1980s

The sculptures of Congolese artist Bodys Isek Kingelez (1948-2015) offer a vision of a future modernity that is beautiful, harmonious, and functional.

The following excerpt is from Socialist Architecture: The Reappearing Act, published in Berlin by The Green Box in 2017. A collaboration between the architect Srdjan Jovanovic Weiss and the photographer Armin Linke—supported by the Graham Foundation—the book introduces the concept of an “architecture of Balkanization” and explores textually and visually what that might be in the landscape of the decentralized socialist society of Yugoslavia.

The Rauschenberg Overseas Cultural Initiative was a large-scale international traveling exhibition that doubled as a cultural exchange program.

The Rauschenberg Overseas Cultural Initiative was a large-scale international traveling exhibition that doubled as a cultural exchange program.

Artist Maris Bustamante reminisces about the importance Juan Acha’s ideas had for her and a generation of young artists.

At the age of sixty-seven, Polish artist Zofia Rydet began her photographic series Sociological Record in an effort to document Polish individuals in their private and deeply personal spaces.

From action painting to free-form music concerts, East German performance art establishes itself in the GDR’s final decade.

Art historian Sara Blaylock discusses experimental practices in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) during the 1980s within a global context.

Art historian María Clara Bernal discusses the necessary work of negotiating context and difference in art history, and the importance of Conceptual art and Land art for the Colombian art scene of the 1980s onwards

Diana Campbell Betancourt, Artistic Director of Samdani Art Foundation and Chief Curator of Dhaka Art Summit, interviewed Syed Jahangir, artist and founder of the Asian Art Biennale, the oldest existing biennial of contemporary art in Asia.

Karin Zitzewitz discusses significant impulses and influences on art production in South Asia, between the artists’ immediate context and practices or discourses of feminism and globalization, which have dominated since the 1980s.

Translated into English for the first time, this text by Latin American theorist Juan Acha was first presented at a conference at the Museo de Arte Moderno de Medellín in 1981 and later published as part of the conference proceedings.