with a red grid. The interior of the half-circle is lined with narrow bands of black and silver and dotted with collaged stars, and the base is punctuated at irregular intervals with conical trees. A sweeping stair rises to an elevated platform ringed with flags. “The dominant color is clearly blue, the color universally associated with the United Nations,” Kingelez wrote. “The stars are distributed around the form of the building. They represent the member countries, which I want to be equal. In this palace, peace is an indispensable tool for the democracy of nations.”⁹⁰

Kingelez in Paris: Magiciens de la terre

The 1989 exhibition Magiciens de la terre, mounted in Paris at the Centre Georges Pompidou and the Grande Halle de la Villette, was the first to bring Kingelez’s work to an international audience. It would be difficult to overstate the reverberating impact of the show, which Cameron likened several years later to the act of “toss[ing] a bomb into the village square of the international art community.”⁹¹ Organized by curator Jean-Hubert Martin, with Mark Francis, Aline Luque, and André Magnin, Magiciens de la terre was a pioneering and controversial attempt at creating a global contemporary art exhibition. It was planned with the express and primary goal of recalibrating the inclusion of artists from the “mainstream” and the “margins” of artistic production through the development of a checkl​ist that would include Western and non-Western artists in equal proportion. This ambition was met in art history circles with deep suspicion. A preemptive take-down by Guy Brett called into question the project’s potential for success, emphasizing the likelihood that it would end up flattening the artists’ contributions into Western art world–approved sameness: “For have not the subversive and emancipatory projects of the 20th century avant-garde—from the surrealists at one pole, with their proposals to ‘liberate desire,’ to the constructivists at the other, with their plans to transform the environment—been reduced, first by the art market and then by the wider range of lifestyle, to the same bland range of designer- commodities?”⁹² Martin has gone on to devote much of his career to attempts at dissolving the binaries of West/non-West, fine art/vernacular that plague many institutions, and in a lively, at times barbed and contentious conversation in advance of the exhibition, he seemed perfectly aware of the potential pitfalls of his project, refuting each of them in turn and asserting, “Our first concern is with exchange and dialogue, with understanding others in order to understand what we do ourselves.”⁹³

How was it that Kingelez, who at the time had no international profile to speak of, came to be included in the exhibition? The curators called on experts in France and abroad for suggestions and guidance as they began their exploratory research.⁹⁴ One source was Jean-François Bizot, the Paris-based editor-in-chief of the culture-oriented monthly Actuel and founder of the world-music broadcaster Radio Nova, whose work occasionally took him to Kinshasa. He was friendly with Samba, the peintre populaire whom he had commissioned to do a project forActuel in 1982, and so was able to connect the exhibition organizers with him and make some suggestions about whom to see in Kinshasa. Martin himself happened upon the 1984 article by Girard and Soulillou in autrement, with its unattributed black-and-white photograph, and he put the artist on a list of figures to investigate.⁹⁵ He later called on Soulillou, then stationed in Douala, Cameroon, to help locate Kingelez, which he did in 1987.⁹⁶Magnin made a trip to Kinshasa and met the artist; upon his debrief with the curatorial team back in Paris, there seemed to be little doubt that Kingelez would be included in the exhibition.⁹⁷

A photograph taken in Kinshasa in 1988 shows Kingelez sitting in a narrow, high- walled alley with three works intended for the exhibition. Allemagne An 2000 andParis Nouvel were included in the show; the third, Brasilia, was badly damaged in transport.⁹⁸ Kingelez had purchased some materials in Kinshasa with the money advanced by the exhibition organizers upon the commissioning of the sculptures, and while formally they are clearly connected to the earlier work of the 1980s, materially they are noticeably different. Gone are the collaged elements from reclaimed packaging and the palette dictated primarily by the discarded materials Kingelez was able to source. The new mediums include pencil, colored pencil, watercolor, colored paper and cardstock, silver reflective paper, and gold metallic paper (rolled to form tiny tubes), all of which the artist could have bought at a local stationery or hardware store. From this point forward, Kingelez used found materials less often, although he returned to them with gusto in the early 2000s. In an offhand remark, Jonathan Jones later wrote of the artist that “his delicate colourful follies are made from the unwanted detritus of city life. Kingelez incorporates any old rubbish into his architectural language—packaging of all kinds, bits of cardboard, shiny paper.”⁹⁹ In fact, Kingelez always selected his materials with care, and even in the earliest works he did not use stained or discolored paper, despite the challenge that might have presented. Susan Vogel has noted that, “to us [in the West], objects of cardboard and paper seem so ordinary, transitory, flimsy . . . but in Kinshasa these materials mean the opposite. They are exotic, expensive, and imported. It’s even hard to keep this stuff clean.” S¹⁰⁰ Later the artist proudly declared that he had thirty thousand dollars worth of imported art materials in the front room of his house.¹⁰¹

In both Paris Nouvel and Allemagne An 2000—one ebullient, the other restrained— there is a sense of equilibrium and order. The buildings are symmetrical, regular, predictable: an opening on the left is matched by an opening on the right, a structural riposte to the improvisation-dominated ethos of the city in which Kingelez lived and worked. Paris Nouvel is dominated by pristine colored cardstock and, for the first time, gold, which Kingelez would go on to use in many sculptures. The work itself is a veritable riot of color and form, with repeating horizontal bands of sky blue, dancing red diamonds, and bands of white—hewing to the French tricolore—plus snaking ladders of gold. Allemagne An 2000 is almost austere in comparison, a rational, rectangular form of black, red, and white, suggesting the colors of both the East and West German flags. Each level is adorned with the same orderly forms: three circles and a series of vertical parallel lines, along with an odd protruding shape in light green—an abstracted letter “b” that serves as a kind of monogram for the artist and a reminder to viewers that “Bodys made it.”¹⁰²

Elevated on a series of tiers, the building is surrounded by lanterns made of identical pins; lengths of yarn suggest trailing, verdant vines in round and rectangular planters. The painted base reflects Kingelez’s inclination toward floral and star-shaped forms, which recur in almost every work. Both sculptures suggest a national character, early manifestations of this enduring concern.

The catalogue for Magiciens de la terre identifies each of the one hundred participating artists’ country of origin and prints their responses to the question“Qu’est-ce que l’art?” (What is art?). Kingelez answered:

“Art, the rare product of great reflexive values, accompanied by serious movements of imagination, that the author of such invention turns toward the promises of dearer sacrifices of a better and hoped-for future. Art, with all its consequences of maturity, of creativity, is a hidden wealth whose cultivation requires patience, as well as respect of the talents which are specific to the latter in order to be commensurate with this knowledge. A vital necessity, art is a progress which marks the importance of a person, of a practice, or of a city that is developing harmoniously. Art is a higher knowledge of doing well in order to, in the end, live well, as it is one of modernism’s types of individual and collective renewal.”¹⁰³

In this, his first published text, the artist’s persona as a writer is fully developed. Lofty, high-minded, with big goals and ideals, he aspired to nothing less than a radical rethinking of the world around him. Just as he created his own visual language in his sculpture, he also began to invent new nouns and adjectives and new sentence structures to describe his philosophy and works. Kingelez had begun producing descriptive texts to accompany his sculptures in the early 1980s,¹⁰⁴ and by the late ’80s and early ’90s many of his new objects were paired with such a document. Virtually impossible to translate faithfully from the original French, the texts give another window into Kingelez’s ethos and ideas. As Marie Lemeltier and Céline Soutif have written, these manuscripts have much in common with the sculptures they accompany: “In his texts as in his extrêmes maquettes, he presents himself as the creator of a new language. The artist imagines an unedited vocabulary and a rhetoric that form what he calls his ‘langage bodysois.’ In effect, he uses fanciful words and syntax that reflect the demiurgic character of their creator. For the viewer-reader, the understanding of his texts requires abandoning all traditional or academic reference.”¹⁰⁵ The extrême maquette finds its literary parallel in the artist’s personal language, in which he constructs with words rather than with paper.

Magiciens de la terre included six sculptures by Kingelez, a combination of works made in Kinshasa and Paris, as he had been commissioned by the curators on behalf of the Grande Halle de la Villette to make several sculptures on-site.¹⁰⁶ The curatorial team supplied him with materials, assistants, and a studio space in the exhibition hall. Two of these works were reproduced in the catalogue. La Croix du Ciel, a sky-blue tower more than eleven (miniature) stories tall and clad in a fitting azure, takes the form of an eight-pointed star. The work is marked by no fewer than four assertions of the maker’s identity: a round emblem with a fluted border that proudly announces in penciled block letters “BODYS ISEK-INGELEZ Kinshasa ZAÏRE ARCHITECTE MAQUETTISTE”; “Bodys isek-Kingelez L’Architecte,” in red marker; and “Bodys-Isek-Ingelez” and “Bodys Isek Ingelez” in graphite. La Mitterannéenne Française, the other work reproduced in the catalogue, also reflects the artist’s concerns with symmetry, regularity, and repetition, with nesting and layering, and with verticality and elevation, as it too reaches skyward, topped by a finial bedecked with an eight-pointed star. The title of the work introduces Kingelez’s signature punning wordplay, in this case referring to François Mitterrand, then president of France. But while Mitterrand is referred to only once, the name of the maker (“Bodys,” “Bodys-Isek-Ingelez,” “Bodys-Ingelez-Isek”) appears multiple times. These repetitions suggest the central position of the work’s author. Unlike the anonymous objects Kingelez repaired at the IMNZ, these sculptures were not made by an invisible hand: the artist demands acknowledgement.

Another work Kingelez made in Paris is Mausolée de Kingelez, a sculpture of imposing scale and a horizontality new to his oeuvre. It takes the form of a multipointed, star-shaped tube, like one of his towers turned on its side and inflated. Video footage of the artist at work shows him hovering over the all-white skeleton of the unfinished work, placing and then re-placing elements with long tweezers and testing and adjusting the curve of the roof elements.¹⁰⁷ Constructed primarily of white foamcore and blue cardstock and decorated with marker, the central form has open grids at its ends that suggest large divided windows. They are lined with cotton mesh (presumably a newly acquired material), suggesting a screen or scrim. Perhaps most extraordinary are the tiny plastic figurines, the kind used to populate architectural models, arrayed inside like visitors to a tourist attraction.

Kingelez’s participation in Magiciens de la terre was a turning point in his career, as it was the first significant exposure of his work to curators, scholars, and collectors. Prior to the exhibition, Kingelez had not been well known even in his hometown. A headline in the March 23, 1988, issue of the Kinshasa-based dailySalongo—“Chéri Samba à Paris”—heralds another local artist’s inclusion in the first exhibition of “artists from the whole world,” touting Samba’s singular genius and his exceptional contribution to Magiciens de la terre, as described by Magnin.¹⁰⁸ The last sentence of the article reports that “Bodis [sic] Kingelez maquettiste architecte autodidacte” would also be included. Kingelez wrote to Magnin to request that the spelling of his name be corrected in the article, which suggests that he himself did not have the necessary contact at the newspaper to do so.¹⁰⁹ Soulillou has reported that when he located Kingelez in advance of the show, “he was living far from the center. . . . He had not many prospects to earn any [money] from his work in . . . Kinshasa.”¹¹⁰ A 1999 painting by Moké, Kingelez à ses débuts, depicts the young artist at work in a modest setting, slicing a sheet of colored paper. He is surrounded by sculptures (including 1981’s Approche de l’Échangeur de Limete Kin) but isolated and ignored by those around him.

In addition to the works he made for Magiciens de la terre, Kingelez produced several other sculptures during his six months in Paris, including Bel Atlas andStars Palme Bouygues.¹¹¹ These two sculptures directly reflect the artist’s experience in Paris. Kingelez was in the city on July 14, 1989, the bicentennial of the French Revolution, when the Grande Arche de la Défense, a distinctive, massive hollow cube of a building, was inaugurated with a military parade. Part of Mitterrand’s Grands Projets program of transformative new civic buildings, the monument was designed by a Danish team and engineered and built by the France-based multinational developer Bouygues. Its inauguration likely appeared on the front page of every newspaper in the city. Kingelez completed Bel Atlas two weeks later; it features a triangular form in lieu of the cube, floating within an open three-sided frame. Stars Palme Bouygues followed shortly after; its remarkable inverted-triangle form was a tacit challenge issued to the company’s founder, Francis Bouygues, by the artist.¹¹² Kingelez again worked with the blue, white, and red of the French flag, creating a sense of intricacy through repetition—in the open grid of the sculpture’s two wings, the checkerboard of the base, the barbershop stripes of the entry arch, and the tricolor planters, benches, and barriers. The repetition also imposes a sense of structure and control, despite the seeming illogic of the overall form. If he were envisioning this as a built site, Kingelez thought of everything, from the parking to the bar. The sculpture is celebratory and joyful but also an assertion of confidence and prowess: Anything you can do, I can do better.

The photographer, collector, and businessman Jean Pigozzi was enraptured byMagiciens de la terre, particularly the works by African artists. He later recalled, “The great shock for me was that African art wasn’t just what I had seen at the Musée du quai Branly in Paris or The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. It was Samba, [Frédéric Bruly] Bouabré, Kingelez, who had been completely unknown to me. When I saw Kingelez, I thought, ‘Wow! I want to meet this guy. I want to take him to Las Vegas and help him build the most amazing casino ever!’”¹¹³ Pigozzi quickly engaged Magnin to help him create what is now an unmatched collection of art from sub-Saharan Africa: the Contemporary African Art Collection (CAAC—The Pigozzi Collection). Of the twenty-one African artists inMagiciens de la terre, ten are represented in the CAAC—some, including Kingelez, in great depth.¹¹⁴ After six months in Paris, Kingelez returned to Kinshasa, and one of Magnin’s first trips as curator of the CAAC was to that city, where he reunited with the artist and began commissioning new works from him.¹¹⁵ This relationship would last until the artist’s death, and in time the collection grew to include more than thirty of his sculptures, by far the greatest concentration of Kingelez’s work anywhere.

Extrêmes Maquettes Around the World

Since 1989, Kingelez’s work has been shown in nearly thirty countries on six continents. In the years immediately following Magiciens de la terre, he was included in numerous important exhibitions, the first of which was África hoy: Obras de la Contemporary African Art Collection, the CAAC’s initial major show, which opened in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain, in 1991, before traveling to the Groninger Museum, in the Netherlands, and Mexico City’s Centro Cultural Arte Contemporáneo. Kingelez was the subject of monographic shows in Berlin, at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in 1992, and in Paris, at the Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain in 1995. He traveled extensively, often visiting the cities where his work was on view. In 1997 he participated in the second Johannesburg Biennale, his first opportunity to exhibit in Africa. Titled Trade Routes: History and Geography, the biennial was overseen by artistic director Okwui Enwezor, who in the following years would have a critical role in making Kingelez’s work visible to a broader public. The biennial addressed the general theme of historical cultural exchange; it comprised six installations, each organized by a different curator. Kingelez was part of the installation Hong Kong, etc, curated by Hou Hanru, which took the titular locale as emblematic of a postcolonial hybrid city, primed for the collision of the forces of globalization: unstable and ambiguous, on the verge of transformation, congested and soaring, bridging north, south, east, and west. Featuring a number of Asian and Asian-diaspora artists, including Huang Yong Ping and Fiona Tan, it created a framework in which the future-facing orientation of Kingelez’s work was deeply resonant.

His sculptures were presented in a specifically African context in The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa, 1945–1994, a landmark 2001 exhibition organized by Enwezor, which examined a dynamic and politically charged half-century through the lens of liberation and art movements. Kingelez’s work was presented in a section devoted to modern and contemporary art, which included paintings and drawings by Ibrahim El-Salahi, photographs by Seydou Keïta and Malick Sidibé, and sculpture by Yinka Shonibare. Together these works exemplified African artists’ systematization, deployment, and use of modern forms, values, and structures rather than presenting modernism as a model imposed by the West. In the twenty-fifth São Paulo biennial, Iconografias metropolitanas, curator Alfons Hug positioned Kingelez’s work not in an ethnographic or geographic framework but rather in a thematic one. It was included in a section devoted to utopia, a so-called “12th City” of focus in addition to the eleven real-world metropolises, including Caracas, Istanbul, and London, that structured the exhibition. His work appeared alongside that of artists including Carsten Höller (Germany), Los Carpinteros (Cuba), and Sarah Sze (USA).

Also in 2002, Kingelez’s inclusion in documenta 11, the landmark quinquennial exhibition in Kassel, Germany, cemented his position as an artist of international significance. Deeply informed by the conditions of postcolonialism and globalism, Enwezor, the event’s artistic director, aimed, he wrote, to create a space that rejected “normalization or uniformization of all artistic visions on their way to institutional beatification.”¹¹⁶ Kingelez was an ideal fit—an artist who had developed his own visual language and remained true to it, unswayed by broader currents in contemporary art, the demands of the market, or the influence of collecting and exhibiting institutions.

Toward Utopia: The Cities

In addition to the sculptures of individual buildings Kingelez made in those years, the 1990s saw him engaging at a new level with the broader urban landscape, combining multiple structures in single works as he had done much earlier inKinshasa: Cité du 24 Novembre de l’Authenticité Africaine, the earliest known example. In Magiciens de la terre, Kingelez had installed Mausolée de Kingelez on the same pedestal as several other sculptures (designated simply as “immeubles,” or buildings), which he connected with roadways and populated with tiny figurines. But those structures lacked the characteristic attention to detail, layering, and repetition present in his work at the time, and they may have been constructed quickly in situ merely to provide the suggestion of a wider landscape. In 1992 Kingelez started amalgamating buildings in Kimbembele Ihunga (Kimbembele Ville), a homage to his home village. Set on a tripartite base, the work comprises several distinct, fully realized buildings, noticeably smaller in scale than his earlier pieces. It also includes thoroughfares: the buildings are centered on the intersection of the boulevards Isek and Kingelez.

In 1993 he began another work named for his hometown, Kimbembele Ihunga, a massive sculpture that would take nearly two years to complete and that would mark a quantum leap forward in his thinking about multibuilding sculptures.¹¹⁷Filling a platform approximately six feet wide and ten feet long, it is a complex and comprehensive vision for the future of the community. At the “Gare Meridion,” a high-speed train waits in the station beneath a roof with honeycomb cutouts. Buildings with grand, curving staircases and towers delineated with thin strips of gold metallic tape form a dizzying grid. They include a church, a grocery store, and numerous named structures: the “M’Boyo Building,” the “Wa-ta-di” restaurant, and “Kingelez Stadium,” with its soccer pitch. In his statement about the work, the artist emphasized its futuristic aspect (as well as its connection to his own legacy):

“The monument of Kimbéville belongs to a genre of art which has attained its zenith presenting what already has the potential to become or is on the way to becoming a reality. Gradually the town of Kimbembele-Ihunga, abbreviated to Kimbéville by its creator-maker, the enlightened artist of new horizons, Bodys Isek Kingelez, should glorify the times rather than exist merely to further my own success and prosperity, in view of my fame and international reputation as a highly talented artist. . . . Kimbéville with its dazzling array of forms and colors is a 21st- century environment which has fired my artistic imagination.”¹¹⁸

The text goes on to state that the community he created is a “real bridge between world civilizations of the past, the present, and the future”and cites its potential, if realized, to become a tourist attraction.¹¹⁹ It describes the town’s sectors and sections, its leading clans, and how they are connected to him. A public sculpture in front of the town hall is a tribute to Kingelez’s father; striding forward, the figure bears some resemblance to Le bouclier de la révolution (The shield of the revolution), a monumental sculpture by Alfred Liyolo (born 1943) that replaced a likeness of Henry Morton Stanley on Mont Ngaliema in 1971. Kingelez’s figure carries not a shield and spear but a book: “This statue carrying his body of knowledge in his hand, simply represents the intellectual heritage of common sense and good manners which belongs to multicultural people. This is the way my father has proudly risen above the meaning of a ceremonial life to practice art in praise of beauty and grace which will bring about a better world.”¹²⁰

Kimbembele Ihunga is replete with formal self-references, evoking the cascading waves of Stars Palme Bouygues and the open geometries and fluted trees, now inflated to skyscraper height, of Bel Atlas. It is a summary of the artist’s formal invention up to that point in his career and a kind of self-portrait: a mapping of the people and places that shaped him. Of course, there was a local precedent for such a miraculous transformation, a dusty small town turned into an international metropolis: the (temporary) metamorphosis of Gbadolite into an utterly modern center for industry and government. Over the next several years, Kingelez immersed himself in the arduous creation of large-scale cities, making around eight altogether, including Ville Fantôme and Ville de Sète 3009.

In the summer of 2000, Kingelez traveled to Sète, in southern France, for a residency at the boundary-crossing Musée International des Arts Modestes (MIAM), which was then just about to open its doors. Founded by artists Hervé Di Rosa and Bernard Belluc, the museum sought to elide distinctions between fine art, folk art, popular art, and the work of self-taught artists. MIAM commissioned a work from Kingelez, and during the weeks of his residency he created Ville de Sète 3009, a homage to his host city that he executed with an emerging formal looseness.

Traversed by canals and ringed with a blue that suggests the sea, Ville de Sète 3009 makes concrete references to the maritime city in which it was made. There are numerous references to Paul Boyé, the textile and uniform manufacturer founded in Sète in 1904; to the Hôtel Azur, where Kingelez stayed, just down the quai de Bosc from MIAM; and even to the city’s summer water-jousting tournament, a tradition since the seventeenth century. None of the buildings bear any resemblance to their prosiac real-world counterparts, however; instead, they glow with translucent hues, sparkle with dustings of glitter, flash from a sea of metallic gold stars, and twinkle with the electric lights Kingelez installed along the work’s central axis.

There is, notably, a hospital anchoring one corner of the sculpture. While a medical facility is the focus of The Scientific Center of Hospitalisation the SIDA, it is a rarer occurrence in Kingelez’s work than a bank, an office, or a stadium. It was during this period in Sète that the artist experienced the symptoms that would shortly result in a cancer diagnosis. Pigozzi arranged for Kingelez to be treated in Paris, and the radical surgery that saved his life also sapped his energy, necessitating changes in his day-to-day behavior. Even before his treatment, however, Kingelez knew that all was not lost. He positioned the hospital in Ville de Sète 3009 not far from the “baie d’Espoir,” or Bay of Hope.

Kingelez’s most productive period was now behind him, and his artistic output slowed. In October 2001 he told a visitor, “I’m so tired. It’s so hot, it’s the start of the rainy season. I just had cancer. . . . At the moment, I don’t need more work.”¹²¹The following year, however, Kingelez made another ambitious project: New Manhattan (Manhattan City 3021), a response to the shattering terrorist attack on the World Trade Center towers in New York on September 11, 2001. The work, a city sculpture, reflected both his sympathy for the grieving city and a proposal for amelioration: “I have an idea to replace the two towers. I want to build three towers. The third tower is a defense against bombs. The third tower is filled with water, and its cooling effect will prevent any bomb from exploding. I want to prevent the current towers from being destroyed in a cruel manner. I think it’s good. Thanks to my solution, the Americans will find an appropriate solution that will help dry their tears and heal their wounds.”¹²²

Success was double-edged for Kingelez. He achieved his dream of getting into “the realm of real estate,” as he had joked, and toward the end of his life he reportedly owned as many as thirty houses dotted across Kinshasa.Draper, “Kinshasa: Urban Pulse of the Congo,” 123. For the joke about real estate, see Kingelez, “Artist’s Statement,” 6. Although he never made his home anywhere else, he occasionally expressed frustration with the city, which he considered to be at odds with his own ambitions—the call of “Work, work, work” that “resonated like an echo” in his head.¹²³ “I stay in Kinshasa to work,” he said, “even though the climate is disastrous for my oeuvre and for me, because this is where I have the moral support of my family. But I am like a stranger in Congo, where I have never been recognized. It’s mostly foreigners who commission my work.”¹²⁴ By many accounts, Kingelez responded to his material success by becoming more reclusive, staying at home with his extended family, his wives, and his children, venturing outside only rarely.¹²⁵ Perhaps as a result, he wasn’t as well known in his own country as Samba, for example, nor idolized internationally like the sapeur and pop star Papa Wemba, the “King of Rumba Rock,” whose death in 2016 sparked outpourings of grief and public tributes from Paris to Nairobi.¹²⁶ In 2013, two years before his death, Kingelez said to a reporter, “Here in Kinshasa, I’ve never done any exhibition. Let me tell you, no one knows who I am or what I do. Two weeks ago, I was very sick, and I was about to die in front of my wife. No one in Kinshasa would have known. Nothing on the radio or the TV or the newspapers. That’s the way it goes in the Congo.”¹²⁷

Kingelez died on March 14, 2015. Three days later, the notice of his death in the French newspaper Le monde hailed him as a “monument of Congolese art” and aptly identified both the utopian underpinnings of his oeuvre and the implicit social critique in his “chimerical architecture . . . without police or cemetery, traffic or congestion.”¹²⁸

In 2000 the artist claimed to have produced 3,014 works over the preceding twenty-five years.¹²⁹ While that is almost surely an overestimate, it is also certain that sculptures have been lost to floods and shipping accidents, to the effects of time on paper and glue, to oversight and human error. In researching this project, I have seen just over one hundred or so single works and eight cities by Kingelez in collections around the world. Yet even in this relatively modest number, his oeuvre is a towering achievement, a body of sculpture with tremendous visual allure and enduring social resonance.

Kingelez anchored his work in the present and the recent past and in the fabric of the city around him, inspired equally by colonial architecture, the ambitious buildings of post-Independence Zaire, and idioms that typify national building styles. But his work was always future facing. In an era in which cities, including Kinshasa, were (and continue to be) under pressure to accommodate unprecedented rates of growth and the attendant challenges to civic life, Kingelez pointed a way forward, offering models of beauty, harmony, and functionality. His work addressed the great challenges of the twentieth century—decolonization, health crises, the quest for nationhood and national identity—but it is infused with potential, both philosophical and formal. In his hands, new, cooperative ways of living and working were possible, and the most mundane of materials could become technically precise, inventive, and elegant objects. He declared himself “a designer, an architect, a sculptor, engineer, artist.” His dazzling sculptures, manifestations of a future that perhaps only he could see, suggest one additional role: “A visionary,” he said, “is someone who dreams of what doesn’t exist yet.”¹³⁰

Title and epigraph: The phrase “Kingelez visionnaire” is inscribed throughout the artist’s work Kimbembele Ihunga. For the epigraph, see Bodys Isek Kingelez, “Artist’s Statement,” in Perspectives 145: Bodys Isek Kingelez(Houston: Contemporary Arts Museum, 2005), 9. This extraordinary autobiographical statement was adapted from an interview in French between Kingelez and André Magnin in Paris and Kinshasa in 2000.

This essay by Sarah Suzuki was originally published in the exhibition catalog Bodys Isek Kingelez , available in the MoMA bookstore.

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While the arenas of contemporary art and traditional practice can sometimes seem starkly disconnected, an exploration of cultural and aesthetic traditions is one fruitful lens through which artists have considered and addressed current conditions. Often this is achieved through a re-investigation of methods, materials, and motifs. While these forms are sometimes identified with a historical place and time, and are no longer practiced, others continue to be viable and relevant today, though often situated within the realm of craft, vernacular culture, or folklore, rather than of high culture or the avant-garde.

In a recent series of materially and formally hybrid collaborations, called Fields of Sight, the artists Gauri Gill and Rajesh Vangad suggest the proximity and productive tension of the traditional and the contemporary, as they mix visual languages, artistic strategies, and global concerns in new and surprising ways. The Delhi-based photographer Gauri Gill has become a strong voice in the international contemporary art community over the last few years, with gallery exhibitions and major photography prizes, as well as group shows at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Yale University Art Gallery, the Whitechapel Gallery, and the Smithsonian’s Freer Gallery and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery in Washington, D.C. Since 1999 Gill has embedded herself in nomadic Rajasthani communities, documenting the everyday lives, traditions, and struggles of their citizens, often revisiting the same subjects over an extended period of time in a continuous process of documentation, as in the ongoing series Notes from the Desert. 

Her collaborator for Fields of Sight, Rajesh Vangad, comes from a very different segment of India’s art world—he practices the traditional tribal folk form known as Warli. Vangad has recently been awarded major commissions in Mumbai, at the Consulate General of Switzerland, and the Chhatrapati Shivaji International Airport. His work is in the collections of the National Crafts Museum in Delhi and the Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art. He is a third-generation practitioner of Warli, an art form that dates back to 3000 BCE and is his matrilineal legacy. Warli painting relies heavily on a geometric vocabulary of circles, triangles, and squares, inventively combined to suggest human and animal forms engaged in the activities of daily life, of harvest, and of other yearly rituals, but as Vangad says, “Art thrives when it expands,” and his distinctive style includes contemporary motifs and images.

Fields of Sight, comprising Gill’s black-and-white photographs, dizzyingly overdrawn with Vangad’s dancing Warli forms, resulted from a series of long conversations between the artists, with Vangad sharing the history, legends, and folklore of his hometown of Ganjad, which has a complex history of change and unrest. The pictures speak to both artists’ interpretations of the physical and spiritual landscape, and of the city’s past, present, and future. Vangad appears in each image, not only as an artist, but also as a narrator, suggesting that he is spinning stories that fill the pictographic space. The pair of pictures seen here suggests an urban-rural continuum, a breakneck rate of change and growth, the centrality of ecological concerns. Perhaps an unlikely pairing—a contemporary photographer obsessed with documenting communities that live almost beyond the reach of the present, and a traditional artist bringing an ancient form into the modern moment—Gill and Vangad have produced a thought-provoking body of work that asks the viewer to expand his or her own field of sight.

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This text was originally published under the theme “Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Research Institute for the Study of Art from Latin America.” The original content items in this theme can be found here.

As one of the leading figures in postwar Brazilian art, Mira Schendel worked across mediums, from painting and sculpture to artist’s books. Perhaps most critically, she redefined the possibilities of a drawing practice—and indeed, what a drawing could be—not only for herself, but also for subsequent generations of artists. MoMA’s holdings of drawings by Schendel are quite extraordinary, and document many facets of her wide-ranging practice, from her use of paper as a sculptural material, knotted and corporeal in the Droguinhas (Little nothings), to the austere, almost mystical seriality of Trenzinho (Little train).

The incredible, masterful Sem título (Objeto gráfico) (Untitled [Graphic object]) is from what is likely her best-known series of drawings, made in 1966 and 1967. This work began as a very thin sheet of Japanese paper, which was inscribed by hand with forms suggesting alphabets both real and invented—reflecting Schendel’s longstanding interest in experimental writing and exploration of language and its forms—and collaged with Letraset type, which signals her interest in concrete poetry, creating a tension between the handmade and the commercially produced. The sheet was then sandwiched between two sheets of Plexiglas, and configured to be hung in space, where it suggests the density of language, our need to navigate through and around it, and the body’s interaction and confrontation with it. At the same time, it dissolves one of the most basic traditional notions of a drawing: that it has a front and back.

Though Schendel was in dialogue with her Brazilian colleagues, her artistic voice was a unique one. She subscribed to no school, no group, no movement, and moreover, her work was in a constant state of evolution.

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Though she was born in Karachi, Shah’s life has been a peripatetic one. She moved
to Brussels at the age of two, and later spent time in the United Kingdom before
moving to the United States. Her adolescent years were spent in New York, and
followed by a move to Providence, where she studied architecture at the Rhode
Island School of Design. Today she lives and works in New Delhi, and continues to
travel extensively, resulting in a personal and specific cultural mash-up that blends
elements from the various and varied places in which she has lived and studied.

Shah’s oeuvre to date consists primarily of works on paper, including digital prints
and drawings that reflect her architectural studies. In The Black Star project, the
layering of images encompasses minutely detailed architectural renderings,
intricately wrought drawings referring to the miniature tradition, snippets of Mughal
portraiture, and her own snapshots from her ongoing archive. Shah’s works create
unique tensions: she includes concrete references, such as Mecca’s holiest site, the
Kaaba, but her images possess a dreamlike lack of specificity overall; their beauty is
tough and hard-edged, devoid of any exotic palette in favor of a nearly
monochromatic one; and the images seem both historical and relentlessly of the
moment. The reappearance of forms and figures in different sheets from the portfolio
hint at a story and cast of characters that are viewed through a personal lens, but the
images resist the soft focus of nostalgia and our desire to unravel a suggested
narrative. Here, the technique is a perfect fit for the project, incorporating digital tools
that have allowed the artist to easily collect and catalogue the recurring elements of
her lexicon, and to layer the various elements of her source material.

Shah has moved in new directions since she made The Black Star in 2007. A visit to
her studio in Delhi revealed that she is continuing to reexamine recent history and
India’s modernist architectural legacy, in the form of small sculptures and woodblock
prints, as well as in monumental, architecturally inspired drawings.

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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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1. On the Second Kochi-Muziris Biennale: Whorled Explorations

By Cara Manes

Kochi was our first stop on what was, for everyone on this leg of the trip, our first visit to India. We arrived in the major port city of Kochi, in the southwestern region of Kerala, in the middle of the night, and then shuffled into our hotel beds for a few precious hours of rest before venturing into the southern Indian sun toward the main site of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale. Whorled Explorations, the biennial’s second edition, was organized by Jitish Kallat, an internationally esteemed contemporary artist based in Mumbai. Appointed by the biennial’s Artistic Advisory Committee, Kallat was tasked with envisioning a show that “responds to the environment that hosts it,” according to the accompanying exhibition catalogue. Indeed, since its founding in 2012, the biennial’s mission has been to “draw from the rich tradition and public action and public engagement in Kerala . . . and build a new aesthetic that interrogates both the past and the present.”

Past and present certainly converge in the city of Kochi, where sixteenth-century Portuguese churches are intermingled with spice markets and restaurants on streets filled with auto-rickshaws and goats vying for the right of way. The biennial integrated seamlessly into this dialectical space. Kallat built a conceptual framework for the exhibition around an investigation of oppositional forces, as he explained when we met with him in Dubai a few days before our visit. In his curatorial essay for the catalogue, he cites two historic currents from the fourteenth to seventeenth centuries that informed his thinking—the maritime explorations of the Age of Discovery and the astronomical propositions made by the Kerala school of astronomy and mathematics. By examining the location’s history, he aimed to “reflect back or forth in time to understand the present” and to “interlace the bygone with the imminent, the terrestrial with the celestial.” Toward that end, he selected a wide range of works by ninety-five artists from thirty countries that speaks broadly to these themes. He organized the works into installations in eight venues across the city, each one a heterogeneous presentation. Free of any chronological, geographical, or medium-specific constraints, Kallat employed a seemingly more intuitive curatorial logic to create a host of unique, generative juxtapositions. Throughout the exhibition, however, a general leitmotif was discernable: Kallat seemed to gravitate toward work involving globes, compasses, maps, telescopes, and star charts—tools for plotting a course through space and time.

Encapsulating Kallat’s point of view and setting a tone for experiencing the biennial through this lens, Powers of Ten, a well-known 1977 film by Charles and Ray Eames, is the exhibition’s opening work. In it, a camera zooms out at a rate of one power of ten every ten seconds, and then back in at the same rate, so that the pictured image first expands incrementally from human to cosmic scale and then contracts in the same manner. The work is installed at the biennial’s main site, Aspinwall House, the sea-facing compound of offices, residences, and warehouses built for a nineteenth-century British trading company. The physical space itself unfolds as a series of successive rooms in loosely adjoining buildings surrounding a central courtyard, each roughly devoted to one artist or project. Other highlights from this venue include Francesco Clemente’s Pepper Tent, a giant tent painted with scenes inspired by the artist’s travels around the world, and the crowd-pleasing Descension by the well-known Indian artist Anish Kapoor, an abyss-like whirlpool cut into the existing floor, which serves as a literal illustration of the thematic “whorl” of the exhibition’s title.

Interspersed among large site-specific installations by internationally renowned artists such as these were many smaller-scale works by younger artists. Installed in an interstitial space at Aspinwall House, American artist Tara Kelton’s video work depicts a laptop screen placed against the open door at the end of a commuter train in Bangalore that is live streaming video feed from a camera placed at the front of the train, suggesting the sensation of simultaneous time travel. One of the greatest discoveries for me was the work of Kerala-born artist Unnikrishnan C. At twenty-three, he was the youngest artist to participate in the biennial. For his project, installed in the show’s Pepper House venue, he spent two months in Kochi (a few hours from his hometown) recording his observations of daily life in the city by painting figures, objects, symbols, and simple scenes onto individual bricks and arranging them into a site-specific “brick wall diary,” as he has described his project. Unnikrishnan seems to be developing a unique visual language that blends the personal and universal; I look forward to seeing more from him!

2. Notes on CAMP at the Dr. Bhau Daji Lad Mumbai City Museum

By Jennifer Tobias

Representing the MoMA Library during the March 2015 C-MAP trip to Dubai, Sharjah, Mumbai, and Delhi, I was most taken by the fascinating institution known as the Dr. Bhau Daji Lad Mumbai City Museum (DBDL), its revival by Tasneem Zakaria Mehta (Managing Trustee, Honorary Director, and MoMA International Council member), and the current installation by CAMP, a self-described studio organized in 2007 by Shaina Anand (filmmaker), Sanjay Bhangar (software programmer), and Ashok Sukumaran (architect). Visiting with Mehta and two CAMPers on site helped me to grasp a particular segment of the installation—The Annotated “Gujarat and the Sea” Exhibition—as a compelling historiographic palimpsest.

As a self-aware de- and reconstruction of a colonial museum, the DBDL is a fertile setting for a meta-exhibition. A striking Victorian structure in the heart of Mumbai, constructed in response to the 1851 Great Exhibition in London, the DBDL opened in 1872 as the Victoria and Albert Museum, Bombay. By the late 1990s the museum was neglected, but Mehta organized an innovative public-private partnership to restore and revitalize the institution, which reopened in 2008. In addition to the structure itself, two salient Raj-era aspects of the institution that survive today are the collection of “Indian manufactures” and model-filled displays presenting a history of Mumbai.

Mehta conceived of artist involvement as a key element of the revived mission. Noting that the collection was originally built with little interest in individual makers, her approach today is to “bring artists back to the center” through enlightened management of the legacy collection, building a contemporary collection, and—most relevant here—a stimulating series of interventions. In this framework, artists (especially alumnae of the related Sir J. J. School of Art) conceive installations that engage the space and the collections, often addressing local culture in light of both the colonial legacy and contemporary social issues.

CAMP’s series of installations, titled As If – III Country of the Sea, brings together segments of the group’s multi-year project examining maritime culture proximal to the western Indian Ocean. The Annotated “Gujarat and the Sea” segment revisits an installation first realized in 2011 at Lalit Kala Academi in Delhi.That project deconstructed an eponymous 2010 exhibition and symposium (and later a book) organized in the Gujarat port town of Mandvi. The exhibit, initiated by a local historical society, was composed largely of digital reproductions of artifacts held by UK archives as well as private collections, with the reproductions licensed for the duration of the show. Scholars from around the world participated in the symposium, and the show traveled to other sites in Gujarat.

The installation at DBDL constitutes primarily photos of photos of photos. For example, a photograph of a photograph of the annotated checklist (left, top) shows a cryptic and apparently damning list of the show’s organizers. In another example (left, middle), a photo of a photo of primary-source documents, which are held by what is presumably a Gujarati hand, is annotated with the oblique, “Not just Word of Mouth but Slide of Hand On a replica Gujerati navigation log dated 1644.” In a clearer example (left, bottom), a photo of a colonial map of Gujarat is updated with present-day claims by British Gas. Although it’s difficult to do a close reading at this remove, CAMP’s argument is clear: they object to the use of colonial spoils licensed back to its subjects, and they charge that limiting local informants to a caste of Hindu seafarers failed to account for the diversity of the colonial period and the present.

As an art-making strategy, Annotated “Gujarat and the Sea” is an excellent foil for CAMP’s more critical (if less edited) larger project about contemporary maritime culture in the region. Where the original show featured aura-deprived reproductions of colonial spoils, CAMP’s larger project counters with a barrage of ostensibly collaborative contemporary media (radio, cell phone data, video, shipping records) and extended (if coy) interpretive texts. If the Annotated “Gujarat and the Sea” show can be criticized as unreflective colonial nostalgia, CAMP’s work errs in the other direction: it is anthropological in its thoroughness and reluctance to draw explicit conclusions.

I conclude that this is precisely the point of the Annotated “Gujarat and the Sea” : to engender critical thinking about the historiographic endeavor. Experiencing this in person, in the DBDL context, and from the C-MAP perspective, was a wonderful object lesson.

3. Studio Visits in Mumbai and Delhi

By Sarah Lookofsky

In Mumbai we met the artist Shilpa Gupta in her studio. She gave us an overview of her diverse practice, particularly her most recent works. I was especially struck by the site specificity of her practice, since I had previously understood her work, which I had encountered in European museum contexts, as abstract and conceptual. Upon speaking with her about her most recent pieces, it was clear that most of her practice is deeply invested in the Indian context, particular the deep scars of partition that persist in the present. For instance, she spoke of a recent untitled body of work (2013–14) that addresses the Chitmahals, the Bangladeshi minority enclaves in India and vice versa—sites where 51,000 people effectively live within a hostile nation. Gupta’s presentation made me ponder two important phenomena that impact the global circuits of contemporary art: on the one hand, it is often the more metaphorical and conceptual works that circulate internationally and, on the other, works that have a local specificity take on a more metaphorical meaning once they leave local audiences and their frameworks of reference behind.

In Amar Kanwar’s New Delhi studio, among other topics, the documentary filmmaker discussed his forays into what could be described as narrowcasting (as opposed to broadcasting to the widest possible audience): screening his films directly to the people who are depicted in them and most affected by them in turn. He has put very considerable investments of time and funds into a continued presence in the remote Indian locales on which his films have focused. For Lightning Testimonies (2007), the site of filming and later screening was the state of Assam; and, for The Sovereign Forest (2012–), a place of continued display was established in Odisha. This direct involvement importantly exists alongside Kanwar’s ongoing screening and exhibiting within both cinematic and artistic contexts, making his practice a unique example of one that engages activism and art at the same time. Kanwar was very insistent that he does not see a contradiction or problem in inhabiting these multiple contexts, and thus different spheres of comprehension, at once, arguing that the problems his works engage—whether sexual violence or economic disenfranchisement, to name just two important examples—are of the broadest consequence.

As our conversation was closing, Kanwar mentioned something that has stuck with me: once he has documented something or completed a film, he is always deeply preoccupied with what he experienced in the moment of shooting but, nevertheless, did not manage to record. This insight struck me as profound in the context of a world that is evermore mediated. Despite our increasing capacity to record everything, there is still so much, for better or worse, that will continue to elude capture.

4. TRANSFIGURATIONS: The Sculpture of Mrinalini Mukherjee

On the flight home from Dubai, I couldn’t stop thinking about Mrinalini Mukherjee. For me, a jam-packed trip always creates a collection of lingering afterimages—Dayanita Singh’s collection of “museums” installed in her studio; the brightly colored boats in the Sharjah Creek, which we followed to find Michael Joo’s installation; the gently turning forms of the wind garden that Haegue Yang had installed in a small courtyard in Sharjah’s Heritage District—and occasionally an image that’s insistent, refusing to fade, staying at the front of my mind until I can get back to the library and start digging up more.

Mrinalini Mukherjee (1949–2015) was a leading sculptor of her generation in India. However, her work wasn’t widely exhibited internationally, and so for me, the monographic exhibition at the National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi, organized by Peter Nagy, was revelatory. I had seen three intriguing examples in the Gwangju Biennial last fall, installed there with photographs by Lionel Wendt, but this show covered it all. Her practice comprised an in-depth material experimentation and relied primarily on dyed hemp fibers for nearly five decades, before she turned to embrace ceramics and later bronze. Her works simultaneously suggest figurative and botanical forms, arising from both nature and modernist strategies, capable of both structure and formlessness.

As a student at the University of Baroda, Mukherjee was exposed to the pedagogical philosophy of K. G. Subramanyan, which embraced equally craft and “high art” techniques and strategies. This intersection can often be a thorny one, difficult to navigate, and it is one of the topics that’s touched on in the current exhibition Scenes for a New Heritage: Contemporary Art from The Collection. Mukherjee addressed this issue head-on in a 1994 interview, noting, “In India the arts have always existed alongside each other, at different levels of sophistication. India has an enormous wealth of craft, and I believe in an integrated approach to art and craft, so I enjoy working with the linguistics developed by the practice of craft. It is through my relationship to my material that I would like to reach out and align myself with the values which exist within the ambit of contemporary sculpture.” (“An Interview with Mrinalini Mukherjee.” In Mrinalini Mukherjee: Sculpture, 11. Oxford: Museum of Modern Art, 1994.)

5. Beom Kim at the Sharjah Biennial 12

By Laura Hoptman

Beom Kim (Korean, born 1963 in Seoul; lives and works in Seoul) is a conceptual artist who has used many mediums including, most notably, drawing and video to display his particular kind of dry humor, which is delivered with words, figurative drawings done in a childlike style, and multimedia installations. A central figure in the contemporary art community of Seoul for the past twenty years, Kim has become increasingly well-known internationally in the last decade. I first saw his work in the Istanbul Biennial in 2003, but it has subsequently been included in the 2005 Venice Biennial, in a one-artist exhibition at the Cleveland Museum of Art, which traveled to Redcat in Los Angeles, and in a number of surveys of contemporary Korean art. One of his best-known works is a small installation called A Rock That Was Taught It Was a Bird in which a video of the artist lecturing a stone on avian transformation plays on a screen located within a facsimile of the set in the video.

A selection of Kim’s drawings and a single-channel video work were on display at the Sharjah Biennial 12, as was a group of Kim’s works that was notably different from any work by him that I had seen before. A cycle of thirteen paintings that the artist began creating in 2008, it was collectively entitled Untitled (Intimate Suffering). Extremely simple, even austere, the series consists of shaped canvases in a variety of sizes that are covered in rough, sepia-colored linen. Some have minimal interventions in black that resemble readable symbols like a dash or a cross. These paintings were displayed in several galleries at the Sharjah Art Museum. The last canvas in the series, Untitled (Intimate Suffering #13) was created specifically for the biennial and hung at the SAF Art Space. It consists of a sixteen-foot-high canvas that has been systematically covered with black crosses so that the whole creates a kind of maze-like pattern that causes, when looked at, what Bridget Riley has famously called a “visual tickle.” The elegant simplicity of this group of paintings is a surprising turn for an artist known neither for his minimalist aesthetic nor for his work in this medium. In fact, this work is less connected to Kim’s oeuvre of humorous, mildly absurdist multimedia installations than it is to the history of Korean avant-garde art and, specifically, the work of the Dansaekhwa group, who began exhibiting in the late 1960s. The name Dansaekhwa, which means “monochrome,” refers to artists who were experimenting with the idea of the non-metaphoric painting/object in which space is expressed through concrete, non-illusionistic means that might include staining the surface of the canvas or punching holes in it, or replacing canvas with more porous materials like burlap or paper. In his Sharjah canvases, Kim deliberately places himself in a Korean avant-garde context, one that belies the more generic lingua franca of the Biennial-type installation for which he is best known. This statement of allegiance, clearly abetted by the curator’s choice to represent Kim in this startling way, is visually stimulating, but also exemplary of a personal politics and a point of view. The paintings as paintings are beautiful, and the gesture, as a conceptual move in a varied career, is as bold as it is moving.

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On one of my first trips to Japan in 2008, I visited the Hyogo Prefectural Museum, which has a stellar collection of Gutai work housed in a big Tadao Ando building. Its collection galleries are dominated by painting and sculpture, but hidden among these was a tremendously powerful small etching – a dark scene, surreal and melancholy – by Chimei Hamada, now 96 years old. Widely considered one of the most important artists of his generation in Japan, he is represented in many public collections there, but only rarely in international ones. In subsequent trips over the last several years, I’ve seen and considered, and compared as many impressions of Hamada’s etchings as I could, and that research culminated in the acquisition of a group of five works for MoMA’s collection in 2012.

Born in 1919, Hamada studied oil painting at Tokyo Fine Arts School. Upon graduating in 1939, he was immediately drafted into the army and was sent to combat in China. There, he saw firsthand the horrors of the battlefield, the mindless hierarchy of the military, the irrationality of wartime decision-making, the humiliation of powerlessness and inability to think freely. Despondent, but sustained by his artist’s eye, he recorded what he saw, often sketching on tissues as other materials were scarce.

After the war, he settled in Tokyo, and began to process what he had seen during his service, which took the form of small, monochrome etchings of great intensity. The decision to work in this medium was a purposeful one. He describes its metallic sharpness, its cold expression – the way an image emerges from the darkened plate like smoke clearing on the battlefield. He had taken a printmaking class in college, but now devoted himself to the medium, teaching himself aquatint and mezzotint, searching for scarce materials, and even designing and fabricating his own printing press at a machine factory in Nagano.

The result was a group of 35 works made during an intense period of creativity between 1950 and 1954, which mark his most compelling artistic achievement, including the five prints that are now in MoMA’s Collection. These are all scenes that depict the tragedy and absurdity of war, but without national, temporal, or geographic identifier, and with an artist’s eye for composition and abstraction of horror. In Under the Shadow, Hamada depicts himself and his fellow conscripts as what he calls caterpillars, regarded by their superiors as no more than insects. The barren landscape of northern China’s Shanxi Province can be seen in several of the plates – a geography that he found both alien and beautiful. The influence of historical precedents and influences is clear. Hamada described what he saw as “The darkness of the Middle Ages transported into the present” presaged in the cruel, anatomical nightmares of Heironymous Bosch, and the war-focused print cycles of Goya and Otto Dix, both of which are already represented in MoMA’s Collection. This selection of works by Hamada offers a fascinating counterpoint to those projects, and a different cultural perspective on an enduring theme.

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Huang identifies Reptile (1989), a work he presented at Magiciens de la terre, as his first room-size installation. It evolved from his earlier experiments in which he washed books in a washing machine and his strategic juxtapositions of Eastern and Western literary and philosophical traditions. By happenstance, he was still in Paris when the Tiananmen Square massacre took place, a turn of events that led him to become a permanent “refugee” and frequent participant in international exhibitions.

Huang also talks about Long Scroll (2001), a drawing in MoMA’s collection that represents various moments in his life and oeuvre, as well as his Roulette series, which includes several roulettes that he designed to “teach” himself to make art through chance.

Read the second part of this conversation, in which Huang discusses his Dadaist practices in the 1980s and 1990s here.

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The vivid memories of the scents and tastes of East Asia have stayed with us long after the trip. We enjoyed delicious dishes prepared by artist Siren Chung for the Chuseok holiday in Seoul, quaffed magic water consecrated by the father-in-law of Japanese artist Wada Masahiro, at the Yokohama Triennale, enjoyed the best tofu while talking to Lee Mingwei about exquisite Taiwanese snacks in a restaurant near the Tokyo Tower, and sipped amazing hibiscus tea infused with sun-dried tangerine peel in the company of artists Lee Minghsueh and Tseng Yu-chin at IT Park in Taipei. It is incredible how food connects people and how many times we chatted over food and drink with art professionals. At such moments, life and art are inseparable.

Two weeks are of course barely enough to take the pulse of the dynamic art scenes in three countries. Numerous galleries, studios, museums, restaurants, and cafes slipped out of our intense schedule.

01. Gwangju Biennale: Okin Collective Intervention in the Exhibition Space

By Yu-Chieh Li

It would be difficult to miss Okin Collective’s intervention in the exhibition space at the Gwangju Biennale. While we were touring the show, a cheerful, amplified voice broke in unexpectedly throughout the day and in a pleasant cadence started giving instructions in English and Korean for performing lung exercises.

Hi everybody. We’re Okin Collective.

Now, it’s time for lung exercises.

Now, it’s time for lung exercises.

No lung, no art.

Your lungs, our power!

Guards in the exhibition space took part in the performance, by performing the gymnastics, to encourage visitors to participate. The sound piece For the Beloved and Song (2014) was broadcast with exercise instructions at irregular intervals over the PA system in and around the exhibition space, its background music adapted from “March for the Beloved,” the official song commemorating the Gwangju uprising of 1980. The lung exercise is presumably beneficial for general health, but it can also potentially protect practitioners during social and political emergencies. Lungs power the song that recalls the past and prepares for the future.

The political implication of the piece was not perceived quite as directly as this description suggests. As is typical of Okin’s work, the call to exercise was mostly taken at face value. In the exhibition space and on the Biennale Plaza, we saw members of the public performing Tai chi-like movements to the broadcast. Spontaneous participation of this kind diluted the work’s heavy intent.

02. Gwangju Biennale: Yamashita Kikuji

By Sarah Suzuki

Sometimes a work is so good or so strange or so unexpected that it will stay with me for days. Such was the case with Yamashita Kikuji’s 1968 painting Season of Change, installed at the 2014 Gwangju Biennale. As I’ve familiarized myself with the art of postwar Japan, I’ve been fascinated with the surrealist tendency present in some of the work. You can certainly see it in the etchings of Chimei Hamada. Born in 1919, Hamada studied art, and upon graduation was immediately drafted into the military. His first-hand knowledge of the horrors of war reverberated in his work for decades to come: his dark, forceful etchings of the mid-1950s depict the tragedy and absurdity of war while revealing his artist’s eye for composition and his ability to use abstract forms to convey horror.

Yamashita (1919–1986) was also drafted and fought in China. His paintings from the postwar period, which drew on his battlefield experience, suggest the hallucinatory, nightmarish paintings of Hieronymous Bosch, in which animals, demons, and humanoid figures interact in scenes of horrific depravity. A pointedly political allegory, Season of Change addresses the power dynamic between the United States and Japan after World War II. Having seen just a few examples of Yamashita’s work before, notably in the collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo (MOT), this strange and haunting picture left me curious to know more.

03. Lionel Wendt at the Gwangju Biennial

By Eva Respini

Biennials offer plenty of opportunities to make discoveries. My favorite discovery at the 2014 Gwangju Biennial was not a hot new young artist, but rather an artist who was at his prime in the 1930s and ’40s—the Sri Lanken Lionel Wendt (1900–1944). About halfway through the maze of galleries presenting works (many of them in large installations) by artists active today, I stumbled into a beautiful gallery with approximately 25 modestly sized black-and-white photographs. A closer look revealed that many of the pictures were solarized and montaged, techniques that are hallmarks of photographic experimentation that took place in the 1920s and ’30s. Indeed, the label revealed that Wendt was working in Sri Lanka during the waning years of colonial rule. I was fascinated by the variety and beauty of the pictures, ranging from a handsome portrait of two men in turbans, with its silvery patina from solarization, to a doctored seascape, a photomontage of a boat at sea collaged into a frame reserved for decorative art works. A quick Google search revealed that Wendt was also a musician, critic, and cinematographer and that there is an art center in Colombo dedicated to his legacy. Surrounded by contemporary art, Wendt’s works seemed utterly fresh and surprising, and they held their own in an elegant and quiet way. Since leaving Gwangju, those pictures have made an indelible impression on me. Perhaps a trip to Colombo is in order to learn more?

04. The Belated Funeral as Performance: A Dialogue with Minouk Lim

By Yu-Chieh Li

The opening performance of the 10th Gwangju Biennale, a powerful piece by Minouk Lim, took place on a rainy afternoon. A helicopter hovered over Biennale Square, where ambulances and buses converged, carrying high school students, relatives of civilian victims of the Korean War, and members of the May Mothers’ House, who lost children in the Gwangju uprising. Remains of civilian victims from the Korean War were carried from an ambulance by blindfolded family members to shipping containers on the square as the May Mothers and high school students looked on. A mourning ritual was enacted in front of one of the shipping containers, surrounded by reporters and Biennale visitors. Spectators were silent; sounds of camera shutters and rainfall dominated the scene. The performance was streamed live both in the exhibition space, where it was shown as a two-channel video installation, and on the website of OhmyNews. The shipping containers holding the human remains were left on the square until the Biennale ended. The next day was sunny. We were amazed to see the square empty and the two containers standing under the blue sky. The bright image presented a striking contrast with the gray scene of the day before. We had loads of questions for Minouk, with whom we had a fifty-minute talk rather than a formal interview. It ended up being a great time for sharing thoughts.

Click here to read the transcript of the dialogue.

05. SeMA Biennale Mediacity

By Jenny Schlenzka

Seoul is a bustling metropolis with lots to observe: high-tech screens beeping and flashing everywhere, hyper fashionable teenagers, K-Pop blaring in all directions, and, of course, tempting flavors from street-food vendors, all clamoring for attention. It wasn’t easy to stick to our packed schedule, but luckily the Mediacity biennial, held at the Seoul Museum of Art, turned out to have its own worthwhile sensations. Founded in 2000, the biennial was intended as a reflection on the media and technology frenzy that is at the heart of Korea’s booming economy.

Whereas former iterations reportedly focused mainly on new-media art works, the 2014 edition included some sculptures, installations and two-dimensional works that gave the exhibition some breathing space and made for a stimulating walk-through. According to his catalogue statement, this year’s artistic director, the artist/film director Park Chank-yong, chose to focus on Asia and aspects of its history that continue to inform the present, though often in forgotten or overlooked ways. The theme of invisibility is hinted at in the biennial’s title Ghosts, Spies, and Grandmothers, three key words through which to look at Asia’s “experiences of intense colonialization, the Cold War, rapid economic growth and social change in such a short period.”

The biennial presented 42 international artists from 17 countries. Haegue Yang’s Sonic Rotating Ovals (2013), which were installed at the beginning of the exhibition as well as on the top floor, are playful sonic sculptures covered in countless small metallic bells that, triggered by visitors’ movements, make an enchanting sound reminiscent of spiritual or religious rituals. The night before we had had dinner with the artist, who had just moved back to her native Seoul after a long and professionally successful stay in Europe. She told us about her feelings of exhilaration regarding Seoul’s cultural and economic boom mixed with a slight frustration at its slow shedding of the old political and social systems, which make life in Korea more complicated and restricted than she had hoped.

The video SeaWomen (2012) by the young Anglo-Greek artist Mikhail Karikis is an impressive portrait of a community of elderly female sea laborers called haenyeo, who live on a South Korean island and make their living by diving for pearls and seafood. The immersive soundscape of the installation is composed of so called sumbisori, the traditional breathing technique. The sound resembles seabird screams and invokes a sense of the danger these women face in their daily work. None of the laborers in the video seems younger than 50, which leads one to wonder about the sustainability of this ancient matriarchal and communal profession in times of globalization.

Another room featured an extensive archive of the Japanese avant-garde group Zero Dimension, led by Kato Yoshihiro and Iwata Shinichi and active from the early 1960s to the early 1970s. Most of the photos and flyers on display carried images of the group’s so-called “rituals” and “art terrorism,” which the members often staged in public spaces, dressed in costumes and equipped with props. Their activities climaxed with the anti-Expo movement in 1970, captured in the documentary White Rabbit of Inaba (1970). Unlike the Japanese avant-garde artists who got involved in the international mega-exhibition, Zero Dimension protested with rituals in and around Osaka against art’s participation capitalist consumer culture.

A whole chapter of the biennial focused on Shamanism, once the official religion in Korea and still practiced widely today, albeit in reduced form. My favorite contribution, Ba Ba Bakuhatsu (Grandma Explosion) Series (1969–70), was by the photographer Naito Masatoshi, whose portraits of elderly Japanese women shamans are taken at night with a flashlight as the women speak to their deceased husbands and sons, conduct nocturnal prayers, mourning ceremonies, and dances. The vitality and intensity in the women’s expressions, heightened by the lighting, makes one believe in their ability to communicate with the afterworld.

06. Seoul: Soo Sung Lee at Audio Visual Pavilion

By Yu-Chieh Li

Audio Visual Pavilion is an art space that feels like a secret garden hidden in the hustle and bustle of the Korean capital. With traditional tile roofing, a simple residential interior, and plain exhibition rooms of various sizes, it is an anomaly among Seoul’s sophisticated galleries. We saw an exhibition by Soo Sung Lee, who merged his works with the architectural setting, filling every space with light colored, minimalist sculpture, including a pool placed in the yard. The entire pavilion was incorporated into the artist’s work.

07. Yokohama Triennale

By Eva Respini

What happens when an artist curates a biennial? Our group had the opportunity to find out on our first day in Japan, when we traveled 30 minutes by train from Tokyo to the busy port city of Yokohama. The 2014 edition of the Yokohama Triennial was directed by the esteemed photographer Yasumasa Morimura, who is known for his performative recreations of iconic images from art history, from Duchamp’s gender-bending alter ego Rrose Sélavy to Cindy Sherman’s centerfolds. The triennial’s title, Fahrenheit 451: Sailing into the Sea of Oblivion, took as its inspiration Ray Bradbury’s 1953 dystopian novel, later adapted to film by François Truffaut. A newbie curator, Morimura stated on the Triennial’s website: “The future is unknown. But a ship has set sail from Yokohama Port, and to be completely honest, the journey is likely to be risky with me as the captain. Being an artist, I’ve never had the chance to serve as the artistic director of any international exhibitions. I’m taking the wheel for the first time and the ship has already left port without my having had a chance to learn how to steer.” Armed with this information, we set off to view the triennial, which filled all the floors of the Yokohama Museum of Art as well as a large, airy pier on the water, reachable by bus in 10 minutes. Free to explore as he wished, Morimura included a wide range of artists working in all mediums, hailing from all over the world, from the past and the present. Smaller than previous iterations of this triennial, the 2104 show offered a window onto Morimura’s many interests, from the performative photographs of French provocateur Pierre Molinier to the drawings of Japanese artist Chiyuki Sakagami. A discovery for many in the group, Sakagami’s intricate (verging on obsessive) drawings were like little jewel boxes, each seeming to contain a universe, a whole cosmology of new biomorphic forms. Another crowd favorite was Belgian conceptualist Marcel Broodthaers’s Interview with a Cat, a recorded interview from 1970 that provided comic relief for the group. We ended the tour with a trip to the pier, where we witnessed the performative unveiling of a mobile stage for Japanese artist Miwa Yanagi’s theater piece Nichirin no tsubasa (Wings of the Sun), based on a text by Kenji Nakagami.

08. Tokyo: Mori Art Museum

By Sarah Suzuki

For me, no trip to Tokyo is complete without a visit to the Mori Art Museum in the towering urban complex known as Roppongi Hills. Sure, the view is a draw but more important are the memorable exhibitions I’ve seen there: big midcareer surveys of Lee Bul and Mokoto Aida; projects with emerging artists like Meiro Koizumi and Tsang Kinwah; in-depth investigations of historical moments, such as Metabolism: City of the Future: Dreams and Visions of Reconstruction in Postwar and Present Day Japan, held in 2011; and Roppongi Crossing, the museum’s biennial exhibition of new art that always yields fresh discoveries.

On this visit, we arrived between shows as construction and planning were underway for Lee Mingwei and His Relations. The galleries might have been empty of objects, but they were full of deep thinking, conversation, and planning by the artist and the museum staff. Lee Mingwei’s work is not primarily object-based but instead is often centered on ideas of interactivity and participation. Over the last 20 years, his projects have involved dining, mending garments, conversing, and letter writing. This kind of experiential art can be challenging to show in an institutional context and is further complicated by a retrospective presentation in which multiple works are activated at once.

We’ve faced similar challenges at MoMA while installing Rirkrit Tiravanija’s landmark installation untitled 1992/1995 (free still) and Superflex’s CopyLight Studio. One of the key opportunities of travel is the chance to engage in in-depth dialogue with colleagues around the world about institutional issues like these and the varying strategies we employ to respond to them. In the past, I’ve had the pleasure of discussing the challenges and complexities of reinstalling Gutai works from the phenomenal collection of the Hyogo Prefectural Museum of Art with curator Koichi Kawasaki. On this trip, we had the honor of talking with the Mono-ha artist Kishio Suga and hearing his views on reinstalling and recreating sculpture made of ephemeral materials. Lee Mingwei described to us his aim for a multipronged approach at Mori, including experiences that visitors would have to register for in advance, and others that could be encountered by chance in the galleries. Conversations like these are crucial. They suggest new approaches and new answers to questions that we’re all asking. Alas, I left Tokyo without getting to experience Lee Mingwei and His Relations for myself, but I look forward to another conversation about it on my next trip to the Mori.

09. Taipei: Chen Chieh-jen’s “Realm of Reverberation”

By Yu-Chieh Li

On a warm and humid afternoon we strolled from The Cube Project Space in the Gongguan area through the streets teeming with snack bars to Chen’s studio, situated in an apartment building in the Wenzhou Street area. Located opposite National Taiwan University, the neighborhood is a labyrinth of cafes and bookstores but smells more like a rainforest.

Chen Chieh-jen was a leading performance artist in Taiwan in the 1980s. In the 1990s, after an eight-year pause in his career as an artist, he started to address Taiwan’s colonial history using the moving image. We had the privilege of seeing his almost-finished film Realm of Reverberation before its debut at the Asia Triennial Manchester 2014.

The film takes the Losheng protest as its starting point. The Losheng Sanatorium for Lepers was founded by the Japanese Colonial Government to forcibly house and quarantine people suffering from Hansen’s disease. In 2002 the sanatorium was demolished by Taipei’s Department of Rapid Transit Systems (DORTS) over vehement protests by residents, scholars, lawyers, engineers, and documentary filmmakers.

Chen showed us the second section of the film, which depicts the visual narratives of the inmates and takes the viewer on a tour of the ruins of the sanatorium. Like many Taiwanese films, Realm of Reverberation is slow-paced. With much modesty and shyness in his smile, Chen kept telling us, “This passage is almost over. But let me know if you want me to fast-forward.” On the contrary: we were deeply moved by the tranquil beauty of the lepers’ faces—the images still linger in our minds.

10. Taipei: Yao Jui-chung and his archive

By Yu-Chieh Li

Yao Jui-Chung’s 18-year-old cat Moca kept wanting attention from us as we pored over the artist’s portfolio and archives in his studio. Yao is also an art critic and an enthusiastic collector of newspaper clippings, ephemera, and photographs of art events. Such documents fill his studio and are the basis of his pioneering works Installation Art in Taiwan 1991–2001 and Archives on Performance Art in Taiwan, 1978–2004.

Yao might well be described as a modern literati figure, but his projects are concerned with political and social issues rather than his own emotions. He has never concentrated on a single medium at any one time. His latest work, Ruins Series, a photographic project documenting unused public buildings that were originally intended as exhibition spaces in Taiwan, was shown in this year’s International Architecture Exhibition in Venice. Unfinished landscape drawings made with ink on paper were also on view in his studio. From afar they look like traditional ink scrolls, but up close the brushwork is idiosyncratic and tumultuous.

11. Taipei: IT Park

By Yu-Chieh Li

IT Park is perhaps the oldest artists’ space in Taiwan. Founded in 1988 by Chen Hui-chiao, Liu Ching-Tang, and Tsong Pu, it is an exhibition space, a place where artists’ archives are preserved, and, even more importantly, it is a center for artistic exchange and a place to socialize and hatch ideas.

Lee Ming-Hsueh’s brilliantly-installed solo show largely comprised conceptual prints and found objects: dust brooms joined with dust pans, sculptures made of contact lenses, lighters attached to the wall and combined with graffiti. The highlight was the watermelon/knife. I was surprised at how these readymades went so well with the gallery space. Everything had a minimal, casual beauty.

IT Park captures the persistent energy behind Taiwan’s relatively slow-paced lifestyle. In fact, I find that much Taiwanese art does just that.

12. Taipei: Yu Cheng-Ta’s “Practicing live”

By Yu-Chieh Li

Yu Cheng-Ta’s new three-channel video is a send-up of the contemporary art world. The plot is woven from the dialogues of a fictional family of art professionals portrayed by renowned artists, curators, art critics, and gallerists from Taiwan, Japan, and the UK. The actors play alternate versions of themselves: for instance, the gallerist Chi-Wen Huang plays a museum director. Their conversation centers on the rules of the global art world and their plight as art professionals. Well-known maxims from philosophers and cultural theorists pop up in mockery of the overuse of quotations in art criticism.

The story culminates with the arrival of the news that son, David Yu, deemed by his family to be an unsuccessful artist, has won the Turner prize. It is also revealed that he has two other identities – famous artist David X and collector Skyban. With a story woven around an artist with multiple identities, this film throws a question to the global art system—How do you survive today as a contemporary Asian artist?

13. Taipei: Stray Dogs at the Museum: Tsai Ming-Liang Solo Exhibition

By Yu-Chieh Li

“Before Tsai Ming-liang’s films appear, we actually did not know what ‘slowness’ is.” – Chang Hsao-hung. “Slow Walk in Museum.” (from the brochure for Tsai Ming-Liang Solo Exhibition at MoNTUE)

We left time in the afternoon of our last day to slow down with Tsai’s award-winning film Stray Dogs presented in an unusual way, in an unconventional setting. In recent years, Tsai has identified himself more as an artist who works with moving images than as a film director. When entering the Museum of National Taipei University of Education (MoNTUE), we had to walk between heaps of tree branches to reach the screening places. The film was shown in several locations and scales: beneath staircases, on walls, and in a cozy space furnished with floor cushions where it was projected on two facing walls. Visitors were free to orient their cushions any way they wished.

In the brochure to the show, Tsai explains how he’d like to challenge the traditional idea of cinema as a temple-like place.

In my childhood, the cinema was usually a single-building architecture, like a big box surrounded by barbed wires outside, also like a temple with more than one thousand seats…All family would see the movie together, too. At that time, going to the cinema was like a pilgrimage. It happened during the 1960s and 1970s….Now the cinema has become a shopping mall… It is composed of small halls and frequent showing sessions. You can go to see them at any time.

The artist defies conventions of big-box cinemas and multiplex warrens by isolating fragments of the film and projecting them in corners as independent installations. The magic of Tsai is his ability to create drama by showing unremarkable slices of ordinary life—people eating, walking, sleeping in real time and suddenly introducing a disturbance. By decontextualizing these sequences, he opens them up to new and different readings.

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Day 1

Keio University Art Center and Archives

By Michelle Elligott

Great to see the Sogetsu ephemera collections at the Keio University Art Center. The Sogetsu materials dovetail nicely with pieces we have (including great Akiyama Kuniharu material) in the Museum’s Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection Archives. The unique materials (like the letters in the Takiguchi Shuzo Papers) were wonderful.

Materials at the Keio University Art Center and Archives

By Michelle Elligott, Christopher Y. Lew, Nancy Lim

Roundtable at Tokyo University of the Arts

Organized by Kobata Kazue, the roundtable at the Tokyo University of the Arts started with Kobata’s introduction on performance and perfomativity in Japanese art in the 1960s. She screened 8mm film footage of Hijikata Tatsumi’s performance Revolt of the Flesh, and spoke about the activities of the Ankoku Butoh movement. Kobata raised an interesting point regarding the relation of painting and performance in 1960s Japanese art.

I was particularly struck by the work of Tadasu Takamine (born in 1968, lives and works in Kyoto), who was a member of a radical performance group Dumb Type. Tadasu is a very interesting artist with radical video and performance practices dealing mainly with politics and sexuality. During the roundtable, the artist screened his controversial video piece Kimura-san (1998), featuring footage of the artist providing sexual relief for a disabled friend, as well as the performance he did during his residency in New York of exchanging clothes at flea markets in the East Village in 1993. He is well-known for his video God Bless America, shown at the Venice Biennale in 2003. For eighteen days, Tadasu and his female partner lived in an entirely red room, filming themselves as they worked, ate, slept, and had sex. In the resulting time-lapse footage, we see them kick and punch a sculpture into being: a giant head, resembling George W. Bush, which continually sings God Bless America.

Roundtable at Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music

By Nancy Lim

Day 2

Meeting with Hisano Atsuko of the Saison Foundation

Founded in 1987, the Saison Foundation is one of the leading organizations providing grants to contemporary theater and dance groups from Japan and abroad, offering residency and studios for rehearsal. Its origins are in Studio 200, an experimental artistic space from the 1980s that was situated in the Ikebuko department store. The white box of Studio 200 hosted performances by Hijikata, Teshigawara Saburo (an important figure in contemporary dance during the ’80s), and concerts by rock groups from Korea and China.

The Saison Foundation, with Hisano Atsuko

By Nancy Lim

Chim↑Pom: Not Just Provocations

By Doryun Chong

I used to feel unsure as to where this young group’s provocations were headed. In the wake of the disasters in Tohoku in 2011, and seeing their courageous series of projects and performances, I’m beginning to think that they really have a sense of purpose and mission—trying to shake the art scene and even the wider society, which perhaps have grown too comfortable and complacent after many decades of stability and prosperity. http://chimpom.jp/

Meeting Chim↑Pom

By Christopher Y. Lew

Chim↑Pom presented an overview of their work, which includes projects from their solo show Real Times, made in response to the March 11 disaster at Fukushima. It’s amazing how quickly they reacted. They made a powerful series of videos and actions: they collaborated with local youths in Soma City, raised a flag in dangerous proximity to the Daiichi plant, and made a polemical intervention in Taro Okamoto’s mural in Shibuya train station.

A Visit to MUJIN-TO Production’s Gallery

By Nancy Lim

Mori Art Museum

By Nancy Lim

“METABOLISM” Exhibition at Mori Art Museum

Visit to the Mori Art Museum and the exhibition METABOLISM: The City of the Future. Dreams and Visions of Reconstruction in Postwar and Present Day Japan. Very extensive exhibition about the most widely known modern architectural movement to have emerged in Japan in the 1960s. Meeting with Mami Kataoka, the museum’s chief curator, after a walkthrough.

Kudos to the “METABOLISM” Team!

By Doryun Chong

I think we were blown away by the depth of the scholarship, impeccable installation, and of course, the richness of the subject itself. Kudos to the Mori!

Dinner with Minemura Toshiyaki, Hirasawa Go, and Hayashi Mihchio

By Nancy Lim

Film Critic Hirasawa Go’s Shinjuku Night Tour

By Doryun Chong, Christopher Y. Lew, Nancy Lim

Day 3

A Visit to the Hara Museum

By Doryun Chong, Michelle Elligott

Utterly delightful: loud, semi-naked cabbage throwing and water spitting

By Sarah Suzuki

We Are BANANA!!

By Banana Gakuen Theater Company

Hello Guys!! We are BANANA!! from Tokyo made in Dangerous JAPAAAAAAAAAAAN!!!!!

Thanks for your LOVE to BANANA.

Ecstatic Critique?

By Doryun Chong

There are about 40 to 50 performers, split equally between men and women on a stage that’s barely big enough to hold all of them. But somehow, they manage to jump up and down and around, dancing and singing like a giant boyband or girlband-cum-cheer squad en masse in constantly changing formations for over an hour! It’s also like Billy Blanks’ Taebo or one of those extreme, military-style workouts. We were overwhelmed by the constant sensory overload, including some of those sweat-drenched actors running into the audience. The director, Nikaido Toco, who later joins the troupe on the stage, was incredible too. She sounded like Kim Carnes screaming at the top of her lungs while doing all those moves in perfect sync with her actors. In the midst of this madness, there’s actually something serious and a complexity there. Sonically and visually, they reproduce a struggle of the sensory overload of Japanese mass media, where any meaningful message is impossible to hear unless you can project even louder over that noise. Maybe their performances are an ecstatic critique of the uniformity that they at the same time wear and abuse in school uniform.

Day 4

National Museum of Art, Osaka

By Michelle Elligott

Two highlights of the National Museum of Art, Osaka, included a Shiraga Kazuo painting dedicated to Michel Tapié and a wild, surrealistic Tiger Tateishi painting depicting a samurai, the KKK, Mao, and a crawling child. (We all agreed Doryun should include it in his Tokyo exhibition!)

Breaker Project

By Nancy Lim

Breaker Project

By Nancy Lim

Breaker Project is a cultural organization that started in 2003. Based in Osaka, it supports a variety of community-based art projects and presents them in temporary exhibition spaces throughout the Kansai region. At the time of TsukaharaYuya’s installation, Breaker Project occupied a two-story, multifamily residential unit from the early 20th century that the current artist-in-residence discreetly transformed by means of delicate light, sound, and sculptural installations that fiddle with the infrastructure. One room was also modified to include a sleeping area for overnight visitors, and on the floor above, an enclosed platform was built in the otherwise unstable attic (the artist had fallen through the attic floor a few months prior and broken his arm). The project was accompanied by varied educational programming intended to engage the local community indefinitely — even after the show closes and Breaker Project moves on.

Contact Gonzo

By Nancy Lim

Contact Gonzo is a performance group from Osaka founded in 2006 by Tsukahara Yuya and the dancer Kakio Masaru. Gonzo means “eccentric” or “hooligan”; the name comes from Gonzo journalism of the ’70s in the United States. The group has developed a very specific form of contact improvisation and Russian-style Aikido. Based on physical ability and trust, its innovative practice is at the crossroads of contemporary dance, performance, and street actions. Contact Gonzo’s first works were performed outdoors, mainly inspired by street and skate culture, and uploaded on YouTube. Recently they have been performing in many festivals and art spaces in Japan and Europe. The group has also developed a an innovative strategy of documenting their performances.

Contact Gonzo Live

By Eva Respini

I traveled across town to the Kichijoji area of Tokyo to catch a performance by the Osaka-based performance collective contact Gonzo. We met the members of contact Gonzo in Osaka, and they showed us documentation of their performances. This young collective straddles the worlds of dance, performance, and visual art: the founder is trained in theater design and dance, but other members come from the fields of graphic design and art, as well as dance. When I heard they were performing as part of the Teratotera Festival of contemporary dance and performance, I jumped at the chance to see them live. Contact Gonzo performed for 20 minutes on the roof of the Tokyu department store, in front of an audience of about fifty people.The performance included five of the six members (the sixth member was photographing and videotaping), was improvisational, and included water bottles and a single illuminated lightbulb as the only props. It was one of the most exhilarating performances I have seen, especially since it was punctuated by a dramatic darkening of the skies and light rain.

Day 5

Interviewing Shiomi Mieko

By Michelle Elligott

I had the honor and privilege of conducting an interview with Shiomi Mieko. A strikingly elegant and articulate artist, she spoke with insight and ease about her work and her participation in Fluxus activities. I especially appreciated her explanations of how she arranged the cards for the MoMA exhibition Thing/Thought: Fluxus Editions, 1962–1978 and her inspirations for Spatial Poem and Disappearing Music for Face. In regards to the latter, she stated her belief that anything can be music, even the shifting clouds. She once saw a young girl’s smile fading; she said it was like beautiful music.

Day 6

Yumiko Chiba Associates, Ginza Showroom

By Eva Respini

My day in Tokyo began with a viewing of vintage photographs by Uematsu Keiji at the Ginza showroom of Yumiko Chiba Associates. We have only one work by Uematsu in MoMA’s collection, and I was excited by the opportunity to see more. The Uematsu exhibition included vintage 1970s prints of his performative actions in the landscape. With these works, he was seeking to draw out shapes in space and use his body to find the equilibrium point within a gravitational field, creating mutual interrelationships between the body, the object, and space. He is an artist who later became associated with the Mono-ha movement. It was interesting to see the little-known photographic works of an artist mostly known for his sculpture. In addition to the exhibition of works by Uematsu, there was a fascinating exhibition of conceptual photography titled To the 1970s: The Turning Point of Photography and Art. The exhibition traced conceptual photographic practices in the 1970s in Japan, including works by Masafumi Maita, Kanji Wakae, and Takamatsu Jiro’s 1972–73 series Photograph of a Photograph (one example is in MoMA’s collection). Many of the works in the exhibition explored the materiality of photography and an intermedia relationship. The works were made by artists rather than photographers, and at this time, photography emerged as a tool to escape known forms of visual perception and forge new visual languages. Many of the works and artists in this exhibition were new to me. It was exciting to become acquainted with a different tradition in Japanese photography.

Day 7

Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography

By Eva Respini

The Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography has one of the best photography programs in the world. Kasahara Michiko is their chief curator and a friend. She is ambitious and inventive in her programming, and I was happy to see her again and to meet her fellow curators at the museum, Fujimura Satomi and Tasaka Hiroko. We viewed works from their storage collection, including Otsuji Kiyoji prints. The images dated from the 1950s, but the artist made the prints in 1989 and ’90, at the time of the museum’s opening. We also looked at photographs by Hosoe Eikoh, including works from his seminal collaboration with Butoh legend Hijikata Tatsumi for the book Kamaitachi, which involved a series of journeys to northern Japan in order to embody the presence of mythical, dangerous figures at the peripheries of Japanese life. At MoMA, we have works by Hosoe in the collection, but only a few from his collaboration with Hijikata. As always, there is no substitute for seeing works in the flesh, so to speak. We ended our visit of the museum with a viewing of the Naoya Hatakeyama exhibition Natural History. The exhibition was a survey of some 150 color photographs focusing on the landscape, including pictures made in Switzerland, France, and Japan. The exhibition included new work detailing the aftermath of the March 11 earthquake and tsunami in Hatakeyama’s hometown, one of the hardest hit areas. The work juxtaposed a slide show of pictures Hatakeyama had taken in his hometown before the destruction with some sixty photographs of the disaster and its aftermath. The exhibition also included a new video animation of his well-known explosion series, for which he scanned and animated his previously still photographs. This step represents a new artistic endeavor for Hatakeyama.

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