In this essay, Māra Traumane guides readers through the diverse, interdisciplinary practice of the Riga-based collective Workshop for the Restoration of Unfelt Feelings (NSRD), which operated from the end of the 1970s until 1989. NSRD was involved in the avant-garde music scene as well as in architecture, and their activities ranged from concerts and the production of record albums to performances, writing, and video art.
Zenta Logina (1908–1983) was a Latvian artist at work during the Soviet occupation. Her paintings, reliefs, and sculptural objects developed in a singular manner, as she broke away from the accepted framework of visual arts codified by the regime and crossed into the realm of contemporary art as we define it today.
In 1970, Johnson Donatus Aihumekeokhai Ojeikere, otherwise known as J.D. ‘Okhai Ojeikere (Nigerian, 1930–2014), made Fro Fro, the point of departure of this short text. Storyteller and lens-based artist Jumoke Sanwo reads this image, produced during Nigeria’s nationalist drive and considers Ojeikere’s subjects and their unapologetic defiance.
As the entrepreneurial co-founder of the Société Zin, a modernist design company, Safia Farhat (Tunisian, 1924–2004), contributed to the visual aesthetics of civic space during the formative period of Tunisian socialism and state feminism. Jessica Gerschultz introduces Farhat’s key role in sustaining a mural tradition for Tunisian modernists.
Art historian Inesa Brašiškė highlights the ideas behind the work of Lithuanian-American artist and architect Aleksandra Kasuba (1923–2019), most notably her countering of the rigid geometry of architecture through the use of soft materials and curved shapes, and her emphasis on the fundamental connection between the built environment and the formation of subject.
In this essay, cultural historian Linda Kaljundi revisits Estonian art of the late Soviet period. Looking at work from the 1970s and 1980s from an ecocritical and environmental perspective, she argues for the necessity of taking a comparative, transnational approach in order to reach beyond the Western centric understanding of environmental art histories.
C-MAP Africa fellow, Nancy Dantas, reads Mozambican modernist Bertina Lopes’s anticolonial trajectory and long-distance nationalism in ‘Tribute to Amílcar Cabral’ (1973).
This year’s C-MAP seminar series, Transversal Orientations, comprised four panels that took place on Zoom in June 2021. This essay reflects on Acts of Transfer and the Repertoire, the second panel in the seminar series featuring Tsitsi Ella Jaji, Laura Anderson Barbata and Lina Lapelyte.
Showing up in food, cosmetics, fuel, and medicine—and, by consequence, in much of the air we breathe—corn is a ubiquitous presence in our lives. Inspired by the first episode of MoMA’s Broken Nature Podcast, this text investigates how one single crop travels through our contemporary food system.
This essay brings together Baltic artists Anu Põder and Virgilijus Šonta, considering their mutual interest in human corporeality and non-heteronormative visuality to explore how their artwork reflects a disregard of official concerns of the late Soviet era, and sheds light on the blind spots of the homogenizing use of Western theoretical frameworks.
In December 1979, walking down a long road in eastern Santiago de Chile, Rosenfeld bisected the center-line markings through the perpendicular application of broad white tape. Executed at the height of a dictatorship, her defiant gesture generated a powerful new social sign: a path of crosses.
Temptations to pronounce a politics of ecology and technology are incisively moderated in this essay on Tetsumi Kudo’s multimedia installation, presented in MoMA’s Gallery 420 through the fall, prompting a broader critical commentary on the negotiations of cultural typification and belonging in the artist’s oeuvre.
