To begin with, I want to stay with the title.¹ All of its terms are plural, and this matters. My concerns are not the singular, canonical, capital H History or the capital A, capital H Art History—the forms of knowledge claimed by the state or by national narratives, academic institutions, market logics, or whatever capital is able to extract value from them. Histories, convivialities, art practices: These are multiple, distributed, often contradictory, and they don’t require elaborate justification in the context of what I want to unfold here.

The idea of conviviality that I often return to comes from Paul Gilroy, a theorist of race and racism whose work continues to shape how we understand coexistence in postimperial worlds. Gilroy uses “conviviality” not as a slogan or a more cheerful synonym for multiculturalism, but to describe how people in postimperial cities actually live with difference: the ordinary, improvisational mess of everyday life. People who, despite long histories of race, empire, and inequality, still find ways to eat together, borrow sugar, share the same streets, laugh at the same jokes. He is drawn to those small negotiations—those moments in which what might have divided people (language, skin, faith, memory) ends up coexisting with what they share: a bus ride, a football team, the weather, the city itself.²

When Gilroy’s book first appeared in Britain, it was titled After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture?—a diagnosis of a nation unable to let go of its imperial past. But when it crossed the Atlantic to the United States, the title was quietly changed. Columbia University Press published it as Postcolonial Melancholia.³ “Empire” disappeared. “Convivial culture” was deemed too cheerful, too opaque, perhaps too British. Instead, “melancholia”—the mood of something lost but not admitted—fit the American atmosphere of the early 2000s. This was the period after 9/11, when the United States was in the thick of the “War on Terror” and attempting to police the world while insisting it wasn’t an empire. The new title spoke to that anxiety: a grief that follows power but refuses to name itself.⁴

Gilroy was, of course, writing about postimperial Britain, where the residues of empire cling to everyday encounters—in accents, in skin, in smell, in gesture. And yet he observed how, despite all of this, people still manage to live side by side: joking, arguing, sharing food, improvising a common life out of uneven materials. This, for Gilroy, is conviviality. Not harmony, but the practice of staying with differences. And it is this practice—with all its messiness, its harshness, its in-your-face realities, its tragedies and anxieties and dramas, and its inseparability from humor, generosity, kindness, and the continuous effort to make not just a life but a livable environment for oneself and for others—that resonates so deeply with the archipelago now known as the Republic of Indonesia. A place where coexistence has long been ordinary and difficult at once, where differences are not exceptions but conditions of life.⁵

Allow me to briefly outline what I mean by “modern Indonesia.” I do not mean a tidy timeline or a national story one finds in textbooks. I mean something provisional: the ongoing, unfinished effort of learning how to live together across differences—ethnic, linguistic, religious, ecological—and under changing regimes of power and imagination. This definition is not final, and it will never become final. It is subjective and temporal, crafted for the purposes of this moment, and one I would likely contest in another conversation. But it is a starting point—a way to think about how conviviality, histories, and art practices intersect in this archipelago and its many modernities.

Let’s say that the “modern Indonesia” began around 1908, with the Sumpah Pemuda—the Youth Pledge.⁶ The moment when Bahasa Indonesia (Indonesian) was declared a unifying language across the archipelago that was colonized by the Dutch. It is important to note that even today, Bahasa Indonesia is the first “foreign” language most Indonesians learn in school. More than 700 languages continue to be spoken across the archipelago; for most people, one or two of these remain their mother tongue—some of the languages have their own scripts, their own cosmologies, their own epistemologies of the world.

The decision to adopt Bahasa Indonesia as a unifying language, the way I see it, was an invitation—not a solution or a magic key. It was a proposal for an experiment in speaking and being together across islands, tongues, and lifeworlds. Around this same period, in the arts, painters such as Wakidi (1889–1979), Abdullah Suriosubroto (1878–1941), and Mas Pirngadi (c. 1878–1979) were producing the mooi-indie (beautiful Indies) landscapes—colonial-era images of ordered nature, picturesque tranquility, and the comfort of distance. By the 1940s, other forms began to surface: the untamed figures of Emiria Sunassa (1894–1964)⁷, the expressive sculptures Tridjoto Abdullah (1917–1989)⁸—gestures that argued, questioned, and refused to remain fixed within the available vocabularies. What, then, begins to shift in these works? Is it a matter of representation, or something else—perhaps a reconfiguration of relation, of subjecthood, of how bodies and environments hold one another? I will now introduce you to two of Emiria’s works that I have encountered and (re)staged. Even as they appear here within exhibition space, these figures do not fully settle into the distance of representation. They retain a proximity that resists being reduced to image alone.

A male figure poised in mid-action. His archer’s bow drawn, body leaning back, muscles taut as he prepares to release an arrow. His dark-toned skin is accentuated by ornaments—large earrings, a feathered headdress, and a red sash at his waist. He stands within an environment dominated by the enormous vivid pink and red lotus leaves and blossoms that are blooming around him. The contrast between the earthy tones of the archer’s body enveloped in a dense vegetal field and the saturated hues of the lotus flowers creates a heightened sense of drama.

Emiria often painted figures from across the archipelago—from Balinese and Tidoreans to Dayaks, Bugis, Papuans, Javanese, and Sundanese—but here the figure’s identity is imagined, a creation of the artist’s vision. The surreal scale of the lotus plants transforms the scene into a suspended, almost mystical moment. Painted around 1941–46, during the final years of colonial rule and the dawn of Indonesia’s independence, the work conjures questions of identity, perception, and the Other, framing a human presence within a lush, dreamlike world on the threshold of a history in the making.⁹

A female figure from Sulawesi. But let’s talk a bit about Emiria in around 1910–20. She entered Jakarta’s artistic and political circles in the 1940s and 1950s. Before then, she was remembered otherwise. Oral accounts suggest she was identified not as a princess of Tidore but rather as Emmy Pareira (a Minahasan woman from the Manoppo-Pareira clan), who was raised in Manado and educated in Christian missionary schools. In the mid-1910s, she and one of her sisters were known as musicians—a pianist and singer, respectively—who performed in Dutch society circles in Ternate and, briefly, in Europe (1914–15). There she went by the name “Sunny.” Later, in the 1920s, she described herself as a “girl from the East” who was studying Dalcroze eurhythmics (a musical pedagogy based on body movement) in Brussels and Vienna.¹⁰

In the late 1940s, art schools began to open, bringing Western curricular structures. What is now the Institut Teknologi Bandung (ITB) was established as the Technische Hoogeschool te Bandoeng in 1920 under Dutch colonial administration. After independence, its art-related programs developed within this technical and pedagogical lineage, eventually forming the Faculty of Art and Design in 1984.¹¹ Meanwhile, the Institut Seni Indonesia—Yogyakarta (the first of its kind, now replicated across the archipelago) emerged from a series of institutions founded by nationalist artists—many left-leaning and largely self-taught—including ASRI (Indonesia Academy of Fine Arts, 1950)¹², ASDRAFI (Indonesia Drama and Film Academy), and AMI (Indonesia Music Academy). One might expect that this Yogyakarta group of founders—known for critiquing their predecessors’ idealized depictions of Indonesia in the style of colonial painters—would create a curriculum of their own. Mind you, they did not. The Jogja art school, too, adopted a Western structure and orientation. What is now the Institut Kesenian Jakarta (IKJ), which only formed in the late 1970s, is perhaps the only one that openly stated its grounding in the approaches of Santiniketan.¹³ Yet even there, the national education system surrounding it remained thoroughly Western in design, imagination, and form.

This quick sketch of these schools—their differences, their genealogies—is meant to show that the “modern” in Indonesia was never singular. With their establishment, people’s sense of what counted as “high art” shifted from wayang and temple reliefs toward painting, sculpture, and other forms taught in majority art schools all over the Western world. But the older forms never vanished. As long as they remained functional within their communities, they continued to circulate, inspire, and complicate any neat narrative of artistic progress. In speaking about “modern Indonesia,” I am thinking less in terms of chronology or style and more in terms of conviviality as practice: the everyday negotiation of languages, traditions, faiths, empires, merchants, farmers, rulers, and neighbors. The “modern” was—and remains—about relations: how to live together, how to keep conversations open, how to practice care even when histories, hierarchies, and inequalities persist.

Another example, from a different time, might help to make this more tangible. These are images I often return to—of artworks and people being with them. Not just looking, but talking, pointing, laughing, pausing. There is curiosity there as well as a kind of ease. A willingness to stay with the work, and with one another, without needing to resolve anything too quickly. If we stay a little longer within these situations of looking, certain works begin to hold our attention differently. Not as examples of a period, but as presences that gather and redistribute how people stand, point, speak, and remain.

The first photograph was taken within As if there is no sun, an exhibition that was part of the 58th Carnegie International: Is it morning for you yet? in Pittsburgh (2022).¹⁴ The other is from a more recent exhibition at Gajah Gallery in Yogyakarta titled Kebebasan Manusia Perasa (Freedom of the Sentient Beings, 2025).¹⁵ Research-wise, the latter extends the former, continuing Hyphen—’s inquiry into the practices, rhythms, and daily worlds of mid-twentieth-century painters often left out of national and mainstream narratives. Both titles are not newly coined.¹⁶ They arrive from writings produced alongside the works themselves—from observers of their own time. In this sense, the exhibitions do not simply look back. They carry forward ways of sensing that were already in circulation, allowing them to meet the present again.

In the photograph from the Carnegie, one such work draws a more focused kind of engagement: Two viewers stand close to it; one points toward the lower part of the canvas, the other follows. The gesture is small, but it reorganizes the encounter. Attention narrows, slows, becomes directed. The painting is not simply seen; it is entered into through another’s indication. In her painting Aku Hamil (I’m Pregnant, 1962), Kartika (born 1934) presents her own body turning slightly away, even as her gaze meets ours. The interior around her—chairs, a hanging lamp, a smaller portrait—recedes unevenly, as if space itself is unsettled. Objects gather in her hand and scatter at her feet. The palette presses rather than opens: yellows, greens, ochers that feel closer to density than light. What is held here is not immediately shareable. The painting does not clarify itself; it withholds, or perhaps more precisely, it concentrates.

And yet, in the photograph, this interiority does not remain closed. It is approached collectively—through pointing, through conversation, through the act of showing something to another. What might otherwise remain singular becomes partially held in common. Not fully understood, not resolved, but shared enough to sustain an encounter. If conviviality names the practice of living with difference, then this moment suggests that such practice does not depend on transparency. It can also be built around what resists easy articulation—around forms of sensing that are unevenly distributed, guided, negotiated. One points, another follows. Attention is shared, but not equally. The work participates in this asymmetry, shaping how relation unfolds.

A different rhythm appears in the second image, where Title not yet known (2005) by Siti Roelijati (1930–2023), Bakau-bakau (Mangrove, 1973) by Sriyani (1930–2006), and Gerobag (Cart, 1969) by Kustiyah (1935–2012)—are gathered along the wall. Here, attention does not settle as tightly. It moves—across surfaces, between figures, from one painting to another, and back again. Viewers do not fix themselves in front of a single work; they circulate, pause, resume. The encounter becomes less about entering one interior and more about navigating a field. In Roelijati’s compositions, lines rarely rest. Figures, animals, and objects seem to emerge through movement rather than outline. The eye follows but never quite arrives. Looking becomes a matter of attunement—of staying with rhythms that do not resolve into a single focal point. Sriyani’s works, by contrast, often hold a quieter density. Forms gather slowly; darkness is not absence but a kind of presence that reveals itself over time. One does not grasp the image at once. It requires returning, adjusting, allowing the work to unfold at its own pace. Kustiyah’s paintings move still differently. Her brush seems to glide, carrying a lightness that does not negate depth but instead approaches it without weight. Flowers, objects, self-portraits—these do not insist on symbolic reading. They offer themselves as things to be lived with, to be encountered in their immediacy.

Taken together, these works do not present a unified style or direction. What they share is less formal than relational: a way of holding the world that allows proximity without collapse, distance without detachment. They invite forms of looking that are sustained, negotiated, and often shared. It is perhaps here that the words of Oei Sian Yok return, not as a statement to be confirmed, but as something that begins to resonate differently: “The birth of nationalist awareness at the beginning of this century also awakened Indonesia’s humanist consciousness. This, then, became their right to freedom as sentient beings.”¹⁷

Read from within these situations—of looking, of pointing, of staying with works and with one another—this “right” does not appear as a declaration secured once and for all. It emerges, rather, in the act itself: in the ability to attend, to respond, to remain with what is not immediately resolved. Freedom, here, is not located outside the encounter but practiced within it. In one instance, it takes the form of a concentrated interiority—a figure who holds something not fully shareable, yet not entirely closed. In another, it disperses across a field of works, where attention moves between images and bodies, never settling for long. In both, what is at stake is not only what is seen, but also how seeing becomes possible, and with whom.

Marianne Katoppo’s writing offers another way to approach this. For Katoppo, freedom is rooted in compassion—not as sentiment, but as a capacity: the ability to be touched and to touch in return. Such a capacity does not eliminate distance; it works through it.¹⁸ It allows proximity without possession, relation without the need to resolve differences. Perhaps this is what these works—and the situations that gather around them—make available. Not a unified account of modernity, nor a stable image of the human, but a set of practices: of sensing, of attending, of being with others, human and otherwise, in ways that remain open, partial, and ongoing.

If histories are multiple, and convivialities are lived rather than declared, then art practices might be understood less as objects to be interpreted than as conditions for such encounters to take place. Not answers, but occasions. Not resolutions, but ways of staying.

The post Histories, Convivialities, and Art Practices in Modern Indonesia appeared first on post.

Ananya Sikand: Today we’re joined by Rajyashri Goody, who will present her artistic practice and long-term research on the interweaving of Dalit food culture and Dalit literature adapting recipes from autobiographies. These recipes serve as the backbone of her work across ceramics, installation, photography, printmaking, and performance.

Food is an important site of memory, resistance, resilience as well as a form of embodied politics, because among the many reasons that the Hindu caste system has such deep roots is that rules related to adhering to caste have been applied to basic activities necessary for survival such as eating and drinking, which are bound up in casteist notions of purity and pollution. Dalit people have been treated as untouchable and impure for thousands of years, and many are still denied basic rights to food, water, land, and literacy. Rajyashri’s work highlights how Dalit identity is being reclaimed and reinvented through acts of everyday resistance, especially relevant in the present moment given the rise of Hindu nationalism, which promotes the upholding of casteist values, vigilantism, and violence against minority communities in the name of religion.

Rajyashri’s work is presently part of the Post-National Digital Pavilion, a program developed by the Institute of International Visual Arts (iniva) in collaboration with the British Council at the 61st Venice Biennale.

Rajyashri Goody: I want to begin with the recipes (fig. 1) that I work on, an ongoing practice since 2017. I started my research in 2016, when many parts of India were seeing a lot of lynchings based on the suspicion of eating or transporting beef. At the time, Muslim and Dalit people were targeted, accused of eating beef, and then publicly attacked. Simultaneously, there were many protests. One, in particular, led by lower-caste people in a village called Una in Gujarat centered on their refusal to pick up dead animals, a job forced on this community because of their lower-caste and “untouchable” status. Across India, Dalit people are forced to take on the role of sanitation workers, which includes disposing of carcasses of dead animals. Dead cows have been a major source of food for the community because, historically, Dalit people haven’t been allowed to own land, much less grow their own crops, etc. Today, many Dalit people are resisting these jobs, but it’s very difficult because no other caste wants to undertake them. Dalit people, even if they’re going to school, etc., are forced by the system to take on such labor. I read, about 10 years ago, that all the sanitation workers in India are Dalit and that no other communities are involved in this work. As all of this was happening in 2016, I started thinking about my own food practices—given my mother belongs to this community—and asked myself: What do we eat as Dalit people?

My family doesn’t eat beef because we became Buddhist in the 1950s, like a lot of Dalit people. In embracing Buddhism, we gave up eating meat in general—and especially beef because of its connection with sanitation work. But I asked myself, What if I’m eating vegetarian food? Does that then become Dalit? What about if I share food with an upper-caste person? What about the food makes it upper-caste or makes it polluted—as is thought to happen if a Dalit person shares food with an upper-caste person. 

I’ll read a recipe from my writing called “Well Water”

Although the well
belongs to the Patils,
the spades and the shovels, 
the sweat,
the explosives 
of the Mahars 
were used to dig and build it.
You are the reason 
for water in the well.

But now you are not allowed 
to draw water from it.
If you are walking by
feeling tired and thirsty
go down the well 
to drink water
while your friends keep watch.
Make sure no one sees you.
Otherwise you might be badly beaten.

Quench your thirst 
furtively.

Touch the water.
Gather it in your cupped palms.
Ripples might form on the surface.
The water inside the earth might shake.

This writing is adapted from Dalit literature—“Well Water” from Sharankumar Limbale’s writing and “Chaanya” (fig. 2) from Daya Pawar’s. Whenever I read a Dalit autobiography, I mark where the writer mentions food or water. Then I switch it from the first person to the second to make it read like a recipe—but often one that’s impossible to actually follow. I started this exercise for a number of reasons, including the fact that I couldn’t find any Dalit cookbooks—other than Shahu Patole’s Anna He Apoorna Brahme, which had just come out in Marathi.¹ And there haven’t been any other Dalit cookbooks since people from the community haven’t been allowed to read and write. So how does one write a cookbook in the first place? A cookbook assumes many things, including access to a functioning kitchen, utensils, and ingredients, all of which is related to socioeconomic status. But there’s also an assumption of pride in one’s food, which with Dalit people is difficult because many of our food practices stem from being forced to eat leftovers, to beg, to make do with nothing—but not as a form of resistance. It’s not something that parents want to pass on to their kids. So how does one remember and gather these recipes, and should one even bother? That’s when I realized that it’s not necessary to have a Dalit cookbook in a conventional sense. But Dalit literature, a massive genre given it’s only 50–60 years old, is filled with writing about food and water. Dalit oppression is deeply connected to the stomach, so this exercise has allowed me to understand the similarities in Dalit food across India, but also the differences—and how time works in strange ways. For example, I’d be reading something written 40 years ago and something else written five years ago, and it could be the exact same story. This continues, and I’ve made 23 cookbooks so far. 

These recipes allowed me to build on other works, such as those shown in the exhibition Eat with Great Delight (2018) at the Clark House Initiative (fig. 3).² This series came from my family photos, specifically from examining them as records of where traces of food existed. My family has had access to a camera since the late 1980s, when my mother married my father, a white man who came to India to do social work, and he had a camera. Not only did he take photographs, but also other family members began to use the camera. It was interesting to see the differences between the photos that he took for work and our own family photographs of celebrations. I showed 18 family photos as they were, alongside eight recipe books. Photography, just like writing, is a tool for access. What do you do with a camera? What do you photograph? What do you do with a pen? What do you write about?

I also started working with ceramics in 2017, which came about because I didn’t want to actually cook the food—because it’s not about that. I’m not interested in making a Dalit dish, and people were approaching me and saying, “Can you cook something?” They didn’t get it. But I did want to make something with my hands. Because the reading and writing were getting to be too much, I felt like I needed to process it in a different medium. I started with bhakris (fig. 4a), rotis made out of millet, because some Dalit writers write beautifully about it, comparing it to the sun and moon, to the mother and father, to heaven and hell. I wanted to create the bhakri in a material that would last. Then I went on to make larger installations that reimagine many of the recipes (fig. 4b)—especially if they center foraging or hunting or stealing food—and processed these stories while making the ceramics. Some pieces look like food items, but there are many that don’t. Some look rotten; some look like fungus. Unlike food, or perhaps like Dalit food, they are inedible. 

Then I made Is the water chavdar? between 2020 and 2022. It’s an installation of 10,000 stupas, which look like inverted bowls, about the Chavdar water tank in Mahad, Maharashtra. In 1927, our leader Dr. B. R. Ambedkar walked to this tank with 10,000 people to drink water from it. They were in Mahad for a conference on Dalit rights, and even though the government had made it legal for Dalit people to access public water bodies, they were still carrying their own water. So they drank from this tank to make a point. It’s one of the most important Dalit events in history, and yet, it’s forgotten by mainstream upper-caste India. It’s not really mentioned in history textbooks, but Dalit people grow up learning about it and going to Mahad. I wanted to make a memorial or homage to the people who went there. Also, this event was not photographed. Even though cameras were accessible in 1927, it was not considered important enough to record.

I made 10,000 stupas and arranged them to look like a square water tank (fig. 5). I surrounded them with prints of images I sourced from Google Maps. Even though images of the 1927 event don’t exist in any formal archives, Google Maps has thousands of images of Dalit people visiting the location since then. I chose 27 and printed them on transparent sheets and then pressed them into printmaking paper, which gives them a wet-looking quality (figs. 6a–c). This process allowed me to protect the identity of the people in the pictures, but at the same time, they stand in for people from the past or the future. I wanted their faces in the prints because I think people taking photographs of themselves at the water tank is special. It also allowed me to speak about the water without displaying any actual water. These images surround the installation, and then in the middle of it, a beam in the center of the space is covered with paper pulp I made from the Manusmriti, which Ambedkar burned in Mahad about six months after the original event. He burned the book, saying that it must be destroyed, but at the same time, he knew that it was more important for the ghost of Manu, which still lives on in people’s minds, to be burned and defeated.³

In Deeksha (figs. 7a–b), I printed photographs that I had taken of my family celebrating the anniversary of our conversion to Buddhism. In 1956, about six months before Ambedkar died, he converted to Buddhism. He said, “I may have been born a Hindu, but I won’t die one,” and along with him, many Dalit people converted. Our form of Buddhism is quite different as there’s no god, no worshipping of any Hindu deities, no superstition. Gods have controlled Dalit people for thousands of years. It is said that you’re born in this community because you were bad in your past life, so there’s no mobility outside of it unless your god decides differently. With Buddhism, you’re taught to learn to build dignity from within yourself. Now there’s a big resurgence of Buddhism, but if I tell people I’m Buddhist, they’ll know I’m Dalit. I don’t know how much of a difference it makes to others, but at least for us, for our own dignity, it does matter.

For Did you open the door, or did you find it open for you? (2023), I built a stupa with paper pulp from newsprint (figs. 8a–b). Ambedkar started many newspapers in his lifetime, so I was thinking about literacy, access to it, and the possibilities of it. The stupa has become quite an important architectural form. Whereas within Hinduism, we wouldn’t be allowed inside a temple, this conversion has allowed us to access and embrace ancient Buddhist sites that have been in the vicinity for thousands of years as a way of reconnecting—or connecting in the first place—with our new religion. We’re also building new stupas that are hollow inside to serve as meeting places. In Bombay and Pune, you often see white domed structures that are Dalit Buddhists spaces, and they’re occupying more and more parts of India. I built this stupa thinking about the past and the future. 

I started Give up your old habits in 2023 based on the image of Ambedkar (figs. 9a–b), and now I’m building a larger body of work around it. Ambedkar’s image is everywhere, across India—a man in a suit, tie, and glasses, often holding a book—and it’s an interesting relationship that we’ve built with it, because it’s one of pride. Yet it’s also a marker of where Dalit people live, which allows others to make judgments and assessments. In this body of work, I’m printing the same image of Ambedkar on porcelain, but as a silkscreen print, so when it’s on the wet clay, it becomes something else. Each one looks quite different but they all have hints of Ambedkar in them. I’m repeating them in the hundreds and thousands, so let’s see what happens with that.

I’ve also been doing quite a few performances over the past years. Turn Your Bowl into a Stupa (figs. 10a–d) was in Bukhara. Essentially, it was 1,000 bowls that we turned upside down. I feel like this is a strong metaphor for Dalit Buddhism. There is a Tibetan story about when the Buddha was dying . . . His disciples asked him, “What do we do with your body when you die?” And he took his begging bowl and turned it upside down. Though nobody knows if it’s historically true and given Dalit people’s association with begging, with this embrace of a new religion—we’ve also taken the begging bowl and turned it upside down and said no to the past and rejected many things. The performance began with me reading out the recipes followed by turning the bowls upside down with three collaborators. I was very excited to perform this work in Bukhara because the name “Bukhara” stems from the word vihara, which means “Buddhist monastery” or “temple.”

Everything is quiet now was a small performance that I did in Canada (fig. 11). It included four people and four bowls, which we slowly turned upside down. It started with a poem I had written about the Khairlanji massacre, a caste-based atrocity that took place 19 years ago, in which a whole family was brutally killed—and they still haven’t gotten justice. I was using the turning of the bowl as a way to slow down time and to think about this family. I’ve also been working with press photographs that were taken at the sites of this atrocity—at the hut that the Bhotmange family lived in, at the canal where their bodies were dumped. As horrible as it sounds, these photographs and even more violent ones have played a huge role in rallying the Dalit community to push for justice. It was also—as a 16-year-old—my first real encounter with what a Dalit atrocity looks like and with seeing the whole community come together in response to these photos. Though this is a strange way of spending time with them—they’re ink-jet prints, so I use a paintbrush and water to erase them, but they’re still there though certain bits are washed out. 

AS: As a way of beginning our conversation within the context of this group, which is focused on the city and the theme of infrastructures, I was thinking about Pune and Maharashtra as larger infrastructures in your practice—from the neighborhoods where you’ve fabricated different elements of your practice to your involvement with the secular art movement started by Prabhakar Kamble, Clark House, histories of Dalit activism in the region, etc. Could you speak about this? 

RG: It’s all connected. Because my parents are involved in social work, it’s not really been a choice to involve myself in these things. I think even if I wasn’t making art, they would still be an important part of my life. It has been quite special to be involved with the secular art movement, which is the art wing of a political movement in Maharashtra. And it was in spaces like Clark House, the Ajanta caves, and The Middle Way Retreat Centre in Kondanpur where these conversations were had and still continue. The last time we did a secular art movement workshop, we just wanted to get together and see each other’s practices—because we don’t often have opportunities or time or spaces for that—and to look at each other’s work, to listen to each other. Though there’s room for so much more. For example, it’s still very difficult to critique each other because if we’re seen critiquing each other even slightly publicly, then upper-caste artists or people in the art world will use that against us. They try to involve themselves in it and pit us one against the other. It’s quite exhausting. Unfortunately, we’re still seen as just Dalit artists by savarna people. I don’t think I’ll ever make work that’s not about caste, but there has to be space beyond that category. Also, if somebody doesn’t want to recognize the persistence of caste, they simply won’t. Labeling us this way makes it convenient for them to stereotype our practices, tick a box, and look away as fast as possible. 

Lucy Gallun: Thinking about this idea of space-making and how it has come through in your practice across different approaches, media, techniques, etc. . . . You talked about writing being a place, and of literacy and disseminating writing being a history that you’re taking up in your work, but also, about the building of a stupa—of creating something that’s visible in communities—especially in Maharashtra. Could you speak about this idea of a practice of space-making and what it means to you?

RG: Many upper-caste dialogues center on the fact that there’s not enough information, or that people don’t see caste, or that they didn’t grow up practicing caste, etc. Even when I was looking for Dalit cookbooks, I couldn’t find them. But then I realized that it’s just a matter of shifting my perspective; perhaps they don’t exist in a conventional form, but they do exist nonetheless, and then I discovered there’s so much in Dalit literature. I think this is the case with space-making as well, and that my large-scale installations are a way for me to spend time in the spaces themselves, but also, to really think about the significance of these spaces. Whether it’s an ancient site or the Chavdar water tank, which in photographs looks like any other water tank, is important to me. They are both big and small omnipresent sites, and Dalit people recognize and remember them. Even though the white stupas are everywhere, it’s easy for upper-caste people not to pay attention to them in their day-to-day landscapes. For instance, I’m in Goa now, and while Goa is the neighboring state to Maharashtra, and Maharashtra has always had a visible Dalit presence—there are blue Buddhist flags and white stupas everywhere—Goa has considerably less of one. But I tell myself that I have to find out what and how this looks in Goa. I’m trying to train myself to look differently. 

Ksenia Nouril: I’m struck by the materiality of your work—the breaking down, disintegrating, and bringing back together of paper pulp, your painting of photographs to dissolve them, etc. Could you talk about materiality in your practice?

RG: The materiality of my work is very important, if not the most important. Materiality, such as the texture of the paper, for example, allows me to move away from words, from writing, from that sort of language, and allows for a certain kind of infrastructure of invisible presence. The paper disintegrates, and while you can no longer read what is on it, it’s still there. I’m trying to figure out what that means and what to do with it. There’s a lot of hope with Dalit narratives, but there’s also one step forward, three steps back. A lot of the work that people are doing gets invisibilized. With materiality, it allows for that hesitation. While I can be more hopeful when I’m speaking, the materiality of the work allows for a sadness, a haziness, a blankness that paper or ceramic or the blurred photograph can communicate to the viewer better than I can.

Lanka Tattersall: Since Ananya mentioned you’re exhibiting in Venice, could you speak about what you’ll be up to there?

RG: Essentially, it was a grant to produce work that could be shared digitally and that would involve what my community means to me. There’s a Dalit girls’ hostel in Pune—close to where I live—and my parents have been involved with it for decades. I’ve also been visiting it since I was little. Most of the girls there come from villages around Maharashtra, and they’re there because their schools are extremely far from their homes—sometimes 20 kilometers away. Having to walk these distances to get to school would be incredibly difficult. I held workshops—on writing about food, about school, and on drawing their journeys to school, drawing what their schools looks like—and produced a booklet of 15 recipes and stories about finding food, stealing food, etc. The girls who participated were 13–14-year-olds, so their stories are more joyful than the ones I typically read, and I merged them with recipes that I created from female Dalit Maharashtrian writing—so they read as narratives from young girls, and time is again warped. Alongside it, the stories are also presented on video, where the girls read them out in Marathi and English.

LG: I was thinking about how you read us some of your recipes in English, and about the girls reading in Marathi and English, and to a previous session on the little magazine movement in Maharashtra that thought through the different ways that information is shared and what communities share through language, and I’m curious about how that has come up in your practice. 

RG: Until last year I was quite adamant that everything I write had to be in English, even though I can read Marathi and Hindi and I’ve accessed many autobiographies via English translations from Tamil and Telugu. I don’t see English as a non-Indian language, and historically, we weren’t allowed to study pure Marathi or Sanskrit, so an English-language education was the way out and necessary for upward social mobility. English has been an important language of access. There’s no real nostalgia for Marathi, but at the same time, there is something to be said about things that are untranslatable. When I’m reading a Dalit autobiography in Marathi, it’s different from what it is in English. I don’t want to romanticize it, so I keep it in English, because if my audience can read English, then I don’t want to create a barrier to the work. But what I realized from the girls reading in Marathi and English is that even if the audience can’t understand Marathi, there is a generative pause in listening to another language. Again, the girls are studying English; they’re not fluent, but they wanted to read in English as much as they wanted to read in Marathi. If I had robbed them of reading in English, I would have made them feel like they weren’t good enough or that they shouldn’t have been studying English in the first place, so to have their voices in both languages was important.

AS: I have a question about reading as a practice in your looking at memoirs, autobiographies, and memory texts. These writers would have been among the first generation in their families to be educated. Could you speak about these primary sources and about the format of the recipe—what drew you to it, how you adapted some of the larger concerns of the texts into recipes, etc. 

RG: I started with Maharashtrian Dalit writers because they were in my house. The Maharashtrian Dalit community also has an advantage, because Ambedkar was from this community, and it has been the force of his direct influence that has and continues to encourage the community to leave behind caste-based manual work, move to cities, and send their kids to school. A lot of the writers in this genre are male—though there are many female writers as well. But, if one was going to send their children to school for the very first time, it was often the sons who were sent. The realization that one could also send their daughters came later. 

But with the recipes . . . they’re a ploy to get the audience to read the original book. I keep things simple and, in each booklet, I’ll only include six recipes—some short, some slightly longer—and then at the back of the booklet, it says that this has been adapted from “x” autobiography to invite the audience to read this literature. I wish it was not about that, but coming from this space of people not knowing where to start, I provide them with options. Also, as much as my family is involved in this work, it’s still difficult to have one-on-one conversations because there is a lot of shame involved. There are things that people just don’t want to talk about, and I respect that. Dalit writers have written down everything that they needed to, so I decided to see what they’ve written about and to bring it out in whatever way I can. It’s almost like preliminary research for having actual conversations with my own family and others in the future.

AS: It’s also a ploy for people who claim caste doesn’t exist . . .

RG: Yes. The act of opening a book and reading for oneself has allowed me to have more interesting conversations around caste, especially compared to my earlier works which were a little more on the nose, and elicited anger and questions such as why I’m showing work on caste if caste doesn’t exist. So sometimes opening a book, reading it, and trying to figure it out for oneself allows the audience to take it in differently.

This essay stems from the Contemporary and Modern Art Perspectives (C-MAP) Bombay/Mumbai initiative at MoMA. The 2024–2026 Bombay/Mumbai research program was conceived and organized by Ananya Sikand (C-MAP Bombay/Mumbai Fellow) and Lucy Gallun (Curator, The Robert B. Menschel Department of Photography). Read more about C-MAP here.

The post Dreaming of Food, Air, and Water: In Conversation with Rajyashri Goody  appeared first on post.

A Diasporic Mythology (2021) by Bagus Pandega (Indonesian, b. 1985) is a kinetic and sound installation organized in concentric rings (fig. 1). In the outer ring, several stringed instruments are similar in shape but culturally distinct: a taishōgoto from Japan and a sijobang harp, Balinese penting, Lombok penting, and mandaliong, all native to Indonesia. At the center of this arrangement are live tea plants equipped with MIDI Sprout sensors that capture bio-information from plants, which is translated to signals that activate the instruments. The MIDI sensors are also connected to a mechanical system that reads musical scores printed on a sheet of vinyl paper. The scores are informed by interviews Pandega conducted with local musicians who played the instruments included in the work. From these conversations, Pandega wrote scores that the sensors read as digital annotations, triggering a network of solenoid drivers and rotating motors to strike strings or press keys, creating an automated, live performance. This automation is bound by an invisible thread of historical and cultural translation. While the instruments explore how the same acoustic apparatus (the string instrument) circulates and adapts across different regions and cultures, the tea plants speak of the colonial history of the Dutch bringing tea from Japan to Indonesia.¹ Without oversimplifying the work through a mere, brief description, this is the intricacy of Pandega’s aesthetic.

Pandega assembles various electronic components, musical instruments, found objects, and 3-D-printed custom parts and software into artworks that combine and generate kinetic, acoustic, and light elements in a modular way: Each of the constituent components can be replaced, modified, or exchanged to form another iteration. Despite the technical marvel of his installations, Pandega’s approach to artistic practice remains fundamentally DIY—an artistic ethos that intentionally bypasses industrial standards. Pandega has adopted this “maker” mentality—rooted in Indonesia’s 1990s media landscape—to reexamine the collision between society and nature, as seen in The Diasporic Mythology.

DIY culture in Indonesia as it relates to art is primarily associated with self-organizing. It acts as a response to the lack of art infrastructure or institutions, and takes form in collective or community-based practices. However, DIY can also be seen in the process of creating artwork through a culture of customization and the use of “low technology” in media and new media art, that was introduced to Indonesia in the 1990s, along with the growing consumption of media and information technology, such as computers and the internet, in Indonesia and Southeast Asia in general. 

Pioneering multimedia artist Krisna Murti (1957–2023) utilized video installations to critique the friction between Indonesian tradition and technological consumerism. Canonical works such as 12 Hours in the Life of Agung Rai, the Dancer (1993)² and Learning to Queue Up to the Ants (1996)³ highlighted a clash of modernities in which the digital medium was used to examine tradition rather than replace it. While Murti’s installations were not modular and, furthermore, were typically fixed in their configuration, his interdisciplinary approach laid the groundwork for the more fluid systems developed by the next generation. 

In contrast, Heri Dono (b. 1960) created low-tech kinetic installations that critique Indonesia’s position as a consumer of technology. Observing that defective electronics were more often discarded than repaired, he incorporated used motors and coils into his work. Dono looked upon this process of “reviving” obsolete objects as a form of mechanical animism.⁴ His practice was further informed by the concept of dua seni rupa (two arts) first explored by Sanento Yuliman in 1984, which encourages a dialogue between “high” and “low” sociocultural phenomena.⁵ Dono’s works, for example Gamelan of Nommunication (1997), use mechanical devices and samples to automate traditional instruments, prefiguring the automated ensembles later made by Pandega (fig. 2). 

In their work in the 1990s, Murti and Dono examined encounters between technology and tradition as well as the binary tensions arising from symbolic and performative gestures addressing them. Sometimes, they distanced themselves from the concept of high technology. At other times, they were satirical or parodic in their approaches to it. Their video works are parts of fixed installations that would always be arranged in the same way—as opposed to being modular and reconfigured depending upon the context. Yet, their works are also interdisciplinary in nature, a characteristic that foreshadows the new media works of a later generation of artists.⁶ As Indonesian curator Agung Hujatnika has observed, the early Indonesian media artists who merged art and technology were not driven by a spirit of “scientific discovery” but rather by their interest in the impact of technological culture on and in the everyday lives of Indonesians.⁷ 

Ade Darmawan (b. 1974) and other artists working at the dawn of the 2000s—in post-Reformasi Indonesia—expanded new media art in terms of both artistic expression and infrastructure.⁸ Though the cultural mood of this period was in many ways euphoric, including for artists and musicians, the capitalist television and music industries, which favored more popular media, remained a hegemonic and out-of-reach ecosystem. As a reaction to this, machine customization culture, closely linked to experimental sound and music performance, flourished. For example, the early sound installation performances of the short-lived Yogyakarta-based artist duo Garden of the Blind—Jompet Kuswidananto (b. 1976) and Venzha Christ (b. 1975)—were primarily constructed from tinkered technology. Kuswidananto described their practice as “electrocraft,” a term he coined for a method of working that falls somewhere between the realms of analog and digital.⁹ This kind of low-tech assembly is apparent in the duo’s performance Kingdom of Broken Heart (2001), which features a cyborg-like performer equipped with a sensor-based right-hand glove and a spine that emits beeps when it moves (fig. 3). Seated in a chair on a postapocalyptic stage, beneath rotating televisions suspended from the ceiling, the performer remains central to the installation. 

Pandega’s practice emerged from a more established landscape of artist-led infrastructure, including collectives like ruangrupa (est. 2000, Jakarta), which staged the first OK. Video—Jakarta International Video Festival in 2003, and Bandung Center for New Media Arts, which institutionalized DIY and DIWO (do-it-with-others) mentalities. As part of the generation that emerged after the new media artists born in the late 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, Pandega had earlier and more significant exposure to technology and relatively established infrastructure and reception. He earned a Bachelor of Arts in sculpture in 2008 and a Master of Fine Arts in 2015 from the Faculty of Art and Design at the Institut Teknologi Bandung (ITB). Pandega’s artistic development coincided with the emergence in 2007 of “intermedia” within the practical and pedagogical trajectory of ITB, which developed the category as a new and separate discipline within its fine arts department as a means of integrating art within media and information technology. Though Pandega himself remained an autodidact, this institutional shift in focus made new media art a budding practice within the formal infrastructure of ITB, which traditionally, had been more artist-initiated and grassroots-oriented.

In 2007, Pandega also encountered the work of Japanese artist Muneteru Ujino (b. 1964) at KITA!! Japanese Artists Meet Indonesia, where Ujino exhibited The Rotators (2007) (fig. 4).¹⁰ Ujino is known for sound installations that combine 20th-century industrial products, such as household appliances, electric guitars, cars, and building materials, with DIY technology. Pandega took inspiration from his practice and started exploring the tension between the functional history of an object and its potential to generate sound.

By 2015, Pandega was fully integrating modularity, treating installation components as individual, wall-bound units of vinyl and light—a pivotal shift evident in his Clandestine Transgression series (fig. 5). In subsequent works, like Polka (2016) and A Tea Poi on Moo (2016), he further distilled the complex setups into self-contained modules. This new approach allowed him to extract and recontextualize various components across exhibitions, to look upon them as technical and conceptual nomads rather than fixed parts of a single unit. While Murti and Dono utilized traditional musical instruments to symbolically illustrate a cultural clash with modernization, Pandega favored a different friction: stripping the instruments of their melodic expectations and treating them as raw sound generators. 

Referring to his practice as “social-based DIY,” Pandega visits local smiths and technicians—such as lathe operators—to commission components and machine parts for his installations as well as to establish long-term relationships with the people integral to his artistic practice.¹¹ His works are hands-on, and his deep, consistent engagement with objects and the smiths who make them is testament to the dialogic and often communal nature of new media arts in Indonesia. Pandega’s work transforms and deconstructs the functionality and nature of everyday objects, some of which he has acquired secondhand. His use of modern musical instruments, whether they are intact or physically deconstructed, echoes the interdisciplinary ethos of earlier artists. Whether using vinyl LPs, lamps, or custom instruments, Pandega treats every variable as a technical and conceptual nomad that can be continually repurposed through new prompts and iterations across different modular systems.

A Diasporic Mythology explores the diaspora of culture and objects through trade and musical influence. This kinetic and sound installation establishes relationships between Indonesia and Japan by bringing together seemingly unrelated items from across borders into a diasporic ensemble. The taishōgoto, a 1912 Japanese invention, hybridizes a typewriter mechanism and stringed instrument. In joining it with Indonesian instruments—a mandaliong (Lombok), penting (Bali and Lombok), and kecapi sijobang (West Sumatra)—Pandega creates a cross-cultural dialogue. 

This ensemble is connected to the live Camellia sinensis, a tea plant with deep roots in colonial trade between Asia and Europe. MIDI Sprout sensors detect the plants’ electrical conductivity as biodata, triggering solenoids and motors to pluck the strings. The resulting sound is a musical and historical cacophony that highlights three of Pandega’s core interests: 1) an assembly of instruments from different cultures; 2) the use of nonhuman agency (nature) to “control” technology; and 3) the contrast between traditional, native instruments and modern, technological devices and softwares. The contrasts explored here by Pandega mirror the cultural tensions explored by Murti and Dono in the 1990s. 

In the context of A Diasporic Mythology, modularity operates on two levels: technically, in merging electronic components and living organisms into reconfigurable systems, and conceptually, in recasting cultural objects and their inherent histories as interrelated fragments brought together to reconstruct an ensemble or an ecology. The modular logic allows each work to perform as a fluid mechanism capable of being dismantled and recalibrated to inhabit new geographical and curatorial environments without losing its integrity. Since its inception, A Diasporic Mythology has experienced a dispersion from its original articulation. The work debuted in 2021 as a commissioned piece in the 10th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art. It was then featured in 2022 in Pandega’s solo exhibition O (pronounced “circle”), the focus of which was ecological extraction and circular economies. On both occasions, the arrangement of individual modules, each enabled by its own inherent technical and architectural capability, echoes the diaspora it aims to address. 

The modular nature of A Diasporic Mythology is also due to the functional independence of its components. As previously mentioned, Pandega treats acoustic, light, and kinetic as individual elements that can be brought together to form a more expansive body of work, that is, a richer ecology. This work is composed of several self-contained modules that can operate independently or on a smaller scale. Indeed, some of them have been used in entirely different artworks. For example, the taishōgoto is also part of Pandega’s Remaining Ending (2020). In this earlier piece, an orchid is clipped to the MIDI Sprout so that its conductivity can be read by the device to play the taishōgoto. In front of the musical instrument, Pandega placed three books on Pendidikan Sejarah Perjuangan Bangsa (Education on the History of the National Struggle), a subject in the curriculum of the Indonesian New Order.¹² Different from A Diasporic Mythology, the taishōgoto in Remaining Ending conceptually represents the history of education in Indonesia, which was influenced by Japanese colonialism, and links it to the education system and controlled narratives of the New Order era. 

In A Diasporic Mythology, this same instrument conceptually represents a different colonial historical network, a shift that is further complicated by a series of similar stringed instruments with nonetheless different cultural associations. This example shows how the very same module might conceptually transform when it is recontextualized, or placed within a different and more entangled installation.¹³ This particular mechanism also echoes the diaspora in that modules formerly concentrated in one environment have scattered from their homeland to inhabit new, more culturally intricate environments.

A Diasporic Mythology does not hide its modularity (fig. 6). Indeed, its constituent parts are literally laid bare—with nothing shrouding them. Viewers can simultaneously observe the exposed circuitry, structure, and tangled wires up to the electric power socket into which they are plugged. On full display, the modules making up A Diasporic Mythology are thereby rendered visibly equal—even though the tea plant and musical instruments serve as the main discursive points, and despite the fact that the rotating LED screen is at the center and top of the concentric installation. Pandega’s objective as a new media artist is to invite viewers to pay attention to his work’s complexity. A Diasporic Mythology coaxes them to trace how the tea and taishōgoto, for example, are connected not only through the MIDI Sprout, but also through the cultural diaspora. The repetition of certain objects across Pandega’s works demonstrates a configurability that reveals both diasporic and prototypic dimensions.¹⁴ By considering the same mechanism in the context of different arrangements, we can see how it might serve as a prototype, or preliminary mechanism, for future rearrangements—wherein new elements are added and old ones subtracted or repurposed to serve a new ecology of relations. Ultimately, any one module might be rescaled and/or rearranged, evolving alongside the specific ecology of a particular exhibition.

To define the trait of a module and modularity in Pandega’s practice, we might look at how the artist combines physical hardware and historical objects. In Pandega’s practice, which evolved from studying fine art sculpture to applying his “social-based DIY” method, a module is not merely a building block of an installation; it is a self-contained conceptual block capable of inhabiting different contexts. Each module represents a combination of technical and conceptual components. Each possesses the functional capacity to operate as a single mechanism, as exemplified by Remaining Ending, or as part of a larger, webbing ecosystem, such as A Diasporic Mythology. Each constituent possesses a distinct history or association, be it with colonial trade or musical migration, that persists regardless of its physical and historical displacements. Hence, modularity is the aesthetic that allows the inherent cultural or historical quality of an object to be as reconfigurable as its hardware.

As seen in A Diasporic Mythology, modularity is also defined by the exposed relations within the installation. By baring its circuitry, the work weaves technical mechanisms into visible figures of speech. This unshrouded modularity invites the audience to trace the relationships between the modules—not just their physical presence. Modularity mirrors the diasporic framework: It embodies the historical dispersion of the objects it utilizes by migrating across geographical and curatorial ecologies.

Pandega’s modularity clearly addresses more than technological or scientific discovery. It also calls attention to artistic derivations resulting from the discrete material and conceptual properties of each module. It demands an understanding of a complex material ecology: What did the module look like previously? How does it function in the present work? What possible mechanisms might it operate in the future? Within this circuitry, historical moments serve as “invisible” modules, the connective tissue that complicates Pandega’s installations and enhances what might otherwise be a purely kinetic endeavor. By treating every component as a module, Pandega moves beyond the binary tensions of the 1990s media art into a space of fluid, intermedial conversation. Through this intricate assembly, Pandega ensures that the complexity of his modularity lies not just in its technical spectacle, but also in its ability to fundamentally question our own relationship with technology, its politics, its ecology, and its history.

The post Bagus Pandega: Aesthetic of Modularity appeared first on post.

1.

As one’s eyes dart between the formal contrasts in this silver gelatin print by Sabelo Mlangeni, observing the ways the image’s compositional differences never quite settle—elliptically forming and unforming in accordance with what figures or details the viewer momentarily foregrounds—we might take note of a quiet antagonism that labors within and beneath its visual field, one that interrupts the logics of identification that cohere the genre of portraiture. There is, in other words, a syncopated visual music in Mbulelo and Friends, Thembisa Township that emerges in the dynamic correspondence between the socio-material embodiment of the three photographed figures and the docu-realist aesthetic framing of Mlangeni’s camera. This tension raises more questions than answers as to who these figures are and what their relationships to each other might be. The image belongs to Mlangeni’s series Isivumelwano (2003–20), which documents wedding ceremonies and marital festivities throughout South Africa (and also in neighboring states such as Mozambique, Lesotho, and Eswatini). In the process of looking, we are prompted to refract the image through our own internal virtual archives of wedding celebrations, a cross-referential activity of visual recall that perhaps yields no further clarity. 

Among the three figures that confront us, who might Mbulelo be? Has Mlangeni positioned them in the center, or are they the figure on the left, who appears to stand out the most due to their relatively taller height and femme-adjacent presentation? This figure’s black, tight-fitting cross V-neck, which features a campy lace sleeve, and luminescent jewelry to match, forms a striking optical tension with the relatively normative loose-fitting white shirts worn by the other two figures, who are unaccessorized. It is at this moment, through Mlangeni’s choreographed conflation of aesthetic form and social signification, that the regulatory logics of gender and sexuality become foregrounded as organizing principles in the visual field. The effeminate figure in black forces a double take, one that destabilizes the presumed normativity of the neighboring figures. As if emanating a kind of irruptive, radioactive matter, this figure produces a semiotic disturbance in the texture of the composition that subverts the (colonial) association of bridal femininity—and by symbolic extension, virginal purity—with racial and chromatic whiteness. Such exorbitant matter and its disorderly effects have, in recent history, gone by the name of “queerness.”¹

Yet, if indeed Mlangeni’s image invites a reading of these three Africans as corporeal figurations whose desires, expressions, and practices counter the structures of compulsive heteronormativity, there remains the unanswered question if what we see here is a glimpse of a “queer” African wedding.² If so, might we be looking at a fragment of the wedding’s stylish guests? Or alternatively, might one, or even two, of these figures in fact be the newly wedded couple? 

2. 

South Africa is the only country on the African continent that currently recognizes marital contracts between same-sex couples. This juridical exception is due to a combination of economic, historical, and geopolitical factors stemming from the termination of the apartheid regime in 1994 and the country’s subsequent reintegration into the capitalist world-system following decades of international boycotts and sanctions. The country’s neoliberal, progressive rebranding as a multicultural “rainbow nation”—amenable with an expansive outlook on human rights that includes sexual orientation—was based on a structural disavowal of decades of racial capitalist degradation and violence.³ These systemic forms of material, psychological, and spiritual denigration continue into the present day. Although discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation has been constitutionally protected since the state’s liberal democratic makeover in the 1990s, same-sex marriage was not legalized until 2006. 

Mlangeni’s image is set in the Thembisa township, a spatial artifact of an apartheid-era policy that dispossessed indigenous Africans of their land and enclosed them as proletarianized units of racialized labor in surveilled and resource-extractive death zones. This social fact necessarily complicates potentially innocent readings of this image and the series to which it belongs as unfettered celebratory scenes of black love and kinship. That Mlangeni’s image, like Faith and Sakhi Moruping, Thembisa Township (fig. 2), is dated 2004—that is, before the legalization of same-sex marriage in South Africa—further gestures toward some of these depicted ceremonies as social-performative scenes wherein subjects refuse the recognition or valorization of their unions within the juridical confines of the postcolonial state.⁴ Therefore, while some images in the series materialize queerness as the warm, anticipatory illumination of an irreducibly utopian not-yet future, Mlangeni doubly situates such visions of Afri-queerness within and against the ongoing future-aborting machinations of settler coloniality and racial capitalism.⁵ It is precisely this visually articulated entanglement—authorized by Mlangeni’s fidelity to documentary ethics and a self-consciousness about the photographic apparatus’s subjective mediation—that lends his images their qualities of historical truth and affective potency. 

Importantly, Mlangeni’s Isivumelwano series does not only document queer marital unions. In fact, most of the pictures render conventional heterosexual couples. That being said, I suggest that Mlangeni’s work allows us to witness the enduring constitutive animations of what Hugo ka Canham has termed the “riotous deathscapes,” within which black working-class South Africans exist. Regardless of their sexual orientation, these individuals queerly articulate their historically undermined attempts at forming and sustaining bonds of intimacy, kinship, and commitment.⁶ Therefore, my use of “queerness” here exceeds identitarian ascriptions. Rather, it names processes and relations that unsettle and exceed the racially gendered and sexualized means through which the colonial-capitalist matrix of power reproduces itself on a global scale.⁷

Indeed, throughout Mlangeni’s series, we observe a multitude of black working-class, Afri-queer, and Afri-indigenous disidentifications, creative appropriations, and outright rejections of the colonial-bourgeois genre of the “white wedding.”⁸ Here, the wedding ceremony is projected as a revelatory social stage where contradictions of race, gender, sexuality, and private property are woven into turbulent convergence. Their inseparable articulations are determined by the ever-shifting structural configurations of the South African postcolony, as well as the neocolonial world-system to which it is interminably subjected.⁹

3. 

The rhythmic oscillation between joyous sociality and structural violence indexed in Mbulelo and Friends, Thembisa Township recalls a series by Mlangeni titled Country Girls (2003–9; fig. 5–8). In the scores of monochrome images that make up the project—all similarly shot over several years on analog film—we are given mediated access to loosely connected countryside communities of queer South Africans living in Mpumalanga province. Like Thembisa, Mpumalanga bears the unhealed geological, metaphysical, and societal scars of racial capitalist brutality due to coal mining and industrial agriculture. Yet, in Mlangeni’s series, we’re still able to hear the impossible thrums of black queer social life—wayward forms of social relation composed in the wake of the recursive catastrophe of coloniality.¹⁰ Such anarchic social geometries do not arise in a vacuum, but rather are intergenerationally sustained through forms of reproductive, system-antagonistic labor embodied by what Joy James calls the “captive maternal.”¹¹

In Country Girls, a figure like the queer activist Bafana Mhlanga might approximate such a labor function. During a recent conversation, Mlangeni spoke of Mhlanga’s profound formal and informal organizing efforts, which provided the refuge-like conditions for the intimate, subterranean gatherings so movingly depicted through his camera lens.¹² In Bafana getting ready for work (2009; fig. 5), Mlangeni captures Mhlanga from behind with a towel wrapped around his waist as he inches towards an open door. The interior space is humble—a pot on a table, some objects on a dressing stand, a sheet lazily draped over a couch that might have just been slept on. The composition retains an atmospheric, soft-focus blur—as if Mlangeni took the image in a quick, improvised instant. Centering Mhlanga’s modest space and modest work through modest means, Mlangeni’s sensuous interior image alludes to a more capacious understanding of love, an “anoriginary” conception that precedes and transcends its institutionalized reification by wedding ceremonies or marital festivities.¹³ This is a socially and temporally dispersed, non-individuated kind of love; a stubborn love of people who colonial modernity has long rendered valueless, unlovable; an ungovernable love that maintains an aversion to Power, no matter the cost; an intoxicating love, ever so determined, that seeks out and architects the birth of liberatory possibility.¹⁴

The post Sabelo Mlangeni | Other Love Stories appeared first on post.

From February 5 to 11, 2026, members of the C-MAP Africa group from The Museum of Modern Art traveled to Morocco on a research trip that included several cities: Marrakech, Casablanca, Rabat, Tangier, and Tétouan. Over the course of the visit, the group met with artists, curators, scholars, and cultural practitioners and toured studios, archives, museums, and independent initiatives. Upon their return, the travelers were invited to reflect on a single moment that shaped their experience and prompted them to reconsider their work at MoMA. Because these responses are intentionally brief, they do not fully capture the breadth of encounters that shaped the experience. 

The group extends its heartfelt thanks to Chahrazad Zahi, whose knowledge and good spirit were integral to the trip. The group also remains deeply grateful to the many artists, scholars, collectors, and cultural workers across Morocco who so generously shared their time, knowledge, and spaces with us, and whose hospitality and openness made the journey possible including but not limited to the following: Oumayma Abouzid, Amina Agueznay, Mustapha Akrim, Yto Barrada, Elisabeth Bauchet-Bouhlal, Amina Belghiti, Amina Benbouchta, Hicham Benohoud, Meriem Berrada, Khalil Binebine, Mahi Binebine, M’barek Bouhchichi, Hicham Bouzid, Nadia Chabâa, Larbi Cherkaoui, Kamal Daghmoumi, Florence Renault Darsi, Hassan Darsi, Touria El Glaoui, Safaa Erruas, Oumaima Haitof, Hassan Hajjaj, Laila Hida, Amine Houari, Abdellah Karroum, Imane Lahrich, Othman Lazraq, Mohamed Mourabiti, Amina Mourid, Mounia Yasmine O’Neal and the team at The Mothership Tangier: Khawla, Chef Mohamed, BaMjido, Othmane, Saïd, and Si Mohammed; Juan Asis Palao Gómez, Mehdi Qotbi, Karim Rafi, Younes Rahmoun, Sara Rerhrhaye, Nadia Sabri, Abderrahim Yamou, and Fatiha Zemmouri.

The 2026 C-MAP Africa trip was organized and researched by Beya Othmani, the C-MAP Africa fellow (2024–26).

Smooth Nzewi, The Steven and Lisa Tananbaum Curator, Department of Painting and Sculpture, C-MAP Africa Group Leader

On Mohamed Chabâa 

The stewardship of an artist’s legacy is something I find deeply compelling, especially when it is taken on by family members. Nadia Chabâa, an art historian who has dedicated herself to her father’s legacy, stands out as a particularly inspiring example. Before our visit to her home, my knowledge of Mohamed Chabâa (1935–2013) was spotty and largely limited to his role in the triumvirate that founded the Casablanca Art School. But his contributions ran much deeper. He combined artistic practice, theory, and pedagogy, and architecture was at the heart of it all.

In 1966, Chabâa joined the Casablanca Art School as a teacher, leading workshops in decoration and graphic arts and establishing an Arabic calligraphy workshop as a core part of the curriculum. Alongside Mohamed Melehi (1936–2020) and Farid Belkahia (1934–2014), he co-organized Présence Plastique, a manifesto-exhibition held in Jemaa el-Fna Square in Marrakech in 1969, deliberately bringing art into public space.

In 1982, he joined the faculty of the National School of Architecture in Rabat, Morocco’s first architecture school, and in 1994, he returned to his alma mater, the National Institute of Fine Arts in Tétouan, as its director, overhauling both its Italian classical curriculum, which had been place since Chabâa was a student there in the 1950s, and its pedagogy. There, he shaped a generation of Moroccan artists now active on the international scene, including Younes Rahmoun and Safaa Erruas, both of whom we visited during our trip.

I was also quite impressed with how Chabâa’s own artistic practice evolved over the years, from hard-edge abstraction of the 1960s and 1970s to looser abstraction in the 1980s to more gestural lines from the late 1990s onward.

Ksenia Nouril, Assistant Director, International Program

C-MAP research trips typically culminate over a year’s worth of distance learning. They are an on-the-ground continuation of the dialogic, group-based learning practiced by C-MAP members at MoMA in their monthly meetings with artists, curators, and scholars, which are organized by the C-MAP fellow and the C-MAP group leader. Thus, our short but precious visit to Morocco was but one piece of a larger and longer-term project with deep roots in our institution’s mission to connect people to and through art.

This metaphor of piecing or putting together lends itself to the many ways of making we experienced in our multicity venture via plane, train, and automobile. I was particularly struck by the power of pattern, which emerged as a salient trope for artists with whom we met or whose works we saw on view at various venues. Whether it is the repetition of an iconic image in the works of Safaa Erruas or Hassan Hajjaj or the repetition of a shape or color in urban and religious architecture alike, such as at the Madrasa Ben Youssef, pattern permeated our visual field. Meeting with Amina Agueznay brought pattern into the conversation a different way, specifically through the traditional weaving patterns incorporated in her work Curriculum Vitae from 2020–21, which comprises dozens of blocks made by weavers from different communities across Morocco. Each block represents that weaver’s “language,” which is passed down from generation to generation and is either well known or endangered. Agueznay also showed us Burials, a work from 2024 that also meditates on waving as a language, creating parallels between words and stitches. 

Leonardo Bravo, Director of Public Engagement, Department of Learning and Engagement

The opportunity to travel to Morocco with the C-MAP Africa group felt like stepping into a long-held dream. Since my youth, Morocco has occupied a vivid place in my imagination—shaped by the mystique of North Africa, the wandering spirit of the Beats, and the hypnotic sounds of the master musicians of Jajouka.

To finally move through the country itself—along the vibrant streets of Marrakech, amid the coastal rhythms of Casablanca and the layered histories of Tétouan and Rabat, and across the luminous threshold of Tangier—was to encounter a reality even more compelling than the one I had imagined.

Across these cities, Morocco revealed itself as a landscape shaped over millennia, where culture and history unfold in layered and interconnected ways. It is a place continually formed and re-formed through the shifting currents of empire, colonization, and self-determination.

Particularly moving was the exhibition on Berber and Amazigh culture across the Maghreb at the Pierre Bergé Museum of Berber Arts, which offered a powerful testament to the grace, dignity, and resilience of these communities. The presentation underscored how Amazigh cultural traditions continue to resonate across generations and geographies.

Among the many memorable encounters during the trip, our visit to Think Tanger stood out. The work of Hicham Bouzid, Amina Mourid, and their collective—creating a platform for collaborative learning, research, and public inquiry—deeply resonated with my own interests. Their experimental, research-driven approach to collective knowledge-making at the intersection of arts, culture, and civic life closely aligns with my institutional work.

I left the visit inspired and hopeful about developing stronger connections that might lead to future collaboration with MoMA.

Oluremi C. Onabanjo, The Peter Schub Curator, The Robert B. Menschel Department of Photography

Our time in Morocco was sprawling in its scope, intensive in its sensibility. From Marrakech to Casablanca, then Rabat to Tétouan, our final day in Tangier remains crisp in my mind’s eye.

The night prior, we had visited Yto Barrada’s inimitable Cinémathèque Tangier—followed by a convivial dinner over which we discussed Morocco’s expanded presence at the forthcoming Venice Biennale (Barrada representing France; Amina Agueznay representing Morocco).

On a dewy, fragile morning, the group arrived at The Mothership, where we encountered the expanded fields of Barrada’s artistic and social practice. In ethos, The Mothership is a site for artistic retreat, experimental research, and interdisciplinary exploration inspired by natural dyes and Indigenous traditions. Physically, it consists of a series of studios and dwelling spaces occupied by visiting residents, collaborators, and Barrada’s family. These are threaded together and surrounded by a variety of flowering and subsistence gardens.

Situated on a dramatic set of cliffs that overlook the Strait of Gibraltar and face Spain, the view from the rear balcony of The Mothership is anchored by a massive tree. Here, Barrada has constructed a sturdy platform that one can access through netted passageways entangled among branches. She calls this her raft.

In considering this view, I was catapulted back to the first time I leafed through her photobook A Life Full of Holes: The Strait Project (2005)—a project that shaped my understanding of the stakes of contemporary photography in Morocco and which anchors MoMA’s photographic holdings of Barrada’s work.

Looking skyward at her raft, I was plunged back into the world of French social work pioneer and writer Fernand Deligny that Barrada had shaped at MoMA through Artist’s Choice: Yto Barrada—A Raft (2021–22), which was organized thoughtfully in collaboration with my colleague Lucy Gallun.

Still reeling from the loss of Jay Levenson—who has made, and continues to make, so much possible within and beyond MoMA—I was reminded of what it means to sustain an insistent generosity of spirit and a rigorous fidelity to life in all of its forms.

Thomas (T.) Jean Lax, Curator, Department of Media and Performance

Mother, Ship

Yto Barrada has been building rafts with others for over twenty years. Consider the tree house she made in 2005 in the garden of her Tangier home, which later that year she photographed and called Raft in Strangler Figtree. Or her 2021 tabletop sculpture—Tamo’s Raft (Le radeau de Tamo)—included in her Artist’s Choice exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art.

Yto’s rafts are rarely flat, much like the buoyant structures made of fastened materials used by migrants as makeshift boats. You don’t need me to recall images of Mediterranean migrants here for you to call to mind the morphological echoes between Yto’s assemblages and the vessels captured in photographs endlessly circulated via news and social media.

Those shapes are echoed in the meandering wires that wind atop Tamo’s ship and hover in the diagonal lines of ladders extending below the tree house and web of branches linking the two-hundred-year-old strangler fig tree to her house.

In this trail of associations, ghosted but not forgotten, a network of rafts seems to breed more floating platforms. There is a technical word for this type of vehicle: a mothership, designed to carry, lead, or serve other vehicles as they travel through water, air, and space.

Yto’s rafts tend to float in groups. To call them “Yto’s” rafts is itself a usable fiction. They are perhaps better described as our rafts; Yto keeps them company.

Michelle Elligott, Chief of Archives, Library, and Research Collections

Specificity, universality, transmission of ideas, connection, circulation, and yes, beauty.

Younes Rahmoun’s presentation at the Tétouan School of Fine Arts helped me reflect on the experiences, new ideas, and hope that were centered during this most enlightening trip to several cities in Morocco.

Formed and informed by his family tradition, and deeply rooted to his locality, Younes discussed his background and practice. I enjoyed learning about his Ghorfa (room) series in particular. With his mother’s support, he inhabited a small space under the stairs in the family home, which became his studio—a space for work and meditation. He translated that architectural space into a series of drawings, objects, and installations in various media.

Some installations appeared in gallery contexts, while others were situated in the landscape—but always with the artist’s intended desire for the viewers to concentrate on their “here and now.” His presentation also spurred me to contemplate the path to my current role, from my first art history courses at Smith College, where Younes had a residency and solo exhibition in 2024 that included his most recent Ghorfa, which he installed in the woods a few miles outside of campus.

The show was curated by Emma Chubb, who joined our meeting in Tétouan, and together we all toured the School of Fine Arts library and discussed the critical importance of collecting, preserving, and making accessible research materials, particularly of artists, populations, and regions that may be underrepresented in research institutions.

I am grateful to all the inspiring people we met throughout the trip, and I felt honored to think together with such wonderful MoMA colleagues, including our dear Jay Levenson, who helped open horizons for so many with his humor and humility.

Kate Lewis, The Agnes Gund Chief Conservator

I am very grateful to all the collectors, collectives, curators, publishers, researchers, and, of course, artists (including their families and colleagues) across Morocco who so generously welcomed us into their homes, studios, spaces, museums, galleries, and cinemas over the course of the 2026 C-MAP Africa research trip.

At MoMA, artists and makers are integral to the stewardship of the collections. A clear thread that emerged during this journey was how the process of making—of choosing materials and techniques, of collaborating with others—is deeply influenced by histories, religion, language, politics, and communities.

In the beautiful city of Tétouan, we were fortunate to visit Safaa Erruas in her downtown apartment studio. She shared with us her “ideas and materials from my internal kitchen” and talked about an artwork Les Drapeaux (2011–12).

This piece consists of the flags of the 22 Arab League member states reimagined as white pearls embroidered on sheets of 600 gsm cotton paper, reflecting on the Arab Spring.

Embroidery is a local tradition, passed down from mother to daughter, and the Tétouan practice is known for its stylized flowers and geometric shapes on unbleached canvas. It was interesting to hear how she worked with local embroiderers to create this painstaking work.

The multilayered significance of this approach and method reminded me that beyond materials and process, people are at the center of art and also, by extension, museum collections.

Jay Levenson embodied this ethos: Meet artists in their communities, where they are.

In memory of Jay Levenson (1948–2026), Director of MoMA’s International Program

The post C-MAP Africa in Morocco: Reflections from the 2026 Research Trip appeared first on post.

Carlos Quijon, Jr.: Can you walk us through the decision of choosing ruangrupa (ruru) for the Exhibition Histories book series? Of course, with the recent developments in ruru’s practice, talking for example about their artistic direction of documenta 15, the book has turned out to be a very timely historicization and mediation of the collective’s practice. I am wondering what the considerations were in writing about ruru’s practice at this particular historical moment?

David Morris: We can recall that conversations toward the book solidified around 2018, when farid rakun came to visit Afterall and spoke with exhibition studies students, and we started exploring the idea of archiving and historicizing ruru—the whys and the hows of it. It quickly became clear that this presented a number of challenges to the kind of research we do, practically and intellectually, and this seemed like a good place to start. As with most of the Exhibition Histories publications, the book developed quite organically from there, in a slow-burn way and across many conversations with our editorial collective and ruru friends and network, until it felt “ready.” (We often describe the Exhibition Histories process as a kind of simmering, slow cooking with multiple pots on at once.)

In short, when the documenta plan was announced, we were already some way along. If anything, it diverted our book plans since, understandably, documenta 15 (d15) took up a lot of the ruru bandwidth—although how things played out in Kassel made the need for a deeper analysis and understanding of ruangrupa’s work seem all the more urgent. 

Wing Chan:  In the book itself, ruru’s participation in d15 takes up maybe 2 percent of the overall page count. What interested us more are these questions: what kind of collective activism is ruru evocating? Where did it come from? How has it kept ruru going for decades in Jakarta and beyond? Personally, I feel ruru’s stories can teach us a lot about why it is important to not do things alone, about genuine, sustainable ways of relating to one another. It’s timely in this world full of wars.

Arianna Mercado: After 2022, so much of the conversation around ruru and their process suddenly became only about d15 and its aftermath. There was much to be said about ruru and how they operate in global and local art ecologies that goes way back to before d15. In the process of making this book, we felt that it wasn’t necessary to just continue adding to the conversation around d15, hence it is only briefly covered in the book. Ruru has been working through lumbung, through ideas of sharing and reciprocity, since their inception, so we felt that it was necessary to highlight this immense body of work by focusing on their support systems and the infrastructures they have built in Jakarta, Indonesia, and beyond.

When Wing and I were first doing the research before we went to Jakarta, it was a lot of, “OK, so let’s put ourselves in their shoes in 1998. What did their life look like back then? What pop culture media were they consuming? What was circulating in universities and in more artistic circles?” We watched a lot of movies, especially romcoms, like Ada Apa dengan Cinta? (What’s Up with Love; 2002). We read some of the books that were banned at the time—Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s novel This Earth of Mankind (1980), for example. We also listened to a lot of music of their time. We wanted to put ourselves in the shoes of ruru to think about their dreams, aspirations, and lives before even trying to understand their practice.

CQJr: I am interested in how you imagined the structure of the book. Of course, the book is about ruru’s 25-year history, so for the most part, it takes ruru’s practice as a frame through which a possible history of the interfacing between art, exhibition, and history (in Indonesia, in Southeast Asia, in Asia, in the global contemporary, etc.) can be written, understood, or—even as a baseline—be made legible. Because of the apparent “centrality” of ruru in the development of contemporary artistic discourse in Indonesia and across Southeast Asia (i.e., how almost all practitioners active in the contemporary art ecology of Indonesia were once part of or have worked with ruru), I am wondering if there were considerations around how to foil this narrative of centrality. 

DM: ruru’s 25-year lifespan is the longest timeframe we have attempted in the series, and this was among the creative challenges we had in making it legible to a wider audience (we hope) as well as in opening up larger questions about “art”, “exhibition”, “publics” and their interconnected histories, geographies, economics, ecosystems, etc., and the difficulties and possibilities they create for researchers, art historians, artists and institutions—what methodologies they demand or suggest. 

At some point early on, we were thinking it could be productive to constellate ruru with other different but comparable initiatives in the region, to look at all of them together, which might have worked to “decentralize” ruru and foreground a regional narrative—this is an approach of some earlier books in the series. But for this book, we took up a different challenge in trying to develop a kind of “institutional history” of ruru with the idea that perhaps a method would develop that could then offer an approach for other kinds of institutions, whether quite similar to or very different from ruru.

WC: Contributions to the last chapter of the book, namely Enin Supriyanto’s interview write-up and Nuraini Juliastuti’s essay on jamming, offer a long view on sustainable collective practices shaped by the sociopolitical climate in Indonesia and globally since the 1970s.¹ We hope that people who care about ruru—and ruru themselves—will be informed by these perspectives. In addition, Melani Budianta’s research on ruru’s economic models from 2000 illustrates how ‘centrality’ could be a myth.² I’d like to believe that our writers have introduced some new focal points.

There are things that repeatedly emerged that we just picked up on. For example, people will say, “Oh, ruru is a boys club!” So Arianna and I would debrief and ask what they really mean? People would say, “Oh, ruru, they were a product of Jakarta.” When you hear this more than two times, three times, four times, you start to build a vocabulary about how to describe ruru and the narratives that counter these descriptions. Somehow, along the way, we also identified the writers that we wanted to commission to talk about these things. I think what is quite interesting about the ruru book is that the commissioning or the identification of the writers or artists happened throughout the entire process—rather than at the start of the actual research. It doesn’t matter how many books we have put together before. No formula applied neatly to ruru. Everyone—scholars, artists, ourselves—were learning. Our team learned by doing.

CQJr: How did you engage with the scope and address of ruru’s practice? I am imagining that looking at ruru’s practice would necessitate looking at it in relation to various coordinates and geographies and publics and ecologies and addresses: “Indonesian,” “Southeast Asian,” “Asian,” “global contemporary,” and so on. How did you deal with this editorially? 

DM: I remember being very struck by how it was almost like there were at least two versions of ruru in circulation. Or, there were two in particular that we were thinking about from early on. What have they meant to people locally in their immediate context? And what have they meant to their wider publics, beyond Jakarta, beyond Indonesia? We were thinking about how to “translate” in both directions—people locally knew one side of the story, and people outside Indonesia (or even, outside their local Jakarta neighborhood) would know another. It’s a story that has many sides, but these are two parts of it we tried to bring together. They have such a presence internationally, such a currency, and it’s not really my sense that they’re much more concerned with that than with building their local infrastructure, with thinking about the next generation—you know, they’re very committed to that. I think that to some extent, there’s a calculation of using the international footprint as a way to consolidate the projects they have in and across Indonesia.

AM: It’s hard to specify the who’s of ruru’s address, because on the one hand, Jakarta (and Indonesia as a whole) is a really important part of the work that they do—on-the-ground and as material. But I do think that in extending their networks internationally, they give people different understandings of how to work, the ways in which you can work equitably or do things with your friends and  build something together.

In the process of doing research for the book and commissioning writers, I personally felt that the idea of placing ruru within conventional narratives of “Southeast Asian art” seemed less and less appropriate—or necessary. When we visited Jakarta, the impact of ruru in the building of arts infrastructure felt very clear and palpable. Their documents, archives, and personalities have a somewhat mischievous nature, but in speaking to ruru and their collaborators, it was really interesting to hear about their efforts to build projects outside of Java, about how important upskilling is and how they engage with students and practitioners outside art fields. All of these plans and ideas are not very known or talked about in the realm of “global contemporary art,” partly due to language barriers, but perhaps also due to conceptions of what a “global contemporary art practice” might look like. We hoped through the book to be able to communicate the breadth of their practice and how it escapes these labels.

CQJr: Lastly, in terms of the category of the series Exhibition Histories: How do you make sense of ruru’s inclusion in this series? Did you see it as a case study that extends the categories of the “exhibition” and its “histories”? Is it a critique and maybe a move toward doing away with this framework? What were the kinds of conversations that you were having in relation to Exhibition Histories as a discursive formation and the book’s entry to the series?

WC: I think in terms of the series, from the book FESTAC ’77: The 2nd World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture (published by Chimurenga and Afterall Books, in association with Asia Art Archive, the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College and RAW Material Company, 2019) onward, the Exhibition Histories framing is already not containable. Because the FESTAC book was already blurring what is actual historical material and what are new commissions. Visually they are treated pretty much the same, which means that the chronology is very blurry for a book on exhibition history. 

If the ruru book is not part of Exhibition Histories, if it were placed in a bookshop, it would be grouped under something like relational intelligence instead of exhibition histories.

DM: We were also looking back to Artist-to-Artist: Independent Art Festivals in Chiang Mai 1992–98 (published by Afterall Books in association with Asia Art Archive and the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, 2018), which was already starting to rethink the parameters of “exhibition history” in a comparable way. I think we’ve kept that descriptor even though in practice it’s become pretty expansive. FESTAC and Chimurenga were so amazing. It was a massive learning on my part—and on all our parts—in terms of how to take a very different approach to historical research and publishing. 

FESTAC was a massive Pan-African festival that contained exhibitions as part of it. It was important to think about the whole thing and that’s where the focus must be. You miss a lot if you’re just talking about one of the exhibitions that were part of it. (They had a lot of really interesting exhibitions as well as the expansive presentation of artistic work from across the continent and diaspora there were dedicated exhibitions on contemporary Nigerian art; African architectural technology; Pan-African books, fashion, science, plus film and performance programmes, a huge conference . . . and still more!)

The way that “exhibition” was always understood by us is as a point where art meets a public, where it becomes a collective activity. With ruru, the idea of “art” is put into question—and while the “exhibition” is not where they’re coming from either, it’s still about practices of coming together.

I think there’s something to be said for the analytic—there’s something that it does when you put it in a framework of exhibition history that is, to me, still productive. 

For one thing, it helps with people who are more invested in the exhibition as form, allowing them to reconsider their assumptions. In the part of the world where we live and work, there are more parts of the art ecosystem that are more invested in a certain idea of exhibition’s white-cube lineage. There’s a certain strategic value to saying, “Well, this practice has equal, and in my view, much more relevance. And if you want to talk about the history of exhibitions, we need to talk about this.” And perhaps the more things you put in this “box” of exhibition history that don’t look like that, the more stretchy and expansive the term can become. It allows a bit more openness to thinking about “exhibition” and “history,” both of which are, in the case of ruru, tricky terms.

The post Tricky Terms, Coming Together: Arianna Mercado, David Morris, and Wing Chan and Carlos Quijon, Jr. in Conversation appeared first on post.

Shrujana Niranjani Shridhar: For me, Mumbai has always been a working-class city. That’s its defining character. Any city that grows because people come there to work develops certain things: functional public transport, cheap food, spaces you can access without feeling excluded. Rent is expensive, of course, but life around you feels reachable. That accessibility shaped my childhood. I was constantly out—taking buses and trains on my own by age eight or nine. That kind of mobility gives you agency that stays with you, especially for a girl in India (fig. 1).

I also grew up in a very political home. My parents are Ambedkarite, Marxist, anti-caste people who fought hard for their education, and their politics shaped everything in our house. My family has been in Mumbai for a couple of generations, so our relationship to the city is deep. Even with the gentrification happening now, it is still hard for me to be angry at Mumbai. There was a time when the city felt like it was truly ours. We could sit by the sea, go to the aquarium, the museum, the planetarium. My parents took me everywhere, and that exposure shaped me into someone who is always thinking and asking questions.

Mumbai also gave me a visual language. It did not come from galleries, because there were not many accessible ones then. It came from the trains, the sea, the political culture of Maharashtra, the literary tradition of essays, theater, poetry, and also from the vibrance of the music we grew up with. There was a kind of freedom in those moments, even if it was never fully available to Dalit girls in the same way. That tension between what we desire and what we can access has shaped how I look at the world.

MV: You were also growing up during an intense political moment in the city, with violence unfolding around you while the country projected a very different public narrative. As your political commitments deepened, how did this dissonance shape your sense of responsibility as an artist? 

SNS: I was born in 1992, so all the politics of that time were simply the atmosphere of my childhood. Babri happened shortly after I was born, the Bombay riots happened right after, and the 1990s and early 2000s were ripe with bomb blasts and communal tension.¹ It became normal for us. You would be waiting for a train or a bus, hear that a blast happened somewhere else in the city, and then you would just go home. Everyone who grew up in Mumbai in the ’90s lived with that kind of violence.

At the same time, mainstream media kept presenting a very liberal idea of unity and diversity. Those were the images painted everywhere, even though the reality around us was completely different. When I think about it now, it feels absurd that this is what we accepted as normal. But that environment shaped how I thought about culture and what it means to make something that cannot be twisted or misunderstood later. 

As someone from a marginalized community, I’m never only an artist. I’m always thinking about the past that shaped my family, the present I’m trying to make sense of, and the future I want to help build. My work has to hold all of that. That’s why I don’t respond immediately to events around me. My practice needs time to research, to understand what already exists, and to be intentional about how I represent myself and my community.

I also know now that I am someone who needs to be liberated. I’m part of the community I’m speaking from. For me to work honestly, I have to understand what my own body carries: my grandmother’s experiences, my sisters’ experiences, my friends’ experiences. All of that moves through me, and processing it takes time. I’m always thinking about posterity. I don’t want a future where culture looks back at us and gets it wrong. I can’t control how the present sees us, but by making the work I make, I’m putting something into the present that I hope the future will understand clearly. There should be no mistake.

MV: I’d like to turn to the portraits in your new series Educate, which takes these questions around representation into the lives and lineages of Dalit women. How did that project begin, and what does “educate” mean for you in this context?

SNS: Educate is the first part of a three-part series I began about a year and a half ago. The title comes from the first word in [the slogan] Shika, sanghatit vha ani sangharsh kara—which is usually translated as “educate, agitate, organize.”² But shika is often misunderstood, and it actually means “learn.” “Educate” in English can sound like teaching others, but I’m thinking about learning in a much broader sense: the knowledge systems Dalit communities have built, the violence students have endured, and the determination with which they continue to pursue education. I’m not trying to glorify that struggle; I’m trying to understand what this pursuit of knowledge has meant over a very long time.

For us, learning has always been taken seriously as a way out of poverty and caste oppression. Even if literacy rates are lower than the national average, the numbers themselves are remarkable given what people have been put through. Culturally, there is a very specific emphasis on education. At our events, there are always books, pamphlets, translations. At Chaityabhoomi on December 6, people spend their hard-earned money on literature and art.³ These are things supposedly meant for the elite, yet everyone wants to learn something—or at least to hold onto that aspiration.

All of this brought me to Mukta Salve (fig. 3). In 1855, when she was only 14, she wrote “About the Grief of the Mahars and Mangs” in the Marathi journal Dnyanodaya. It’s one of the earliest published anti-caste texts by a Dalit girl. The essay is painful, but it’s also full of a sharp awareness that education is the only way out of enslavement. Ambedkar repeated her points about half a century later. So for me, Educate has to begin with Mukta Salve.

MV: Instead of depicting Salve directly, you’ve chosen to paint her “descendants,” the people in her intellectual and political lineage. How did that idea take shape for you?

SNS: When I looked at the few visuals that exist of Mukta Salve, there’s really just this one image that circulates. And it doesn’t sit right with me. Beautiful as it is, it feels like it’s coming directly from the lineage of Raja Ravi Varma (1848-1906)—those soft, “divine” upper-caste aesthetics rooted in colonial art pedagogy. Ravi Varma painted women from oppressor-caste households into these ethereal, gentle embodiments of “sacredness,” and those images went on to define what an “ideal Indian woman” or “goddess” looked like (fig. 4). That visual language wasn’t built from our lives; it was built from theirs.

So when I look at that image of Mukta Salve, it doesn’t feel connected to who she might have been, or what she wrote, or the conditions she was writing from. It’s an aesthetic that isn’t ours. I did think for a moment, “Should I try to paint her?” But what would be the point of that? For me to sit here and imagine her face… I don’t know what that activity does or what it gives to the work, or to us as a culture.

I instead began thinking about Dalit women and girls who are pursuing education now—the people who are carrying her legacy forward. And I wanted the portraits to be a space of release for them, not a re-creation of a historical figure we can’t accurately imagine. That’s how I started painting my friend Divya, who is doing her PhD in New York (fig. 5). The titles themselves will hold that connection between her and Salve, something like Divya in lieu of Mukta Salve, or Mukta Salve’s Divya. The two women are tied together in the work—not visually but conceptually. Divya becomes a way of thinking about what Mukta Salve made possible and what it means for Dalit women to pursue knowledge today.

MV: In the portrait of Divya, the pose of rest feels central. Rest has a very specific lineage in Western portraiture, often idealized through the bourgeoisie. How were you thinking about rest in this context?

SNS: Divya wasn’t posing at all. I spent the day with her, waiting to see when she would finally stop moving. And, at one point, she just sat down. If you look closely, there’s a scowl on her face. It’s not rest. It’s a five-minute break in a full day of labor. That moment is important because portraiture usually puts something on a pedestal: dignity, beauty, power. Here, I wanted to put that tiny, vulnerable pause on a pedestal. That’s the release I’m talking about.

The patterns in the painting do specific work too. The couch pattern comes from the crops grown on Divya’s family’s land. They are literally what she rests on, generationally and materially. The blanket is the exact sari her mother wears in a photo Divya showed me. Divya doesn’t like keeping direct references to her home because the distance becomes too painful, so I brought her mother in indirectly, through pattern. Because her mother is central to Divya’s rest.

And the vulnerability of her pose exists only because of my relationship with her. This is based on a photograph, not a sitting. If she were sitting for me, the softness would disappear, and it would become labor again. That’s why it matters that she wasn’t performing. She was simply tired. And my work is to take that moment and magnify it.

MV: When I visited your studio, you were also working on a portrait of a woman in a bathtub. It felt like a very different kind of scene—still intimate, but coming from another set of questions. Could you talk about what you’re exploring there?

SNS: Yes. That portrait is still very unresolved. It’s of my friend Hrithik, who’s doing her PhD in Minneapolis (fig. 6). She had just moved to the US, and we were talking about how suddenly you have bathtubs everywhere. In India, you don’t. A bathtub is such an aspiration— a marker of “you’ve made it.” And then we started talking about bubble baths—how much guilt there is because of the water, and how strange it feels to allow yourself that kind of pleasure. And from there, we were talking about what we allow ourselves as Dalit women, and what we don’t.

She’s very young. And right now, she’s in this moment of “I’ll do whatever I want. I’m going to have fun. I don’t care what anyone says.” And that takes a long time to arrive at. It might look like normal “young person behavior,” but for her it’s new. She has become young now. That also happened to me—I came into my youth when I was older. When I was younger, I wasn’t young. So for her, this portrait is about exercising agency, claiming the right to live her life as a young person, on her own terms. And for me, it’s also the first time I’m painting someone in this context.

MV: That question of agency feels connected to what you were saying earlier about the series as a whole. Not just rest, but how Dalit women navigate their own representational constraints. How does that come through in this portrait? 

SNS: All of these portraits are not only about repose. They’re also about morality and respectability politics, and how those things get imposed on Dalit women’s bodies. Shailaja Paik writes about this: the way Dalit womanhood, through the anti-caste movement, starts to carry an imposed masculinity.⁴ We become bodies that are supposed to represent endurance, sacrifice, honor. You never want your body to trigger the tabooed memories of the kinds of labor Dalit women were historically forced into. And that’s a huge burden, because that same body also has desires, sexuality, pleasure. But you cannot express that. You cannot be playful. That’s what we mean when we say, “I didn’t get to be young when I was younger.” Within the anti-caste movement, there is so much respectability politics. Someone will always say: “This is not how someone from our community behaves. You represent serious things, so you must always be serious.” There is no space to be fully human.

And you know, it’s uncomfortable for me too. There are moments when I’m painting and I think, “What am I doing?” These women are simply feeling something, and it doesn’t look overtly political. It doesn’t look radical. But there is a radical edge to it. While I paint, my body has to stay aware of that tension—not only the need to challenge Brahminical patriarchy and Brahminical supremacy, but also the need to challenge ourselves. Art cannot just make us feel represented. It can’t only give us images of Dalit women that confirm what we already know. It also has to push us to ask, “What do we allow Dalit women to do?”

As someone shaped by the anti-caste movement, I have to ask whether I am ready to tolerate women from my community enjoying themselves. Because the moment Dalit women experience pleasure or softness, it’s dismissed as frivolous or unserious. And that dismissal sits on top of generations of emotional, physical, and intellectual labor carried disproportionately by Dalit women. They have carried entire communities, yet are not afforded their own humanity. That’s the challenge this series is trying to hold. If you had told me four months ago that I would be painting someone in a bubble bath as part of Educate, I wouldn’t have believed you. It feels wild. Because the histories around education for Dalit communities are full of violence—the use of water against us, the violence in schools and universities, the experiences of Dalit students navigating institutions designed not to include them. Those histories shape what we imagine “education” is supposed to look like, and you wouldn’t expect these portraits from that imagination. 

MV: Especially when you place them in the lineage of Salve’s writing.

SNS: Exactly. To then say Mukta Salve’s Hrithik—that is an immense claim. And yet while the rest of us are tense, she is there, having the bubble bath she deserves. She is in bliss. 

MV: Which was the point of Salve’s writing—to carve out the right to live differently.

SNS: This is what I mean when I say my work is about creating the moments we want in the future, in the present. If the goal is equity—that all of us get to enjoy our lives—then shouldn’t we say that we deserve that enjoyment now? That’s the dialogue happening in my head while I make this portrait. 

MV: Alongside these portraits, you’re also making an installation for the Kochi-Muziris Biennale that comes out of Educate and its focus on water, violence, and learning. How did that work grow out of the same questions?

SNS: Last spring, as I was thinking about different aspects of Educate, I started thinking about how water has been used as a weapon and a tool of segregation against Dalit students (fig. 7). Shailaja Paik also writes about this in her work on Dalit women’s education—how, when the British tried to include oppressed castes in schooling, caste Hindus were furious. Their main argument was that if their children studied with us and drank water in the same spaces, their children would be polluted. Water became the most contested site.⁵

And it continues. There was a case recently of a boy who drank from his principal’s bottle and was beaten. There was Indra Meghwal, a little child in Rajasthan who drank from the common source in school and was beaten to death by his teacher.⁶ I was thinking about the violence that water holds, of water as an archive. I was also thinking about Ambedkar’s experiences in school—No peon, no water—where he could only drink if a school official (peon) poured water for him from a height, and if that person didn’t come, he had no water. Water is the site of humiliation and the site of resistance. After Dr. B. R. Ambedkar’s legendary Mahad Satyagraha in March 1927 at Chavdar Tank, the local caste Hindus were infuriated and decided to “purify” the water using panchgavya (a mixture of cow urine, cow dung, milk, ghee, and curd). Polluting the water in this way was preferred to the mere thought of human beings from a different caste touching it.⁷ An infuriated Dr. Ambedkar decided to burn the Manusmriti shortly after, on December 25, 1927, at Mahad.⁸

Inspired by this, I wanted to use that same material, water, to destroy the Manusmriti. I started working with unfired clay tiles, roughly A4 or letter size, so they read as “documents.” I went through the Manusmriti and picked verses that specifically talk about education and what should happen if someone from an oppressed caste dares to study, what punishments are prescribed. It was a very painful process to read and select those texts.

I developed these slabs and began printing the verses on them with henna, using a screen-printing process on the wet clay so the text would be very clean and legible. Then I built an installation where water slowly drips onto the tiles (fig. 8). As it keeps dripping, the text dissolves, the clay collapses, and it literally turns to mud.

I also made the tiles as a walkway (fig. 9). You have to step on them to enter the space. It feels like stepping on dry leaves—there’s this very soothing, ASMR-like cracking sound. It’s calming. You hear the water dripping, you feel this relief in your body. And then you look down and read what you’re stepping on, and it hits you like a ton of bricks. That’s the experience I wanted: the calm and the violence arriving together, in your body.

Over time, as people keep stepping, the text becomes less legible. I’m completely okay with that. In fact, I think some of these texts should never be archived. They should not exist. I don’t need to give you evidence of the atrocity; the fact that I had to create them just to destroy them should tell you enough. And this is coming from someone who cares deeply about archives, who loves holding on to pieces of history. The work at Kochi via Conflictorium displays only the walkway tiles on a 6 by 10-foot floor space.

MV: You’ve talked about wanting people to encounter this installation alongside the portraits from Educate. How do you imagine that relationship between stepping on the tiles and then seeing these images of Divya and Hrithik?

SNS: I’ve been thinking about the tiles and the portraits as two different but connected bodies of work. Any time someone wants to access the work in Educate and the portraits of rest, bliss, and release, I want them to do this act of stepping on the Manusmriti first. You shouldn’t be able to just walk in and enjoy the leisure of Dalit women without confronting what has been done to us. The tiles become a threshold, and you have to embody that act of destruction at least once. We have done this kind of work—a thousand times over, in a hundred different ways—before we allow ourselves a moment of rest. So as a viewer, at the very least, you have to do this much. 

And, as an artist, I also have to be careful not to reproduce that violence endlessly. The water only needs to be poured once. I don’t want to spend my life making and remaking these tiles so that they can be destroyed over and over. As much as it gives me pleasure to destroy the Manusmriti, I also have to liberate myself. 

The post “What do we allow Dalit women to do?”: Shrujana Niranjani Shridhar in Conversation with Maya Varma; Part I appeared first on post.

One such incident unfolded on Christmas Eve in 1991. Berenice, the childhood friend of South African contemporary artist Gabrielle Goliath (born 1983), was fatally shot in an act of domestic violence. In contrast to the detailed recordings of the negotiations to end apartheid, the circumstances surrounding Berenice’s death remain obscured. The day after the tragedy, Goliath visited Berenice’s mother, who, upon seeing Goliath, cried out “Berenice,” not “Gabrielle,” and clung to her tightly. Being addressed as “Berenice” had a profound impact on the artist. “I recall how this name, Berenice, was spoken over me, into me, as a kind of sunken chord. It is a name never to be mine, and yet mine and of my heart—to be borne, as part of me and to be shared,” states Goliath.¹  

Nineteen years after Berenice’s death, Goliath began producing a photographic series titled Berenice (2010–) commemorating her friend’s death. The series is ongoing and, to date, consists of three iterations, each composed of photographic portraits of sitters—mainly brown women, including the artist—surrogate figures for Berenice standing in her ghostly absence. The death of Berenice also catalyzed Goliath’s larger artistic practice of commemorative mixed-media installations dedicated to victims of racial and gendered brutality in and beyond South Africa.

Berenice 29-39 (2022; fig.1) is a serial installation of eleven portraits, each of which depicts a woman wearing a white, diaphanous, sleeveless shirt. Each sitter, gazing directly at the viewer, embodies the absent presence of Berenice. The portraits are life-size. They are composed in a head-and-shoulders format, set against backgrounds ranging from earth tones to muted pinks and purples. Along with commemorating Goliath’s childhood friend, Berenice 29-39 registers the bereaved mother’s cry of “Berenice.” Her reverberating call echoes in the unwavering gaze and embodied presence of the sitters, who, along with Goliath, take on the name “Berenice.” The sitters, therefore, undertake a complex task of not only standing in for Berenice but also channeling her mother’s call. 

The uniform head-and-shoulders composition of the portraits, which are tightly cropped at the upper torso, and their portrayal of stoic, straight-faced sitters conjure the visual language of administrative photographs. Meanwhile, the numbering in the individual works’ titles recalls the seriality of the state archive and its efforts to reduce people to anonymous, nameless subjects. Within South Africa’s historical context, a colonial photographic regime took shape in the newly formed nation in the early 20th century. It developed in tandem with cataloguing policies structured around gender, race, and class.² Building on these representational systems, South Africa’s apartheid government mandated that all individuals over the age of 16 be photographed and issued an ID under the newly enacted Population Registration Act of 1950. During this period, photography was adopted on a mass scale through the introduction of standardized headshots accompanied by classificatory textual codes that aimed to “fix and classify bodies.”³ Moreover, “racialized looking” became formalized, which had perilous implications for those classified as “African” and “coloured”—particularly Black people subjected to pass laws.⁴ 

By engaging with the state’s scopic regimes, Berenice 29-39 reveals the links between the visual norms of the colonial-apartheid administration and ongoing systems of violence that continue to position difference as vulnerable and disposable. Drawing from these visual arrangements, Goliath emphasizes the sitters’ labor of stepping into what she calls “that policed archival register”—the state’s regulatory system of order from which the series draws—as a way of invoking Berenice and resisting “the total capture of the archive and the photograph.”⁵

Berenice 29-39 is situated within Goliath’s ongoing investigation into histories of dominant representation and their contemporary afterlives. Goliath elaborates, “I’m directing much of my critique towards the field of aesthetics. A regime of representation that is itself already inherently raced, gendered, and classed.”⁶ Through this critique and the foregrounding of women in Berenice 29-39, Goliath’s portraits expose the aesthetic production of a universal subject—white, male, and heterosexual—often against fixed depictions of Black and brown women who, in turn, have been rendered hyper-visible and vulnerable to violence.   

Confronting the prejudice inherent in photography and archival traditions, Goliath disrupts their extractive and classificatory logics to produce portraits in her own way. Unlike the fixed, monochromatic background of administrative photography, the tonal shifts in the series’ backdrops—from earth tones to pink and purple—suggest movement and improvisation (fig. 2–4). Given South Africa’s enduring systems of racial-gender violence, these colors gesture to hope, possibility, and renewal within a landscape marked by brutality.

Contending with the limits and possibilities of photography and the archive, Berenice 29-39 calls for an engagement sensitive to Berenice’s mother’s call. These portraits encourage a perceptive mode of engaging with photographs, in line with the scholarship of Tina Campt—a significant inspiration to the artist—who foregrounds the theory of listening to images “as a practice of looking beyond what we see and attuning our senses to the other affective frequencies through which photographs register.”⁷ Campt’s approach invites us to perceive photographs, including bureaucratic pictures, not only as images of rigid subjectivities but also as sites in which dissent and fugitivity take place. 

Unlike the small, state-issued photographs, Goliath’s photographs are life-size. By producing Berenice 29-39 at this scale, the artist encourages her audiences to confront the sitters head-on. The sitters’ presence is therefore inescapable as they look back at the audience—creating an almost mutual line of vision that troubles the panoptic gaze of the colonial-apartheid state.⁸ In this shared gaze between audience and sitters, questions arise about the potential of audience participation and photography: What might different ways of looking produce in the afterlives of the colonial-apartheid project, and how might the embodied presence of audiences extend the reach of Berenice’s mother’s call well beyond the photograph’s frame?

An Enduring Mourning

Goliath convenes sitters from her community to stand in for Berenice in the series. In this practice, which she refers to as a “lifework of mourning,” the artist’s ongoing series presents a shared, laborious ritual of invoking Berenice and the name her mother called out to Goliath.⁹ Unlike the individualistic, alienating dynamics of bureaucratic systems, Berenice 29-39 becomes a space of collaboration, relationality, and collective solidarity. In this prolonged ritual of mourning, Berenice 29-39 proposes a different mode of remembering, one that is open-ended, collective, and uninhibited by the forgetfulness inherent in linear, monumental memorials. As the series unfolds over an extended period and each sitter assumes the spectral presence of Berenice, the portraits rehearse—over and over—a method for living and remembering in the shadows of an empire determined to see difference as expendable and unmemorable.¹⁰

This public and labor-intensive ritual of grief enacted in Berenice 29-39 calls to mind political mourning practices in South Africa. During the 1980s, mass funerals of Black activists murdered by the apartheid regime in the 1980s—and the circulation of their photographic documentation—became a critical site of “militant mourning” and Black resistance.¹¹ More recently, the widows of the Marikana massacre, the wives of the Black miners murdered in South Africa in 2012, continue to mourn and demand justice for the reprehensible killing of the miners.¹² Situating Berenice 29-39 within these public practices of mourning brings into view Black traditions of mourning in South Africa as strategies of liberation and radical remembering.¹³ Goliath’s work is in conversation with these traditions and distinct in its enunciation of an artistic language rooted in durational embodied rituals that emphasize collectivity and relationality. 

By sustaining a ritual of mourning for more than three decades after Berenice’s death, Berenice 29–39 performs, as Goliath explains, “a certain refusal of ‘the archive’ as a political configuration of differentially valued life.”¹⁴ This refusal is enacted through duration, embodiment, and collaboration. Against systems that render racialized and gendered violence legible only through anonymized data, the series holds a name—“Berenice”—close, repeating it without exhausting it. As sitters enter a photographic archival register, they inhabit it otherwise, transforming seriality into ritual and standardization into a collective labor of care. The life-size portraits (fig.5) confront viewers directly, interrupting the one-directional gaze of administrative photography and recasting spectatorship as an ethical encounter. Attuned to the reverberation of Berenice’s mother’s call, Berenice 29–39 asks what it means to remain with mourning rather than to resolve it. In doing so, the series moves beyond critique to model a way of living with loss that resists closure and forgetfulness, insisting instead on the ongoing grievability of a life the archive failed to hold.

Gabrielle Goliath‘s Berenice 29–39 (2022) is on view in the exhibition New Photography 2025: Lines of Belonging, from September 14, 2025, to January 17, 2026, at The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

The post Mourning Against the Archive in Gabrielle Goliath’s Art appeared first on post.

In March 2025, members of the C-MAP Southeast and East Asia Group visited Manila, Ho Chi Minh City, and Hanoi. In Vietnam, we met the curator Van Do, who served as one of our interlocutors, joining us on visits to museums, galleries, and studios. Her essay “Hanoi Children’s Palace: Nostalgia for the “New Socialist Human” stems from this engagement.

With red scarves knotted at our necks, we gather in rows every Monday morning before class for the weekly flag-raising ritual. Beneath the national flag, members of the ceremonial team, dressed in red-and-white uniforms and wearing hats shaped like bamboo shoots perched on their heads, beat drums and crash cymbals fiercely, as we sing along to the national anthem. At its close, we respond in unison: “For the socialist homeland, for the great ideal of Uncle Hồ: Ready!” In every classroom, the Five Teachings of Uncle Hồ hang neatly beside the blackboard (usually on the right side): “Love your Fatherland, love the people. Study well, work well. Unite well, discipline well. Keep good hygiene. Be honest, brave, and modest.” After school, following the instructions of Uncle Hồ, we rally quickly in the schoolyard for collective physical exercise. Outside the classrooms, storytelling contests about Uncle Hồ, revolutionary heroes, or moral lessons; theatrical reenactments of historical events; and the collection of scrap materials for “small plan campaigns” to raise funds for the school and instill environmentally conscious habits become endearing rituals of discipline in camaraderie.

More than simply school routine, such rituals were designed to develop the body and mind of the “new socialist human”¹, laying the foundation for building socialism in post-independence Vietnam. Beyond our formal schooling, Hanoi Children’s Palace extended socialist cultivation into our leisure time, reverie, artistic endeavors, and sports training. I spent the summer of 2004, when I was nine, at the Children’s Palace learning to read music and how to play the organ. Ten years later, in 2024, I revisited these childhood memories when alongside Le Thuan Uyen and Pham Minh Hieu, I approached the Palace as curator of Hanoi Children’s Palace: Nostalgia for the Future.² Taking the ideological history, architecture, and uncertain future of the Children’s Palace as a point of departure within the city’s broader projection of the creative industries as a strategic force, the project sought to examine how the institution’s pedagogical inheritance persists within the textures of everyday life and socialist memory.³ 

Mass singing and choral performances, often of revolutionary or patriotic songs—especially those expressing love for “Uncle” Hồ Chí Minh—once filled the music classrooms of the Children’s Palace. I can still hum and recall the dance steps to “Last Night I Dreamed of Uncle Hồ” and sing along to “Who Loves Uncle Hồ Chí Minh More than Teenagers and Children?” Written by composer Phong Nhã after his visit to the Palace in 1945, the latter song encapsulates a moment of nation-building, one coinciding with Vietnam’s declaration of independence from French colonial rule and the establishment of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam.

The layered history of the Hanoi Children’s Palace can be traced back to the 1930s, when the site first served as a kindergarten during the French colonial era. Later, in 1946, it was taken over by the Democratic Republic of Vietnam and transformed into the headquarters of the Young Pioneer Organization—a central institution during the resistance against French colonialism for mobilizing children, adolescents and young adults, and for organizing cultural activities. Under different names and in varied form, this political mission continued throughout the anti-American war until national reunification following the Geneva Agreements in 1954.

In 1974, with support from the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic in the spirit of Soviet-bloc solidarity, the original French structure was converted into a six-story complex featuring signature perforated concrete sunshades and the Red Scarf Theatre. The building was designed by architect Lê Văn Lân (born 1938), a graduate of the first Architecture and Construction cohort of the Hanoi University of Science and Technology (fig. 1). Lê Văn Lân’s career spanned leadership positions in urban-planning agencies, a residency in Moscow focused on urban planning (1961), and advanced training in the German Democratic Republic in cultural architecture (1968–72).

Lê Văn Lân’s trajectory situated him within transnational socialist architectural discourse, in which rational urban planning, collectivist functions, and the civic role of public institutions were intertwined. The Hanoi Children’s Palace was therefore not a singular project but rather part of a broader network of cultural-educational infrastructures dedicated to shaping the socialist subject. The architect’s immersion in Eastern bloc urbanism and institutional design likely reinforced his conviction in architecture’s formative power—to spatialize ideology, discipline the senses, and stage a future-oriented collectivity—as a means to help build a new socialist country and contribute to the renewal of a nation devastated by war.

The name “Hanoi Children’s Palace” was adopted in 1985; prior to that, the institution was known as the Children’s Cultural House (1975–85) and the Children’s Club (before 1975). This renaming in the 1980s was likely intended to align with the nomenclature used across socialist nations, while also asserting the ideological role of the institution. The very concept of a “children’s palace” originated in the Soviet Union in the 1920s–30s with the Palaces of the Young Pioneers (Дворец пионеров)—extracurricular centers where children engaged in sports, arts, science, and ideological education. 

From the 1950s onward, this model spread throughout the socialist world—in Eastern Europe, Central Asia, and allied countries across Asia, Africa, and Latin America. In the German Democratic Republic, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, and Poland, children’s palaces and youth cultural houses became urban landmarks and emblems of socialist modernity. In China, they proliferated from the 1950s under Maoist ideology, with many still operating today. North Korea monumentalized the model with the Mangyongdae Children’s Palace in Pyongyang (built in 1989). In Cuba, the Ernesto Che Guevara Children’s Palace (Palacio de Pioneros Ernesto Che Guevara) opened in 1979 as a large-scale extracurricular center combining ideological education, vocational training, and cultural, technical, and athletic programs for young students.

In Hanoi, three major institutions—the Vietnam–Soviet Friendship Cultural Palace, the Youth Cultural Centre, and the Hanoi Children’s Palace—remain architectural traces of a socialist ambition to cultivate the citizens of the future, each corresponding to a different stage of subject formation: childhood, adolescence, young adulthood, and the working masses. The architecture of these institutions localized socialist aesthetics through modernist planning, multifunctional public spaces, and symbolic ornamentation. In Vietnam, Hanoi Children’s Palace continues to operate under the administration of the Ho Chi Minh Communist Youth Union. Established following the founding of the Communist Party of Vietnam in 1930, the Ho Chi Minh Communist Youth Union was formalized in 1931 as a socio-political organization responsible for youth education, mobilization, and cadre formation. Operating under Party leadership, the Union functions as a key intermediary between the state and young people, combining political training with cultural, artistic, and social activities.

Despite their continued operation, the civic-educational functions of these institutions have significantly eroded; these spaces have increasingly shifted toward ideologically neutral cultural-commercial programming. Under the pressures of neoliberal marketization, the architecture of collective dreams—once overflowing with optimism for a socialist future—has deteriorated. It now not only competes with an expanding landscape of private arts, sports, and educational facilities, but also is facing the risk of appropriation if not outright demolition.

For generations of children who came of age after the war, me included, the Hanoi Children’s Palace endures as a tender repository of childhood memory. On my first site visit to the Palace, which coincided with its 69th anniversary, observed under the title Bầy chim về tổ (A Flock of Birds Returning to Its Nest), a group of Palace alumni—now in their sixties and seventies—performed on the stage of the Red Scarf Theatre. They sang the same songs they had performed in their youth. Beneath airy corridors and patterned concrete sunshades shimmering in the sunlight, childhood was celebrated through collective play, reverie, performances, and long, exhilarating hours of creative learning.

Held from November 9–17, 2024, Nostalgia for the Future was a curatorial project that unfolded within the three buildings that make up the Hanoi Children’s Palace: Ấu Trĩ Viên (or Childhood Institute), the six-story classroom building, and the Red Scarf Theatre, expanding into an exhibition that spanned indoor and outdoor spaces, public programs, and playgrounds. In this essay, I focus on Nguyễn Trần Nam (born 1979)’s “We Never Fall” (2010), Nguyễn Thuỷ Tiên (born 1993)’s “About the Weight of a Tragic Eyelid” (2024), and Nguyễn Huy An (born 1982)’s Vowels series (2014–24) to examine how each of these works entangles socialist memory with the political role of pedagogy, while probing the possibilities of art to intervene in and reinterpret an ideological pedagogical project that has long receded. Here, “nostalgia” is not sentimental longing; instead, it names a stance that acknowledges the discipline, violence, and psychic residues of socialist education, along with its broader politico-ideological ambition to forge the “new socialist human,” and the ways in which this past continues to inscribe itself in the present. By reintroducing and recontextualizing contemporary artworks within a site once instrumentalized for political pedagogy, the curatorial gesture confronts and reshapes socialist legacies, enabling the Children’s Palace to assume a new role (albeit for only nine fleeting days) as a space for artistic and curatorial intervention—as an attempt to write into its history before the uncertain future overtakes it.

The Red Scarf Theatre—a 500-seat auditorium with recessed, starlike ceiling lights that sits on the right side of the classroom building—once hosted hundreds of thousands of performances, from ballets and dramatic productions to music competitions for children across the country. It now became the stage for Nguyễn Trần Nam’s “We Never Fall” (fig. 2). Five life-size composite sculptures resembling Russian balance dolls stood silently in the dim hall. The work drew on the lật đật (balance doll or Nevalyashka (Неваляшка) which means “one that never falls”). The lật đật was a familiar imported toy that was brought to Vietnam in the 1960s–80s through Soviet and Eastern European aid and trade. It circulated among generations of children and students studying abroad at the time.

Each of the dolls, modeled after the artist’s family members, represents a role within socialist Vietnam: the peasant, the teacher, the worker, the student, and the artist—a symbolic taxonomy of laboring, disciplinary, and creative bodies mobilized to visualize the socialist “collective subject.” Installed within the Red Scarf Theatre, the work took on a fictive dramaturgy: four dolls occupied the position of the former orchestra pit, facing an empty audience, as one doll—the student wearing a red scarf—waited in the wings.

The roly-poly mechanism—righting itself each time it is pushed over—embodied resilience and stability, yet this very capacity to endure revealed its paradox: an endless return that hardens into rigidity, a self-operating system that survives by refusing transformation. Are we the ones doing the pushing, or have we already been absorbed into a programmed movement? Are we watching them perform their choreographed gestures, are they watching us in return? The scene unfolded as a meditation on socialist pedagogy—on discipline, observation, and the suspension of action—in which resilience becomes indistinguishable from resistance to change, and a collective is trained to watch, to wait, and to return, again and again, to its predetermined place.

Behind the wings of the Red Scarf Theatre, another “stage” was concealed within a former dressing room, where Nguyễn Thuỷ Tiên’s “About the Weight of a Tragic Eyelid” quietly asserted a commanding presence (fig. 3).⁴ The work took the form of a monumental sculpture: a basin of Hồng Hà violet ink—shaped like the traditional lectern found in public school classrooms across Vietnam—paired with a set of distorted stainless-steel fountain pens poised above but not touching the liquid surface. For generations of students in Northern Vietnam, Hồng Hà violet was the compulsory ink used in grades one through six; children were taught to write only with the right hand and to follow the Latin alphabet. At the Children’s Palace, as in schools nationwide, “penmanship contests”—in which award-winning handwriting featured immaculate proportions, precisely measured letter spacing, balanced strokes of thin and thick lines, a calibrated tilt, and rhythmically connected curves—reflected prolonged disciplinary training. Discipline here was not simply correct posture or repetitive practice—it also came with punishment. How many generations remember the sharp crack of a wooden ruler across the palm for messy writing, wrong stroke order, left-handedness, or the failure to memorize a lesson?

In socialist pedagogy, discipline and punishment “naturalized” violence through repetition, surveillance, and self-control, echoing the proverb that frames strictness as affection: Thương cho roi cho vọt, ghét cho ngọt cho bùi (roughly, “Those who love discipline with the rod and the whip; those who hate offer sweetness and indulgence”). Such a saying becomes an alibi for coercion. In Thuỷ Tiên’s work, this history has been materialized as bodily, edging toward exhaustion—hovering between physical and psychological fatigue. The word “eyelid” (mi mắt) in the title becomes an extended metaphor—a thin, trembling threshold between alertness and rest, discipline and collapse.

A trio of works by Nguyễn Huy An, produced over the span of a decade—“A à ” (2014), “Musical Notes” (2023), and “Music Notations” (2024)—was installed across two locations within the Children’s Palace: the “Uncle Hồ and Children” Memorial Room (where Hồ Chí Minh signed the Preliminary Agreement with the French on March 6, 1946) and the drum-and-trumpet rehearsal room of the former Ấu Trĩ Viên, where the Young Bamboo Shoot ceremonial team still practices weekly. As with many of Huy An’s projects, this constellation of works operates simultaneously as performance and conceptual installation. Though produced ten years apart, they resonate as variations on a shared impulse: dismantling the visual and sonic architectures of socialist propaganda and returning them to their raw, pre-ideological forms.

In “A Ă Â,” the artist extracted all 29 letters of the Vietnamese alphabet and five Vietnamese tone marks from faded or partially destroyed propaganda slogans painted on the walls of cultural houses across Northern provinces outside of Hanoi (fig. 4). Painstakingly isolating each character, Huy An reframed them individually, stripping them back to a neutral, emptied state, prior to reassembling them into words, meaning, and ideology. Made of layered lime paint, these slogans accumulate over time: new ones are painted over old, then crack, chip, and erode, leaving overlapping fragments of what once lay beneath. Some letters remain decipherable; others are broken, orphaned, or illegible, severed from any coherent phrase. For the Children’s Palace, Huy An retained only the 12 vowels (A, Ă, Â, E, Ê, I, O, Ô, Ơ, U, Ư, Y) and five Vietnamese tone marks, placing them high up against an aged wall like remnants of a bygone propagandistic past.

In Huy An’s live performance as part of “4th Quarter Report” (Á Space, 2023), in which the work “Musical Notes” first appeared, the artist carried a bundle of bronze bars as he walked out before the audience.⁵ He slowly scattered the bars across the floor while reciting a poem that begins, “In two-four time and the marching rhythm / March to Hanoi – March to Saigon / I count” (fig. 5). He then proceeded to count aloud the 255 musical notes that make up two songs, both of which are often broadcast as “victory anthems” through public loudspeakers on national commemorative days: “Tiến về Sài Gòn” (“March to Saigon”) by Huỳnh Minh Siêng, is played on April 30 in honor of the reunification of South Vietnam, and “Tiến về Hà Nội” (“March to Hanoi”) by Văn Cao, is played on October 10 to mark the liberation of the capital from French colonial rule. Once considered triumphant, celebratory, and bound to historic moments of liberation, these songs—repeated year after year until their glory erodes—are, here, stripped of narrative and affect, in effect reduced to abstract sonic objects.

After counting, Huy An concluded: “The sum of two marches / plus nine single rests, / amounts to 255 tones.” The 255 notes are thus reduced to a simple numerical sequence, then translated into bronze bars capable of producing sound. At the end of the performance, the artist struck the bar corresponding to the note G (sol). Exhibited later as a museological artifact in the “Uncle Hồ and Children” Memorial Room—surrounded by archival photographs and documents—the bronze bars lie neatly on a long table draped in dark green velvet, assuming a solemn presence that confronts the persistence of ideology as it is ritualized into everyday life (figs. 6, 7).

In “Musical Notations,” public monuments across Hanoi have been transformed into musical instruments: the Martyrs’ Monument in Vạn Xuân Park (Quán Thánh district), the Martyrs’ Monument in Bà Kiệu Temple Square, the Martyrs’ Monument in the Vietnam–Soviet Friendship Cultural Palace, the statue of King Lý Thái Tổ, the statue of painter Victor Tardieu at the Vietnam University of Fine Arts, monuments to Alexandre Yersin and José Martí Péréz, the Lenin Monument in Lenin Park, monuments to Nguyễn Trãi and Emperor Quang Trung, the statue of Saint Paul at Xanh Pôn Hospital, and the Nguyễn Văn Trỗi monument at West Lake, among others. By striking each monument with a hammer and recording their resonant echoes, Huy An produced a series of “notations” that collapses symbolic hierarchies: socialist heroes, ancient kings, foreign intellectuals, and anticolonial figures are all reduced to the acoustic materiality of hammered stone and metal—later transcribed into onomatopoeic words. Monuments to martyrs, emperors, and revolutionaries are symbolically leveled, leaving behind nothing but the sound of matter.

Across the three works in Huy An’s “Vowels” series, a process of deconstruction has transpired: letters, musical notes, and monuments have each been returned to elemental form. In their transition, the works invite us to consider how political symbols might be released from ideological function and returned to the realm of pure sensory encounter, open to potential poetic reassembly beneath a sky that seems anything but new.

Rather than treating the Hanoi Children’s Palace as a neutral site for artistic display, Nostalgia for the Future engaged it as a historical apparatus—a space designed to enact socialism as a performative project, in which the “new socialist human” is not merely imagined but continuously produced through education, discipline, collective ritual, and bodily training. Within this context, nostalgia is not about singing the same old songs or indulging in sentimental recollections of the past. Instead, it operates as a critical stance—one that acknowledges both the emancipatory promises and the disciplinary violence embedded in socialist pedagogy as well as interrogates how socialist ideals were rehearsed, normalized, and internalized through everyday bodily practices.

The works discussed here do not simply reference this legacy; they position themselves in relation to it, testing what remains operative, what has failed, and what continues to structure subjectivity in the present. While reactivating pedagogical residues and recalling lived histories, the project orchestrated nostalgia as a critical field of strategies through which artists perform, rehearse, distort, or refuse inherited pedagogical forms and socialist values. Nguyễn Trần Nam draws on his own familial memories to question socialist ambition by unsettling its symbols through intimate and playful engagement. Nguyễn Thuỷ Tiên, by contrast, approaches nostalgia as an embodied and affective residue, foregrounding how socialist education persists not only as ideology but also as somatic memory—in posture, endurance, sensation, and affect. For Nguyễn Huy An, nostalgia takes the form of a quiet, destructive poetics, a subtractive process in which structures and symbols are gradually eroded and rendered fragile, opening them to semantic and sonic reconfiguration.

At the center of the Children’s Palace complex lies an open courtyard that once functioned as a space for collective activity and play. Here, gym classes and group exercise took place, parents and grandparents waited to collect their children, and brass bands rehearsed their repertoire (fig. 8, 9). Under the pressures of urban densification, the courtyard has since been repurposed as a ticketed parking lot. For the project, a playground was reintroduced into this space. Modeled after Điềm Phùng Thị’s modular sign system and designed by Think Playgrounds, it included slides, swings, and climbing structures.⁶ The playground temporarily reclaimed the courtyard and returned it to its intended subject—children—while simultaneously calling into question the site’s future capacity for play, reverie, and cultural enrichment amid its ideological defunctionalizing and the rise of market-driven, privatized educational infrastructures.

Together, these positions formed not a consensus but rather a spectrum of interventions across which socialist legacies are variously negotiated, resisted, and reconfigured in the present. In drawing these tensions into the present, the project proposed nostalgia not as reconciliation or closure, but instead as ongoing negotiation with the political and affective residues of socialist ambition.

With special thanks to Carlos Quijon, Jr., and Minh Nguyen for their editorial input. 

The post Hanoi Children’s Palace: Nostalgia for the “New Socialist Human”  appeared first on post.

In looking at photographs of live models, plaster casts of Greek sculptures, and students on the website (figs. 1a and 1b) of the Sir J. J. School of Art (JJ) in Bombay (present-day Mumbai), one notices how the condition of the body and labor in relation to art is a haunting presence in 20th-century photography. Shot between the 1930s and 1990s by three notable photographers—Homai Vyarawalla (1913–2012), Foy Nissen (1931–2018), and Raghubir Singh (1942–1999)—the photographs I’ve chosen to highlight in this essay articulate the interface of art and labor over a long and unwieldy terrain.¹ I also analyze how these images capture the unstable status of student artists and its correspondence to the precarious trajectory of JJ.

This essay marks four phases in twentieth-century Bombay. It touches upon the nationalist heyday of the late colonial period, coinciding with the interwar years and the eventual onset of deindustrialization in the postcolonial city as evidenced by the Great Textile Mill Strike (1982–83). In doing so, it delineates the popularity of the Shiv Sena, the ethno-regionalist, right-wing-organization-turned-political party, from the 1960s to the ushering in of neoliberal reforms and state-sponsored violence in the early 1990s. The photographs discussed showcase the distressing circumstances of the city’s working poor as they came knocking on the doors of the art school. They represent a departure from prior illustrative studies, many of which depict the laborer as inseparable from their craft. These earlier visual renderings not only are rigid caste-based occupational studies, but also commodify and group people and goods for the colonial economy.² While the unnamed subjects of these types of images are categorized as “Santal Mother, Girl, or Man,” “Fishwomen [sic] of Bombay” (the native Koli community), or “Palanquin Bearers, Bombay” (who were mainly Dalit Mahars), the bourgeois photographers who took them are identified and thus accorded authorship (figs. 2 and 3).³

In the 20th century, as live models at JJ were placed in conversation with plaster casts of Greek sculptures, the worn human forms of the models underscored the stark valorization of art over labor. The photographs that capture this dichotomy evoke the continued incongruence between outmoded colonial art instruction and the parlous position of both fine artists and laborers at JJ and beyond.⁴ While nationalist sentiment swept through many aspects of life in the 1930s, the influx of Eurocentric methods extended unevenly to the temporary hiring of live models to proclaim an “authentic” Indian art. These live art sessions disembodied the model by decontextualizing and romanticizing the absented adivasi (tribal) figure or pious, religious woman as the symbolic native type, untainted by the trappings of colonial modernity (figs. 4 and 5).⁵ Anonymized men and women assembled as native types bore witness to the canonization of carving, painting, etching, and setting in stone—that is, to the colonial practice of classifying and essentializing select communities.⁶ While live models and art students were interminably devalued and alienated during deindustrialization, some of them, as seen in photographs by Vyarawalla and Singh, resisted being cast as the marginal figure by returning the subaltern gaze.

JJ was established in 1857 by cotton and opium merchant Jamsetjee Jeejeebhoy (1783–1859) to provide relief to and upskill displaced migrant workers in what was a ruthlessly competitive colonial market. However, it eventually cultivated only a preferential, cultured class.⁷ On the one hand, though JJ facilitated commissions for artists to design sculptural forms in city structures, a detachment from and dismissal of Indian artistry steadily grew among the Indian art circuit in the late 19th century for various reasons, including the difficulty in cultivating a sustained patronage.⁸ As artisan and agrarian populations were compelled to migrate in large numbers to Bombay and engage in laborious work in textile mills, construction, shipping, and other manufacturing industries, their lives were upended on an unprecedented scale by colonial expansion.⁹ On the other hand, while opportunities may have been available to some prospective students to apply to JJ, many of those gaining acceptance fell by the wayside as they faced extraordinary difficulties there, with only a handful later succeeding as fine artists.¹⁰ However, with concerted endeavors over time, JJ’s reputation improved, and students from other regions were able to avail of dedicated scholarships and thus to enroll.¹¹

JJ was premised on the bourgeois, individualistic apprenticeship structure that developed in response to industrialization in England and Europe from the mid-19th century onward. As with other colonial art schools in India, JJ exacerbated a sharp divide between traditional, familial, and community-based workshops and the colonial education system, which mandated English as the language of instruction with prerequisite training in geometry and arithmetic at the admissions stage.¹² These “reformist” requirements, along with education fees, systematically disqualified and disbarred poor and lower-caste artisans, thereby separating the field of craft from that of art. Even though craftspeople were considered important practitioners and knowledge-makers, they were viewed as mere copyists and only brought to art schools to exhibit their artistry and wares and assist students (fig. 6).¹³ Subsequently, an exclusive echelon of elite, upper-caste “gentleman” artists burgeoned as “intellectual tastemakers” at the colossal expense of artisans.¹⁴ Despite preliminary efforts to integrate them into the student body, artisans were apprehensive about foregoing their more dependable, albeit paltry agricultural earnings for non-remunerative education.¹⁵ Over time, their absence was transferred, disincarnated, and disseminated by illustrated publications circulated at JJ.¹⁶ Hence, in the photographs taken at JJ by Vyarawalla, Nissen, and Singh, displaced migrant workers make spectral appearances as live objects in art education.

Colonial art schools promoted scientific drawing via human anatomy lessons, and for this purpose, plaster casts of Greek sculptures were favored over live models.¹⁷ In the late 1930s, JJ student and photographer Vyarawalla pictured her contemporaries Rehana Mogul and Mani Turner creating a sculpture exemplifying such principles, including clarity of view and precision of measurement (fig. 7). In this striking photograph, Turner (on the far right), bends forward with calipers in hand to ascertain the proportion of her subject’s upper leg. His waist is also cinched with a measuring tape. For Vyarawalla and her classmates, who came from a host of backgrounds, JJ was extolled as an artistic abode for experimentation in photography and freedom for women.¹⁸ It was also projected as the ground for the reinvention of Indian artists, including women, at a time of soaring nationalism in late colonial Bombay.¹⁹ As a female photographer and student, Vyarawalla cancels the male gaze and gives space to her female subjects, downgrading the male model’s status and labor. 

Returning to the photograph, Mogul looks up, decidedly satisfied with her sculpture of the live, male model. While the work is not life-size, it is strategically located within the composition and thereby rendered the tallest figure. Thus, it is given prominence and a larger-than-life stature in the high-ceilinged JJ studio. Just as he posed for hours for the sculpting session, the model was forced to stand still as a photographed subject; nonetheless, he looks straight at the camera, holding our gaze.²⁰

The live model enacts the queries of renowned British industrial design educator Henry Cole (1808–1882). After the Great Exhibition of 1851 in London, a world’s fair that heralded the colonial empire as the global pioneer in processing and harboring goods from around the world, Cole interrogated the worth of artisans. He questioned whether artisans should be expected to function as automated machines as per their employers’ demands, whether the commercial aspect of their labor could be compromised for skilled creations, and whether manufacturers recognized this and, moreover, were willing to invest money in educating artisans in order to foster a more skilled labor force.²¹ In figure 7, however, there is a split—the live model, who is no longer an artisan and thus deterritorialized, is at the service of Vyarawalla, Mogul, and Turner’s education. Yet, he does not entirely subdue himself to the machinery of sculpture-making and photography.

Vyarawalla directs a twofold production in which the live model has been relegated to a specimen, while Mogul and Turner are enhanced as artists. The deskilled laborer is utilized as raw material for a sculpture and thereby demarcated from the artists, who pay him no heed. Thus, a neat and graded symmetry unravels itself. While both Mogul and the sculpture as a finished product occupy the foreground, the model and Turner are arranged in the background to demonstrate various stages of sculpting. The two female sculptors are on either side, absorbed and tending to their respective props, one artificial but more exalted than the human male model. 

The model is not lionized like a permanent fixture of JJ, such as the plaster casts of Greek sculptures or the students’ sculpted figurines, but instead beckoned to JJ whenever there is a need for his muted and sampled presence. He represents an eerie and curious amalgam of the “native type” and the Greek ideal but still stands out.²² His look, which evinces personhood and a cynical consciousness, defies and pierces the composition, as he does not conform to an anonymized live model. ²³ His gritty stare reflects the long-standing labor networks of caste, kinship, and village through which single male workers, like him, navigated the workplace and neighborhood in a fluctuating economy.²⁴ In this regard, the long stick that he holds—archetypal of idealized “native type” imagery—comes into view in figure 8.²⁵ The man’s encounter at JJ underpins the grave situation of “mobile incarceration,” whereby badli (temporary) workers would have been picked from designated spots in the city and brought to the school to earn an income.²⁶

A formalist and painterly rendition of a sketching session attended by mostly male students, with a few female students scattered across the class, is framed by Vyarawalla in figure 9.²⁷ In this image, a sari-clad woman seated on a raised platform encircled by the students models with her hands clasped on her lap and her body on silent display. Though this is the only photograph of a live, clothed female model discussed here, women often modeled nude at JJ.²⁸

The Postcolonial Moment

Forty years later, three male students engrave busts modeled after a middle-aged man sitting slouched on a raised platform (fig. 10), a scene captured by Foy Nissen, the prolific photographer, writer, and amateur historian of Bombay who was of Danish origin. This oblique composition captures the static disembodiment of the alienated model, who stares vacantly into a clutter of half-open and half-closed window shutters.²⁹ An unaligned and haphazard path of abject unemployment and deindustrialization stretches out before the live model, whose corporeal presence is as bereft and hollow as the sculptures underway.³⁰ He ekes out a living as an expendable live model, a still life always in supply. At the same time, we can discern some changes in the student composition at JJ in the late 20th century.³¹

In 1955, steps were taken to make the art school more inclusive, with 5 percent of seats reserved for candidates from socially and economically disadvantaged backgrounds (“Backward Classes”) based on an entrance test.³² Following an arduous struggle by the diverse political base of the Samyukta Maharashtra Samiti (Unification of Maharashtra Committee), the State of Maharashtra was formed along linguistic lines, with Bombay as its capital in 1960. However, from the late 1960s onward, the Shiv Sena’s regionalist but wide socioeconomic membership, goaded by its middle-class leadership and driven by increasing financial instability in Bombay, violently advocated for and took direct action to secure ethnicity-based job reservations for the local Marathi population.³³ Since 1970, JJ has instituted monthly scholarships and fee exemptions for students, thus attracting a broader pool of applicants.

However, in 1984, the year in which Nissen’s photograph was shot, Bombay was marked by two imbricated major events: The nationwide imposition of the Emergency (1975–77), when emergency powers were applied across the country, paved the way for the brutal sundering of robust labor politics and history in the city.³⁴ This was ramified by the Great Textile Mill Strike, which accelerated neoliberal reforms.³⁵ After this labor stoppage, mills in the city shuttered, driving more than a hundred thousand workers into casual, informal employment. In this atmosphere of economic uncertainty, scores of disenchanted Marathi workers were galvanized and girded by the right-wing, anti-migrant, and anti-Muslim rhetoric of the Shiv Sena.

Color and a Postmodern Critique 

The pall of deindustrialization hangs heavy in the downcast eyes and static body of the elderly live model captured by Raghubir Singh in figure 11.³⁶ A dire juncture at JJ is presented via this photograph of an emaciated, aging man who, seemingly diminished and disenfranchised, is clad in an oversized kurta, dhoti, and turban. His frail and bent frame is at odds with the plaster casts of classical, nude Greek male sculptures symbolizing Eurocentric ideals of the male form that surround him. Moreover, the color photograph offers an incisive reading of the problematic continuation of this “educational” tradition and artisanal and scholastic disempowerment at JJ well into the late 20th century.³⁷

Singh composed this aberrant scene to unsettle notions of colonial grandeur and to foreground its oppressive hangover in the lackluster confines of JJ. The ongoing, ill-fitting presence at JJ in 1991 of casts of Greek nude sculptures tells us of its unrelenting durée in the postcolonial city. Singh has orchestrated a disharmony between these two teaching aids—the live model, an “ethnographic type” (again holding a stick) of which he was critical, and Greek sculpture—and that of art students, who represent a third category. The students are not portrayed as dutifully immersed in a conventional classroom setting; instead, like the model, they stay on, compelled to “wait” and remain on-site.

The young male student pictured with slumped shoulders and his hands on his back evokes restlessness and unease. He is seemingly caught unawares, despite the reassuring hand of a friend on his shoulder. The intrusive photographer draws us in, setting up a trenchant triangular network of gazes as he inhabits the place of student-artist and intervenes as scathing outsider-spectator—in effect, creating a visual critique that extends beyond the male student in the photograph to encompass the general dissent among students and alumni regarding outmoded education at JJ, among other issues. He constructs a postmodern critique, arresting the apparent friction at JJ by transfixing the male student’s consternation and awkward stance within his own field of view.³⁸ Both the institution and its students faced numerous obstacles well into the 20th century—including the unaffordability of art materials, a dearth of faculty, low attendance, outdated teaching methods, a lack of residential facilities for students, and even an attempt to close the school.³⁹ The apparent wariness of the confounded student and the constrictive environment speak to the repeated demands of students and alumni to revise syllabi, upgrade infrastructure, and introduce English-language tutoring. In the course of time, some of these measures were undertaken.⁴⁰

The continued veneration and aegis of objects over labor at JJ tie together labor and education through the disparate gazes and positions held by the photographed subjects whom Vyarawalla, Nissen, and Singh capture and bring to our attention. Their photographs unfold the dynamics and impact of art education and labor beyond the precincts of the art school, highlighting the convergence of social inequities and the scarcity of resources.⁴¹ They infer a narrative of the reverberating consequences of colonial knowledge and the concomitant making and entrenching of hierarchies, in which the resources necessary for artmaking became privileged enclaves unto their own, with hardly any public or private intervention. The indigent labor of the city has continued to serve as live models well into the present day, as demonstrated by photographs on JJ’s website (figs. 1a and 1b).⁴² Disaggregated, disarmed, and appropriated by art schools, artmaking, and the accumulation of capital in the city at large, the below-minimum wages paid to said live models were recently upgraded.⁴³

The JJ studio portraits encapsulate interconnected points of disproportionate modernity in a city teetering on the precipice of chronic unrest. They are distinct traces enunciating the poignant state of affairs within the school’s lofty walls and sunlit, capacious interiors for live models and students. Though monumental scale allows for the bodily autonomy of labor and studenthood in Vyarawalla and Singh’s photos (figs. 7, 8, and 11), in figure 9, by Vyarawalla, they are dwarfed and made a diminutive spectacle of. The photos by Nissen and Singh (figs. 10 and 11) show a consistent decline in both sitters. Together, as apparitions, they carry the burden of coerced historical experience, enduring the industrial capital model upon leaving a stagnant rural economy. Thus, the drawn-out process of mill closures, the protracted affair of deterritorialization and depoliticization of the urban poor, and the hastening of liberalization and right-wing propaganda—enabled by the Emergency—were inextricably coterminous with the pedagogical inertia of JJ. ⁴⁴

The post Laboring and Learning: Live Models and Art Education at the Sir J. J. School of Art, Bombay, in the Long 20th Century appeared first on post.