In a series of email conversations with art historian Moira Roth, Dinh Q. Lê (1968–2024) recalled a form of ritual he would perform on each of his trips back to Vietnam. As an act of healing to help his home country recover from the wounds of war, Lê would carry with him some amount of American soil that he would then mix into the water of the Mekong River. In his own words, this action of soil transfusion was a way to “help the wandering souls of all American MIAs lost in the jungle of Vietnam to have some sense of home.”¹ Conjuring both the artist’s trajectory from Southeast Asia to the United States and back again and a process of anamnesis across historical and political events, this anecdote is suggestive of the matrix guiding much of Lê’s work, in which histories of war and violence and the individual lives they often overshadow constitute threads—narrative as well as material—that are open to recombination.

Indeed, the act of bringing an element (soil) from a distant place and mixing it with a local element (water), ultimately—all things considered—results in the transformation of both, a process that can be seen as a translation of the method Lê used to create the series for which he is best known, namely his “photo-weavings.”² Untitled (Soldiers at Rest) (2003) belongs to this body of work, which resulted from Lê’s long-term archaeological investigation of the visual culture of the American War (known as the Vietnam War in the United States), via a traditional Vietnamese weaving technique. Lê learned the latter from his aunt who, when he was a child in Vietnam, wove grass mats, and he later adapted this traditional craft for his own purposes. As Christopher Miles, an artist, curator, and friend of Lê has noted, the function of weaving was, for Lê, both “an effective method and a powerful metaphor” in addressing the layering of personal, historical, and cultural registers operating in his practice.³ In an attempt both to interrogate the construction of representations of Vietnam and the way his own subjectivity related to them and to explore how “to take back control of those images,” Lê cut chromogenic prints of archival and found imagery into strips that he interlaces into composite pictures.⁴

Untitled (Soldiers at Rest) shows a group of five men who, as the title suggests, are taking a break from their military duties. This moment of pause from the temporality of war is signaled through their bare chests and laid-back demeanors. They smile at the camera; one man in the foreground can be seen holding a cigarette. Elements of warfare are identifiable, mainly in the form of a vehicle that, at the center of the image, one of the soldiers is seated upon. This scene is interlaced with two other characters whose presence produces an impression of spectrality and wards off any attempt to capture the image as a whole—that is, to find an all-encompassing meaning within it. The most easily discernible of them is Cynthia Wood in her iconic role as a Playboy Playmate in Apocalypse Now (1979). Wearing a pale sky-blue cowgirl outfit and white hat, she appears in a number of Lê’s other woven photographs, including in Paramount (2003), Untitled 9 (2004), and From Vietnam to Hollywood (paratroopers) (2005), as part of his endeavor to examine the connection between sexualized imagery and imagery of war and political violence. Wood’s inclusion in Untitled (Soldiers at Rest) seems to aim to problematize certain binaries within the image. Often, black-and-white images are archival or photojournalistic and so Wood is rendered in bright colors—in contrast to the soldiers. Furthermore, the men’s faces are identifiable, while hers is partially blurred through the effects of crosshatching—the mark of Lê’s “own style of weaving.” As the artist has declared, “There are parts where I skip weaving to make a certain part of the image clearer or to hide an area.”⁵ In Apocalypse Now, the arrival of Playmates in the Vietnamese jungle to perform for the soldiers results in the latter’s display of violent virility—led by their drive toward a fantasized full satisfaction that, in fact, exposes the military’s impotence. However, in Lê’s image, this scene is not reduced to the mere spectacle of the female body offered to the male gaze—or even to its critique. The quasi-kinetic dimension of Lê’s photo-weavings, when encountered in real space, invites the viewer to a wander of body and gaze, and to a back-and-forth examination of “hidden” elements and of the work in total. And so, on closer inspection, Untitled (Soldiers at Rest) reveals the silhouette of a man who, emerging from the right-hand edge of the picture, stands face-to-face with Wood, his arm stretched toward her and blending in the picture as he reaches out to her. Within this triangular scenario, it is unclear (at least to the author of the present speculation) which gazing subject is the object of Wood’s lascivious pose. As already mentioned, the soldiers seem to stare at the camera—or the viewer—and the way Lê has crosshatched Wood’s right eye directs her gaze in the same direction. As for the character on the right, Lê has woven a strip of the soldiers in the other image into the area of his eye socket.

Having experienced war and refugeehood, Lê’s questioning of what forms the memories of Vietnam led him to undo their established representations and to “start to insert other narratives,”⁶ a process that, as major commentators of Lê’s work have noted, “can be seen as acts of repair or as a kind of memorial.”⁷ Here, questions arise: do Lê’s gestures of interlacing, interweaving, or suturing constitute a form of critique, and what do these other narratives entail? In this regard, Lê stated in a 2023 interview: “Everything’s kind of merging, so I was trying to break the whole thing apart into pieces or to deconstruct it, to start to talk about how everything is merging between facts, between fiction, between personal memories into this landscape of surreal memories, neither facts nor fiction.”⁸ As this statement on merging levels of realities and the constructed scenario of Untitled (Soldiers at Rest) suggests, the insertion of other narratives produces indeterminacy and undecidability relative to the legibility and visibility of the images he produces. My contention is that this phenomenon relates as much to the material condition of weaving as to its conceptual and psychic dimensions. Although rarely discussed by his commentators, the visual likeness between Lê’s woven photos and the texture of early electronic videos is striking, and it is something the artist himself commented on: “I always think of the weaving in terms of pixels, because weaving is the first binary structure. Maybe not exactly from the start, but certainly over the years I have been working on the project, and particularly after the first body of work in the late 1980s, I was aware of that relationship.”⁹ Thus, it can be inferred that the site that interlaces the personal with the political is precisely the minimal unit of a woven image—the stitch, the point of suture, or the pixel. A suture closes a wound but in so doing, makes it visible; and to borrow from philosopher Maurizio Lazzarato’s writings on the videographic image, similarly, Lê’s “weaving, dissolving, and re-weaving flows . . . is radical constructivism in politics as well as in the . . . image.”¹⁰

In memory of Dinh Q. Lê and to our missed encounters. Thank you to post editors Beya Othmani, Carlos Quijon, Jr., and Elena Pérez-Ardá López for making this encounter of another kind possible.

Untitled (Soldiers at Rest) (2003) is currently on view as part of the presentation titled “War Remembers Me” in Gallery 214.

The post Method and Metaphor: Dinh Q. Lê’s Untitled (Soldiers at Rest) (2003) appeared first on post.

This essay by art historian Gabriela Germana Roquez delves into the significance of landscape in the art of the Sarhua community in the Peruvian Andes and the Shipibo-Konibo people in the Amazon. Through her analysis, Germana Roquez illuminates how these artworks depict, embody, and summon the landscape, emphasizing the active role of the natural world in the artists’ creative process. By exploring the interconnectedness of humans and nonhuman actors in artistic expression, Germana Roquez prompts us to reflect on the spiritual dimensions of representing the natural environment, drawing from both rural and urban contexts in Peru as case studies.

The modern Western concept of landscape has traditionally implied the existence of an observing subject and an observed territory. It corresponds to an anthropocentric perspective, in which humans are superior to nature and thus allowed to control the territory and extract its resources. In the arts, this understanding has conventionally meant the depiction of an expanse of natural scenery from a single, detached viewpoint. While artists in recent decades have proposed diverging manners of representing the landscape (or the territory that surrounds them), new critical studies and theories have posed other ways in which it can be analyzed.¹The development of ecocriticism and new materialisms has been particularly instrumental in questioning the centrality of humans in ecological contexts and in highlighting the agency of nonhuman elements.²

However, as Jessica Horton, Janet Catherine Berlo, and Sara Garzón have all noted, we must acknowledge that these seemingly new ideas in fact originated among Indigenous groups and have been a constant presence in their millenarian thought.³ Further, Indigenous artworks that reference the natural environment offer alternative thought models.⁴To understand Indigenous perspectives on the notion of territory, we must engage with diverse Indigenous epistemologies and ontologies. One important subject among many Indigenous groups is the concept of vital materiality and the interconnections between different beings and elements on earth. Indigenous and rural communities in the Andean and Amazonian regions of South America perceive that all entities in nature are interdependent, and yet that each one possesses agency and intentionality all its own. Moreover, many of these elements hold sacred significance.

Building upon Indigenous ecologies and materialisms, this text addresses the ways in which people from the rural communities of Sarhua in the Andes and Shipibo-Konibo in the Amazonia comprehend the material world that surrounds them and how this understanding guides their aesthetic production. First, I analyze painted boards produced in Sarhua and Shipibo-Konibo textiles. I argue that these objects are “embodied landscapes” interacting with human and nonhuman elements that define their material, formal, and iconographic configurations in both sacred and nonsacred ways. Next, I analyze a series of paintings created by contemporary Sarhuino and Shipibo-Konibo artists who have relocated (or whose parents relocated) to the capital city of Lima. This inquiry illustrates how these artists, while adhering to many traditional Western painterly conventions—particularly the use of representational images, cartographic renditions, and the landscape as the background or setting for human activities—are still able to evoke the natural environment from the sacred and animistic perspectives that they inherited from their communities.

Painted Boards and the Power of the Mountains

Sarhua is a rural community located in the Ayacucho region of the Peruvian central Andes. Sarhuinos inhabit a small town in a valley surrounded by big mountains, and they use the adjacent lands for agriculture and livestock labor. Among the community’s most important symbolic objects are the Tablas, long painted boards that date as far back as the 19th century. About 118 inches high and 12 inches wide, they are normally attached to the ceiling of a newly constructed house.

Their main functions are to represent kinship relations and to maintain systems of reciprocity within the community.⁵But Tablas also protect the house and the family that lives in it, together with their lands, animals, crops, goods, and chattels. People in Sarhua, as in other Andean regions, consider the mountains, known as the apus or wamanis, to be agentic, powerful beings.⁶I pose that the Tablas care for the houses in the same way that the apus care for the town. Both the materiality and iconography of the Tablas and their participation in ritual are central to this analysis.

Sarhuinos make the Tablas when a couple is constructing the roof of their new house. The Tablas are read from bottom to top, beginning with a dedication from the compadres,⁷followed by depictions of the Virgin of the Assumption, the patron saint of Sarhua; the couple who owns the house; their close relatives (who appear in order of importance); and the sun.

Sarhuinos obtain the wood to make the Tablas from various trees, including pati, aliso, or molle, all of which grow in the valleys near the town, and use the burned branches of chillka, or willow, also from the valley, to outline the figures. They obtain the colored earths used to paint the figures from the mountains that surround Sarhua. To apply the colors, painters use retama sticks and feathers from local birds, and to fix the colors, they use qullpa, a type of resin they obtain from rocks located in the highlands.⁸ Indeed, the materials necessary to produce the Tablas come from the whole of the Sarhuino landscape. Native American curator Patricia Marroquín Norby has pointed out that in many works of Indigenous art, the source of the materials, the way in which they are collected, and their treatment speak to the relationship between the inhabitants and their territory. These works, therefore, do not represent the landscape; rather, they are the landscape.⁹

When the Tabla is ready, the compadre delivers it to the new homeowners in a ritual called Tabla Apaycuy. He and his wife, family, and friends, together with other local residents, carry the Tabla through the town of Sarhua along with goods such as corn, potatoes, fruits, and ichu, a grass from the highlands that is used for roofing.¹⁰Through the Tabla Apaykuy, the Tabla interacts with the entire Sarhuino landscape. More importantly, after the owners of the house attach the Tabla to the ceiling and celebrate with a great party, the Tabla gets in touch with the apus through a ritual called inchahuay, thereby acquiring the power to protect the house. During the inchahuay, guests walk and dance around the outside of the house wearing cloaks and conical hats made of ichu. Sarhuino painter Primitivo Evanán Poma indicates that through this practice, people invoke the apus for the protection of the house.¹¹Anthropologist Hilda Araujo points out that inchahuay is also the Sarhuino name for a layer of fog that, when it settles on the mountains on August 1, indicates a good year—that is, a year with a lot of rain. Thus, when the Sarhuinos wear these conical hats, they act as “mountains of good luck.”¹²

According to Andean concepts of animism, places and things are sentient entities that have the power to act. Further, as Bill Sillar notes, “Things that have had prior relationship, or evoke similarities, with other places, things or people may continue to have an effective relationship with their origin or referent.”¹³The Tablas de Sarhua, in fact, act like the apus or wamanis. Through their images and materiality, they are connected to and interact with the context surrounding them and have the agency to take care of the house and family, their goods, and their lands.

Shipibo-Konibo Textiles and the Power of Plants

The Shipibo-Konibo, an Indigenous community living in rural towns along the Ucayali River, in the Peruvian Amazon, have a different understanding of their territory and its visual representation in everyday objects. The Shipibo-Konibo consider themselves part of nature and the forest, trees, rivers, and land as entities with agency. Essential to the Shipibo-Konibo culture are the rao plants, or plants with power, which they consider to be intelligent beings.¹⁴Through ritual consumption of these plants, the Shipibo-Konibo connect with them and use them for medicinal purposes. They also use rao plants to guide them through their inner selves and to experience a deep communion with nature.¹⁵

Inspired by the visions formed when using rao plants such as piripiri (Cyperus sp.) and ayahuasca (Banisteriopsis caapi), Shipibo-Konibo women create and apply geometric patterns to bodies, clothing, ceramics, and other objects, materializing the koshi, or positive energy of the plants.¹⁶

Called kené in the Shipibo-Konibo language, these visual designs allude to the spots on the skin of the primordial anaconda ronin, who created the rivers and constellations as well as the paths that beings (animals, plants, spirits, and stars) use to travel and communicate.¹⁷Similar to interconnected labyrinths, they represent the river and the constellations that are central to the community’s worldview.¹⁸The Shipibo-Konibo’s understanding of the territory takes place through ritual and connection with the energy of plants, linking the territory with the cosmos and with human beings and their daily activities.

Among the objects that Shipibo-Konibo women cover with kené is the cloth they use to make traditional garments, such as the chitonte, or skirt for women, and the tari, or tunic for men. They construct these clothes from plain-weave fabrics made of a native variety of cotton that grows in the Ucayali region. Women used to grow the cotton, spin it, and weave it with a backstrap loom.¹⁹Once they have the cloth ready, they paint the kené using vegetal dyes that they make from the bark, fruits, leaves, roots, and seeds of local plants.²⁰Then they cover the cloth with gray clay sourced from the river’s edge and dry it in the sun. When they wash the cloth, the once pale designs are shown to have turned black and colorfast. Sometimes the women add bits of color derived from plants—such as red from achiote, yellow from the roots of the guisador, and purple from the ani plant.²¹ In other cases, they completely dye the new cloth using the bark of the mahogany tree to achieve a reddish tone or river clay, which results in a black fabric they then embellish with colorful embroidery and applied white strips.²²

As in the case of Tablas, Shipibo-Konibo textiles evoke the territory. This territory is not an alien space, as it is intrinsically linked to the body of the person who wears the garment made from the cloth created within it. The materiality of the clothing links the human body to local plants, water, and soil; and the patterns link it to networks—to the roots of plants, the paths of rivers, and the movement of stars.²³Moreover, the energy of the rao plants protects those wearing the clothing from various evils. The whole garment is testimony to a worldview in which the body is directly linked to nature and the territory on both cosmic and intimate levels.

Transitioning to a New Environment

During the second half of the twentieth century, when economic and social crises heavily affected rural regions in Peru, many people living in those areas had to migrate to the big cities, especially to the capital, Lima. There, migrants had to reshape their lives, fight for income and basic rights, learn Spanish, and negotiate the power structures in place. In the same way, they had to reshape their artistic practices to fit the market and the art system and to communicate with an urban audience.²⁴ In the 1970s, a group of Sarhuino painters in Lima began to produce smaller versions of the traditional Tablas and to depict costumbrista scenes of Sarhua for an urban audience. The new Tablas were a success, leading Sarhuinos to also depict social injustices and personal concerns.²⁵Shipibo-Konibo art followed a similar transition. Some of the Shipibo-Konibo who migrated to Lima in the 1980s shared the traditional knowledge of their people through figurative images describing traditional practices and rituals as well as their worldview and, more recently, their political struggles.²⁶In these new paintings, both Sarhuino and Shipibo-Konibo artists adopted Western conventions, transforming their engagement with the landscape. Although intended for other audiences and purposes, many of these pieces managed to refer in novel, clever, and creative ways, to the landscape from the perspective of Indigenous Andean and Amazonian ontologies and epistemologies.

The mountains form the background of many Sarhuino paintings produced in Lima—that is, they are shown as part of the landscape in the Western sense. Some painters, however, have taken an interest in evoking the agency, power, and sacredness of the apus. Since the 1970s, the painters of the Asociación de Artistas Populares de Sarhua (ADAPS) have made several versions of Apu Suyos.

All of them feature the mountains of Sarhua, but in the form of men dressed in regal clothes. According to the inscription on the painting, the apus in the composition eat the offerings (fruits, wine, special bread, coca leaves, cigarettes, flowers, etc.) that the Sarhuinos have left for them on the table after a herranza, or cattle-marking celebration. A central figure, Millqa, receives the products, and invites the other apus to enjoy these “exquisite offerings.” All of them agree to protect the trusted sheep cattle.²⁷This portrayal of the Sarhuino landscape conveys the agency and power of the mountains to an urban audience, which is why the painters decided to use Western conventions and render the apus as human beings dressed like European kings.²⁸

In 1997, Carmelón Berrocal made Mapa del distrito de Sarhua con casitas, in which he represents the territory of his native town based on modern Western cartographic conventions.²⁹

However, this work exceeds the standard models based on precise measurements and instead highlights important places and elements for Sarhuinos—mountains, farmlands, roads, streets, chapels, canals, and rivers—whose proper names are indicated in writing. Also, the urban area is subjugated by the colossal mountains and the starry sky. This map, therefore, not only represents a territory, but also accounts for the power of the apus and nature over the life and culture of the Sarhuinos. Furthermore, Berrocal made the painting with colored soils collected from Sarhua. The painting is an intellectual depiction of the territory and yet also connected to it through its materiality.

In 2023, Venuca Evanán, the daughter of two Sarhuino painters who had relocated to Lima, produced La ofrenda de Francisca.

The composition of this work centers on the artist’s grandmother, Francisca, who is making a pagapu, or offering to the mountains, and giving thanks to the Pachamama, or the earth, for all that she offers. The four mountains in the background represent the four apus of Sarhua, which is Francisca’s hometown. In the foreground, Venuca has depicted the sea and coastal region where Lima is located and where she was born. The elements shown reference the relationship between humans and other natural beings as well as the migration story of the artist’s family. By including colored soils that she sourced from the mountains in Sarhua and sand that she collected from her neighborhood in Lima, Venuca reinforces this aspect of the artwork.³⁰

For Shipibo-Konibo people, the kené, the geometric designs that women visualize when connecting with rao plants, have been a means of reference to the context surrounding them, together with the concepts and knowledge to navigate it. Elena Valera (Bahuan Jisbe), born in the community of Roya, Pucallpa, learned kené from her grandmother and has applied it to both textiles and ceramics.³¹In Lima, she created her firsts paintings with materials and techniques like the ones she used before moving to the capital. First, she dyed the fabric with mahogany bark to obtain a reddish background, and then she painted the images with natural pigments she obtained from mud, plants, and soil from Roya.³²Onanya Baque Raoni (1990s) portrays an onanya, or traditional healer, who is using rao plants to cure a sick child and their mother.³³

Valera, who is also a traditional healer, speaks on different levels of the centrality of plants and their power in the Shipibo-Konibo worldview through the theme of onanya, the inclusion of kené designs in her subjects’ clothing, and her use of plants as a primary material.

Eventually Valera stopped using natural dyes and began painting with acrylic on cloth. She also began depicting the migration of the Shipibo-Konibo people to Lima. In a 2011 painting, the artist addresses the natural environment of the Amazon Forest and the Andean mountains that the Shipibo-Konibo must cross to get to the Peruvian capital.

These places are rendered as interrelated environments, though some important differences stand out. While in the Amazon Forest, everything seems to work in perfect harmony, especially the relationship between women and plants, in Lima all the elements—three Shipibo women, a computer, the San Cristóbal mountain, and the tall buildings—are disconnected from one another. In this complex environment, while two Shipibo women learn new skills to succeed in an industrialized and globalized world, a third woman, dressed in traditional Shipibo-Konibo clothing, represents the connection to knowledge that their mothers and grandmothers learned from plants and transmitted through kené.³⁴

Harry Pinedo, son of Elena Valera and born in Lima, is also an artist. His painting El apu y la danza de Ronin (2022), characteristic of his work about the migration of the Shipibo-Konibo to Lima, shows two men and a woman performing a dance in honor of Ronin on the streets of the Shipibo-Konibo community of Cantagallo in Lima.³⁵

Ronin is the mother serpent of waters, a primordial being who gave rise to the universe and whose skin is the basis of the kené designs.³⁶The Ronin dance and the presence of kené on the people’s clothing and the floor celebrate the harmony of the Shipibo-Konibo world. The San Cristóbal mountain, the main apu of the Lima area, a powerful being before the Spanish invasion and a sacred Indigenous space today reconquered by the Shipibo-Konibo, stands in the background.³⁷ Two big trees, located on either side of the mountain, are also prominent elements in the composition, highlighting the power and importance of plants to the Shipibo-Community in Lima.

These works question the Western anthropocentric conception of the landscape and allow us to conceive new understandings of landscape and territory. Indigenous ecologies and materialisms, therefore, constitute an effective approach to analyzing them. Produced in different contexts, however, they must also be analyzed on their own terms. Elizabeth Burns Coleman points out, in regards to Indigenous art, the importance of knowing “the kind of broad categories that are established in the society in which it [the object] was produced, as well as the category in which the artist that produced the work expected it to be understood or interpreted.”³⁸Sarhuino and Shipibo-Konibo people living in their rural communities are especially concerned with the vitality of matter and the interconnection of different beings in nature. They do not produce objects that represent the landscape or territory around them. Instead, these communities create, in collaboration with mountains and plants, acting entities that interact with their immediate contexts. Sarhuino and Shipibo-Konibo contemporary artworks made in Lima are no longer sentient given that they are made for urban, Western audiences. The artists have conveyed, through images, the power of the mountains and plants and their relationships with other beings. However, by using strategies such as representing natural beings with human traits and incorporating material elements from the natural environment and symbolic references to the knowledge of their respective communities, these artworks continue to be powerful objects that never cease to negotiate their Indigenous epistemologies.

Spanish

El presente ensayo de la historiadora de arte Gabriela Germana Roquez explora la importancia del paisaje en el arte de la comunidad Sarhua en los Andes y del pueblo shipibo-konibo en la Amazonia, ambos en Perú. En su análisis, Germana Roquez nos muestra el modo en que estas obras de arte representan, encarnan y reivindican el paisaje, destacando el papel activo que el mundo natural desempeña en el proceso creativo de los artistas. Al explorar la interconexión de los actores humanos y no humanos en la expresión artística, Germana Roquez nos invita a reflexionar sobre las dimensiones espirituales de la representación del entorno natural, tomando como casos de estudio tanto contextos rurales como urbanos de Perú.

El concepto occidental moderno de paisaje tradicionalmente ha supuesto la existencia de un sujeto observador y de un territorio observado. Esto responde a una perspectiva antropocéntrica, según la cual los seres humanos son superiores a la naturaleza y, por tanto, pueden controlar el territorio y extraer sus recursos. En el mundo del arte, este concepto generalmente ha llevado a representar la extensión del paisaje natural desde un punto de vista individual y distante. En las últimas décadas, mientras los artistas han propuesto diversas formas de representar el paisaje (o el territorio que les rodea), los nuevos estudios y teorías críticas han planteado también otras maneras de analizarlo.³⁹Tanto el desarrollo de la ecocrítica como del nuevo materialismo han sido particularmente decisivos a la hora de cuestionar la centralidad del ser humano en el contexto ecológico y de resaltar la agencia de los elementos no humanos.⁴⁰

Sin embargo, como han señalado Jessica Horton, Janet Catherine Berlo y Sara Garzón, debemos reconocer que estas ideas aparentemente nuevas en verdad surgieron en los grupos indígenas y han sido una presencia constante en su pensamiento milenario.⁴¹ Más aún, las obras de arte indígena que hacen referencia al entorno natural proponen estructuras de pensamiento alternativas.⁴² Para comprender la noción de territorio desde las perspectivas indígenas, tenemos que abordar diferentes epistemologías y ontologías indígenas. Un tema muy importante para los diversos grupos indígenas es el concepto de materialidad vital y la interconexión entre los distintos seres y elementos de la Tierra. Las comunidades indígenas y rurales de las regiones andina y amazónica de América del Sur consideran que, en la naturaleza, todas las entidades son interdependientes y, sin embargo, cada una posee agencia e intencionalidad propia. Es más, muchos de estos elementos revisten un valor sagrado.

Basándose en las ecologías y los materialismos indígenas, el presente texto explora el modo en que los habitantes de las comunidades rurales de Sarhua, en los Andes, y shipibo-konibo, en la Amazonia, conciben el mundo material que les rodea y cómo esa concepción guía su producción estética. En primer lugar, analizaré las tablas pintadas que se elaboran en Sarhua y los tejidos shipibo-konibo. Propongo que estos objetos son “paisajes encarnados” que interactúan con los elementos humanos y no humanos que definen sus configuraciones materiales, formales e iconográficas, tanto a nivel sagrado como no sagrado. Luego examinaré una serie de pinturas creadas por artistas sarhuinos y shipibo-konibo contemporáneos que se han trasladado (o cuyos padres se han trasladado) a la capital, Lima. Este análisis mostrará cómo estos artistas, aunque se han adherido a diferentes convenciones pictóricas occidentales tradicionales –en particular, al uso de imágenes figurativas, de reproducciones cartográficas y del paisaje como fondo o escenario de la actividad humana– siguen siendo capaces de invocar el entorno natural desde las perspectivas sagradas y animistas que heredaron de sus comunidades.

Las tablas pintadas y el poder de las montañas

Sarhua es una comunidad rural situada en la región de Ayacucho, en los Andes peruanos centrales. Los sarhuinos habitan un pequeño poblado en un valle rodeado por grandes montañas, y usan los terrenos aledaños para labores agrícolas y ganaderas. Las Tablas –largos listones de madera pintada que datan del siglo XIX– se encuentran entre los objetos simbólicos más importantes de la comunidad. Miden unos tres metros de alto por treinta centímetros de ancho, y normalmente se colocan en los techos de las casas recién construidas.

Su principal función es representar las relaciones de parentesco y mantener los sistemas de reciprocidad dentro de la comunidad. ⁴³Pero las Tablas también protegen la casa y a la familia que la habita, junto con sus tierras, animales, cultivos, bienes y enseres. La gente de Sarhua, igual que en otras regiones andinas, considera a las montañas –a las que llaman apus o wamanis– como seres poderosos y con agencia.⁴⁴ Planteo, por lo tanto, que las Tablas cuidan las casas de la misma manera que los apus cuidan el pueblo. Tanto la materialidad como la iconografía de las Tablas y su participación en los rituales son fundamentales para este análisis.

            Los sarhuinos hacen Tablas cada vez que una pareja empieza a construir el techo de una nueva casa. Las Tablas se leen de abajo hacia arriba, comenzando con una dedicatoria de los compadres,⁴⁵ seguida de representaciones de la Virgen de la Asunción (patrona de Sarhua), de la pareja propietaria de la casa, de sus parientes cercanos (que aparecen en orden de importancia) y del sol.

Los sarhuinos obtienen la madera para hacer las Tablas de distintos árboles –entre ellos el pati, el aliso o el molle– que crecen en los valles cercanos al pueblo, y usan las ramas quemadas de chillka o sauce, también provenientes del valle, para delinear las figuras. Las tierras de colores que usan para pintar las figuras las obtienen de las montañas que rodean Sarhua. Para aplicar los colores, los pintores usan varas de retama y plumas de aves locales, y para fijarlos, aplican qullpa, un tipo de resina que obtienen de piedras ubicadas en las zonas de más altura.⁴⁶ Así, todos los materiales necesarios para producir las Tablas proceden del paisaje sarhuino. La curadora de arte indígena Patricia Marroquín Norby ha señalado que, en muchas obras de arte indígena, el origen de los materiales, la forma en que son recolectados y el tratamiento que reciben reflejan la relación de los habitantes con su territorio. Por tanto, estas obras no representan el paisaje, sino que son el paisaje.⁴⁷

Cuando la Tabla está lista, el compadre se la entrega a los nuevos propietarios en un ritual llamado Tabla Apaycuy. El compadre y su esposa, familia y amigos, acompañados de otros residentes locales, transportan la Tabla a través del pueblo de Sarhua junto con otras mercancías como maíz, papas, frutas e ichu, una hierba de las tierras altas que se utiliza para techar.⁴⁸Mediante la ceremonia del Tabla Apaykuy, la Tabla interactúa con todo el paisaje sarhuino. Y lo que es más importante, luego de que los dueños fijan la Tabla al techo de la casa y celebran con una gran fiesta, la Tabla entra en contacto con los apus a través de un ritual llamado inchahuay, donde adquiere el poder de proteger la casa.⁴⁹Durante el inchahuay, los invitados pasean y bailan alrededor de la casa con capas y sombreros cónicos hechos de ichu. El pintor sarhuino Primitivo Evanán Poma afirma que, mediante este ritual, la gente invoca a los apus para que protejan la casa. La antropóloga Hilda Araujo explica que la palabra inchahuay también es el término sarhuino que se usa para designar una fina capa de niebla que, si se asienta en las montañas el 1 de agosto, es señal de que vendrá un buen año, es decir, un año con abundantes lluvias. Así, cuando los sarhuinos usan esos sombreros cónicos, están actuando como “montañas de buena suerte”.⁵⁰

Según las concepciones andinas de animismo, los lugares y las cosas son entidades sensibles que tienen poder para actuar. Es más, como señala Bill Sillar, “las cosas que han tenido una relación previa o que suscitan similitudes con otros lugares, cosas o personas pueden seguir manteniendo una relación efectiva con su origen o su referente”.⁵¹ Las Tablas de Sarhua, de hecho, actúan como apus o wamanis. A través de sus imágenes y de su materialidad, están conectadas e interactúan con el contexto que las rodea, y tienen agencia para cuidar de la casa y de la familia, de sus bienes y sus tierras.

Los textiles shipibo-konibo y el poder de las plantas

Los shipibo-konibo, una comunidad indígena que habita en pueblos rurales a lo largo del río Ucayali en la Amazonia peruana, tienen una forma distinta de entender el territorio y su representación visual en los objetos cotidianos. Los shipibo-konibo se consideran parte de la naturaleza y ven el bosque, los árboles, los ríos y la tierra como entidades con agencia. Las plantas rao, o plantas con poder, son fundamentales para ellos y las consideran seres inteligentes.⁵²A través del consumo ritual de estas plantas, los shipibo-konibo entablan una conexión con ellas y las utilizan con fines medicinales. También recurren a las plantas rao para que éstas los guíen por su interior y experimentar una profunda comunión con la naturaleza.⁵³ Inspiradas en las visiones que perciben cuando consumen plantas rao como el piripiri (Cyperus sp.) y la ayahuasca (Banisteriopsis caapi), las mujeres shipibo-konibo crean y plasman motivos geométricos en sus cuerpos, ropas, cerámicas y otros objetos, materializando la koshi o energía positiva de las plantas.⁵⁴

Estos diseños visuales, denominados kené en el idioma shipibo-konibo, evocan las manchas de la piel de la anaconda primigenia ronin, quien creó los ríos y las constelaciones, así como los caminos que utilizan los seres vivos (animales, plantas, espíritus y estrellas) para trasladarse y comunicarse.⁵⁵Similares a laberintos conectados entre sí, representan tanto el río como las constelaciones que son fundamentales para la cosmovisión de la comunidad.⁵⁶ A través del ritual y de la conexión con la energía de las plantas, los shipibo-konibo comprenden el territorio y lo vinculan al cosmos y a los seres humanos y sus actividades cotidianas.   

Entre los objetos que las mujeres shipibo-konibo cubren con kené destaca la tela que usan para confeccionar prendas tradicionales, como el chitonte, o falda para las mujeres, y el tari, o túnica para los hombres. Confeccionan estas prendas con telas de tejido liso realizadas a partir de una variedad autóctona de algodón que crece en la región de Ucayali. Las mujeres solían cultivar el algodón, hilarlo y tejerlo con un telar de cintura.⁵⁷Cuando la tela ya está lista, pintan el kené con tintes vegetales que elaboran con cortezas, frutos, hojas, raíces y semillas de plantas locales.⁵⁸Luego cubren la tela con arcilla gris procedente de la orilla del río y la secan al sol. Cuando la lavan, los diseños que eran pálidos se oscurecen y se fijan a la tela. A veces las mujeres añaden toques de colores derivados de plantas, como el rojo del achiote, el amarillo de las raíces del guisador y el púrpura de la planta ani.⁵⁹En otros casos, tiñen completamente la tela nueva utilizando la corteza del árbol de caoba para conseguir un tono rojizo o arcilla del río, lo que da como resultado un tejido negro que luego adornan con bordados de colores y apliques de tiras blancas.⁶⁰

Al igual que en el caso de las Tablas, los tejidos shipibo-konibo evocan al territorio. Este territorio no es un espacio ajeno, sino que está intrínsecamente unido al cuerpo de la persona que usa la prenda elaborada con la tela que se fabricó en él. La materialidad de la prenda conecta el cuerpo humano a las plantas, al agua y al suelo del lugar; y los diseños lo conectan a otros entramados: a las raíces de las plantas, a los caminos de los ríos y al movimiento de las estrellas.⁶¹ Además, la energía de las plantas rao protege a quien lleva la ropa de distintos males. Toda la prenda es el testimonio de una cosmovisión en la que el cuerpo está directamente unido a la naturaleza y al territorio, tanto a nivel cósmico como íntimo.

La transición a un nuevo entorno

Durante la segunda mitad del siglo XX, una serie de crisis económicas y sociales afectaron gravemente a las regiones rurales de Perú y muchas personas tuvieron que migrar a las grandes ciudades, sobre todo a la capital, Lima. Allí, los migrantes tuvieron que rehacer sus vidas, luchar por conseguir ingresos y derechos básicos, aprender español y negociar las estructuras de poder existentes. También debieron reconfigurar sus prácticas artísticas para adaptarse al mercado y al sistema del arte, y para aprender a comunicarse con un público urbano.⁶²

En la década de 1970, un grupo de pintores sarhuinos en Lima empezó a producir versiones más pequeñas de las tradicionales Tablas y a representar en ellas escenas costumbristas de Sarhua orientadas a un público urbano. Las nuevas Tablas fueron un éxito, lo que llevó a los sarhuinos a representar también las injusticias sociales y sus preocupaciones personales.⁶³ El arte shipibo-konibo siguió una transición parecida. Algunos de los shipibo-konibo que emigraron a Lima en la década de 1980 mostraron los conocimientos de su pueblo mediante imágenes figurativas que describían prácticas y rituales tradicionales, así como su cosmovisión y, más recientemente, sus luchas políticas.⁶⁴En estas nuevas pinturas, tanto los artistas sarhuinos como los shipibo-konibo adoptaron convenciones occidentales, lo que supuso una modificación en su relación con el paisaje. Si bien estas piezas fueron pensadas para otros públicos y con otros propósitos, muchas supieron referirse al paisaje de forma novedosa, inteligente y creativa, desde la perspectiva de las ontologías y epistemologías indígenas andinas y amazónicas. 

Las montañas son parte del fondo de muchos cuadros sarhuinos realizados en Lima, es decir, se las presenta como parte del paisaje en el sentido occidental. Sin embargo, algunos pintores se han esforzado por evocar la agencia, el poder y el carácter sagrado de los apus. Desde la década de 1970, los pintores de la Asociación de Artistas Populares de Sarhua (ADAPS) han realizado varias versiones de Apu Suyos.

En todas se pueden ver las montañas de Sarhua, pero personificadas como hombres vestidos con ropas de la realeza. Según la inscripción en la pintura, los apus de la composición comen las ofrendas (frutas, vino, pan especial, hojas de coca, cigarrillos, flores, etc.) que los sarhuinos les han dejado sobre la mesa después de la herranza o fiesta de marcación de ganado. Una de las figuras centrales, Millqa, recibe los productos e invita a los demás apus a disfrutar de estas “exquisitas ofrendas”. Todos se ponen de acuerdo para proteger el ganado ovino de los leales.⁶⁵Esta representación del paisaje sarhuino busca transmitir la agencia y el poder de las montañas a un público urbano, razón por la cual los pintores decidieron utilizar las convenciones occidentales y representar a los apus como seres humanos vestidos como reyes europeos.⁶⁶En 1997, Carmelón Berrocal hizo el cuadro Mapa del distrito de Sarhua con casitas, en el que representa el territorio de su pueblo natal según las convenciones cartográficas occidentales modernas.⁶⁷

Esta obra, sin embargo, excede los diseños estándares basados en mediciones precisas y destaca, en su lugar, los espacios y elementos importantes para los Sarhuinos –las montañas, las tierras de cultivo, los caminos, las calles, las capillas, los canales y ríos– cuyos nombres propios aparecen indicados por escrito. Además, el casco urbano se presenta dominado por las colosales montañas y el cielo estrellado. Este mapa, por tanto, no sólo representa un territorio, sino que también da cuenta del poder de los apus y de la naturaleza sobre la vida y la cultura de los sarhuinos. Más aún, Berrocal pintó el cuadro con tierras de colores recogidas en Sarhua. El cuadro es una representación intelectual del territorio, pero además está conectado a él por su materialidad.   

En 2023, Venuca Evanán, hija de dos pintores sarhuinos que tuvieron que reestablecerse en Lima, pintó La ofrenda de Francisca.

La composición gira en torno a la abuela de la artista, Francisca, quien realiza un pagapu u ofrenda a las montañas y da gracias a la Pachamama, o tierra, por todo lo que nos ofrece. Las cuatro montañas del fondo representan los cuatro apus de Sarhua, ciudad natal de Francisca. En primer plano, Venuca representó el mar y la región costera en que se encuentra Lima y donde ella nació. Los elementos representados remiten al vínculo entre los seres humanos y otros seres naturales, así como a la historia de migración de la familia de la artista. Venuca subraya este aspecto de la obra incluyendo tierras de colores que obtuvo en las montañas de Sarhua y arena que recogió en su barrio de Lima.⁶⁸

Para el pueblo shipibo-konibo, el kené –los diseños geométricos que las mujeres visualizan cuando se conectan con las plantas rao– ha sido el medio para referirse al contexto que les rodea, así como a los conceptos y conocimientos necesarios para desenvolverse en él. Elena Valera (Bahuan Jisbe), nacida en la comunidad de Roya (Pucallpa) aprendió el kené de su abuela y lo ha aplicado tanto en textiles como en cerámica.⁶⁹En Lima creó sus primeras pinturas con materiales y técnicas similares a las que utilizaba antes de trasladarse a la capital. Primero, teñía las telas con corteza de caoba para obtener un fondo rojizo, y luego pintaba las imágenes con pigmentos naturales que obtuvo del barro, las plantas y la tierra de Roya.⁷⁰Onanya Baque Raoni (década de 1990) retrata a un onanya, o curandero tradicional, que utiliza plantas rao para curar a un niño enfermo y a su madre.⁷¹

Valera, que también es curandera tradicional, plantea en distintos niveles la centralidad de las plantas y su poder en la cosmovisión shipibo-konibo, a través de la figura del onanya, la inclusión de diseños kené en la ropa de sus personajes y el uso de las plantas como materia primordial.

Con el tiempo, Valera dejó de utilizar tintes naturales y empezó a pintar con acrílico sobre tela. También comenzó a representar la migración del pueblo shipibo-konibo a Lima. En un cuadro de 2011 la artista retrata el entorno natural de la selva amazónica y las montañas andinas que los shipibo-konibo deben atravesar para llegar a la capital peruana.

Estos lugares están representados como entornos que se relacionan entre sí, pero se pueden ver ciertas diferencias importantes. Mientras que en la selva amazónica parece que todo convive en perfecta armonía, en especial la relación entre las mujeres y las plantas, en Lima todos los elementos –las tres mujeres shipibo, la computadora, el cerro San Cristóbal y los altos edificios– están desconectados entre sí. En este complejo entorno, mientras dos mujeres shipibo aprenden nuevas habilidades para triunfar en un mundo industrializado y globalizado, una tercera mujer, vestida con prendas tradicionales shipibo-konibo, simboliza la conexión con los conocimientos que sus madres y abuelas aprendieron de las plantas y transmitieron a través del kené.⁷²

Harry Pinedo, hijo de Elena Valera y nacido en Lima, también es artista. Su cuadro El apu y la danza de ronin (2022), característico de su obra sobre la migración de los shipibo-konibo a Lima, muestra a dos hombres y una mujer ejecutando una danza en honor a ronin en las calles de la comunidad shipibo-konibo de Cantagallo, en Lima.⁷³

Ronin es la serpiente madre de las aguas, un ser primigenio que dio origen al universo y cuya piel es la base de los diseños kené.⁷⁴La danza de ronin y la presencia del kené en la vestimenta de la gente y en el suelo, celebran la armonía del mundo shipibo-konibo. Al fondo se alza el cerro San Cristóbal, apu principal de la zona de Lima, un ser poderoso antes de la invasión española y un espacio indígena sagrado, reconquistado en la actualidad por los shipibo-konibo.⁷⁵Los dos grandes árboles ubicados a ambos lados de la montaña también son elementos destacados en la composición, ya que subrayan el poder y la importancia de las plantas para la comunidad shipibo en Lima.     

Todas estas obras cuestionan la visión antropocéntrica occidental del paisaje y nos permiten concebir nuevas maneras de entender el paisaje y el territorio. Las ecologías y los materialismos indígenas, por lo tanto, constituyen un enfoque efectivo para analizarlas. Sin embargo, por haber sido producidas en contextos distintos, también hay que analizarlas en sus propios términos. Refiriéndose al arte indígena, Elizabeth Burns Coleman recuerda que es importante conocer “el tipo de categorías generales que rigen la sociedad en la que fue producido [el objeto], así como la categoría con la que el artista que produjo la obra esperaba que fuera entendida o interpretada”.⁷⁶ Los sarhuinos y los shipibo-konibo que viven en sus comunidades rurales están especialmente interesados en la vitalidad de la materia y la interconexión de los distintos seres en la naturaleza. No producen objetos que representan el paisaje o el territorio que les rodea, sino que crean, en colaboración con las montañas y las plantas, entidades con agencia que interactúan con sus contextos más cercanos.

Las obras de arte sarhuino y shipibo-konibo contemporáneas realizadas en Lima han dejado de ser entidades sensibles dado que fueron realizadas para un público urbano y occidental. Los artistas han transmitido, a través de imágenes, el poder de las montañas y las plantas y sus relaciones con otros seres. Sin embargo, al utilizar ciertas estrategias –como la representación de seres naturales con rasgos humanos, la incorporación de elementos materiales del entorno natural y las referencias simbólicas a los conocimientos de sus respectivas comunidades– estas obras de arte siguen siendo objetos poderosos que no dejan de negociar con sus epistemologías indígenas.

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“Seyni Awa Camara doesn’t belong to any artistic school,” wrote art critic Massamba Mbaye in 2016.¹ She resists any classification and has always considered herself a singular artist, whether in the context of her own country or in that of the international art scene (fig. 1). As Mbaye stresses, Seyni Awa Camara (Senegalese, born c. 1945) could easily have been excluded from the history of art built in the aftermath of independence in Senegal under Léopold Sédar Senghor’s patronage and with state support, when artists were trained at the Dakar “école des arts,” mostly as painters. Except for Younousse Seye (Senegalese, born 1940), no women participated in the exhibitions organized to promote national Senegalese art. Younousse Seye was the only woman to display in Dakar (solo exhibition, Théâtre Daniel Sorano, 1977), Algiers (Pan-African Festival, 1969), and Paris (Art sénégalais d’aujourd’hui, 1974). And contrary to most men, she did not benefit from academic training; she learned from her mother who worked as a batik dyer. Camara also inherited her skills from her mother, who was a potter in Casamance (Senegal). Both artists grounded their practices in family knowledge and later developed in more personal directions. Camara certainly gained more attention than Seye over time, especially outside of Senegal. At the turn of the 1990s, her bold statues were displayed in Paris (Magiciens de la terre, 1989), Las Palmas (Africa Hoy, Africa Now, 1992), and Venice (Biennale Arte 2001—Plateau dell’Umanità, 2001). They are now part of important collections such as the National Museum of Art (Oslo), the Theodore Monod Museum in Dakar (see fig. 4), and the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain (Paris), as well as held in many private collections, some of which are in Senegal (Jom in Dakar and the Musée Khelcom in Saly Portudal). If her creations have stood the test of time, they have also crystallized many of the binary opposites that still structure the art world’s expectations, such as art and craft or the collective and the singular, or the caution deemed necessary by the West in validating any artistic process developed in the so-called peripheries. Looking at the history of global contemporary art from the perspective of Camara’s work and career reveals the ways in which globalization operates, especially regarding women artists from Africa.

Seyni Awa Camara’s figures are striking, and yet they are not meant to please or seduce. They stand free, strongly anchored by their feet, and are sometimes double-headed. With their large smiles, their visible teeth, and their bulging eyes, they often look provocatively happy. Their size varies from a few inches to several yards high, but they are always frontal and hieratic; they are sometimes covered with smaller figures, who cling to their torsos and legs (fig. 2).

When Camara started making these sculptures in her village in Bignona (Casamance, Senegal), people were scared; she could not show them publicly. Michèle Odeyé-Finzi recalls that when she met the artist in the early 1980s, Camara was selling utilitarian pots in the local market.² She was keeping her personal sculptures at her home outside the village in a special room that she had dedicated to them. There, statuettes ranging from maternity figures to zoomorphic ones, small frogs juxtaposed with large cats, trucks, or monkeys (fig. 3), covered the floor. They were made of clay of various shades depending on how they were fired, which is less the case today.

Mystery and rumor surrounded her activities and continue to do so: some wonder if she is still alive and if it is she or rather a sibling who is making the sculptures sold today. A triplet, she was about twelve years old when she disappeared into the forest with her two brothers. As the story goes, they stayed hidden for about four months and geniuses protected them and taught them how to model clay. When the three children finally returned to the village, one of them (Allassane) was carrying a sculpture that he said the forest geniuses had taught him to make. Camara told anthropologist Michèle Odeyé-Finzi that all three of them had been initiated into art by mystical forces—a story that perfectly fit the expectations of the West. It only needed to be relayed by the art world to become magical, which happened in Paris in 1989 at the Magiciens de la Terre (Magicians of the World) exhibition.

A lot has been said and written about Magiciens de la Terre as it betrayed many of the hopes it had raised of being the first truly inclusive and international exhibition. According to the Centre Pompidou, which mounted the show, one hundred artists from all over the world were represented in the French capital: fifty from the West and fifty from “the rest” or “non-Western countries.”³ This Eurocentric division was reinforced by the selection criteria: the works of artists from Asia, South America, and Africa were the result of religious, rural, or mystical practices, while those from Europe and the United States were technological, conceptual, and often self-reflexive in nature. Global modernisms were excluded as curator Jean-Hubert Martin feared they would be considered mere copies of Western styles.⁴ The “Picasso syndrome” theorized by Partha Mitter for Indian artists easily applies to any artist from the Global South, and instead of presenting artists who questioned modernism from different perspectives (such as those affiliated with the Dakar School or Laboratoire Agit’Art in Senegal), Martin and co-curator André Magnin chose artists whose work implicitly reenacts the opposition between the “primitive” and the “modern.” This dual approach revived the primitivistic fashion that took place in Europe at the beginning of the twentieth century, when the European avant-gardes drew inspiration from the arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas, hence contributing to their paradoxical integration into the Western canon.⁵ The “problem” with this exhibition was not the art or the artists, but rather the burden of representativity it imposed on the artists as their art was led to incarnate one part of the world in comparison or contrast with another.

Still unknown within the contemporary art scene, Camara’s statues were exhibited next to those of Louise Bourgeois (American, born France. 1911–2010), one of the few “great women artists” at the time, to quote art historian Linda Nochlin.⁶ Bourgeois served as symbolic validation for Camara, a gesture that was reiterated in 1996 when Bourgeois was invited to write about Camara for a book titled Contemporary Art of Africa: “I recognize her originality and a certain beauty. Now, beauty is a dangerous word because notions of ‘beauty’ are relative. So let me be very clear: the work gives me pleasure to look at. As one artist to the other, I respect, like and enjoy Camara.”⁷ Camara always considered herself an artist even though she lacked academic training (in the 1980s in Senegal, only 30 percent of girls went to school, and 93 percent of those attending art school were men⁸). “She enjoyed or missed the privilege of going to art school (a blessing in disguise),” continued Bourgeois. “But there need be no apologies for naïveté or technical shortcomings. Her genuinely expressive figures have a coherence in style.”⁹

Camara started making sculptures when she was six years old. She learned from her mother and used to hide zoomorphic figurines in the burning oven among the pots and amphoras her mother was making to be sold at the local market. At the age of fifteen, she was forced to marry a much older man and stopped creating. Though she was pregnant four times, she never gave birth; moreover, she fell seriously ill and had to undergo several operations. Like too many women in Senegal and around the world who are forced to marry at too early an age, Camara had to fight. She came back to art when she left her husband and found in sculpture a way to survive and rebuild herself. Her creations are testament to the power of a woman who not only persisted in a practice many considered strange or marginal, but also was able to make sense of it. She fashioned a unique style and, in the process, built herself a home and secured stable sustenance for her family.

Drawing inspiration from her surroundings, Camara has been prolific and consistent, often dedicating her efforts to pregnant figures and expressions of the maternal. In 1989, for instance, she showed a series of feminine statues covered with small smiling figures that seemed to be budding from them. The energy and power of this work results from accumulation, from the repetition of motifs that creates a tension and challenges any easy apprehension of their meaning. Faces suddenly appear on a belly or the knees, radiating like a sun. Camara’s anonymous characters wear jewelry, they have scarifications and elaborate hairstyles. They command our attention with their round eyes, but yet repel us with their silent, empty stares.

Camara believes these figures can heal both herself and others. Indeed, she once cured a couple who could not have children, helping them give birth to twins, as she recalls in Fatou Kandé Senghor’s film Giving Birth.¹⁰Healing takes time, as does the making of sculptures, which in Camara’s case, begins with the fetching of clay from the marigot (swamp) and is followed by the fine grinding of shellfish and the mixing of the two ingredients.

Once the modeling has been completed, the firing stage, which takes place in the open air of the concession yard, begins (fig. 5). As is always the case with ceramics, some pieces break or explode, while others endure the flames and come out just fine. Camara can count on the help of her family and is often shown surrounded by the young men (her second husband’s sons) who work for her, obeying her orders, preparing the pellets she progressively adds to her hollow figures (fig. 8). Though Camara trains those who assist her, she does not intend to pass down her style or her secrets, as she states in Kandé Senghor’s film. Her art is personal, unique; she believes she received a gift from God and that when she dies, her production should stop. 

Camara has been living from her art since the 1990s, but to her great regret, she sells mostly to foreigners. As she recounted in 2006: “People don’t know me in my own country. I survive thanks to foreigners’ orders. They buy my work and then they leave. My own country ignores me. They don’t know who I am.”¹¹ Fortunately, things have changed since then. The Théodore Monod African Art Museum organized a show of her work in 2018 and acquired some of her statues. The Dak’Art biennial included several of her ceramics in the national pavilion the same year, including her in a national survey of art, and her fame continues to grow within the Western art market. 

I wish to thank Francesco Biamonte, Bassam Chaïtou, Michèle Odeyé-Finzi, El Hadji Malick Ndiaye, and Fatou Kandé Senghor for the information and images they so generously shared with me for this essay. 

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On Conspiratorial Materialisms

Firearms, Molotov cocktails, flags, and banners are some of the objects in an arsenal of protests and revolts. Alongside clenched fists and enraged bodies, these objects form an imaginary of human gestures associated with the uprising. Art historian and curator Georges Didi-Huberman dedicated the exhibition Uprisings (2016–17) to this theme, assembling artworks collectively serving as an atlas of insurgent gestures.¹Among them was Woman with Flag (1928; fig. 1), a photograph by Tina Modotti (Italian, 1896–1942) of a confident Mexican woman. The exhibition also featured works depicting demonstrations, clashes with police, and expressions of rebellion, mourning, or redemption. The project revealed how a specific imagery of revolt appears in artworks from different regions of the world. At the same time, it identified gestures that though originating in particular historical moments have survived, reappeared and been repeated over time, mobilizing, shaping, and influencing other communities engaged in their own uprisings.

In doing so, it prompts us to consider the extent to which we are able to reimagine revolt beyond the patterns of gestural repetition. How can we seek out other gestures, objects, shared dynamics and forms of insurgence? Are there alternative imaginaries that do not conform to conventional uprisings or that engage with non-Western frameworks, characterized by different knowledge systems, notions of the body, materialities, and gestures? In the pursuit of counter-colonizing revolt imagery, it becomes imperative to reclaim narratives, histories, and artistic expressions from the Global South. To construct alternative archives of insurgent gestures, it is essential to explore modes of political action beyond those in which humans are the only conceivable political agents. This essay focuses on an archival examination of the interplay between material culture, religiosity, and insurgency within the history of the Black diaspora in the Americas and the Caribbean. Through an array of objects and practices embedded in Afro-derived religions and Afro-diasporic material culture, I intend to shed light on expressions of other imageries of insurgency.

Weapons of combat such as spells, magical powders, talismans, statues, and medicinal or poisonous plants, to name but a few, cannot be comprehended solely through a secular, materialistic perspective, as their power to protect, cure, or cause harm arises from cosmological forces. They are, at their core, imbued with enchantment, understood as the sustenance, containment, and activation of life forces, which in turn are related to knowledge, other beings, and higher powers. Crafted through diverse technological means, these weapons hint at heterogeneous materiality, while their existence and persistence acknowledge a potential for new analytical frameworks. In this text, I delve into the relationship between military arsenals and religion, namely through the usage of religious artifacts as conflict tools of anti-colonial rebellion.

I will refer to these objects as “conspiratorial materialisms”², since they represent enchanted forms of socio-material construction while orchestrating bodies, forces, and historical processes to challenge the established orders and knowledge. The term “conspiracy” encapsulates a reactive nature, embodying both a sense of threat and a will to overthrow. Fighting on two fronts, this understanding of the word disrupts the rationalist and disenchanted materiality of the Enlightenment while dismantling colonial subordinations.

To explore this conspiratorial materialism, I will intertwine historical sources from colonial times with contemporary artistic research and artworks in which they figure. I will consider the artistic practices and work of Ana Mendieta (American, born in Cuba, 1948–1985), Ayrson Heráclito (Brazilian, born 1968), Dalton Paula (Brazilian, born 1982), Abdias do Nascimento (Brazilian, 1914–2011), and Tiago Sant’Ana (Brazilian, born 1990). Here, the archive acts as a crucial political methodology, making room for memorial practices of historically marginalized social groups that were persecuted and suffered the violence of colonialism. By reflecting on the material dimension of these objects against the grain, recovering their histories, and recontextualizing them in a contemporary, counter-colonial framework, I believe we can shed a new light on the political and transformational potency of the colonial archive.

Insurgent Fetish

A defiant and rebellious memory resides within an anonymous manuscript written between 1793 and 1806, where a witness of the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804) vividly narrates the French execution of an insurgent. For him, it was not the act of killing that proved most shocking. Following the brutal spectacle, he recalls how the executioners callously searched their victim and his pockets, unveiling a further layer of the revolution: “In one of his pockets [we found] pamphlets printed in France, filled with commonplaces about the Rights of Man and the Sacred Revolution; in his vest was a large packet of tinder and phosphate of lime. On his chest, he had a little sack full of hair, herbs, and bits of bone, which they call a fetish.”³

This amulet led to an understanding of the ontological and epistemological complex of the Black rebels, one in which political writings coexisted with the notion of “fetish.”⁴It survives, albeit in a different geography, in William Blake’s illustration of a Black insurgent in Suriname carrying such a sack beside a firearm (fig. 2). This “fetish” presence conjures up a materialist analysis. As part of the insurgents’ arsenal, it suggests a marked military presence of Afro-derived religious practices during the Haitian revolution.  What seemed like a mere, meaningless joining of objects whatsoever, a trifle, for those trained under the political, secular, and racist gaze of Western thought, this “fetish” brings us however to the order of the “unthinkable.”

For the Haitian American anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot, the unthinkable encompasses “that which cannot be conceived within the range of possible alternatives, that which perverts all the answers because it defies the terms under which the questions were phrased.”⁵The unthinkable points to the ontological and epistemological problem of how to interpret and understand these conspiratorial materialities and their translation into a Western theoretical framework. In other words, how to question the presence of these materialities and make them thinkable. And how, then, not to theoretically pervert their existence and usage. Such perversion not only challenges the colonizer’s limited understanding of historical events but also fosters alternative perspectives on nature and the technologies wielded by collective rebellion.

This fetish shows a way to politically instrumentalize religious materiality and yet it likewise reflects the persistent presence of spirituality within the forces of this insurgency. It illustrates the broad spectrum of material technologies through which Black Africans and their descendants equipped themselves to mitigate, subvert, and combat colonial oppression. Indeed, they insisted on the political dimensions of their cosmologies. In their studies on nineteenth-century slave rebellions in Brazil, historians João José Reis and Flávio dos Santos Gomes address the significant and complex religious presence among enslaved Africans and how this body of knowledge was reflected in counter-power agencies against the colonial state. For Reis and Gomes, the conjunction of African Islam, popular Catholicism, sorcery, and witchcraft, as some of the religious practices of African origin were called, “served as intellectual, moral and practical guides for rebellious slaves, as well as an arsenal for attack and defense.”⁶Today, this warlike apparatus forms an archive of practices that claims other ways of understanding materialism and its possibilities, ways that encompass the composition and capabilities of materials, and their utilization within sociopolitical contexts.

Religiosity brings not only an alternative mode of power administration but also a poetic-political horizon to the ongoing pursuit of epistemic justice. Despite the historical erasure and silencing of Black culture and people by white elites and their political and cultural institutions, some artists have been carrying out the memory work that reaffirms Black ancestral technologies within the Americas and the Caribbean. Despite the imprisonment of African and African-descent doctors, the criminalization of their medicine, and the seizure of their objects, these artists postulate alternative ways of healing. Despite racism, exoticization, folklorization, and the inferiorization of Afro-diasporic cosmology, their research offers new horizons for artistic practice.

Evoking the work of American poet Audre Lorde, Tiago Sant’Ana claims, for instance, that “the master’s tools will never destroy the master’s house” (fig. 3).⁷In so doing, Sant’Ana reminisces about the colonial past and the enslaved people’s labor on Brazilian sugarcane plantations. Further, Lorde’s warning calls for a double gesture—that of inventory and invention. The past, impossible to repeat, can only be actualized as another. When updated into the present, it is necessarily reinvented or even remade. Its actualizations, therefore, are fabrication calls: “Armor fused with axé art and bathed in ebô for the fight against the evils of silencing.”⁸In this sense, conspiratorial materialism offers a way of identifying tools produced outside the colonial power frameworks, but rather along its margins, forcing their way against it.

Revolutionary Vanguard

In this war archive, alongside the fetish, I could also find the case of Joaquim Mina, a well-known African healer and “sorcerer” from western São Paulo arrested in 1856. According to records of the criminal charge against him, he had been sought out by four enslaved people from the Pau d’Alho farm in the State of São Paulo to help murder their slave owner. To achieve it, he asked for materials to fabricate a murderous weapon: “A carved stick, a palm and a half long, woven with white and black threads, with an inlaid glass pedal.” During its fabrication ceremony, “Joaquim’s assistant asked one of the Creoles for a coal . . . and then ‘spat’ . . . on the stick to bless it.” This weapon, similar to a nkisi, according to the historian who recovered the case, was a religious object of the Central African Bakongo People. Shaped as a human body, with two legs and a head, itwas supposed to be buried with its head out “in one of the paths where the slave owner used to pass because at that time the figure would turn into a poisonous snake and bite the victim” (fig. 4).⁹

The act of burying this object of power is given renewed impulse in Ana Mendieta’s Fetish Series, especially in Untitled (Fetish Series, Iowa), in which the artist carved into her own buried silhouette sharp-pointed sticks, just like a nkisi  (fig. 4). These objects of ordering power, called “nail fetishes” by European colonizers, served a protective and attacking function, like “automatic weapons.”Harmut Böhme, Fetishism and Culture: A Different Theory of Modernity, trans. Anna Galt (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2014), 197. In Bakongo culture, these piercing objects are considered both inexhaustible receptacles of vitality and bodies containing their own strength and agency. Re-signified within the African diaspora in the Americas and the Caribbean, they continue to be manufactured and used in the socio-religious dynamics of some Afro-Atlantic communities.

Religiosity, as we have seen, was energized by the materiality produced along forces which strengthened the ongoing desire for liberation. In this political-religious relationship, figures of religious leaders often referred to as “sorcerers” (priests, pais e mães de santo, healers, vodunsis, and zeladores de santo, among others)  were particularly prominent. According to historian Walter Rucker, in the Caribbean and North American contexts, these “sorcerers” were central to the insurgent conjunctures, composing “a revolutionary vanguard”¹⁰that brought “witchcraft” to the center of political mobilization, agency, and the produced fear among local elites through the tactical use of magical powders or potions either ingested or rubbed on clothing. These substances, such as aduru, an Akan medicine from the West African coast, granted invulnerability, special powers, and rebellious impetus.

In Brazil, the use of medicines, garrafadas, and other compoundings was also prominent in colonial tensions. Healers and religious leaders treated illnesses by using their gifts and knowledge to make remedies, herbal baths, and poisons or feitiços (spells) through which they promoted a silent struggle against their masters. One of these drinks became known as amansa senhor (tame lord) as it was used by the enslaved to subdue or even kill their masters. Produced with guinea-hen weed, known in Brazil as guiné or amansa senhor (Petiveria alliacea), it was manipulated using secrets and mysteries to render its victim apathetic and thus incapable of inflicting violence.¹¹

The sculpture Paratudo by Brazilian artist Dalton Paulawas inspired by a research project engaging with this “silent weaponry” to which the amansa senhor and the feitiços belong (fig. 5). Made up of bottles of Paratudo, a Brazilian liqueur, the piece also incorporates guiné, which Paula added to the original beverage. He then tied the bottles together using a fishnet and suspended them from a thicker rope. The piece, conceived for the solo exhibition Amansa-senhor (2015) at Sé in São Paulo, elaborates an analysis of the tactical uses of Indigenous and Afro-descendant spiritual and medicinal knowledge to subvert or arm oneself against colonial oppressions. At the same time, it incorporates organic and perishable elements activated through forces driven by a cosmological and spiritual power.

The reintroduction of ancestral knowledge, especially of plants, has been highlighted in the work of artists like Ayrson Heráclito. In his Sacudimentos series, for example, Heráclito performed two spiritual cleansing rituals in two large architectural monuments linked to the Atlantic slave trade: the Maison des Esclaves (Gorée, Senegal) and the Casa da Torre (Bahia, Brazil). The performance, recorded on video, involved a group of men holding bunches of heated sacred leaves, which they beat and then rubbed on the buildings’ walls (fig. 6). Sacudimento, or spiritual cleansing, is used in African religions to chase eguns, or spirits of the dead, from domestic spaces. Through this political-spiritual gesture, the artist disturbed history by exorcising the ghosts of colonization. In his artistic practice, Heráclito works with a “mystical activism,”¹²serving as an “exorcist artist”¹³by incorporating the political into Afro-Brazilian spiritual practices. Through its implications, interventions, and disruptions of power and violence, this activist practice operates within colonial structures beyond disenchanted agencies, identifying alternative methods of challenging how colonialism operates.

Rebellious Amulets

For the exhibition Acts of Revolt: Other Imaginaries on Independence (2022–23), commissioned by the Museu de Arte Moderna in Rio de Janeiro, Tiago Sant’Ana created the installation Museu da Revolta Bahiense (Museum of the Bahian Revolt). Putting the museum at the center of the installation the artists pointed out its problematic role in the historical construction of Brazil, largely silencing historical events mobilized by Africans and Afro-descendants while showing how to dispute it. In Museu da Revolta Bahiense, he assembled a group of objects evoking insurgencies led by Afro-descendants in Bahia in the nineteenth century. Through this collection of items whose stories straddle fiction and truth, the installation strained the limits, problems, and the archive’s possibilities in constructing a unified Brazilian national history. As a speculative record, it fabled both the objects in time and the time of the objects.

Among these objects, we could find  escritos de guardar o corpo (writings to guard the body), a small leather-bound book with inscriptions in Arabic described as an “amulet with prayers and words of hope to protect the body and soul of the people who were fighting against slavery and religious intolerance, and with ideas of establishing an Islamic republic in Bahia” (figs. 7, 8). Such amulet-books, also called patuás, were present, along with other manuscripts, in the Malês Rebellion of 1835, one of the most important Brazilian revolts, undertaken in Bahia by enslaved people of Nagô and Houssá origin.

According to historian João José Reis, these patuás, like the “fetish” belonging to the Haitian insurgent, were leather pouches that, in various iterations depending on their use and purpose, could contain different elements and “insignificant things,” such as “cotton wrapped in a bit of dust,” “bits of garbage,” “cowries,” or even “a small piece of paper written in Arabic letters.” ¹⁴One such “little book” was donated to the Brazilian Historic and Geographical Institute (IHGB)¹⁵by a member of the Bahian elite at the time of the revolt. In the letter accompanying this gift, the donor described it as a curious object taken from the neck of one of the “Africans killed in the insurrection,” who had “attributed it with the miraculous effect of scaring away bullets and preserving him from death.”¹⁶Beyond the seemingly “insignificant” materiality of patuás, the iconographic elements incorporated in these talismans persistently assert the agential power of symbols and words, indicating a technological aspect.

Part of a variety of tactics still used by multiple Afro-diasporic communities, the graphism in the Malê amulet, like the Bantu pontos riscados in Umbanda and Candomblé, or the Jeje vèvè in Vodou, are also used to summon and invoke entities. The recurrence of this graphic, often made of white pemba,¹⁷as is visible in a 1947 work by Haitian artist Wilson Bigaud (fig. 9), indicates its itinerancy through the Afro-American diaspora across the Americas and the Caribbean but also its iconographic importance in establishing a connection with the spiritual world.

In Bastideana no. 3: Ponto Riscado de Exu Cruzado com Xangô (fig. 10), Abdias do Nascimento portrayed two of Candomblé´s entities: Exu’s “ponto riscado” and Xangô’s ax, which is depicted in red in the background of the canvas. Exu, as the lord of pathways and encruzilhadas (crossroads), initiates movement and serves as the orixá of communication and language, while Xangô represents justice and fire. Knowing the impossibility of representing these beings, the ponto riscado makes them present. As a way of calling gods, beings, and encantados, these symbols allow those to come, when respectfully called upon, and operate within our human realm.

An Archive of Conspiratorial Materialism

Insurgent fetishes, tamer plants, rebellious amulets, and other symbols of power collectively form this conspiratorial materialism archive. The material composition of these objects is deeply intertwined with their respective cosmological systems, rooted in the religions of African ancestry. This connection to the inherent power emanating from them transcends a purely rational understanding of materiality.

Within the framework of conspiratorial materialism, there is pronounced emphasis on these objects’ power and agency as they are strategically used against colonial hegemony, and as tools of symbolic and political contention. By engaging with these objects through the various artistic practices presented here, I aim to go beyond the mere nexus between religiosity in the Americas and contemporary artistic endeavors to carve out a political-poetic horizon—one that prompts us to overcome the secular and disenchanted foundations of Western aesthetics.

Spanish

Sobre el materialismo conspirativo

Armas de fuego, cócteles molotov, banderas y pancartas son algunos de los objetos que forman parte del arsenal utilizado en protestas y revueltas. Junto a los puños en alto y a los cuerpos enfurecidos, estos objetos conforman un imaginario de gestos humanos asociados a la sublevación. El historiador de arte y comisario Georges Didi-Huberman dedicó la exposición Sublevaciones (2016-17) a este tema, para la cual reunió obras de arte que colectivamente funcionaban como un atlas de gestos de insurgencia¹⁸. Entre esas obras se encontraba Woman with Flag (1928, fig. 1), una fotografía de Tina Modotti (Italia, 1896-1942) en la que se ve a una confiada mujer mexicana . Otras obras representaban manifestaciones, enfrentamientos con la policía y gestos de rebeldía, duelo o redención. El proyecto evidenció la existencia de un imaginario específico de la rebelión presente en obras de arte de distintas regiones del mundo. Al mismo tiempo, identificó los gestos que  a pesar de haber surgido en un momento histórico concreto, han sobrevivido, han reaparecido y se han repetido a lo largo del tiempo, movilizando, configurando e influyendo en otras comunidades inmersas en sus propias sublevaciones. 

De esta forma, Didi-Huberman invitaba a reflexionar hasta qué punto somos capaces de reimaginar una rebelión por fuera de los meros patrones de repetición gestual. ¿Cómo localizar otros gestos, objetos, dinámicas compartidas y formas de insurgencia? ¿Existen imaginarios alternativos que no se ajusten a los levantamientos convencionales o que se inscriban en contextos no occidentales, caracterizados por sistemas de conocimiento, ideas sobre el cuerpo, materialidades y gestos diferentes? Para lograr un imaginario de rebelión contra-colonial es clave reivindicar las narrativas, historias y expresiones artísticas del Sur Global. Al construir archivos alternativos de gestos de insurgencia, es importante explorar distintos mecanismos de acción política que excedan aquellos en los que los seres humanos son los únicos agentes políticos concebibles. Este ensayo presenta un análisis de archivo centrado en la correlación entre cultura material, religiosidad e insurgencia en la historia de la diáspora negra en el continente americano y el Caribe. A través de una serie de objetos y prácticas integradas a las religiones de origen africano y a la cultura material de la diáspora africana, me propongo arrojar luz sobre las expresiones de otros imaginarios de insurgencia.

Ciertas armas de combate como los hechizos, los polvos mágicos, los talismanes, las estatuillas y las plantas medicinales o venenosas, por nombrar sólo algunas, no se pueden interpretar únicamente desde una perspectiva secular y materialista, porque su poder para proteger, curar o causar daño proviene de fuerzas cosmológicas. En esencia, están imbuidas de encantamientos, entendidos como soportes, contenedores y activadores de las fuerzas vitales que, a su vez, están relacionadas al conocimiento, a otros seres y poderes superiores. Elaboradas con diversos recursos tecnológicos, estas armas revelan una materialidad heterogénea, y su existencia y permanencia habilita el potencial de nuevos marcos analíticos. En el presento texto, profundizo en la relación entre el arsenal militar y la religión, concretamente a través del uso de artefactos religiosos como herramientas de conflicto en la lucha anti-colonial.

En adelante, voy a referirme a estos objetos como “materialismos conspirativos”¹⁹, ya que representan mecanismos de construcción socio-material con encantamientos, al tiempo que instrumentalizan los cuerpos, las fuerzas y los procesos históricos para desafiar los órdenes y conocimientos establecidos. El término “conspiración” describe un carácter reactivo, y encarna tanto la sensación de amenaza como la voluntad de derrocamiento. Luchando en dos frentes, esta manera de pensar el término desbarata la materialidad racionalista y desencantada de la Ilustración, y al mismo tiempo desmantela las subordinaciones coloniales.

Para indagar en este materialismo conspiratorio, enlazaré fuentes históricas del período colonial con investigaciones artísticas contemporáneas y obras de arte en las que está presente. Para ello trabajaré las obras y prácticas artísticas de Ana Mendieta (estadounidense, nacida en Cuba, 1948-1985), Ayrson Heráclito (Brasil, 1968), Dalton Paula (Brasil, 1982), Abdias do Nascimento (Brasil, 1914-2011) y Tiago Sant’Ana (Brasil, 1990). En este caso, el archivo funciona como una metodología política fundamental ya que da lugar a prácticas de recuperación de la memoria de grupos sociales históricamente marginados, que fueron perseguidos y sufrieron la violencia del colonialismo. Creo que si reflexionamos sobre la dimensión material de estos objetos que van a contrapelo, recuperamos sus historias y los recontextualizamos en un marco contemporáneo y contracolonial, podremos arrojar una nueva luz sobre el potencial político y transformador del archivo colonial.

Fetiches insurgentes

En un manuscrito anónimo escrito entre 1793 y 1806, podemos encontrar un recuerdo provocador y rebelde, en el que un testigo de la Revolución Haitiana (1791-1804) narra de forma muy detallada la ejecución de un rebelde por parte de los franceses. Todavía, para el narrador, lo más impactante no fue el acto del asesinato. Tras el brutal espectáculo, recuerda la manera en que los verdugos revisaron insensiblemente a la víctima y sus bolsillos, desvelando otra capa más de la revolución: “En uno de sus bolsillos [encontramos] panfletos impresos en Francia, plagados de lugares comunes sobre los Derechos del Hombre y la Sagrada Revolución; en el chaleco había un paquete grande de pólvora y fosfato de cal. En el pecho llevaba un pequeño saco repleto de pelos, hierbas y trocitos de hueso, lo que ellos llaman un fetiche”²⁰.

Este amuleto permitió comprender la complejidad ontológica y epistemológica de los rebeldes negros, para quienes los textos políticos convivían junto a la idea de “fetiche”²¹.  También sobrevive, aunque en una geografía distinta, en la ilustración de William Blake en la que se puede ver a un insurgente negro en Surinam, quien lleva un saco de este tipo junto a un arma de fuego (fig. 2). Esta presencia “fetichista” invoca un análisis materialista. Al formar parte del arsenal de los insurgentes, señala la marcada presencia militar de las prácticas religiosas de origen africano durante la Revolución Haitiana. Sin embargo, aunque parecía una mera acumulación de objetos sin sentido, una nimiedad, para quienes se habían formado en la visión política, laica y racista del pensamiento occidental, este “fetiche” nos coloca en el orden de lo “impensable”.

Para el antropólogo estadounidense de origen haitiano Michel-Rolph Trouillot, lo impensable abarca “²². Lo impensable plantea el problema ontológico y epistemológico de cómo interpretar y comprender estas materialidades conspiratorias y su traducción a un marco teórico occidental. En otras palabras, cómo interpretar la presencia de estas materialidades y volverlas pensables. Y cómo, por lo tanto, no tergiversar teóricamente su existencia y su uso. La tergiversación no sólo desafía la limitada comprensión de los acontecimientos históricos por parte del colonizador, sino que además favorece el surgimiento de visiones alternativas de la naturaleza y las tecnologías empleadas por la rebelión colectiva.

Este fetiche muestra una manera de instrumentalizar políticamente la materialidad religiosa y, al mismo tiempo, refleja la constante presencia de la espiritualidad en las filas de la insurgencia. Ilustra el amplio espectro de tecnologías materiales con las que se equiparon los negros africanos y sus descendientes para mitigar, subvertir y combatir la opresión colonial. De hecho, insiste en las dimensiones políticas de sus cosmologías. En sus investigaciones sobre las rebeliones de esclavizados durante el siglo XIX en Brasil, los historiadores João José Reis y Flávio dos Santos Gomes analizan la significativa y compleja presencia religiosa entre los africanos esclavizados y la forma en que ese corpus de conocimientos se veía reflejado en los órganos de contrapoder frente al Estado colonial. Para Reis y Gomes, la combinación del islam africano, el catolicismo popular, la hechicería y la brujería, como se denominaban a algunas de las prácticas religiosas de origen africano, “sirvieron como guías intelectuales, morales y prácticas para los esclavos rebeldes, así como arsenal para el ataque y la defensa”²³. En la actualidad, este aparato bélico constituye un archivo de prácticas que reivindica otras formas de entender el materialismo y sus posibilidades, formas que incluyen la composición y funciones de los materiales, así como su utilización dentro de los contextos sociopolíticos.  

            La religiosidad no sólo aporta un modelo alternativo de administración del poder, sino también un horizonte poético-político a la constante búsqueda de justicia epistémica. Pese al silenciamiento y borrado histórico de la cultura y el pueblo negros por parte de las élites blancas y sus instituciones políticas y culturales, algunos artistas han llevado a cabo un ejercicio de memoria que reafirma las tecnologías ancestrales negras presentes en el continente americano y el Caribe. A pesar del encarcelamiento de los curanderos africanos y afrodescendientes, de la criminalización de su medicina y confiscación de sus objetos, estos artistas proponen caminos alternativos de sanación. Pese al racismo, la exotización, la folclorización y la inferiorización de la cosmología afrodiaspórica, sus investigaciones ofrecen nuevos horizontes para la práctica artística.

Invocando la obra de la poeta estadounidense Audre Lorde, Tiago Sant’Ana afirma, por ejemplo, que “las herramientas del Amo jamás desmantelaránla casa del Amo” (fig. 3)²⁴.  Con ello, Sant’Ana rememora el pasado colonial y el trabajo de los esclavizados en las plantaciones de caña de azúcar brasileñas. Además, la advertencia de Lorde exige un doble gesto: el de la invención y el del inventario. El pasado, imposible de repetir, sólo se puede actualizar como otro pasado. Al restaurarlo en el presente, inevitablemente se lo reinventa o incluso rehace. Sus actualizaciones, por tanto, son llamados a la creación: “Armaduras fusionadas con arte axé y bañadas en ebô para luchar contra los males del silenciamiento”²⁵.  En este sentido, el materialismo conspirativo ofrece un mecanismo para identificar las herramientas producidas por fuera de los marcos de poder coloniales, más bien en sus márgenes, abriéndose un camino en su contra.

Vanguardia revolucionaria

En este archivo de guerra, junto al fetiche, me he encontrado con el caso de Joaquim Mina, un famoso curandero y “hechicero” africano afincado al oeste de São Paulo y detenido en 1856. Según las actas de la acusación penal en su contra, cuatro esclavizados de la hacienda Pau d’Alho lo habían buscado para que les ayudara a asesinar a su amo. Para conseguirlo, les pidió algunos materiales con los que fabricar el arma homicida: “Un palo tallado, de palmo y medio de largo, tejido con fibras blancas y negras, con un pedal de vidrio incrustado”. Durante la ceremonia de fabricación, “el ayudante de Joaquim pidió a uno de los creoles un carbón. . . y luego ‘escupió’… sobre el palo para bendecirlo”. El arma, similar a un nkisi –según el historiador que recuperó la caja– era un artefacto religioso del pueblo centroafricano Baongo. Tenía la forma del cuerpo humano, con dos piernas y una cabeza, y debía ser enterrado con la cabeza hacia fuera “en alguno de los senderos por donde solía caminar el amo, porque en ese momento la figura se iba a convertir en una serpiente venenosa e iba a morder a la víctima”²⁶(fig. 4). 

            El acto de enterrar este objeto de poder vuelve a cobrar impulso en la Serie Fetiche de Ana Mendieta, sobre todo en Untitled (Fetish Series, Iowa) [Sin título (Serie Fetiche, Iowa)], en la que la artista talló su propia silueta enterrada y le clavó palos de punta afilada, como si fueran nkisi (fig. 4). Estos objetos dotados con un poder de ordenamiento, y que los colonizadores europeos llamaron “fetiches de clavos”, cumplían una función protectora y de ataque, como “armas automáticas”²⁷. En la cultura bakongo, estos objetos punzantes se consideran tanto inagotables receptáculos de vitalidad como cuerpos que conservan su propia voluntad y agenciamiento. Resignificados en la diáspora africana en el continente americano y el Caribe, se siguen fabricando y utilizando en la dinámica sociorreligiosa de algunas comunidades afroatlánticas.

La religiosidad, como hemos visto, se dinamizaba por la materialidad producida junto a fuerzas que reforzaban el deseo continuo de liberación. En este vínculo político-religioso destacaban las figuras de los líderdes religiosos, a menudo denominados “hechiceros” (sacerdotes, pais e mães de santo, curanderos, vodunsis y zeladores de santo, entre otros). Según el historiador Walter Rucker, en los ámbitos caribeño y norteamericano, estos “hechiceros” ocuparon un lugar primordial en las coyunturas de insurgencia, conformando “una vanguardia revolucionaria”²⁸que colocó a la “brujería” en el centro de la movilización política, el agenciamiento y el miedo que surgía entre las élites locales por el uso táctico de polvos o pociones mágicas ingeridas o frotadas en la ropa. Estas sustancias –como el aduru, una medicina akan de la costa occidental africana– otorgaban invulnerabilidad, poderes especiales e ímpetu rebelde.

Los remedios, garrafadas y otros brebajes también ocuparon un rol importante en las tensiones coloniales en Brasil. Los curanderos y líderes religiosos trataban las enfermedades utilizando sus dones y conocimientos para elaborar medicinas, baños de hierbas y venenos o feitiços (hechizos) con los que promovían una silenciosa lucha contra sus amos. Una de estas bebidas se hizo conocida como amansa senhor (“amansadora de amos”) porque los esclavos la utilizaban para reducir o incluso matar a sus amos. Elaborada con la hierba de gallina de Guinea –conocida en Brasil como guiné o amansa senhor (Petiveria alliacea)– la manipulaban empleando secretismos y misterios con el fin de apaciguar a la víctima y volverla incapaz de infligir violencia²⁹.

La escultura Paratudo del artista brasileño Dalton Paula se inspiró en un proyecto de investigación relacionado con ese “armamento silencioso” al que pertenecen la amansa senhor y los feitiços (fig. 5). Compuesta con botellas de Paratudo, un licor brasileño, la pieza también contiene guiné, que Paula añadió a la bebida original. Luego, amarró las botellas con una red de pesca y las colgó de una cuerda más gruesa. La escultura, diseñada para la exposición individual Amansa-senhor (2015) en Sé (São Paulo), desarrolla un análisis de los usos tácticos del conocimiento espiritual y medicinal indígena y afrodescendiente con el fin de resistir o armarse contra la opresión colonial. Al mismo tiempo, incorpora elementos orgánicos y perecederos que se activan a través de fuerzas guiadas por un poder cosmológico y espiritual.

La dinamización de conocimientos ancestrales, en especial referidos a plantas, ha ocupado un lugar destacado en la obra de artistas como Ayrson Heráclito. En su serie Sacudimentos, por ejemplo, Heráclito llevó a cabo dos rituales de limpieza espiritual en dos grandes monumentos arquitectónicos vinculados a la trata de esclavizados en el Atlántico: la Maison des Esclaves (Gorée, Senegal) y la Casa da Torre (Bahía, Brasil). En la performance, grabada en vídeo, se puede ver a un grupo de hombres con manojos de hojas sagradas y calentadas en las manos, que golpean y luego frotan las paredes de los edificios (fig. 6). El sacudimento o limpieza espiritual se utiliza en las religiones africanas para expulsar a los eguns o espíritus de los muertos de los espacios domésticos. Con este gesto político-espiritual, el artista alteró la historia exorcizando los fantasmas de la colonización. En su obra, Heráclito trabaja un “activismo místico”³⁰y actúa como “artista exorcista”³¹ ya que incorpora lo político a las prácticas espirituales afrobrasileñas. Por sus repercusiones, intervenciones e interrupciones del poder y la violencia, esta práctica activista opera en el interior de las estructuras coloniales, más allá de los agenciamientos desencantados, señalando métodos alternativos para desafiar el funcionamiento del colonialismo.

Amuletos rebeldes

Para la exposición Atos de revolta: outros imaginários sobre independência [Actos de rebelión: Otros imaginarios sobre la independencia] (2022-23), por encargo del Museu de Arte Moderna de Río de Janeiro, Tiago Sant’Ana realizó la instalación Museu da Revolta Bahiense. Al colocarlo en el centro de la instalación, el artista señaló el problemático papel que la figura del museo ejerció en la construcción histórica de Brasil, al silenciar en gran medida los acontecimientos impulsados por africanos y afrodescendientes, a la vez que mostró cómo disputarlo. En Museu da Revolta Bahiense, Sant’Ana recolectó un grupo de objetos que remiten a las revueltas protagonizadas por los afrodescendientes en Bahía en el siglo XIX. Mediante la colección de objetos cuyas historias oscilan entre la ficción y la verdad, la instalación ponía a prueba los límites, los conflictos y las posibilidades del archivo en la construcción de una historia nacional unificada en Brasil. En tanto registro especulativo, creaba una fábula sobre los objetos en el tiempo y sobre el tiempo de los objetos.

Entre estos objetos se encontraban los escritos de guardar o corpo [escritos para cuidar el cuerpo], un pequeño libro encuadernado en cuero con inscripciones en árabe descrito como “un amuleto con oraciones y frases esperanzadoras para proteger el cuerpo y el alma de las personas que luchaban contra la esclavitud y la intolerancia religiosa, y con ideas para establecer una república islámica en Bahía” (figs. 7, 8). Este tipo de libros- amuleto, también denominados patuás, aparecieron junto a otros manuscritos en la Rebelión de los Malês de 1835, una de las revueltas más importantes de Brasil, protagonizada en Bahía por personas esclavizadas de origen nagó y houssá.

Según el historiador João José Reis, estos patuás, al igual que el “fetiche” del haitiano sublevado, eran bolsitas de cuero que, en diversas versiones según su uso y finalidad, podían contener distintos elementos y “cosas insignificantes”, como “algodón cubierto con un poco de polvo”, “trozos de basura”, “conchas de cauri” o incluso “un pequeño trozo de papel escrito en letras árabes”³². Uno de estos “libritos” fue donado por un miembro de la élite bahiana en la época de la insurgencia al Instituto Histórico y Geográfico Brasileño (IHGB)³³. En la carta que acompañaba la donación, el benefactor lo describía como un curioso objeto extraído del cuello de uno de los “africanos asesinados en la sublevación”, quien le había “atribuido el milagroso poder de ahuyentar las balas y librarlo de la muerte”³⁴. Más allá de la materialidad aparentemente “insignificante” de los patuás, los elementos iconográficos incluidos en estos talismanes tenazmente confirman el poder de agenciamiento de los símbolos y las palabras, lo que denota su aspecto tecnológico.      

Como parte de una serie de tácticas que en la actualidad siguen utilizando muchas comunidades afrodiaspóricas, el grafismo del amuleto Malê, al igual que los pontos riscados bantúes en la umbanda y en el candomblé o el Jeje vèvè en el vodou, también se emplean para llamar e invocar entidades. La reaparición de esta grafía, a menudo hecho con pemba³⁵blanca –como se puede ver en una pieza de 1947 realizada por el artista haitiano Wilson Bigaud (fig. 9), nos muestra su itinerancia por la diáspora afroamericana a lo largo del continente americano y el Caribe, pero también su importancia iconográfica a la hora de establecer una conexión con el mundo espiritual.

En Bastideana no. 3: Ponto Riscado de Exu Cruzado com Xangô (fig. 10), Abdias do Nascimento retrató dos entidadesdel Candomblé: el “ponto riscado” de Exu y el hacha de Xangô, que aparece en rojo al fondo de la tela. Exu, como señor de los caminos y de las encruzilhadas, inicia el movimiento y es el orixá de la comunicación y del lenguaje, mientras que Xangô representa la justicia y el fuego. Consciente de la imposibilidad de representar estos seres, el ponto riscado hace que estén presentes. Al ser mecanismos empleados para invocar dioses, seres y encantados, estos símbolos permiten su manifestación, siempre y cuando se les llame respetuosamente, para operar en nuestro ámbito humano.

Un archivo de los materialismos conspiratorios

Los fetiches de los insurgentes, las plantas amansadoras, los amuletos de rebeldía y demás símbolos de poder forman colectivamente este archivo de materialismo conspiratorio. La composición material de estos objetos está profundamente ligada a sus respectivos sistemas cosmológicos, arraigados a su vez en las religiones de ascendencia africana. Esta conexión con el poder inherente que emana de ellos trasciende una comprensión puramente racional de la materialidad.

En el marco del materialismo conspiratorio se hace especial hincapié en el poder y agenciamiento de estos objetos, ya que son utilizados de forma estratégica contra la hegemonía colonial y como herramientas de contención simbólica y política. Al abordar estos objetos a través de las diversas prácticas artísticas presentadas aquí, pretendo ir más allá de establecer únicamente un vínculo entre la religiosidad en el continente americano y Caribe y los esfuerzos artísticos contemporáneos, para trazar un horizonte político-poético que nos anime a trascender los fundamentos seculares y desencantados de la estética occidental.

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The Fragile Body and the Damaged Subject: A Decade of Crisis and Resistance (1998–2008)

If in the early to mid-1990s, performative actions in Armenia were, to a large extent, launched by situational or strategic collectives and groups as interventions—as correctives to institutional operations of the state and the artworld—and motivated by the desire to communicate beyond the regulated boundaries of “systems” and borders, then the late 1990s marked a shift toward individual actions, enclosure within interiority, and exploration of the body as fragile and the subject as damaged and violated. In the meantime, the earlier emphasis on text, factorgraphic strategies, ephemeral “fixations,” and interventions had been replaced by the newly available medium of video and multimedia installation often involving theatrically infused live performances focused on the body as a site of antagonism toward the social and the political, tout court. The body in these actions served as the tragic locus of the irreparable schism between nature and culture, as a site of technologically inflicted hyper-alienation. This transition from collective actions and interventions to solo performances and video was partly a reaction to the sociopolitical transformations taking place in Armenia in the late 1990s. Fermented amid social and political upheaval, these transformations were experienced as violent and tectonic.

The wild and unregulated free-market reforms of the early 1990s prepared the ground for the rise of the new oligarchy in Armenia while the Karabakh war with neighboring Azerbaijan and Armenia’s 1994 victory inflamed nationalism. Yet it was another political event that triggered a shift in general sentiment, from post-Soviet optimism to imminent disillusionment. On October 27, 1999, several gunmen entered the Armenian parliament, held the deputies and ministers hostage for hours, and subsequently killed the popular, newly elected prime minister and speaker along with six other political figures. In the aftermath of this carnage, which was almost fully televised since the session of parliament taking place at the time of the terror attack was being broadcast live on national television, president Robert Kocharyan usurped political power (which he would retain until the bloody crackdown on oppositional protests in 2008). The 1999 parliament shooting was experienced by contemporary Armenian artists as a cataclysmic event, one heralding the end of post-Soviet aspirations for the construction of a democratic nation-state led by a progressive liberal government. Politically and economically, the newly sovereign state promoting free-market reforms and liberal democracy had given way to a convenient marriage between ethnocentric nationalism and neoliberalism. The official cultural policy of the 1990s of representing Armenia as an ancient yet modern and progressive nation began to fade in the face of “one nation, one culture” rhetoric under the umbrella of Christianity, an identity that became both ideologically expedient and commercially lucrative for the new nationalist elites. Contemporary artists were relegated to the margins of this new social order, foreclosing their embrace of dominant social and cultural narratives or their artistic participation within the country’s official institutions. If, in 1998, the artist known as Sev could have an exhibition at the National Assembly triggering art critic Vardan Jaloyan’s anxiety over art’s identification with power, after the 1999 parliament shootings, the relationship between state institutions and dominant cultural narratives on the one hand and the contemporary art scene on the other could be defined only in negative terms.¹

Meanwhile, the late 1990s were also marked by a triumph of postmodern mediatization of the public sphere, where the world onscreen came to be perceived as more real than the social reality, which was replete with contradictions.² In contrast to the deceptive spectacle of media representations, contemporary artists used the technology of video to signify resistance and “truth.” Here, the performing body being screened for display served as a conduit to an authentic reality, one beneath and beyond the cultural “screen.” Video as a medium of subversion, truth, and exposure in Armenia had its roots in the early 1990s in the form of sexually explicit content on VHS tapes.³ The proliferation of video was technically possible because the Armenian Center for Contemporary Experimental Art (ACCEA) imported cameras, DVD players, TV monitors, and projectors, which it then made available to artists, while the theatrical and ritualistic pathos of performative practices found nourishment in theatrically infused multimedia performances by New York–based Iranian Armenian artist Sonia Balassanian, whose aesthetics were promoted by ACCEA’s theater department.

The triangulation of theatrical video-performance, the conception of the fragile body as a site of violence, and the belief in art as a means of resistance was crystalized in works made by David Kareyan between 1999 and 2007. From ritualistic sacrifice (Dead Democracy, 1999) to eating the victim’s flesh (Eucharist-450, 2000) and splitting bones with an electric saw (Gastritus, 2002), Kareyan displayed the body, often naked, on a video monitor set among incongruent materials such as earth, plants, bones, and fleece to signify the subject’s alienation and estrangement from nature (fig. 1). Kareyan’s work of this period counterposed art’s promise of de-alienation with the false sublation of alienation within the social sphere—where the technologies of the cultivation of the self in a society in which standardized consumerist desires and behaviors promised fulfillment but instead mass-produced conformity. These social technologies of desire shaped the body as an image of power (in edified, upstanding form), while at the same time, subjugated it. The effects of political control and consumerism were inscribed on the body of the normative subject, whose complicit performance of militarism, patriotism, and conservative morality naturalized patriarchal domination. These ideologies produced autoerotic subjects whose frustrated desire could only be expressed through a primordial return to mud (The World Without You, 1999) or invoked through the impossible return to murder and incest (Sweet Repression of Ideology, 2000).

The culmination of these series of videos and performances was Kareyan’s No Return (subtitled Suicide for Eternal Life, Oral Hysteria, Speech Capability Paid [for] by Madness) of 2003.⁴ Realized in collaboration with curator Eva Khachatryan, this three-channel video installation was composed of a central screen showing a Bill Viola-esque video of Kareyan in a white nightshirt digitally superimposed on fire (in different versions of the work, the images on the screens vary) and two side screens showing montages of found footage from documentary films and world news reports of various recent turbulent events superimposed on politically charged signs and words. An audio piece composed of electronic bits and lyrics by early twentieth-century Armenian poet and writer Yeghishe Charents played in reverse accompanied the videos, as did a live performance involving seven female figures, most of whom were members of the punk band Incest, dressed up in hooded black gowns and drumming on tin plates and logs (fig. 2).  

These works echoed Sonia Balassanian’s multimedia theatrical performances of the same period, which were infused with myth and ritual. Balassanian’s performances, in turn, referenced Armenian ecclesial traditions, enacting victimhood, sacrifice, and various rituals of domination and subjugation (Shadows of Dusk and Collapse of Illusions, 2000; and There Might Have Been, 2003, ACCEA). The construction of a total environment that overwhelmed the audience with its production of affect combined video projection, ready-made objects, voice, music, performance, and other media and encompassed the entirety of the viewer’s sensorial sphere, a Gesamtkunstwerk of sorts. Often, such as in Collapse of Illusions, this total environment also functioned as a grand theatrical setting that accommodated other artists’ performances (including those by David Kareyan, Karine Matsakyan, Sona Abgaryan, and Diana Hakobyan, among others). Collapse of Illusions was formed through multiple discrepant activities performed by subjects in solipsistic self-enclosure and constituted a negative side of reality in which everything was as it is in the social world but nonetheless dysfunctional, futile, and completely deplete of time and context. Sewing, knitting, hammering nails, dancing, and “cooking” book pages in tar were performed in a dystopic, atemporal landscape littered with media images, objects, artworks, and debris.

Several artists in the early 2000s produced videos and performances exploring the body as a fragile yet subversive locus of sexuality, eroticism, and desire. Tigran Khachatryan’s videos pursue sexually explicit content montaged onto signifiers of youth subcultures and remixed with ready-made references to film and pop culture. Repetitive and futile masturbatory gestures—or their metaphorical representation through juxtaposition of image and rhythm—often follow the structure of male orgasm (such as in the “explosive scene” of the gas stove burning and being extinguished in Romeo, 2003). This image of the virile subject appears alongside the figure of a male subcultural antihero as an average representative of a bored and jaded generation (Stakler, 2004). In a 2002 performance titled Bread and Cheese, filmed in the medieval monastery Ayrivank, the artist, dressed as a punk soccer fan mimicking a soccer player from the Turkish national team (Umit Davalan), approached a miniature football field lined with white paint, sat in front of the camera, and proceeded to eat bread and cheese (fig. 3). As viewers of the recording of the performance soon realize, the camera positioned in front of the artist was not filming the performance but rather displaying a soccer game. The action of eating bread and cheese evokes a common Armenian adage that one must eat a lot of bread and cheese in order to become an adult.⁵ The saying is often used in a derogatory sense to indicate that someone needs to grow up or mature. This “rite of passage” experienced by the young punk recalls an ironically enacted oedipal patricide that took place at a site of patriarchal authority, that is, on church grounds. However, instead of assuming the father’s place after the symbolic murder, Khachatryan’s male subject remains forever juvenile.

If the male body in Khachatryan’s work is at times virile and sexually provocative (such as in his series of “Garage” film productions including Romeo, 2003; Theodicy, 2005; and Entertate, 2010),⁶ and at other times bored and indifferent, in Harutyun Simonyan’s video performances, it is fragile and vulnerable. Simonyan’s performances are framed in a decontextualized and compressed space in which the naked artist assumes a fetal position onscreen—as in a womb (Untitled, 2001). Simonyan’s naked body dances, slips, and tumbles in a room covered with black linoleum and smeared with Vaseline (Untitled, 2003), it falls asleep (Sleep, 2001), and it performs the feminine work of sewing and attempts to don a feminine dress that is too small (Untitled, 2001; fig. 4). The sexualized male body is masochistically exposed to voyeuristic scopophilia as the audience “infiltrates” the artist’s private space. Yet, masochistic exhibitionism and exposure here do not unambiguously grant the viewer visual control over the fragile body; the subject is also protected and sheltered by the screen/womb in the fantasy of a return to its maternal origin. In Lusine Davidyan’s video Untitled (2003), the embryonic state unfolding on the TV monitor is not a prelapsarian fantasy of the whole and undivided subject but rather the horror of certain and predetermined death. An abstracted form of a body flickers onscreen while a black text on the white wall behind it issues the verdict “Embryonic Death Embedded in Your Body,” echoing the lyrics of heavy metal band Slayer: “Embryonic death, / Embedded in your brain.” The temporality of Simonyan’s work is a regression to the ahistorical and pre-subjective time before birth, to the mother’s body, while Davidyan’s is that of the anterior future—that is, of a future that will have happened in the past.

If the above-described works confine the body to a claustrophobic self-enclosure refusing any relationality or “outside,” other artists of the same generation explore the intersubjective dimension of bodily communication. In Sona Abgarian’s videos of the early 2000s, friendship is conceived as a medium of intersubjective exchange in which play and violence, communication and its failure, appear as rudimentary forms of sociality. In Untitled (2001), two female subjects (the artist and her friend, Astghik Melkonyan) assume a four-legged position and engage in a play of love and envy, empathy and violence, as they circle, hug, and bite each other (fig. 5).

Diana Hakobyan’s videos of the early 2000s position the active body as disruptive to the induced passivity of media spectacle and consumerism as she engages with the deconstruction of the rhetoric of mediatized images and social clichés. In I Can’t Believe in Your Dreams (2002), the artist is seen skipping rope in a series of close-ups (of her face, abdomen, chest, or legs), while her action is rhythmically interrupted by shots of a hammer smashing panes of glass inscribed with social ideals such as “Collaboration,” “Productivity,” “Success,” and “Imagination” (fig. 6). In another, the artist boxes against a pane of glass covered in illegible scribbles in red paint. This figure of the female artist as warrior against social clichés and consumerist desires can be traced to an earlier work by Karine Matsakyan. In 1995, as part of her solo exhibition Triumph of the Consumer at Charlie Khachatryan Gallery, Matsakyan walked into a butcher’s shop with a toy gun and “fired” at hanging flesh (Suicidal Tendencies, 1995).

Anna Barseghian’s 1999 performative photograph taken in a men’s bathroom in the Grand Théâtre de Genève intervenes in the sexual division of intimate spaces. The image shows the artist dressed in a black ceremonial costume, like that worn by a widow or a theatrical performer (fig. 7). She is standing still and upright at a urinal, her back to the viewer. The contrast between the artist’s stern and austere appearance and the “hooliganism” of the act, the assumption of a phantasmal phallus by a conservatively dressed female figure, juxtaposes two incongruent notions, thus estranging the social reproduction of sexuality as it is conducted through the demarcation of segregated sights and signs. 

Up until the early 2000s, these actions were not overtly framed as feminist—with the exception of Barseghian’s work, among a few others.⁷ A shift in framework took place in about 2002–3, when Sonia Balassanian on the one hand and Austrian curator Hedwig Saxenhuber (who was visiting Yerevan) on the other, encouraged an explicitly feminist framing of women artists’ work concerned with the social reproduction of sexual divisions, gender roles and anti-patriarchal manifestations, and the body. The feminist exhibitions Women’s City curated by Arpine Tokmajyan, Heriqnaz Galstyan, and Narine Zolyan in 2004 and Rocks Melting in the Depth of the Earth in 2004 and Women’s City by Eva Khachatryan in 2005 were testament to this shift toward revealing explicitly feminist concerns through a language and discourse of difference and identity characteristic of US third-wave feminism of the 1970s and 1980s. First displayed at the festival Rocks Melting in the Depth of the Earth, artist and musician Tsomak’s video juxtaposes her frantically dancing naked body with a video of a dancing stripper filmed in a club in Yerevan, whereas Sona Abgaryan’s work shows the artist buttoning her blouse, taking it on and off in awkward movements, as a first-person account of violence against women runs in the subtitles.

Astghik Meklonyan’s work Bokhcha (2004) likewise engaged with traditional feminine roles and tasks. But this engagement was not guided by a subversive reperformance of sexual roles. Rather, it was carried out through an exaggerated over-performance in which the female subject became the object of her own labor. In Bokhcha, the artist’s body was wrapped and de-subjectivized and barely visible among other colorful and patterned wraps as she moved slowly through them (fig. 8). These wraps made of blankets and sheets functioned as signifiers of the household labor undertaken by women, while also evoking the experience of displacement and migration. Indeed, “bokhcha,” a Turkish word assimilated in Armenian slang, designates a self-made wrap that immigrants, nomads, travelers, and the displaced use to carry their belongings.

The dominant paradigm of Armenian performative art practices in the late 1990s and early 2000s could be construed as one of a critical deconstruction of socially imposed gender roles, sexual identities, and forms of subjectivization. In this context, Azat Sargsyan’s performative interventions propose another strategy: not to rearticulate the body, identity, and subject in order to subvert dominant discourses but rather to annihilate the very material upon which this ideology conducts its wicked schemes—that is, the subject itself. In Azat (free) Hanging on Freedom Square on the Independence Day (2000) the artist hung upside-down from a streetlight (fig. 9). The title of the action plays with the artist’s name Azat which in Armenian means freedom and is repeated in the name of the iconic Freedom square where the demonstrations for Armenia’s independence took place throughout the late Soviet period. According to the artist, through the action he was commenting on independent Armenia’s actual dependence upon larger geopolitical forces.⁸ A photograph shows the artist anthropologically opposite the human orientation and iconographically in contrast to the statue of Armenian composer Alexander Spendiaryan in the background on the right. This reversal or repositioning as a means of annihilation of the subject was performed in Welcome (1999), which took place at the exhibition After the Wall in Stockholm in 2000 and in 2002 at the São Paulo Biennial.⁹ This time, the artist positioned his body horizontally as a doormat and lied there for two hours to mark the entrance to the exhibition space. This willful self-objectification as a lowly, abject doormat beneath visitors’ feet marked a desire for the obliteration of subjectivity, a desire that reached its extreme in Azat’s subsequent performances involving death and the politics of its commodification.

In Welcome to Armenia, Museum Under Heaven (2003) commissioned for the exhibition L’environement du corps génétiquement modifiable, curated by Barseghian and Nazareth Karoyan, the artist studied the economy of cemeteries, especially the real-estate speculations through which municipal burial grounds in Yerevan spread toward residential neighborhoods. They had become “last destinations” for expat Armenians who lived abroad but dreamt of being buried in their homeland. Azat showed funerary accessories across the city, including a guide to the cemetery “Armenia,” placing the country itself as a cemetery under heaven. The artist, wearing a black garment with a white painted inscription “Welcome,” was photographed next to funerary statues and tombs (fig. 10). His identification of Armenia as a place of death exposed the commodification of this myth and positioned it as an object of touristic consumption.¹⁰ Continuing identification with death and dying, this subject was finally obliterated in the impossible act of witnessing one’s own funeral (the Gyumri Biennial of 2008¹¹). 

Azat’s works recall the 1980s practices of unofficial artists of the Soviet Union, for whom disappearance and death became a means of escaping the watchful eyes of the Soviet apparatus. But, paradoxically, this self-annihilation was also a road to absolute freedom (“Azat” in Armenian means “free”). Enacted in the 2000s, Azat’s anachronistic dissidence was a reminder of the ghostly reverberations of a world that had supplied negative content for the conception of art as a free space for dreaming, a conception formative for contemporary art in Armenia and performative practices within it. This world was the disappearing landscape of Soviet modernity. In the 2000s, when identification with the social context could no longer be secured, the artist’s social function could no longer be affirmed. To be sure, amid conditions of increasing alienation, the imaginary world of artistic creations became a shelter of sorts, a compensatory mechanism, while the artist became ever more marginalized in the context of rampant nationalism and neoliberalism. The return of Armenia’s first president Levon Ter-Petrosyan, a liberal democrat, to politics in 2007 opened up a space for renewed participation in politics and public life for artists, a space that was soon to be violently shut down as the outgoing president Kocharyan announced martial law and, on March 1, 2008, issued a deadly crackdown of the opposition.

Editors’ note: Read the Introduction and Part I of this series here, and Part II here.

Author’s note: The research for this three-part article was commissioned by ARé Cultural Foundation in 2022. Some parts are informed by earlier research conducted for my monograph. See Angela Harutyunyan, Political Aesthetics of the Armenian Avant-Garde: The Journey of the “Painterly Real,” 1987–2004 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017).

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This edition of post Presents was part of the 2023 C-MAP Seminar: Transversal Orientations III. The 2023 C-MAP Seminar was organized by Nancy Dantas, C-MAP Africa Fellow, Inga Lāce, C-MAP Central and Eastern Europe Fellow, Wong Binghao,
C-MAP Asia Fellow, Julián Sánchez González, Cisneros Institute Research Fellow,
Elena Pérez-Ardá López, C-MAP Coordinator, and Rattanamol Singh Johal, Assistant Director, International Program, with support from Marta Dansie, Department Coordinator, International Program, and Jay Levenson, Director, International Program. It was presented in collaboration with the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Research Institute for the Study of Art from Latin America at MoMA.

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Magdalene A. N. Odundo is a ceramic artist born in Kenya in 1950 but residing in Britain since 1971. Much has been made of her biography and the complexities of her education, training, and rigorous practice of creating beautiful vessels that speak to multiple associations and inspirations across the history of art and their resonances with the human form, especially the bodies of women. Odundo, who has been contextualized as a British studio potter and an artist of African descent, belonging to a millennia-old heritage of women’s pottery-making, transcends the restrictions of this duality, working in clay as well as in other mediums, including graphite, bronze, photo transfer, and glass.

Magdalene Odundo has received critical acclaim from writers on the three continents where her remarkable vessels have been exhibited and collected. The praise often begins with the unforgettable impact of first experiencing them: their sensuous and commanding presence as sculpture and their mystique in terms of how Odundo created them.

There has been equally probing curiosity about the ideas and sources that inspired their iconic forms, which seem familiar and new at the same time. Their evocative power resides in Odundo’s deliberate references to pottery made in Africa and, simultaneously, her comprehensive knowledge of the world’s ceramic history. There is an impressive eloquence in the responses to Odundo’s work, among them, those of curator Yvonne G. J. M. Joris, art historian Gert Staal, art critic Louisa Buck, curator Ulysses Grant Dietz, and fashion designer Jonathan Anderson.¹ When asked by Nigerian writer Ben Okri in a 2019 interview what she wants people to take away with them when they look at her ceramic pots, she replied, “I just want them to be amazed and astonished that this very simple material, which is so cheap, so easily found, which we all walk on, can be transformed”.²

Since the earliest exhibitions of her vessels in the 1980s, there has been a focus on documenting the specifics of Odundo’s biography and her complex journey to becoming one of Britain’s most celebrated ceramic artists and one of the first Africa-born contemporary artists to represent Global Africa in museum installations.³ This preoccupation with her biography has generated a standardized narrative that has been repeated in brief or long form in nearly every exhibition text or published essay, starting in 1994 and continuing to the present.⁴ Indeed, it has tended to inhibit how people write about her work, limiting fresh conceptual or critical insights, and increasing a reliance on Odundo’s own words. The consistency of her vessel types and the very knowledge that, with them, Odundo is releasing clay’s captive voices has writers seeking to describe and expose what the work is saying and why. Curators, artists, and scholars have conducted interviews with her, and her responses are extensively quoted.⁵

For Odundo, the human body is a vessel, and her creations share its language: bodies, necks, mouths, lips, and other defining essentials like nipples, umbilici, and vertebrae. These anthropomorphic alignments are universal in global ceramics, and yet the way Odundo abstracts and synthesizes them has been a hallmark of her achievement—and is especially visible in Untitled #15 (1994; fig. 4).

Odundo draws from a storehouse of images and memories, often looking for the essential bits in both to create her vessel types. The striking form of Untitled #10 (1995; fig. 5), for example, captures in clay the extraordinary backward sweep of headdresses worn by early twentieth-century Mangbetu women in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

She incorporated into her formal college studies what she had learned from her African teachers, especially while in residence at the Pottery Training Centre in Abuja, Nigeria, which was established in the early 1950s by British ceramist Michael Cardew (1901–1983), who was himself a student of British studio potter Bernard Leach (1887–1979). By the time she earned her MA in 1982 at the Royal College of Art, Odundo had distilled her own style and technique of working as a 1983 example in the British Museum collection illustrates (fig. 6).

Indeed, based on her experience with local Gbari potters in Abuja, Odundo developed a method of hand-building and coiling and a process of finishing her leather-hard vessels with a labor-intensive sequence of burnishing, applying slip, and lightly re-burnishing to achieve a high-luster surface when fired. She especially admires the celebrated Gbari artist Ladi Kwali (1925–1984), who became her mentor.⁶ Kwali had joined Cardew in 1954 and integrated the wheel throwing, gas-kiln firing, and shiny glazing that he had introduced, none indigenous to the region or, for that matter, to most of sub-Saharan Africa. Kwali was an influential teacher, as were others at the Pottery Training Centre, and key to what Odundo learned from them was the importance of tenacity, patience, and humility.⁷

Odundo spends weeks or even months meticulously building her sculptures. She repeats the shapes she favors (and yet they are never identical), such as that of Newark’s Untitled #10 (fig. 5), as part of an inexhaustible quest to achieve “perfect symmetry and perfect harmony.”⁸ The control intrinsic to her hand-building process is then tested by the firing, first in a purely oxidizing atmosphere that turns them a bright red-orange that intensifies the elegance and fluidity of their shapes, as is expressed in Untitled #4 (1995; fig. 7).

Then, if she chooses, she fires her creations again (and again) in an oxygen-poor environment that changes “the static orange to the one you cannot predict with its various shades of black.” The Munich Design Museum’s Kigango cha Baba and Kigango cha Mama (2009; fig. 8) show how the firing conditions yield variations in patterns of flashing and areas of smoky iridescence that can be dazzling and are the outcome of the inevitable surprises teased by chance in the kiln.

Their humanity is a part of the tension Odundo negotiates between stasis and movement as the vessels undergo the alchemy of transformation. She uses the expressiveness of her vessels’ necks and flaring mouths and the treasured “spots” from the firing to impart a sense of vitality, which is dramatically evident in Untitled #11 (1995; fig. 9) and Untitled (1994; fig. 10). Success for Odundo is having the vessels “dance” even though they are standing still.⁹

Indeed, part of the innovation of her 2019 retrospective exhibition, Magdalene Odundo: The Journey of Things, organized by former chief curator Andrew Bonacina for the Hepworth Wakefield museum, was inviting Odundo to help curate the selection, rendering the specificity of “things” she has identified as her “contemporary and ancient heroes” visible. The project took as its subject the links between what Odundo has studied and revered and the formation of her own ceramic vocabulary. While these links have been detailed in publications and exhibition catalogues, the idea of bringing them together physically in the exhibition space was introduced in the 2006 exhibition Resonance and Inspiration at the Samuel P. Harn Museum of Art, University of Florida. Transcending geographical, temporal, and categorial boundaries, the more than seventy-five disparate objects in The Journey of Things were juxtaposed by the artist with about fifty of her own ceramic vessels dating from 1974/76 to 2016, making for incomparably evocative and astonishing experiences, which she has long sought in the reception of her work.

The range of suggested affinities between her work and the global sources she has mined is impressive. It brings Odundo’s comparative approach into sharp focus, and is exemplified in the installation view provided here (fig. 11).¹⁰ Odundo has chosen her sensuous oxidized vessel from the British Museum (Untitled, 1994; see fig. 9), because for her, it animates the static aspects of fired clay: it conjures the image of Dame Margot Fonteyn (1919–1991), with her long neck and graceful arms, dancing in Swan Lake.

Surrounding it are three works by artists Edgar Degas (1834–1917) and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska (1891–1915) as well as a Greek amphora with black-painted decoration by an “unknown maker.” The subjects of all five works are engaged in activity, whether dancing, wrestling, or frolicking. There is an implied parity among them. Yet, does an arrangement like this complicate viewers’ expectations of Odundo’s influences, pushing the reception of her work beyond the as yet intractable dichotomy between fine arts and craft, suggesting they are all in fact “art”? Or does the journey of things imply something else? The exhibition organizers seem to erode the conceptual ambition of Odundo’s approach with labels and catalogue captions that name “known” artists and call others “unknown makers,” as if their anonymity in the historical record denies them status as artists.¹¹

The Journey of Things, which toured to the Sainsbury Centre in Norwich, along with the artist’s participation in several recent international group and monographic shows—including the 2022 Venice Biennale curated by Cecilia Alemani—have further sealed her reputation and the recognition she so clearly deserves as an accomplished international artist. Through them, Odundo has eclipsed the restrictions of her identity bifurcation and is celebrated on her own terms: for her lifelong dedication to the vessel form and to fired clay as her preeminent mode of expression.¹² The five vessels, made between 2009 and 2017 and elegantly displayed in the Corderie dell’Arsenale in Venice (fig. 12), represent several of her iconic styles and her tendency to work in series in which each constituent creation is unique. With the exception of the central vessel from the Asymmetrical series, the vessels show the variety within the Symmetrical series. Together, the grouping underscores Odundo’s technical and artistic virtuosity and the impact of her subtle humanizing details.  

These recent curatorial projects, along with a long list of residencies, including collaborations with Sloss Metal Arts in Alabama in 1993, the Russell-Cotes Art Gallery & Museum for the 2002 project Acknowledged Sources,¹³ and with glass artists at Pilchuck Glass School in Seattle, the Museum of Glass in Tacoma, and the National Glass Centre at the University of Sunderland (2012­­­–14) encapsulate the persistent spirit of discovery and experimentation that drives her ambitions. At the National Glass Centre, for instance, she produced a collaborative three-part project called Tri-part-it-us. Its culmination was the 2014 installation with one thousand suspended blown-glass elements called Transition II (fig. 13).¹⁴ Its spectacle contrasts with the single 3500-year-old tiny glass ear stud from ancient Egypt that Odundo used as the catalyst for the residency.¹⁵ The closeness of the ear stud to the body, in that the two become one when the stud is worn, continued Odundo’s exploration of art’s humanity and her fascination with glass as an artistic medium.  

Throughout her career, Magdalene Odundo has resisted a singular classification. Because she was educated in Britain, which has been her home base since 1971, she is seen there as a British studio potter and considered one of its best postwar ceramists. In the United States, she was included in the groundbreaking and controversial 1991 exhibition Africa Explores: 20th Century African Art, in which she was one of only two Africa-born women artists and the only ceramist selected by its curator, Susan Vogel. Odundo’s work was a revelation to many of us who had studied the arts of Africa in the 1970s and 1980s and done research on living artists working in “traditional styles” (including the women who still made pottery in their home communities). What distinguishes Odundo from other African artists of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries is her “unapologetic attitude to the idea of beauty.”¹⁶ This has helped her overcome the emphasis on the “Africanness” of her work and instead drawn attention to its formal innovation and distinction from African village–based domestic and ritual pottery.

As a woman who works primarily with clay, Odundo has been marginalized and described as a “maker” or “potter” outside the mainstream definition of fine art per the western canon. This distancing also seems to have minimized her participation in the political discourses around race, gender, and blackness. Monique Kerman has argued that Odundo came of age as a professional before the debates concerning black British art and artists gained momentum, and thus did not engage overtly with issues of racial and ethnic difference.¹⁷ She was excluded from many survey exhibitions that made stars of other contemporary British artists of African descent, like Chris Ofili (born 1968), Steve McQueen (born 1969), and Yinka Shonibare (born 1962).¹⁸ Yet, by the late 1990s, Odundo’s vessels had become better recognized in the United States and in the United Kingdom, and work like hers—long typecast as craft or design—had begun to appear in the permanent collection galleries of art museums. Her sleek modernist sculptural forms offered curators of African art a comfortable bridge between historical traditions and the global contemporary. Odundo’s vessels appeared as the first and sometimes only ambassadors of the new. In the newly reopened de Young Museum in San Francisco, for example, their Odundo vase (2007; fig. 14) was mounted in a case with six historical African wares. Her vessels were also paired with shimmering hangings by El Anatsui (born 1944)—which had received international notoriety at the 2007 Venice Biennale—and installed in museums and galleries, further emphasizing the excitement of original work by contemporary Africa-born artists.¹⁹

Over the same arc of her career, she has been dedicated to education as a university teacher, researcher, supervisor, and visiting lecturer; as a mentor encouraging students and young aspiring artists, especially those from Africa, to take up ceramics as a profession; and as an external examiner for various national and international universities. In recognition of her commitment to education and the field of ceramics, Odundo was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire in the Queen’s Birthday Honours List for Services to the Arts in 2008, honored in 2018 with the ceremonial leadership appointment as Chancellor of the University for the Creative Arts in Farnham, Surrey (where she taught for seventeen years), and elevated to Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the Queen’s New Year’s Honours List in 2020 for Services to Arts and Arts Education. Even if her shifting identity remains a conundrum and the art-versus-craft debate has yet to be dismantled, the rigor of Odundo’s process, her restless search for perfection, and her receptivity to new sources and mediums of inspiration and collaboration have won her significant acclaim as a contemporary international artist with an abiding love of clay.

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Articulations of the relational have been shifting in parallel with the recent turn in global contemporary art toward validating ecological and indigenous practices. This shift invites a consideration of what exactly constitutes the relational among artistic and curatorial efforts within the global contemporary. And among Southeast Asian exemplars, the multimedia practice of artist Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook (born 1957, Thailand) comes to mind as a rich prompt via which to think about the nuances, complications, or possibilities in the relational.

Hinting at such nuances, Roger Nelson and Chanon Kenji Praepipatmongkol’s essay accompanying a recent translation of Araya’s writing proposes the neologism “transunitary” to characterize Araya’s practice: “It is between and across and beyond its many parts and modes. . . . It is a singular practice whose polysemy and sometimes almost dissociative polyvocality circles around ethical, existential concerns.”¹It is striking to note that the thematically diverse range of critical and curatorial discourses on Araya’s practice converge around each of two poles. The first implies that her artistic evocation of the relational hinges on a certain similarity in existential conditions. This does not imply shared suffering through common experiences or circumstances, but rather affective solidarity through proximate conditions of existential marginality—for instance, the similarities between female subjects in patriarchal gender regimes, or those between the lives of powerless, marginalized humans and the lives of animals dependent on human care or vulnerable to human violence. ² Meanwhile, the second discursive tendency dwells on the radical independence, singularity, and intransigence of Araya’s practice, thereby associating the relational with the potential in dissociation, that is, with the artist’s agency in terms of establishing distance from or separating from her immediate artistic and social contexts.³

Here, I would like to think about the question of the relational in contemporary artistic practice from another angle, one more explicitly attentive to encounters or entanglements with difference.⁴ I detour to the artist’s usage of the cinematic tableau as a method of framing, displaying, and addressing difference. In the context of contemporary moving image practices, the tableau has a broader, less traditional meaning than that of restaging an artwork. The cinematic tableau can instead be understood as a compositional form that draws attention to the displaying and viewing of images.

Araya explores the relational potential of the tableau most fully in two video installation series: The Two Planets (2008) and Village and Elsewhere (2011), both of which are composed of short audiovisual vignettes that are usually exhibited as multichannel video and photographic installations. The individual works in each series are almost identical in terms of visual composition. Araya re-situates one or two large-scale, ostentatiously gold-framed reproductions of famous western paintings in outdoor or neighborhood spaces in the rural outskirts of the northern Thai city of Chiang Mai. The video camera frames these reproductions and their visually associative physical surroundings in a straight-on shot. On-screen, the framed reproductions are frontally displayed in the background. In the foreground, small groups of people are visible from the back, and their murmurings, chatter, gossip, speculations, and digressions as they look at the reproductions audible. A reproduction of the work by Vincent van Gogh of a man and woman asleep by a haystack is placed in a lush green field of banana trees and other crops in Van Gogh’s The Midday Sleep and the Thai Villagers (2008; fig. 1); a reproduction of a painting by Edouard Manet of picnickers hangs in a bamboo wood in Manet’s Luncheon on the Grass and the Thai Villagers (2008); and a reproduction of a painting of peasant women by Jean-François Millet is beautifully positioned at the edge of a lake, seemingly suspended above the calm surface of the water in Millet’s The Gleaners and the Thai Farmers (2008). Inside the prayer hall of a neighborhood Buddhist temple, its wooden panels painted burgundy, two enormous and provocative reproductions are placed side by side at one end of the hall; behind them on the wall are brightly colored murals displaying scenes from Theravada tales (Village and Elsewhere: Artemisia Gentileschi’s Judith Beheading Holofernes, Jeff Koons’s Untitled and Thai Villagers, 2011).

In each of these audiovisual vignettes, the duration of the scene displayed approximates the duration of spectatorship by a figural group whose faces we do not see. The visualization of the group signifies “Thai Villagers,” or “Thai Farmers,” transfiguring people who, in everyday life, live in the same suburb as the artist. In each tableau, the group is sitting on the ground, their backs to us, facing the framed reproduction. The shortest of these videos are nearly ten minutes, and the longer ones about twenty-five. Someone comments on a detail that strikes them about the picture in the frame. Another person observes something about this face or that body, this plant, that tool, this hat, or that dish. The group amuses itself, speculating wildly on the backstory in the displayed scene. Sometimes they prod one another to dart up to the framed picture and point out a small detail—or to caress the image of a face, the skin, a body part. With the van Gogh reproduction, the group contemplates the placement of the sickle, the number of wheels on the wooden cart, the total number of oxen legs visible, and the casting of the sunlight on the haystack, all in order to decipher winning lottery numbers. Their conversation flows easily, often straying from the framed reproduction to random neighborhood gossip. Each video is unscripted and staged as a one-take piece using a static shot. The editing is minimal, involving discreet jump cuts to crop out of parts of the conversation without changing the visual composition, giving the impression that the vignettes are displaying spectatorial experiences in real time.

Film theoretical scholarship on the tableau tends to imply a continuation of modernist cinema and museum spectatorship.⁵ This modernist genealogy continues to exert an influence over present-day thinking about contemporary art cinema and the moving image. Here, contemplation remains a persistent marker of the value of spectatorial experience, along with the conception of the apparatus of display that situates the spectator as the solitary beholder of the artwork. Agnes Petho, for instance, observes that the contemporary “tableau-film” ⁶, is, in effect, a continuation of the modernist apparatus for the display of artwork. That is, the artwork is presented for the eyes of the spectator, for contemplation by its beholder. In order for the spectator “to comprehend the picture as a whole,” the work is “displayed in a manner that visibly separates it from the surrounding space,” implying the spectatorial experience is one of intimate, solitary beholding.⁷

Petho differentiates this mode of spectatorship from the more familiar model in which the filmic tableau represents an occasional, exhibitionistic moment of suspension of narrative flow. Her proposition concerning the spectatorial mode of the contemporary tableau-film helps us to grasp the precision with which Araya’s series decenters that model. Rather than reproducing the ideology of the cinematic tableau that is indebted to the genealogy of western modernist art history, the form of display of The Two Planets and Village and Elsewhere instead constellates two incommensurable spectatorial models. The apparatus of contemplative beholding is figured, frontally displayed, and simultaneously entwined with another genealogy of displaying, spectating, and experiencing images, one anchored in improvisatory, social, and participatory interactions.

Village and Elsewhere: Artemisia Gentileschi’s Judith Beheading Holofernes, Jeff Koons’s Untitled and Thai Villagers (fig. 3) is an especially suggestive example in this regard. The framed scene takes place inside rather than outside, in the public space of the prayer hall of a Buddhist temple. In the background of the tableau shot, we see an enormous gold-framed reproduction of an untitled painting by Jeff Koons that is displayed frontally on the left side of the screen. Beside it, toward the right side of the screen, there is a reproduction of a painting by Artemisia Gentileschi, which is encased in a matching gold frame equal in size to the one framing Koons’s work. In the foreground, there are several rows of lively spectator-figures, children and neatly dressed older women—including Araya herself—all of whom are sitting with their backs to the camera on a fandango pink carpet facing the two reproductions. Unlike in most of the other works in the series, a figure stands next to the framed reproductions and faces the camera. He is a Buddhist monk who, for the duration of the video, delivers a humorous, didactic sermon on the third Buddhist precept, the prohibition of sexual misconduct, using the images as visual aids. The response of his audience of unruly children and aunties veers between raucous opining and gleefully digressive and associative interpretations of details in the images to chanting enthusiastic replies by rote. The last group of visible figures in this work are sāmaṇeras, or novice monks, and dogs of different sizes, whose errant wandering off- and on-screen during the unusual sermon disarrays the loose geometric lines of the tableau.

This improvisatory and participatory spectatorship recalls another genealogy of moving-image exhibition: the live narration of films. As with a number of other global majority cinematic cultures throughout the twentieth century, such practices have been the predominant mode of film exhibition and spectatorship in Thailand. Film “versioning” artists toured the country and strayed into borderlands, performing live or as-live vocal improvisations accompanying film projection.⁸ They served as human mediators of film projection performances whose agency in making films come to life, and whose translation of highly mobile, reproducible images into utterances addressed to specific audience congregations, constituted another ground from which to re-pose questions concerning cinema’s ontology and its historical or possible modes of spectatorship. In Araya’s staged tableau, the monk-narrator seems to channel the ancestral figure of the film “versionist.” His improvisatory montaging of a story sequence from Koons to Gentileschi resources his fabulation of a morality tale concerning the spectacular punishment of an adulterous man. The duration of display of this tableau makes perceptible how the monk’s sermon thrives on the sociality and unpredictability of spectatorial energy. To spectate here is to participate in the liveness of improvisation, asserting, exchanging, interjecting, and derailing meaning. Presenting the monk’s versioning and installing traveling, reproducible images inside the temple compound should not be understood in blunt terms as gestures of artistic disruption to the institutional and affective functioning of this place of worship. It is worth recalling that the Buddhist temple ground in Thailand and elsewhere has historically played host to, and certainly continues to host, wide-ranging forms of public celebrations and festivities including itinerant film projection.

In one of her many pieces of writing connecting her visual and textual practice, Araya tells a story of how she came upon the idea to make Village and Elsewhere and The Two Planets:

            เป็นในเช้าตรู่วันหนี่ง ฉันนั่งอยู่ในห้องอาหารกว้างของโรงแรมในเมืองหลวงหนึ่งของยุโรป มีกาแฟร้อนบนโต๊ขณะมองดูหิมะตกขาวบนถนนในเมืองและลานกว้าง ฉันนั่งดูเมืองสลับไปกับอ่านบทความที่อ่านค้างอยู่ว่าด้วยศิลปะอาเซียน ท่อนหนึ่งของบทความพูดถึงการพัฒนาศิลปะของเอเชียจะเป็นไปได้จำต้องได้รับการวิจารณ์ที่แหลมคมจาภายนอก หมายถึงยุโรปและที่อื่นๆ

            ด้วยเหตุที่ชีวิตฉันแวดล้อมไปด้วยสองสิ่งอย่างซึ่งต่างกันคือ ศิลปะซึ่งถูกดูแลดีราวกับจะไม่มีวันตาย กับ อีกอย่างคือเมื่อฉันย้ายออกจากเมืองมาอยู่ในชนบท, ภาพธรรมชาติ การเกิดและตายง่ายๆ ของคนในหมู่บ้าน

                        ฉันวางสองอย่างไว้คู่กัน ศิลปะชิ้นเอกของโลกกับ ชาวนา ชาวสวน สวนทางกับประโยคเคยอ่านข้างต้น

Early one morning, I was seated in a large restaurant inside a hotel, somewhere in a European capital city, with hot coffee on the table. The streets and square outside were covered in pristine white snow. I alternated between watching the world go by and reading an article I had started on ASEAN art. At one point, the author asserts that Asian art can only develop if artists are stimulated by sharp external criticism, meaning from Europe or elsewhere.

I exist in two different environments. One is the world in which artworks are so well looked after they seem immortal. When I moved out of the city, I encountered the other world, a world of nature and of birth and death without fanfare of people in the village.

I placed these two beings together—the world’s renowned artwork, and the farmers—reversing the logic prescribed in the sentence I had read.⁹

Art historian Sayan Daengklom cautions against the reductiveness of reading Araya’s tableaux as a reversing of the Eurocentric mentality expressed in the article she had come across: the provision of an opportunity for the native to talk back and to criticize famous western artworks.¹⁰ Another parallel logic, that of inclusion, likewise meets a dead end when used merely to endorse the socially and symbolically privileged artist for making artworks that apparently endow voice and visibility to the underrepresented. Equally reductive would be to conclude that Araya made these tableaux by manipulating specific groups of people with her symbolic privileges: Araya the artist-academic luring unsuspecting villagers and farmers into her frame in order to expose their ignorance about western modernist art and its spectatorial and museological conventions.

How then to think differently about the relational form of Araya’s tableaux—their constellating, staging, and superimposing of incommensurable modes of display and spectatorship? The logic of display and address in Araya’s series might be thought of as a twist on Jacques Rancière’s proposition concerning the potentiality of art in the aesthetic regime.¹¹ In his argument, the potential efficacy of this regime is premised on dissociating the artwork’s form from its presumed effect. It also implies a conception of community structured in separation and asynchrony. Aesthetic community in this definition concerns the common capacity of every person to experience art in dissimilar and unpredictable ways, and it implies community in absentia, as the speculative future. While differentiating his proposition from western modernist ideas regarding the autonomy of artwork and aesthetic experience, Rancière’s characterization of the potentiality of the aesthetic break still rests on an assumption of the necessary solitude of aesthetic experience. His proposition tends to imply that, at best, artistic works are efforts that, in their very form, explore “the very tension between the apart and the together . . . either by questioning the ways in which the community is tentatively produced or by exploring the potential of community entailed in separation itself.”¹² What if the potentiality of the aesthetic regime—its unpredictability—is less a matter of the separation/solitude of the beholder in their aesthetic experiencing than of the sensorial and perceptual encountering of difference? Here, Édouard Glissant’s proposition regarding the necessity of the poetics of relations in what he calls the “chaos-world” provides a compelling counterpoint. “Chaos-world” is Glissant’s name for the totality of the contemporary world, in which inhabitants live within multiple temporalities and do so within a drastically accelerated time of intercultural contacts and connections. The chaos-world is “the shock, the intertwining, the repulsions, attractions, complicities, oppositions and conflicts between the cultures of peoples.”¹³ Unpredictability is likewise a foundational value in Glissant’s conception of the potential of the aesthetic or the poetic. Yet, unlike Ranciere’s definition of the aesthetic regime, Glissant posits the relational as a situated imagining, opening out from one’s locality and experiencing the extensiveness, immeasurability, openness, and unpredictability of connecting and colliding with others near and far in the totality of the chaos-world. Here, the relational becomes the sensation and the potential of entangling in radically different or incommensurable forms, modes, and beings. With this in mind, I would like to end by drawing attention to how Araya’s tableaux stage encounters with the foreign, and entangle us, the off-screen spectators, in the time-space of the mise en abyme.

The tableau display of the gold-framed reproductions references and aggrandizes museum conventions of hanging and presenting artworks on walls, an exhibition apparatus that lays claim to addressing everyone. Yet the spectators in The Two Planets and Village and Elsewhere exceed the boundary of that universalizing assertion with their actualization of what, following Elaine Castillo, we might call the spectatorship of the unintended.¹⁴ At the same time, their encounters with the reproductions take place in spaces that do not cohere with the museological value of suspending the time and space of daily life. The “Thai Villagers” and “Thai Farmers” in Araya’s tableaux are shown engaging with framed reproductions of art in neighborhood spaces—the local field, temple, and bamboo forest. The spectatorship of the unintended that they enact is a kind of unruly hosting, an extending of hospitality to the foreign, an unpredictable engagement with mobile artifacts from distant lands, cultures, and times.

An iteration of Village and Elsewhere: Artemisia Gentileschi’s Judith Beheading Holofernes, Jeff Koons’s Untitled and Thai Villagers at 100 Tonson Gallery (Bangkok, 13 October 2011 – 31 January 2012) reproduces and re-situates the audiovisual vignette in the format of a single-channel projection of a video within a video. In this example, the projected display shows the sermon video playing on a television screen inside what appears to be a Japanese Buddhist temple and being watched by a small group of monks seated to one side of the television screen. Here, Araya quite explicitly draws attention to the mise-en-abyme structure of the work, highlighting its function as a method of spectatorial entanglement.¹⁵ Each of us, as off-screen spectators, becomes ensnared as the additional figure in the group, the incidental commencer of another space of viewing-participation, situated beyond and “behind” the arrayed bodies of the aunties, children, and dogs on the TV screen, and the monks in Japan whose profiles fill the foreground. In this way, Araya’s installation undoes the separation between the work as an object of viewing, and the spectator as a subject of vision. The mise-en-abyme structure of this and other works in her tableaux creates a preposterous effect of vacillation between the vision of the spectating subject and the spectator as object.

My usage of the notion of the preposterous is inspired by Mieke Bal’s method of theoretic fiction. Bal analyzes the relationship between the work of Caravaggio and that of the contemporary artists who “quote” him, doing so in such a way as to conceptualize the method of “preposterous history” and its accompanying contemporary baroque epistemology.¹⁶ This historiographic method runs counter to art history’s traditional historiographic method, in which the relationship between historical and contemporary works of art is one of the former’s influence over the latter. Bal proposes instead that contemporary artistic works constitute the starting point with which to engage with, understand, or reenvision historical works, and in so doing, to grasp precisely the historical characteristics of those works from the concerns and vantage points of the present. This is the “preposterousness” in question, a dynamic of inquiry constituting a kind of baroque vision characterized by a “vacillation between the subject and object of that vision and which changes the status of both.”¹⁷ Embracing the necessity of reestablishing the terms of relations between entities, acknowledging their singularity while asserting their contemporaneous status, this baroque sense of preposterousness is highly applicable to Araya’s practice. Focusing on Araya’s use of the tableau enables us to better grasp the way the artist makes relational forms. Insofar as her work entangles beings, species, roles, and worlds—the living and the dead, women and dogs, the artworld and the village, the spectator, the participant, and the artist—it might be described, to riff on Nelson and Chanon Kenji’s neologism, as a kind of trans-relational method performing the duration and movement of associating radically different beings and incommensurable worlds. What is so significant about Araya’s practice lies here, in the performing and framing of relations of radically different beings, and of incommensurable and yet contemporaneous entities, in ways that are preposterous, wildly disorientating, and fully lived.

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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 at the Nigerian College of Art, Sciences and Technology (renamed Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria in 1962). Despite her contribution to the history of modernist art, little has been published on her role in the advancement of art during this period or on her far-reaching influence as an art educator. This post feature foregrounds Ugbodaga-Ngu’s role in the structural development of art in Nigeria, the themes that were of particular interest to her, and how she represented cultural identity, practice, and experience in her painting.

Clara Etso Ugbodaga-Ngu was born in Kano, Nigeria, in 1928. Although most biographies state that she was born in 1921 and died in 1996, The Nigerian Artist of the Millennium: Historian, Builder, Aesthetician and Visioner (2004) notes that she was born in 1928 and died in 2003. ¹ This source is likely to be more accurate, not just because it was documented by a professor of art history in the university where she first worked as a faculty member, but because it is aimed at filling a research gap on the biographies of Nigerian artists. Ugbodaga-Ngu taught art in mission schools from 1945 to 1950, when she received a scholarship from the colonial administration to study art at the Chelsea School of Art in London. Four years later, in 1954, she received a National Diploma in Design, with a distinction in painting. A year after that, in 1955, she was awarded an Art Teacher’s Diploma from the Institute of Education, University of London. She was a contemporary of Ben Enwonwu (Odinigwe Benedict Chukwukadibia Enwonwu, 1917–1994), though their work is equally good, hers did not receive the same critical attention because it had been produced by a woman. This is, however, not to deny that some narratives accompany her rarely seen work in galleries, but they are mostly dispersed. 

As an art educator, artist, and arts administrator, Ugbodaga-Ngu contributed to advancing modernism in Nigerian art in the mid-twentieth century and its elaboration in the decades that followed. ² She was the first Nigerian artist-intellectual and woman appointed to teach the first and second generations of art students at the site of the former Nigerian College of Arts, Science and Technology, now Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria (ABU), where she was a faculty member from 1955 to 1964. At the beginning of her career at ABU, she was not popular with her white colleagues, “who felt, she was not supposed to be there.” ³ However, she remained committed to her work during this period, as she taught Life Drawing, Imaginative Composition, and Painting. Ikpakronyi, ⁴ In 1959, she was awarded a Ford Foundation Fellowship that enabled her to accept a lecturership at the Institute of Education at the University of Ibadan. ⁵ Later, she served as a temporary part-time research fellow at the Institute of African Studies at the University of Ife where, in 1964, she wrote a paper on Yoruba ibeji carvings. ⁶

After her departure from Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria for some years, Ugbodaga-Ngu resumed teaching at ABU again after 1966, having raised her four children—three boys and a girl. ⁷ She continued to lecture at ABU in the 1970s, before Solomon Wangboje (1930–1998) was head of the Department of Fine Arts at the Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria (1972–75). ⁸ This is significant because it draws attention to a period when she probably left ABU again. Apart from teaching, in 1975, she served as a state advisor to the Second Festival of Arts and Culture (FESTAC 1977), a pioneering Nigerian festival held in Lagos in 1977 to celebrate Black artists from across Africa and its diaspora. This event was significant in the advancement of art beyond academia in Nigeria and on the African continent at large. She returned to lecturing at the University of Benin in 1980 during Professor D. W. A. Baikie’s tenure as vice-chancellor (1979–85). ⁹

In 1959, as part of the effort to expand and nationalize the curricular offerings in the ABU art department, Ugbodaga-Ngu invited Ben Enwonwu to deliver a lecture on contemporary Nigerian art and Timothy Adebanjo Fasuyi (born 1935), her former student, to speak on traditional Nigerian art. ¹⁰These presentations set the decolonizing stage—along with efforts by other African intellectuals and artists such as Iba N’diaye (1928–2008) and Papa Ibra Tall (1935–2015), both of Ecole National des Beaux-Arts in Senegal, and Francis Nnaggenda (born 1936) of Makerere Art School in Uganda. ¹¹

This was a period when attempts were being made to create national identities and public cultures that would reflect a distinctively African art. In Nigeria, as a result, artistic practice increasingly focused on aspects of Nigerian cultural and artistic heritage, albeit infused with European technique. Ugbodaga-Ngu’s first generation of students, which included Timothy Adebanjo Fasuyi, Solomon Wangboje, Uche Okeke (1933–2016), Yusuf Grillo (1934–2021), Demas Nwoko (born 1935), Simon Okeke (1937–1969), Bruce Onobrakpeya (born 1932), and William Olaosebikan, among other pioneers, went on to form the Zaria Art Society. Not all of them opposed the imported curriculum and colonial imprint of the Royal College of Art. What they universally rejected, however, was their British lecturers’ abhorrence of the incorporation of African art references in their work. ¹² In response, they drew upon diverse African cultural and aesthetic traditions in decolonizing visual practice they defined as “natural synthesis.”

Ugbodaga-Ngu’s educational qualifications and status as an intellectual were far-reaching in their influence. Many of her students obtained certificates in art education, or the so-called Art Teacher’s Diploma, upon completing their training in art. ¹³ Recollecting the impact of his teachers on his artistic development, Kolade Oshinowo (born 1948), who studied painting at ABU from 1968 to 1972, observed that he was fortunate to have “serious and dedicated lecturers like Professor Charles Argent, Mrs. Etso Ugbodaga-Ngu, [and] Messrs. Mike Tailor and Clary Nelson-Cole.” Oshinowo further expressed, “These are people who helped me a great deal in laying the foundation upon which my practice is built today.” ¹⁴ His reference to Ugbodaga-Ngu, in particular, stresses how much she contributed to shaping the direction of his creative process. 

An image of a Fulani milkmaid titled Agwoi (1960) by Uche Okeke, one of Ugbodaga-Ngu’s students, references the vernacular term used to describe people of Fulani descent in Nigeria. The invocation of a milkmaid in Fulani culture reflects the concept of “natural synthesis” in its referencing of not just the maid’s braided hair which highlights a mode of body beautification and adornment, but the intricately decorated calabashes used for collecting and storing cow milk for the day’s business.

Apart from the contributions discussed above, Ugbodaga-Ngu played other significant roles in the development of modernist art in Nigeria. She featured as a regular television guest artist in Ibadan in the 1960s, and participated in several group exhibitions in Europe and the United States. She had solo exhibitions in London 1958, in Lagos and Ibadan in 1959, in Boston in 1963, and again in Ibadan in 1964. ¹⁵

During this time, she developed her own idiosyncratic language; one influenced not only by European art tradition, but also by African motifs and forms drawn from different cultures in northern and southern Nigeria. Some of her works of this period combine the vitality of the northern Nigerian aristocrat with the vivacious and sensuous festival dancers of southern Nigeria, producing in some cases, tension, and in others, repose and calm. ¹⁶ The dominant aesthetic formation of the postcolonial era in Nigeria, as elsewhere on the African continent, took African culture as its paradigm. Some of the major ideologies that shaped this aesthetic were Pan-Africanism, Négritude, and Natural Synthesis. These movements were integral to decolonization and, ultimately, to independence. Although Ugbodaga-Ngu’s paintings are not easily accessible, the few that can be traced indicate her alignment with this paradigm.

Close inspection of her work reveals that she also drew inspiration from Hausa cultural traditions and the lived experience of diverse people in northern Nigeria. This is evident in the range of thematic preoccupations expressed in her paintings, in works such as Abstract (1960), Market Women (1961), and Beggars (1963). Other works, including Palm Wine Seller (1963) and Dancers (1965),reference cultural practices and festival scenes from southern Nigeria. 

Abstract, a highly textural painting, boldly explores color and shapes adopted by European artists in their exploration of African shapes and forms. One Western artist whose style possibly inspired Ugbodaga-Ngu was Pablo Picasso (1881–1973), largely because “Picasso [was] an all-encompassing symbol in the minds of many African artists.” ¹⁷ Despite this stance, Ugbodaga-Ngu did not emulate his style, but rather drew inspiration from the Andalusian to define her own form of abstraction. Her peculiar individual style is evident in this painting, in which she applied the lessons of cubism to her own composition. The picture plane reveals the arrangement of diverse geometric shapes and forms, suggestive of a bull in its rich, earthy color palette but equally evocative of traditional African art in its sculptural forms. The bull’s two “horns” are rendered as thick curved lines, and the animal appears to be in a restive position. This subject matter might have been inspired by Picasso’s bull series and also scenic views of bulls in the northern Nigerian landscape. The sight of cattle is an everyday experience for people who live in the north, and Fulani herders grazing cattle or bulls owned by Hausa households are likewise common.

Market Women (1961) signals the construction of gendered social identity, drawing attention to the socioeconomic activity of the market. Ugbodaga-Ngu used expressionistic brushwork to depict four women: two seated and two standing. Adorned in veils, blouses, and dark wrappers of different colors, they are arranged in the foreground, set against the brown wall of a shop or stall. Chiaroscuro models and defines their bold forms. Ugbogada-Ngu successfully depicted the drapery of their veils and wrappers, the folds and textures of which are highlighted. Their activity, in turn, is suggested by their bowls—calabashes used for the storage of the milk and millet meal sold by Hausa/Fulani milkmaids in northern Nigerian markets. The depiction of these women engaged in work is offset by a group of three men in the distance who, presumably customers are walking toward them and the market. The contrasting portrayals of the men and women highlight the differing gender roles.

The sartorial details also date the activity. Given that the women use veils, as opposed to hijabs to cover themselves. Research reveals that the hijab was adopted in the late 1970s and 1980s as a result of cultural encounters and exchange with Arabs. ¹⁸ Thus, Ugbodaga-Ngu did not merely reflect on the economic activity of these women but their cultural attires in a likely scene from the 1960s.

 Beggars (1963) introduces a nuance in the construction of sociocultural identity among a group of people in northern Nigeria. This particular scene is dominated by a blue background, and three figures arranged in the center of the composition. They are dramatically highlighted with sharply contrasting light and shade. The figure on the left sports a cap while the center and right-hand figures are wearing hats. Their clothing is characteristic of that of mendicants in Hausa/Fulani culture. The men’s hats hint at cultural elements adopted to provide shade as their wearers move from street to street under the hot sun.

In her painting, Ugbogaga-Ngu draws attention to the history of mendacity among men, women, and children forced into vagrancy as a means of livelihood. Indeed, in an attempt to engage elements from indigenous African art, she depicts the three beggars engaged in the act of singing, a cultural practice of Muslim minstrels, who perform satiric operas as they go about begging. Given the fact that Ugbodaga-Ngu was a faculty member at the ABU, Zaria, she must have been witness to and influenced by these groups, as she reflected on modernity in Hausa society. Although the subject is mendicants, the painting does not depict begging as such, but rather the musical performance of oral beggar poets or almajirai. ¹⁹ These Hausa minstrels do not use musical instruments to accompany their street poetry.

A colorful or polychromatic portrayal of a woman adorned in a blue gele and buba, the cultural dress of the Yoruba, Palm Wine Seller (1963) features calabash motifs in the foreground, and as shadows in tones of green and yellow in the background. In front of the vendor, there are five intricately designed calabashes filled with palm wine. Ugbodaga-Ngu has portrayed the woman holding two of the vessels, attempting to present them to customers in front of her as is suggested by her upward gaze. Although the thematic thrust of this painting constructs the identity of an individual selling palm wine, its content draws attention to one of the economic activities of women in Yoruba culture: she is likely the wife of a tapper or a vendor whose trade is selling the beverage. Palm wine is a natural alcoholic drink produced from the fermented sap of various palm trees. Common throughout West Africa, it has social and cultural value in many rural and urban areas in southern Nigeria. Together with Market Women, this painting  highlights Ugbodaga-Ngu’s interest in depicting the various economic activities and roles of women in Nigeria in the 1960s—that is, their noble and industrious engagement in supporting their households.

Clara Ugbodaga-Ngu played numerous roles in advancing postcolonial modern art in Nigeria, becoming an inspiration not only to her students, but also to other Nigerian art teachers and artists. Even though she depicted figures in her work, in many instances, she moved away from a realistic figurative style, blending Western and Nigerian traditions, forms, techniques, and ideas to create fresh modernist work. Not only did she develop and excel at a representational style adopted by early modernist artists, she also contributed to portraying the lived experiences of men and women, drawing attention to aspects of modernity in Nigeria in the 1960s. Her compositions manifest the cultural dress associated with African identity and the cultural differences among people in northern and southern Nigeria. Her work communicates different thematic concerns that convey her thoughts on individual and Nigerian cultural identities, and social and cultural values among people in northern and southern Nigerian cultures.  

In reproducing the images contained in this text, the Museum obtained the permission of the rights holders, whenever possible. If the Museum could not locate the rights holders, notwithstanding good-faith efforts, it requests that any contact information concerning such rights holders be forwarded so that they may be contacted for future editions.

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I remember vividly meeting the late Balkrishna V. Doshi for the first time at his Sangath Studio in the Indian city of Ahmedabad in January 2017. Doshi was an incredibly kind, modest, and unassuming human being, but there was something that emanated from him that people may describe as an aura — the feeling and the comfort of being in the presence of someone enlightened. It is not surprising that the great Indian architect, who passed away after a long and fulfilled life on 24 January 2023, was revered in his home country as a guru — someone who had not only made a lasting impact on the built environment, but whose wisdom also served as spiritual guidance.

Born into a family of furniture makers, Doshi’s prolific career was crowned in 2018 by the Pritzker Architecture Prize, widely considered the most prestigious accolade in the field of architecture. Long before that, he had received his initiation into modernist architecture in the Paris atelier of Le Corbusier, where he worked for several years on the Swiss-French architect’s projects in India, including the Chandigarh Capitol Complex. Having returned from France to the Subcontinent in 1954, he supervised the construction of Le Corbusier’s buildings in Ahmedabad (including the Mill Owners’ Association Building), the same city where he soon after established his own architectural practice under the name Vastu Shilpa, which translates as “environmental design.” In the decades to come, Doshi single-handedly designed a number of extraordinary buildings in his home city, as well as across India, several of which we had the fortune to present to our MoMA audiences in the 2022 exhibition, The Project of Independence. Among his many significant works are the Institute of Indology, Premabhai Hall (both in Ahmedabad), and the Indian Institute of Management in Bangalore, whose complex interweaving of interior streets and squares with shaded pergolas was not only informed by the precedent of great historical cities such as Fatehpur Sikri and Jaisalmer, but also speaks to Doshi’s championing of environmental concerns, making him a pioneer for contemporary thinking.

While in Ahmedabad, Doshi exerted his influence in bringing the prominent American architect Louis I. Kahn to the city in order to design the Indian Institute of Management, substantial parts of which remain under acute threat of demolition today. In 1962, Doshi founded and designed the Center for Environmental Planning and Technology (CEPT), which is located nearby and widely considered one of the leading schools of architecture worldwide. Besides helping conceive and realize the architecture of pivotal institutions in his newly independent nation, Doshi was attentive to social issues and built highly innovative low-cost housing projects for the poorest citizens that provided basic amenities and flexible units. Consistently, Doshi adhered to the tenets of modernism while searching for an architectural language and material expression that was at the same time firmly rooted in his country’s history and tradition, indicative of the optimism and postcolonial mindset that characterized his generation.

Martino Stierli

Cover image credit: Randhir Singh, Balkrishna Doshi, Mahendra Raj. Premabhai Hall, Ahmedabad, India. 2020-21. Digital photograph. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Committee on Architecture and Design Funds.

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