Debates around the ownership of cultural heritage and decolonizing museums have become increasingly visible and polarizing in the public domain, leading to attempts to redefine the term “museum” itself.1The International Council of Museums (ICOM) Extraordinary General Assembly approved the following new definition of “museum” at the 26th ICOM General Conference held in Prague in August…
Across Pratchaya Phinthong’s more than two-decade practice, an idiom of materiality and form has emerged that aligns his artistic trajectory along a conceptualist vein. Phinthong discusses his relationship toward this categorization and shares how he approaches his artistic practice against and alongside conceptualist gestures and methods. This edited transcript comes out of two interviews conducted with the artist over video call in June 2024.
Au Sow Yee’s three-part video series The Extreme Journey of Perwira and the Calm Sea: In 3 Acts (2019–22) begins with a karaoke session. An introductory xylophone sequence announces the unfamiliar Song of Departure: a mash-up of lyrics and melodies from a Taiwanese conscription tune and cinematic theme songs. In conventional karaoke fashion, synchronized textual cues (in Japanese, Chinese, and English) accompany a montage of images, and from the song’s main refrain, we learn of its premise as well as its protagonist: ぼくらのハリマオ | 我們的 Harimau—in English, “our Tiger.”
A work of openness and inscrutability, Salah Elmur’s Missing and Lost People’s Day (2021) commemorates a terrible moment in Sudan’s recent history: the massacre on June 3, 2019, when security forces opened fire on a peaceful protest in Khartoum. Hundreds were killed, injured, or arrested. In this painting, which Elmur made during a residency in…
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 1907, Oskar Kokoschka (1886–1980) was commissioned to create an illustrated fairy tale for the children of Fritz Waerndorfer, founding member and financial supporter of the Wiener Werkstätte, Vienna’s premier design workshop. In Die träumenden Knaben (The Dreaming Boys, 1917), Kokoschka produced a haunting narrative poem about the awakening of adolescent sexuality, set on distant islands, far removed from modern city life and bourgeois society. His meticulously crafted text draws on familiar tropes from classical and contemporary literature, including works by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Viennese writer Peter Altenberg. While nostalgia is an essential trope of the Romantic period, Kokoschka’s work subverts this emerging canon. His work transforms what should have been a Romantic-style evocation of nostalgia and passes traditional wisdom through myth into a critical dismantling of such a gesture. The designs in the artist’s lithographs exemplify the prevalent decorative style of fin de siècle Vienna, showcasing his adept integration of various “primitivist” trends in European art. This is evident in Die träumenden Knaben’s cloisonné-like outlines, unconventional perspectives, and flat color planes.
This conversation, which took place as a collaboration between the International Program and Research Programs at MoMA, featured presentations by the directors of two important art museums in Kyiv on the crises faced by their institutions since the Russian invasion in February 2022. The National Art and Culture Museum Complex Mystetskyi Arsenal (Art Arsenal) is…
5.0: The Fifth Position air cut into song was first installed in four parts at the seventh Singapore Biennale at the invitation of Nida Ghouse, one of the show’s four co-artistic directors. The artwork is part of an ongoing project that is less a comprehensive collection than a compilation of “gaps.” This fifth entry, composed…
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…
From August 2022 to June 2023, artists and friends Julie Tolentino and Kang Seung Lee reflected on their decades-long practices in kinship, politics, performance, and queer history.
Balkrishna Vithaldas Doshi (1927-2023) was a pioneer of architectural modernism in India, and the first architect from the region to be awarded the Pritzker Prize in 2018. His work was prominently featured in the 2022 MoMA exhibition, The Project of Independence: Architectures of Decolonization in South Asia, 1947–1985, during which he participated in an online conversation with Martino Stierli, The Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture and Design. Following Doshi’s passing at the age of 95, in January 2023, we are publishing this wide-ranging conversation accompanied by Stierli’s reflection on the architect’s life and legacy.
What happens when we cross over to the other side? In relation to the phenomenon of transshipment – the risky and at times illicit practice of transferring cargo from one ship to another – artist and poet Rindon Johnson ruminates on borders and bodies that remain in flux.
