Series Introduction This series of three articles presents a selection of the performative practices in Armenian art in the late-Soviet and post-Soviet periods, practices that would herald the separation of nonofficial artists from the official Soviet cultural discourses and practices, and subsequently, in the 1990s, mark the institutionalization of nonofficial or semiofficial art as “contemporary…
Curator Xenia Benivolski looks at the work of Zanis Waldheims (1909–1993), a self-taught Latvian artist who lived in exile in Canada and spent most of his life on a series of about six hundred geometrically abstract drawings. Benivolski considers the thinking behind Waldheims’s work and its meaning in terms of exile, diaspora, and art historical…
Like the subject of his world-renowned installation The Man Who Flew into Space from His Apartment (1981–88), artist Ilya Kabakov is no longer with us. While this reality was inevitable, pronouncing it still remains difficult. The giant hole in the ceiling of this installation—left by its protagonist, who abandoned his isolated Soviet existence by catapulting…
The work of Nigerian woman artist Clara Etso Ugbodaga-Ngu (1928–2003) offers a window into cultural representations of African men and women in postcolonial Nigeria. In what was a male-dominated art scene in the 1960s, Ugbodaga-Ngu stood out not only because of her visual production, but also because of her intellectual involvement as a faculty member…
From August 2022 to June 2023, artists and friends Julie Tolentino and Kang Seung Lee reflected on their decades-long practices in kinship, politics, performance, and queer history.
Balkrishna Vithaldas Doshi (1927-2023) was a pioneer of architectural modernism in India, and the first architect from the region to be awarded the Pritzker Prize in 2018. His work was prominently featured in the 2022 MoMA exhibition, The Project of Independence: Architectures of Decolonization in South Asia, 1947–1985, during which he participated in an online conversation with Martino Stierli, The Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture and Design. Following Doshi’s passing at the age of 95, in January 2023, we are publishing this wide-ranging conversation accompanied by Stierli’s reflection on the architect’s life and legacy.
Joshua Chambers-Letson extrapolates antinomies from Danh Vo’s Death Sentence, a work on paper in MoMA’s collection, in particular the coexistence of values related to life and death.
In this text, Dorota Jagoda Michalska writes about Erna Rosenstein (1913–2004), a Jewish Polish postwar artist. Michalska opens up a transnational perspective, inviting us to look at the artist’s oeuvre through the lens of global surrealisms, connecting her articulations of Holocaust trauma with the work of artists who have dealt with slavery, genocide, exile, and colonial dispossession.
In this essay, Veronika Molnar writes about Hungarian Roma artist Omara, whose diverse practice encompassing painting, intervention, and media appearances challenged the status quo of Hungary’s homogenous contemporary art scene from the early 2000s until the artist’s death in 2020.
Artist and author Nene Aissatou Diallo revisits Safi Faye’s 1982 portrayal of Selbé, a thirty-nine-year-old mother of eight from Fad’jal as she and her compatriots go about their daily routines, carried by song. This feature reflects on the visual portrayal of Selbé, and Faye’s use of the camera in a documentary produced as part of the series As Women See It.
In his screen-prints of the 1970s, South African artist Gavin Jantjes sought to convey the urgency and interconnectedness of global Black liberation movements. As an art student in exile in Hamburg, Jantjes dedicated his early practice to raising awareness of the brutal injustices of the apartheid system in South Africa, engaging with anti-colonial struggles waged by African and African-Diasporic populations around the world. In this essay, art historian Allison K. Young looks at a selection of early abstracted, dynamic compositions which evidence his belief in the connection between art and resistance, and his commitment to solidarity between localized struggles across the diaspora.
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.
