1970s

László Beke Looks Back: Thoughts on Global Conceptualism

In this segment of the theme “Global Conceptualism Reconsidered,” the curators of the exhibition Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin, 1950s–1980s reflect upon their experiences organizing the exhibition. In the following interviews, they address the origins of the exhibition’s concept, the challenges faced in defining and presenting the variety of conceptualisms across the exhibition’s many international subsections, and…

Milan Knížák and Ken Friedman: Keeping Together Manifestations in a Divided World

One of the many intercontinental relationships to arise from Fluxus in the second half of the 1960s was the one between Milan Knížák and Ken Friedman, the two directors of Fluxus East and Fluxus West, respectively. When, in the 1980s, Dick Higgins and Ken Friedman outlined the basic ideas of Fluxus,1Dick Higgins, “Fluxus: Theory and…

“Partition is what we are living even now”: A Conversation with Nalini Malani

This informal conversation took place in March 2015 in Nalini Malani’s studio in Mumbai during a C-MAP trip to India. Gayatri Sinha and Stuart Comer talked to Malani about her practice, spanning from the 1960s to the 1990s. The discussion focused on Malani’s early lens-based experiments, her interest in psychoanalysis, her activities in the 1980s…

Enigmas: The Works of Regina Silveira

In the shadow of the Brazilian military dictatorship, Regina Silveira pursued an elusive art, by necessity and by design. Absence and isolation, illusion and distortion were not only promising artistic strategies, but also richly meaningful metaphors in an era of severe political repression. Trained as a painter and printmaker in her native Porto Alegre, Silveira…

Anna Maria Maiolino’s Book Object

Anna Maria Maiolino (Brazilian, born Italy, 1942) refers to Trajetória I (1976) as a “Book Object,” a term that aptly describes the way it combines aspects of a book with those of a sculpture. Although comprised of eleven folios of black, white, and red papers bound into a black paper cover, it does not include text or…