Carlos Quijon, Jr.: I am interested in how we can think about conceptualism in Southeast Asia, and I want to consider this question in a more exploratory tenor: What is different, if there is a difference, in the development of conceptualism in Southeast Asia? How is its development different from that of Western conceptualism? Do we even need to differentiate the two, or is it more productive to consider conceptualism as an encompassing global narrative—like how it was approached by the seminal exhibition Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin, 1950s–1980s (Queens Museum, 1999)?

David Teh describes your practice and your artistic ethos as follows: “[Phinthong is] a conceptual alchemist, specializing in the conversion of disparate values across apparently unrelated economies.”¹ Teh uses this distinction as a foil or counterpoint in his discussion of how your idea of dematerialization, a concept crucial in Western conceptualism, is very different from our usual take on dematerialization. 

So maybe we can start with that. If you can speak on this idea of conceptual alchemy—what do you think about it? Does it resonate with how you conceptualize your practice?

Pratchaya Phinthong: I am not sure if I have an issue with or am concerned so much about conceptualism or a conceptual approach. I mean, definitely what I have been doing somehow falls into these categories, and I have nothing against that. However, I have not been actively trying to resist these categories. From my point of view, I am interested in understanding other stuff. I am reading around. By reading, I understand the terms of the conversations and, of course, this somehow frames every production of art or the way that I practice it. 

When it comes to the works I make—somehow I do not produce them, somehow I let things produce, somehow I am more interested in trying to question my approaches to thinking than in whether I am being a conceptualist or not. In my practice, I would have people participate in my kind of ideas and thinking. Of course people think, and that does not mean that people have to be born into this kind of conceptual logic. 

CQJr: I also feel like there’s a need to keep this tension; of course people will, if they see your work and if they read about your work, categorize. Especially for art historians, there would be an almost automatic categorization. “Oh, this guy works with labor and materials and language; therefore, he is a conceptualist.” 

Most of the artists from Southeast Asia who are doing a lot of things, not just painting, not just the academic traditions of art-making, but also a lot of other things—they don’t really categorize their work as anything actually. That’s one part of the equation, and then the other part is the work’s legibility or how people react to and read and categorize your practice: “If you’re looking for an artist in Southeast Asia with a conceptualist practice, check the works of Pratchaya.”

If we don’t go with or if we somehow suspend the idea of conceptualism or a conceptualist practice, how do you describe your interests in your work? I know that you work a lot with artisans, laborers, and specialists, and I know that your artistic methods are mostly guided by things or materials that you find. How do you characterize what you do in terms of your interests? What are the usual things that you think about before diving into a work? 

PP: I am interested in the definition of things generally and for art. Why do we need art? Why should it be here for a long time? And then why should I have been born for this, and then why continue doing it? When is it going to end? If it’s not my life, then when will my art life end, and will I be going to other fields, doing other things?

I think if I came from outer space, I would choose to be an artist because artists aren’t responsible for things. We don’t have so much responsibility. We are not nurses, and we are not doctors; we are not architects. They will not come after me when the building collapses. 

So what is really being an artist about? That’s what I am so interested in. A part of what defines what I would call an artist is the work that they do, the production of an artwork. What it means, what the value of it is, how it exists, why it is exchanged—why its value increases or decreases, and if there are ways around this.

It’s a thin membrane that you can really slip in and out of without people understanding it. This really gets you a little numb, and maybe the next time you slip in and out, you will get used to it. People will not be affected because you didn’t respond to something—unless you are in the front lines of art and activism or you really hurt somebody or rip somebody off and you call that part of your practice, or something like that.

So I wonder why I am here. Life is really short, and if I leave for a long time tomorrow, no one is going to care about this, and then next week, I can just come back and be an artist again. No one would really care about this. I mean performing being an artist is also for one’s own sake.

When I started to call myself an artist, you had to have long hair, and you had to act kind of cool, and then you had to have all sorts of things. After all the years of studying, I tried to trash these ideas. When I was in Germany, the classes were really nice. Professors were trying to trash me and force me to forget about what I have. So I started up a new thing. Something that I was not really good at, and then I was trying to be good at things so many times that at some point, I felt that this is the burden of the artist, that this is something that one has to carry on. This is how you get your name as an artist, right? So, I think the problem for me is creating something that I am interested in. It is not just that I want to be good at things.

CQJr: I am interested in what you said about the idea that you can easily slip in and out of the art world—and your art practice, too, in a sense. I am thinking about this in relation to more traditional mediums, for example, painting or sculpture, and how these are very anchored in tradition. These are anchored in producing as many things as you can so that you can become an expert in them. I am wondering if this idea of slipping in and out of your practice plays a part in why you have created the things that you’ve created, the kinds of forms that you work with, or the kinds of concerns that you have—found objects, collaborative processes, invisible histories?

PP: I would describe this as trying to change the approach to the same thing—in different moments and at different times—to understand the different dimensions of it and the meaning that will come out of each approach.

For example, we all shower in the morning—maybe I just did, right? But we do not recognize how we do it. So when you go back to thinking about that . . . you did it without a plan, right? You don’t realize how you started, with touching what, and then trying to do what, and then that you’ve done this thing so many times that it has become a structure—it can be solved and quite automatic. It depends. But once you become aware of that, it changes. So it has become a little bit unnatural. So if you think, “I am realizing right now that I reach for the soap,”—I mean, for example, you have normal soap and you have liquid soap—so you shower differently. I think that’s beautiful.

CQJr: I mean, that’s so interesting—also, because if you remember, we opened our conversation with how David Teh discusses your work in relation to value and in relation to converting value from different types of economies and also the idea of dematerialization. Hearing you talk about your practice—and while you were talking, actually, I had a breakthrough, that maybe what describes your practice best is not really dematerialization but rather an act of denaturalization. We have these kinds of naturalized ideas about what art should be—your example about showering, using bar soap or liquid soap—and that kind of experience. I feel like it is a different way of processing what art-making is. We know these things; we are used to them. 

I want to ground these kinds of realizations in your actual works. If you think about your practice in relation to conventional ideas of conceptualism—or even the tradition of conceptualism and how your practice might move away from this kind of tradition—maybe we can discuss Spoon [disk] (2024) (fig. 2), an amorphous, flattened blob or puddle of solidified metal crafted from unexploded ordnances, unexploded mines that people in the northern part of Laos harvest from their fields and out of which they create trinkets that they sell to tourists.

I wonder how you approached the development of this work. From the outside, for example, for me, looking at this work, there are gestures that you can read as conceptual: There is an object that exists, and you create something out of it; and there is material labor as much as there is conceptual labor involved. But how do you describe the work? How did you start thinking about what it is, and what was your process in relation to creating the work?

And this is more of a personal interest: What came first? Did you know that they were producing stuff from unexploded bombs? Did you know that before, or did you see the object first and then talk to them about what they were doing?

PP: I didn’t know that at first. My artist friends, who are a couple, went to shoot their work in northern Laos, in Napia village. They were passing through the mountains somewhere in Laos, where they went to a noodle place where they served pho. I think it was a Lao-Vietnamese version, and the spoon was really light. That is how they recognized that the material for the spoons was different. It was not common, and then they told me about it. I visited the village with them, and we found out that there are at least 17 houses in the village doing the same thing: They had shophouses where they melted the ordnances and then cast them (fig. 3). This happened under their houses, and they used the same heat to warm their homes. 

This is how I start my work. I mean many stories come from another story. At that time, I was also trying to respond to the idea of soft power for an exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA).² I was trying to see how I can respond to this, and for me, the best way was to throw myself into the situation. And so I went back to Napia, and I chose one house owned by this really young couple who had just had a baby. I think that now he is already grown up. So I just asked them if they were interested in doing something with me. They said yes, and then I asked them if they could cast the metal in molds and then just make a hundred of them.

The next day, we came back, and they had one finished. We kind of liked it, and it started like that. I did not know what to do with it. I just had some idea to make it like a mirror, to make it into something that can reflect. I brought it back and gave it to my friend, who always made things with me. I challenged him to make a mirror out of it. So he had to find a way to slice it and then sand it. This became a recipe. 

All that I am saying is that my process includes a lot of reaching out to other people, to other people’s places and other people’s ideas, and then trying to see if we can do something together. And then the word that we were talking about earlier, “labor,” is in the word “collaboration”—in the middle of it. So, I mean, without these, you cannot be associated with other people; labor always appears, not just in the workforce but also in other forces. To be able to collaborate, whether through your body or your sweat . . . these are my materials. Convincing is also my material. 

So, basically, I am good at shifting and turning things. And probably that currency that David Teh said about alchemy in my practice is coming from this kind of method. It is sort of an exchanging thing, but also different. I mean, it’s crazier than that because in between the nodes, I try to make a cycle of it.

CQJr: And in our previous conversation, you mentioned that you also wanted to make use of the work’s exhibition as part of its performance and, I guess, to allude to the circulation of the objects made out of the unexploded ordnances. Can you tell us more about that? 

PP: Yeah, I mean you saw Spoon [disk] as part of the SFMOMA collection. I never wanted to exhibit in that space, and so I asked them if I could exhibit in the art shop, in the museum shop. I wanted to sell my work and to give the proceeds back to this village.

So I created this box. Inside the box, you see this metal object really shining like mercury, reflecting like a mirror. In the first run, I sold probably 50 pieces, and it was shown in the museum shop and not in the exhibition space. It included a postcard that I dedicated to the curator of SFMOMA because I had sent her the original card (figs. 4, 5).

The city down the mountain has a shophouse where there is a nongovernmental organization (NGO) called Mines Advisory Group (MAG). MAG helps with locating and collecting unexploded mines and exploding them as safely as they can. They hire young women and men and train them. It is mostly the women who go into the open field first, and then when the bomb locator goes off, they mark it, and then the men come in to figure out how to dig up the bomb because it is buried. 

Laos was heavily bombed during World War II. For Thai people, Laos was an ideal place for agriculture. They had hectares of green land, but they cannot do agricultural activities because the bombs are still there (fig. 6). Every time they attempt to cross or cultivate the forest, they get hurt. So they have to have some people help, like from this NGO, but there are only a few, and MAG is one of them. They have a shophouse where they display the trinkets I mentioned earlier. They also earn money from photo postcards, which they also sell in the shophouse. The postcards were the work of one photographer. I do not remember the name on the back, but they sell them for one dollar. 

I got the idea immediately after I saw this, and that was when I made a postcard. I just sent the blank postcard with the name of a curator and the address of SFMOMA, and I sent it from Laos. So the museum exhibited it along with the one that you saw.

The photo on the postcard is a picture of an old lady. She just had her land cleared of bombs, and in the photo, she is holding her first cotton harvest. She planted cotton years ago, and this is her first crop. It is in her hand. It is a piece of pure cotton so light that it flies when you release it from your hand. Then you remember that the bomb was something that fell from the sky. I liked the idea of juxtaposing the two in the box (fig. 7). In the box, you will find something really solid, something that you have to get rid of—the bombs—and then another thing that is really light, that will be leaving you immediately. So it is softness and strength. Something that kills and something that looks hopeful.

CQJr: This attentiveness to form and how forms circulate is very important in your practice. I think for the most part, this is how your works become legible as conceptualist and how they compellingly play out conceptualist gestures. How important is this attentiveness to your practice? How does this attentiveness inflect your interest in value and material and symbolic economies?

PP: I mean, it does not matter what form it is—it could be a painting, it could be whatever; but I found these, and then I designed the paper box with some people I know here, and then we created them by hand, like any merchandise.

The disk in SFMOMA is the raw material for other works in this series. Thinking about that raw material and how sanding it eventually creates this mirror—and that takes a lot of months. And my friend found a technique to transpose the materials from one form to another. When I had the exhibition in my gallery gb agency [in Paris], I was already thinking about other forms that these can take on (figs. 8, 9). I tried to see the bigger picture of the project and how it could extend.

I went to a website about phantom limbs. So a lot of people lost their limbs during World War II. What comes along with this is the phantom limb syndrome, when the missing limb still exists in your brain. I discovered this guy who created this thing called “mirror therapies.” His name is Stephen Sumner, and he runs this organization called Me and My Mirror.

I wanted to connect with him, but this was during COVID. So it was complicated to get connected, and I tried to see if he wanted to collaborate somehow. But what I wanted from him is basically nothing. I just admired the way he did things because he lost his leg in a roadside accident, and then he went to this therapy. So he got over phantom limb, and then he wanted to share the way he did it with other people. He flew to conflict areas like Afghanistan or other war-torn places, and then he went to Cambodia and he just bicycled around the country, finding people who are amputees and trying to help them by giving away this kind of a plate, just a kind of mirror that is light and easy to carry.

We cast the unexploded bombs into these plates and made the mirrors. We exhibited them with the goal that when I sold one, I would share the money with him so that he could go to other conflict areas—because on his website he asks for donations because he is doing it by himself.

This is the legacy of war. The village and other villages like it have been behind, starting with previous generations. They just cannot move on economically. In my practice, I think about how questions of economy can go through this kind of transformation.

This transformation is part of the work—from the raw materials to the objects in the box—and then it becomes an installation nicely representing phantom limbs. All the ideas are brought back as resources for the person who is going to solve the problem on the spot, who wants to stop the pain of people. So when you see this kind of man going like the dot that I have been trying to connect to other dots. Then I think, “This is the reason that I’m here, to connect this dot to others and make things possible.” It is not even about what you call me; you can call me another NGO. I am an artist doing such things. You can call me an activist or whatever you want. In the end, I just do what I am doing, and I think that this is the bigger picture. All of this is somehow giving me back some energy, so I think that this is why I am still coping and doing this. 

Typically thinking about the bigger picture looks like wanting to have bigger frames or using lots of colors or using a bigger canvas. For me, I have these bombs that I can have whenever I want because there are a lot of them to clear out in Laos. How are we going to get rid of these so that people can cultivate their lands? That is how material has been somehow found.

The post Somehow Materials Find Form: Pratchaya Phinthong and Carlos Quijon, Jr. in Conversation appeared first on post.

Artistic photobooks in Japan had originated some years earlier, when photographers and architecture students who had studied at the Bauhaus returned home with modernist ideas. Publications like Sensation of Flight (詩画集 飛行官能 / Hiko Kanno) (1934) and New Compositions of Beauty of Human Anatomy (人体美の新構成 /Jintaibi no Shin Kōsei ) (1932) were part of this avant-garde movement influenced by European photography.³ The Japanese military, recognizing photography’s potential early on, had been using photo publications for propaganda since the late 19th century.

After World War II, the photobook became a key outlet for expression outside the official or institutional art world, especially given the lack of a gallery infrastructure and the overall economic instability. Photobooks were often printed in relatively affordable editions, combining documentary content with a graphic-design sensibility. Notable examples include Hiroshi Hamaya’s Japan’s Back Coast (裏日本 / Ura Nihon) (1957) and Ken Domon’s (ヒロシマ / Hiroshima) (1958), both of which highlight social issues and underrepresented communities.⁴

In this earlier period, from the 1930s to the 1950s, the foundation was laid for the golden age of Japanese photobooks in the 1960s and 1970s, when the photobook became an artistic object in itself—the definitive expression of photography. Kikuji Kawada’s The Map (地図 / Chizu) (1965) epitomizes this shift. During this era, photographers challenged modern photography and documentary traditions, using abstraction and experimental visual language as forms of political and social critique. This trend culminated in the radical break marked by Provoke (1968–1970), a magazine that reshaped the trajectory of Japanese photography.

Despite photography’s growing role in postwar Japan, female photographers remained largely overlooked by art historians and critics. The 1950s saw significant changes in Japanese society, with women entering a wider range of occupations, including photography. However, their role in the context of photography was often limited to that of a studio assistant who primarily handled retouching for a male photographer. Moreover, it was a profession that many women abandoned upon marriage. While Japan’s first photographic school for women had opened in 1902,⁵ it did so 40 years later than its male counterpart, reflecting the broader gender disparities in artistic and professional recognition. Within this male-dominated industry, women struggled to gain legitimacy as independent photographers.

Toyoko Tokiwa (1928–2019) was born in Yokohama and grew up during the devastating years of war and occupation. She developed an early interest in photography, inspired by her elder brother who was also a photographer. After finishing high school, she studied home economics in Tokyo but defied family expectations to marry, choosing instead to pursue a career in photography. She joined the Shirayuri Camera Club (白百合カメラクラブ/ Shirayuri Kamera Kurabu), a social club that evolved into a learning hub where women practitioners honed their skills under the guidance of established male photographers. Tokiwa was interested in capturing the lives of working women, particularly those whose work involved their bodies. Through this focus, she critiqued the gendered division within postwar photography culture and asserted the subjectivity and agency of women photographers.⁶

Her series Working Women (働く女性 / Hataraku Josei) was published in the June 1957 issue of Women’s Review magazine (婦人公論 / Fujin Kōron). Carrie Cushman and Kelly Midori McCormick note that her work’s placement in women’s magazines rather than in photography publications shows that she was disregarded by photography historians of her time.⁷ Working Women was exhibited in Tokyo in 1956 at the Konishiroku Photo Gallery in the district of Ginza. Critics at the time agreed that only a woman could have taken these photographs because a man would not have been able to access the spaces they document. Tokiwa, however, disliked the implication that a woman could only produce exhibition-worthy work when she photographed such subjects.⁸ Shortly thereafter, when she was approached by publisher Mikasa Shobo to produce a photobook titled Dangerous Poisonous Flowers (危険な毒花 / Kikenna Adabana) (1957) based on the Working Women series, she became the first female photographer to publish a photobook in Japan.

While many male photographers of the time focused on postwar devastation, urbanization, and political protests, Tokiwa centered women’s everyday lives and labor. As one of few professional female photographers and someone working with explicitly gendered subject matter, she created a photobook that was not only formally democratic in its accessible format but also socially transgressive. In offering a female-centered narrative within a photographic documentary landscape overwhelmingly shaped by male perspectives, it challenged dominant visual and social hierarchies.

Tokiwa’s photographs align with social realism and emerging subjectivity movements of her time, yet they embody a radical form of empathy as a distinct way of seeing. In her work, empathy becomes a critical factor, and the photobook the platform upon which this vision unfolds most powerfully. Tokiwa’s portraits of sex workers and other working women resist voyeurism and instead foreground relational intimacy. Her lens does not objectify her subjects but rather invites the viewer into their world to bear witness. The sequential format and the physical intimacy between the viewer and the photographs—elements inherent in the photobook form—invite personal engagement, offering a more egalitarian viewing experience than is possible in an austere traditional gallery setting. In this way, Tokiwa subverted the visual conventions shaped by the “male gaze,” a concept introduced by Laura Mulvey in her influential essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975), in which she argues that dominant visual culture tends to position women as passive objects of heterosexual male desire.⁹ This present essay argues that Tokiwa’s photographic disposition fleshed out, for the first time in the history of Japanese photography, a “female gaze,” one that centers empathy, subjectivity, and emotional resonance, and established a new approach to social documentary, one that I theorize as the “empathetic gaze.” The concept of the female gaze emerged as a counterpoint to Laura Mulvey’s framework. As filmmaker Jill Soloway describes it, the female gaze is a sociopolitical, justice-demanding way of art-making. It is a conscious effort to create empathy as a political tool. It changes the way the world feels about women when they move their bodies through the world, fully feeling themselves as the subject.¹⁰

Tokiwa’s Dangerous Poisonous Flowers deepens our understanding of the empathetic approach and exemplifies how the photobook served as its platform while also being a more democratic form of photographic expression. Unlike exhibitions, which are confined to specific spaces and audiences, the photobook allowed for broader circulation and accessibility, reaching viewers from diverse backgrounds. Publisher Mikasa Shobo was not primarily known for art or photography publications; indeed, after the war, the majority of its titles focused on popular literature and translations of works by English-language novelists, such as Ernest Hemingway, and catered to a general readership interested in fiction and Western ideas.¹¹ We can assume that Tokiwa’s photobook reached a wide audience based on its publication history. While exact sales numbers are not available, the book was reprinted multiple times in 1957, the year it was published, suggesting significant circulation and sustained demand.¹² The photobook reached at least its eleventh printing that same year, indicating its widespread popularity and impact.

The title “Dangerous Poisonous Flowers” is a traditional euphemism for sex workers.¹³ The cover of the book features a self-portrait of Tokiwa behind the lens, foregrounding her photographic labor and positioning her as another working woman (fig. 1). This image emphasizes her unique perspective, highlighting her identity as a female photographer. The close-up shot makes the image more relatable for women readers, who recognize themselves in the figure pictured. Inside Tokiwa’s lens, a photomontage shows a man and woman holding each other. But on closer inspection, it becomes clear that the man is forcing the woman to accompany him, dragging her in a way that suggests violence. Although Tokiwa disliked the image because it was staged (as she reveals in her interview with Kelly Midori McCormick¹⁴), this image reinforces the theme of the book, addressing the struggles of being a working woman in a male-dominated world.

The book was printed using photogravure, a printing process that enriches the black tones and was often used at the time for magazines like Women’s Review (婦人公論 / Fujin Kōron) (1916–present) and Ladies’ Club (婦人倶楽部 / Fujin Kurabu) (1920–1988). This printing method, along with the arrangement of the images and choice of paper, mimics those publications in material and composition, perhaps catering to a female readership familiar with such formats. The predominantly dark photos heighten the atmospheric quality of the hidden world revealed in the images. The 248-page photobook unfolds like a memoir, with its extensive first-person narrative evoking the personal nature of a diary. This sense of intimacy is reinforced by its compact size (approximately 7 ½ × 5 ¼ inches), which invites physical closeness with the object, while the absence of borders around the photographs draws the reader into their world. Tokiwa’s autobiographical notes throughout the book enhance its journal-like quality, offering personal reflections on her early years, the process of photographing her subjects, and her evolving thoughts on photography and gender. This combination of text and image, a common style in photo publications at the time, creates a narrative experience that blends visual and written storytelling. The structure of the book—interweaving expansive text chapters with photographic sequences, each marking distinct phases in Tokiwa’s journey—further enhances the book’s diaristic character. The use of first-person narration and the short anecdotal captions accompanying some of the images make it feel as though Tokiwa has directly inscribed the pages, deepening the connection between her and the reader.

A substantial number of photographs in the book are focused on sex workers in the red-light district of Yokohama (fig. 2). The photobook also extends beyond this setting, capturing images of nude models engaged in photo sessions, female wrestlers, divers, and street performers, offering a broader perspective on women who earn a living by using their bodies (fig. 3).

In the accompanying text, Tokiwa reflects on the challenges and dangers she faced while working, particularly within the red-light districts. Armed with her camera and dressed in a skirt and a pair of clogs, she wandered through these shadowy and often dangerous areas. It was precisely her appearance as a young woman that enabled her to move unnoticed and to gain the trust of the women she encountered. They welcomed her into their world and offered her glimpses into their private lives, willingly posing before her lens. “They trusted me because I was wearing a skirt. If I wore trousers, I would have been looked at with alarm,” she explained.¹⁵

As we flip through Tokiwa’s photobook, we witness her evolution from detachment to empathy. Initially, she resents her subjects for what she perceives to be their betrayal of nation and dignity, a feeling evident in her early photographs, most of which were taken from a distance. In figure 4, the prostitutes appear as background figures, seemingly barely noticed by the blurry, shadowy figures in the foreground—perhaps alluding to society’s disregard for their existence. Over time, Tokiwa builds connections with her subjects, capturing them with increasing understanding and compassion. As her work progresses, she moves closer, entering their personal spaces and thereby conveying a more firsthand perspective (fig. 5).

When comparing Tokiwa’s images to those of her contemporary male photographers, such as Shomei Tomatsu (1930–2012), a leading figure in postwar social documentary, a noticeable difference emerges. In Tomatsu’s Prostitute, Nagoya (1958), the artist’s famous photograph of a prostitute, his subject appears defensive, her expression suggesting that she is filled with anger at or at least disapproval of the male photographer’s incursion into her private moment. In contrast, Tokiwa captured her subjects in more relaxed, unguarded moments, often during their free time. In her photographs, her subjects meet her gaze, and we sense in this encounter a feeling of approval or trust. In figure 5, Tokiwa has entered the women’s home, where the central figure (on the left), who appears laid-back, is enjoying a drink and a cigarette. She is surrounded by other women, who also seem to be engaging in their usual routines. Tokiwa’s presence feels natural, as if she is part of their world. As McCormick notes, “[Tokiwa] shifts her position from repulsed voyeur to a photographer with a consciousness.”¹⁶ Ultimately, in shedding light on the realities of sex workers’ everyday lives—using photography as a tool for awareness and advocacy—Tokiwa’s work goes beyond documentation. As the photographer comments in her book, “When I first started, I didn’t feel love for them, maybe hatred. However, when I got into their lives—their rooms—and had tea with them, I realized that these dogs were humans after all. . . . I take these pictures to raise awareness of the negative aspects of the prostitution system.”¹⁷

Tokiwa’s ability to gain her subjects’ trust, to position herself as a participant rather than an intruder in their world, enabled her to photograph them in their intimate settings, capturing their true nature and emotions through her lens. This approach constitutes what can be understood as a “female gaze.” Unlike the traditional male perspective, which often imposes power dynamics of control and objectification, Tokiwa’s images center subjectivity and empathy and aim at awareness. Her camera creates space for the women to appear as full, complex individuals rather than symbols of marginalization or desire. This empathetic way of seeing not only challenges the viewer to look at these women differently but also reinforces the role of photography as a tool for sociopolitical change.

Tokiwa experienced the devastation of World War II, including the bombing of her home during the Yokohama Great Air Attack in 1945, which killed her father. After the US military took control of Yokohama’s harbor, she developed a deep resentment toward American soldiers and channeled this anger through photography. As she explains in Dangerous Poison Flowers, “I took my camera and went to the Yokohama port to comfort my feelings of hatred against the American soldiers while pointing my camera at them.”¹⁸.

Tokiwa’s photographs document US soldiers exploiting Japanese sex workers in the red-light districts. This subject matter parallels the work of male photographers like Shomei Tomatsu, Takuma Nakahira (1938–2015), and Daidō Moriyama (born 1938), who likewise captured the impact of the American occupation of Japan. Ross Tunney describes the US military bases in Japan as embodying the “symbolic rape” of Japan, reflecting the fears of “miscegenation” held by many Japanese people.¹⁹ In Tokiwa’s images (figs. 6, 7), this symbolic rape is powerfully evoked, with the Japanese women depicted as both victims and symbols of a coerced and weakened Japan. Tokiwa’s focus, however, is not on the soldiers but rather on the women’s faces and postures. This shift in perspective gives the women agency, transforming them from passive victims into individuals marked by resilience and strength.

In the second photo sequence in the book, we follow Tokiwa as she enters a hospital in which prostitutes are seeking medical treatment. Hiding her camera under a white coat, she pretended to be the doctor’s assistant, which enabled her to capture intimate and disturbing scenes like the moment of injection. As a female photographer, Tokiwa felt a unique connection to these women, seeing and relating to them in a way that male photographers could not. She sought to reveal their lives “under their skin,” to show their vulnerability.²⁰ The women, who in most cases seem unaware of Tokiwa’s presence, appear vulnerable and tired. One image captures a woman who, having just received a penicillin shot, lies on a hospital bed with her face down and a cigarette in hand (fig. 9). Tokiwa has noted on the side of the image, “She looked like she was exhausted from living” and reveals that it was a scene that left a strong impression on her.²¹ Depicting her subjects as patients offers an unconventional portrayal of prostitution while also alluding to the way prostitution is looked upon as a societal illness.

Tokiwa’s ultimate motivation was to shed light on the harsh realities faced by women whose labor involves their bodies. Her goal was to bring attention to their plight and, in doing so, to foster empathy and awareness. At the same time, she aimed to challenge the stigma attached to sex workers, asserting their humanity and dignity in the face of societal judgment. With remarkable honesty, she reflects on their labor and living conditions, weaving together personal anecdotes and the stories of the women she encountered, offering unconventional portraits of women who were typically idealized by male photographers.

Tokiwa’s photobook not only challenged dominant narratives about sex workers and other working women but also made space for marginalized female voices—both those of her subjects and her own as a rare female photographer in a male-dominated field. Dangerous Poisonous Flowers functioned as a feminist manifesto of its time, incorporating powerful language and imagery that not only empowered women but also exposed their gender-based oppression as workers and artists. In these extensive written passages and photo sequences, she reveals the challenges of being a female photographer and the struggles she faced in completing her project.

From the opening sentence of her book, Tokiwa makes a powerful statement about gender biases in photography: “Does being a woman, rather than a man, give you any disadvantage in taking photos?”²² These words not only challenge established stereotypes at the time but also serve as a testament to the sexist discrimination she endured at the beginning of her career. On the contrary, she believed that it was the very nature of women that made them more capable than men in documentary photography. In Dangerous Poisonous Flowers, she declares: “There is a feminine element to photography. Photographers must have a passive stance to get the subject to accept being photographed. . . . Most of my work was made because I am a woman.”²³

Tokiwa’s photographic work evokes that belief, as we see her subjects allowing her to capture them in their most vulnerable and personal circumstances. What makes her approach unique and compelling is her empathetic gaze, which is free of idealization and marked by a sense of belonging. Empathy, in this case, is a transgressive act, as it challenges the dominant documentary tradition characterized by detachment, domination, and objectification. Instead of reinforcing the viewer’s power over the subject, Tokiwa’s gaze fosters proximity and emotional connection. The empathetic gaze is also a female gaze. Both are grounded in care, presence, and a refusal to look from a position of power, allowing the subjects to reveal their own idea of themselves. The term “empathetic gaze” emerges not as a departure from the female gaze, but rather as a way to articulate its specific emotional and political mechanisms—particularly how it invites viewers to feel with, rather than look at, the photographed subjects. In this sense, the “empathetic gaze” is both a way of seeing and engaging with the subject and an artistic practice that challenges dominant representations and redefines the relationship between viewer and subject.

The book concludes with photographs Tokiwa took in a rehabilitation facility in Kanagawa, where young women from the red-light district were sent after the anti-prostitution law was enacted in Japan in 1956. She photographed them during their free time (working at their sewing machines, arranging flowers, eating), believing that these moments reveal their true natures. These images, accompanied by her words, also reveal a deepening compassion for the working women she had followed for several years.

This final sequence, without context, could easily depict a girls’ school. The women are shown during the day, either attending classes or playing sports, with their bright, clear faces exposed to the lens and radiating innocence. They appear relaxed and absorbed in their activities. Tokiwa is no longer hiding from her subjects. She is present in their daily lives, placing them in front of her lens, against the bright sunlight. She has become one of them. In figure 10, the girls are arranging flowers. The flowers take prominence in the foreground, and the girls seem to blend into them, almost appearing as flowers themselves, reinforcing the title of the book. This scene deeply moved Tokiwa, who writes, “The dirt of the past is washed away clean, and the innocent feelings of young girls, placed in a normal environment, are transformed into a flower arrangement. Even withered and lifeless flowers are still flowers.”²⁴

This essay is the outcome of my research trip to Japan in April 2024, which took place in the context of my internship with the International Program of The Museum of Modern Art. I am grateful to curator Yamada Yuri of the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum, who introduced me to Toyoko Tokiwa’s photobook. I also want to thank Carlos Quijon, Jr., C-MAP Southeast & East Asia Fellow at the International Program for his guidance through this process. A copy of this rare publication is available in MoMA’s Library, thanks to the support of the International Program.

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Born on November 6, 1911, in Fukuoka, Tani Yutaka moved with his family to Terengganu, Malaysia, where he settled and learned to speak fluent Malay (supposedly, to the detriment of his handle on Japanese). During a brief return to Japan in 1931–32, Chinese rioters razed Tani’s family’s barbershop, killing his youngest sister, Shizue, in the wake of the Mukden Incident of 1931. This tragic turn in Tani’s biography set forth the quasi-historical Tiger of Malaya: the vengeful Muslim-Japanese intelligence agent who returned to Malaya, stole from the British and ethnic Chinese to distribute their wealth to rural Malays, and assisted the Fujiwara Agency in covert operations.

Like many heroic narratives, there are contestations to his identity that threaten to refute his claim to the title. Notably, even though he is among Malaysia’s heroes, Tani Yutaka remains relatively obscure. It may be due to the tragicomic nature of his death—one theory is that he succumbed to malaria—but it is more likely that he evades easy political and national identification because of his biography. Instead, the story of Tani Yutaka thrives in Japan as a simplified narrative of the country’s imperial successes in the South Seas through his enticing model of the noble hero traversing the treacherous jungles of Southeast Asia—a performance that oriented Japan to the south and against Western and ethnic Chinese powers in magazines, cartoons, television and cinema.¹ Tani’s enduring legacy in contemporary Japan can be attested to by perhaps the most bizarre of these examples: when, posing as an adorable mascot of Japan’s imperial history in Malaya, he was reimagined as a villager in the popular video game Animal Crossing.²

Today, as Taiwan enacts its own southward gaze with the New Southbound Policy, Au’s locus of production has become laden with these legacies of the Cold War.³ The expression of its latencies emerges in her practice as strongly in her obsession with ambivalent biographies as in her investigations of the filmic traditions and industries that bolster or obscure their dislocation. This obsession, in part a reflection of the artist’s own diasporic condition as a Malaysian Chinese resident of Taiwan, imbues her works with a charged sensitivity toward figures who can be neither fully claimed nor entirely dismissed.⁴ More specifically, it is a critical approach to the evolution of image technologies that has characterized Au’s practice from the start, a perspective that recognizes the pivotal role that cinema played during the mid- to late twentieth century as a platform for ideological warfare, postwar nation-building, and remembrance.⁵

In her 2017 work Castle, Valley, Anonymous Island and Their Return to the Moon (fig. 2), Au reanimates the story of Jim Thompson (1906–1967), the Thai silk tycoon whose mysterious disappearance in Malaysia’s Cameron Highlands in 1967 has been speculatively traced to his associations with the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). In The Kris Project (2016), she imagines an alternative scenario in which the founder of the Cathay-Keris film empire, Loke Wan Tho (1915–1964), survives the plane crash that led to his death upon departing Taiwan in 1964. In these works, Au recovers and collages footage from disparate archives to disorient between fact and fiction. These examples reveal another crucial aspect of Au’s practice: that it is not simply a matter of retelling but rather of mapping a Cold War network and the fluid geopolitical identities and alliances that are held in tension within the biographies of these mysterious historical figures.

The Extreme Journey of Perwira and the Calm Sea orchestrates this hallucinogenic transition between different times, geographies, and chimeras as we journey with Tani Yutaka across the sea and through the jungle, space, and a tiger cave, lured by the promise of adventure. When displayed in Au’s solo exhibition Planet Traveler and Its Broken Song at Project Fulfill Art Space in Taipei in 2022, the videos in the three-part series were distributed within the space in varying screen sizes and heights (figs. 3, 4). The experience was one of disorientating encounters, of rounding corners in dimly lit rooms and of sneaking past an animation of a sleeping tiger, who occasionally wakes up to trigger a version of Tani in his various chronotopes. The viewer’s own journey comes to mirror Tani’s in that one experiences the aesthetics of a transmutable and groundless modern life, a space-in-flux within which we are all bound. And Au declares its artificiality by concluding each video with flashes of its instruments of seeing and imaging. At the end of Electric, Cosmos and the Seance (2022), the drunken revelry of a party between Tani and his companions is rudely interrupted by a confessionary panning shot of a studio, where we see a green screen, a costume of a tiger, and then a diorama of a jungle that later forms the backdrop of her third film To Harimau: See You on the Other Side (2022). To enter too deeply into the hero’s journey, Au implies, is to forgo a necessary distance from its technologies of mediation.

我們的 Harimau, 我們的 Harimau, 我們的 Harimau . . . The song’s repetitive drone is not so much a musical choice as it is a manifestation. Far more than an expression of interest in symbolic interpretations, Au’s practice attunes us to the production of the “our” in “our tiger,” the hero who inhabits entangled times and worlds. By following The Extreme Journey of Perwira and the Calm Sea, this essay identifies in Au Sow Yee’s films a process of defining the perwira as an aesthetic phenomenon: a product of a Cold War imagination—and one that persists as a distracted, filmic formula representing our ongoing search for identity in a post-heroic age.

The Heroic Journey

Prior to proposing a post-heroic aesthetic turn, it is useful to return to existing formulations of the figure of the perwira to understand what exactly Au is confronting. Her first act in The Extreme Journey of Perwira and the Calm Sea is to reclaim Tani Yutaka a hero of as much interest to Malaya as he is to Japan, responding to the overwhelming control of Japanese media over representations of Tani imbued with the language of imperial power. In the title of the series, Tani is a perwira—a Malayan “warrior” and national hero who resurges in various guises across history to represent the changing ideals of postcolonial Malaysia’s elusive cultural self. Embedded within the etymology of heroism in Malaysia is this feudal past: the hero as rebel and resister to colonial forces, resurrected in the postcolonial world as an agent who sets forth a new national order.

In conferring this title upon Tani, Au engages with a dynamic tradition of reconstructing the Malayan perwira, such as Hang Tuah: the 15-century Malay warrior whose loyalty to the Malaccan sultanate became emblematic of Malaysia’s anti-colonial national identity. Indeed, a disproportionate section of Malaysian academic and popular discourse has been dedicated to this potent symbol through a tedious cycle of representations, discoveries, and refutations of Hang Tuah’s lineage, a cycle that in turn mirrors the changing ethnonationalist sentiments of the multiethnic state and its fluctuating ideals.⁶ In 1956, the mythic figure served as a nostalgic anchor in the titular film directed by Phani Majumdar (1911–1994)—Malayan cinema’s first film to be fully shot in Eastman color. Hang Tuah’s unwavering allegiance to the sultan and the kingdom served as an allegory for the role of heroism in safeguarding sovereignty during an uncertain political moment, a reflection of Malaysia’s nascent independence from British colonial rule.⁷

In a rapidly transforming Malaysia of the late 1980s, Hang Tuah embodied the anxieties of a modern nation that could no longer rely on simplistic heroic narratives to define its postcolonial identity. Anwardi Jamil’s 1988 film Tuah took a distinctly introspective approach to the legendary figure, marking a departure from earlier celebratory and heroic portrayals. In this version, Hang Tuah is no longer presented solely as an unflinching symbol of loyalty and righteousness but rather as a character caught between conflicting duties and personal struggles. The film explores the psychological toll of his fierce loyalty to the sultan, most palpable in the film’s reimagining of the infamous episode in which Hang Tuah is ordered to kill his closest friend, Hang Jebat, who has rebelled against the sultan. In this version, Tuah’s actions are depicted not as heroic but instead tragic, framing him as a figure trapped by the rigid codes of feudalism—and raising questions about the nature of power and loyalty. Today, his multimedia representation wields just as much agency in meaning-making within hegemonic state narratives because it offers artists, activists, and cybercitizens the terrain upon which to make alternative histories.⁸

To declare Tani as a perwira, Au draws him into this rich, vernacular cinematic tradition steeped in myth and metaphor. The artist’s symbols and physical lexicon are just as alluring—the appearance of the phallic keris (dagger) speaking to an “authentic Malay masculinity” or the physicality of Tani, who resembles the boyish, mustached perwira of Malayan folklorewhose triumph over a larger opponent embodies a reversal of power through wit and strategy, not violence.⁹ But one senses Au’s awareness of these idioms as having been no more than illusions, exploding clumsily across the screen as dated, tokusatsu special effects characteristic of Japanese action films or, at times, as only a translucent mirage.¹⁰ The cursory glance above at formulations of the perwira reveals how Au’s reframing of Tani within Malaysian cinematic tradition was to situate him in his related context, where she can play out his contingent relationship to a Malaysian postwar heroic imagination. His return, as evoked in a text sequence from Au’s prelude, bears the baggage of “the sadness of a million years, as if possessed by an evil curse.” It is a return that unsettles, reframing the hero as a site of ongoing negotiation and flux.

A Post-Heroic Malaysian Cinema

What was the curse that befell Tani Yutaka? As the same sequence explains, it is an ever-transforming body that marks the cursed hero. It was in reckoning with Yutaka’s glitchy identity that a more transnational lens on the heroic figure, one beyond the perwira, began to appear necessary in my viewings and re-viewings of Au’s films. There are significant affinities between what Au is here addressing with the perwira’s global cinematic equivalents—from Hollywood to independent cinema—and these inflections on Malayan cinema merit renewed attention. For one, there is the concern within the burgeoning, transnational study of heroic tropes, with the hero’s transformation to self-actualization; when describing the psychology of the mythical hero’s journey, founder of heroism science Joseph Campbell pathologizes the hero as necessarily incomplete or unrealized.¹¹ Elsewhere, the scholar Scott T. Allison emphasizes the hero’s transformation as an essential biographical turn resonating across multiple examples: “Without a change in setting, the hero cannot change herself, and without a change in herself, the hero cannot change the world.”¹² In such archetypical heroic narratives, the hero’s transformation is the motive that drives their journey through unfamiliar settings, providing the necessary psychological resolution that elevates them to heroic status.

In The Extreme Journey of Perwira and the Calm Sea, Au denies Yutaka such resolution. Appropriating cinematic tricks including dioramas, theme songs, and green screens, Au dismantles the very grandeur these artifices once sought to evoke, using them not to progress but rather to diminish. Here, they appear awkward, almost absurd, as if they are uncomfortably aware of their own artificiality. In doing so, she aligns with those auteurs who are less beholden to the hero’s political wielding, gesturing toward the perwira’s disintegrating teleological idiom and its aesthetic innovation. These are the traits of the “post-heroic cinema” that film historian Thomas Elsaesser proposed in 2012 as an “imaginative test-bed” for European cinema to address Europe’s loss of a heroic narrative, and the realization that much of the “progressive social projects” that defined it “was also based on imperialism, slavery, and colonialism, on exploitation and exclusion.”¹³ To Elsaesser, in order for a post-heroic European cinema to liberate itself from these tautologies, “it would also have to rethink itself in cinematic terms and no longer assume the screen to be functioning as either ‘window’ or ‘mirror’: the two abiding epistemologies of classical popular cinema.”¹⁴ The post-heroic traits that Elsaesser identifies in his selected films are the flawed heroes whose victories are not material or decisive, but instead philosophical, psychological, or deeply personal.

In the case of Tani Yutaka, the weakness of his archive is the potential of his cinematic transformation. Its state: a memorial gravestone in Singapore’s Japanese Cemetery Park and several shifting, fictionalized portrayals on Japanese media, among them, the television series Bandit Harimao (1960–61) and the movie Marai no Tora (Tiger of Malaya, 1943), both of which Au references. By taking up Tani Yutaka—a figure haunted by his own impossibilities for national recuperation—Au transforms Elsaesser’s post-heroic aesthetic from a response to narrative exhaustion and the collapse of grand civilizations into a productive framework for examining unresolved historical tensions. Unlike European cinema’s disillusionment with heroic narratives after their historical fulfillment, Malaysian cinema never fully consolidated its heroic mode to begin with; its heroes remain caught between a network of Cold War spectralities, feudal loyalties, and competing ideals. In Au’s hands, however, the perwira’s inability to fully realize his heroic mode might itself be generative. The “post” in post-heroic cinema might function differently in postcolonial contexts, not marking the end of heroic narratives but rather their perpetual deferral.

Toward this, Au participates in the canon of Tani’s mythologization by inventing a new chimeric form for the present: an anthropomorphic drummer with a tiger’s head in an astronaut suit with an “ambiguous sexual identity.” This textured figure inhabits the longest and most lively work within the series, Electric, Cosmos and the Seance, which begins in the jungle and on the shores of the South China Sea—two environments ripe with the specters of Malaysia’s Cold War history (fig. 5). In this work, we see Au’s most cogent development and articulation of a post-heroic aesthetics for Malaysian cinema. A fight scene is stripped of violent special effects, with comic, homemade props for weapons used in their place. In the first half of the video, we likewise find the flailing potency of the heroic telos enacted through sound and its chaotic rapture. Non-diegetic sonance of satellite communication and distant drumming introduce the video, immediately defamiliarizing the natural order. These scenes jump to reveal the chimeric Tani as the source of the drumming, cutting between medium and close-up shots to match the increasing veracity of his performance. The syncopated rhythmicality of this sequence functions to dislocate Tani from the jungle as the background morphs into outer space; the jungle can no longer sustain the uninhibited, queer identity of the chimeric Tani.

In its lack of linearity and sense of social purpose, The Extreme Journey of Perwira and the Calm Sea forgoes one of the most important features of the heroic formula: the figure who operates as a self-sustaining and independent agent of will. Instead, Tani’s catapulting across times and worlds with no apparent resolution relates the disruption caused by an accelerated, nonlinear heroic journey that parallels developments in our spectatorial experiences. In Tiger Cave (2020), Au confronts the unstable surfaces of digital aesthetics in the disintegration of her animated tiger, whose CGI rendering melts into skin before disappearing gradually into a flat red screen. This striking sequence recalls Elsaesser’s formulation of a post-heroic European cinema as not only shedding its formulation of nationhood and community, but also necessarily reforming itself in cinematic terms. He writes: “It would deploy the screen as a surface that is neither transparent nor reflecting back, but whose elements are in constant movement and flux, distinct and singular, yet capable of forming new ensembles, configurations, and attributes-in-common.”¹⁵

Aesthetically, we may reasonably ask what Elsaesser is proposing: If there is no community to ground us, is the image of the post-hero as obsolete as its predecessors? Contemporary Malaysian cinema has certainly not spared its impulse for the heroic. In June 2022, Mat Kilau: Kebangkitan Pahlawan (Mat Kilau: The Rise of the Warrior) broke records to become the highest-grossing film in the history of Malaysian cinema, telling the story of the national hero and defender against the British colonists in the Pahang uprising between 1891 and 1895.¹⁶ The painful predictability of its controversies around the film’s representation of non-Malay characters, again, testifies to the specter of postcolonial division and its familiar anxieties and insecurities about the representation of non-Malay identities and cultures that persist in the country today.¹⁷ Reconciling this with the post-heroic aesthetics of Au’s The Extreme Journey of Perwira and the Calm Sea, I argue, requires understanding contemporary art’s retelling of heroic narratives as sparks of aesthetically complex engagements with our nostalgia for mythologies within our ongoing struggle with their cooption by those who wish to reduce them to singulars. If Au’s perwira navigates tangled terrains of postwar myths and cinematic artifice, it is because these terrains are not his alone to traverse—they belong to a broader, shared condition of diasporic dislocation and the fractured inheritances of the Cold War. Au’s post-heroic aesthetic emerges not from the exhaustion of narrative possibility—as in Elsaesser’s European context—but from the recognition that Malaysian cinema’s heroes have always inhabited spaces of productive tensions, moving between competing systems of meaning, vernacular memory and imperial technique.

Ultimately, the sticky and unshakeable power of Au’s perwira is why we should recalibrate our thinking about heroic aesthetics. This does not require us to turn our backs on their cinematic legacies and conventions, a proposition that Au supports by her frequent return to the cinematic archive and which drives the powerful aesthetic effects of The Extreme Journey of Perwira and the Calm Sea. We cannot deny that the hero remains a useful symbol for the will to demand an equal and just society; nor should we be embarrassed by the justifiable reasons for our sentimental attachment to the perwira and heroes in their most simplified and epic forms. These beliefs can coexist in recognition of the urgency to understand how these ideological shape-shifters are mediated by instruments of seeing and power today and in the future.

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Her pottery’s forms and stylistic motifs were derived from Gbari culture and shared among women of her ethnic group (fig. 1). Kwali would go on to make hundreds of waterpots and other thrown wares featuring varied geometric and figurative designs inspired by nature, including animals and plants. This was a way for the artist to intentionally incorporate the Gbari design vernacular in earthenware and stoneware as she developed as a potter. The distinctive blend of traditional Indigenous Gbari pottery and British studio pottery represents Ladi Kwali’s shift from a local ceramist to an international one. This transition—influenced by cultural exchanges occurring in Nigeria when the country was still under British colonial rule—tainted the project with uneven power dynamics that, though problematic, shaped and defined Ladi Kwali’s global acclaim.

In a photograph of Ladi Kwali taken during a pottery demonstration in England in the 1970s by William Alfred Ismay (W. A. Ismay), the most active collector of British studio pottery at the time, Ladi Kwali is elegantly dressed in a pale blue polo shirt, brown patterned wrapper, earrings, and a brown silk head tie (fig. 2). Captured deep in concentration, she is shown incising a waterpot. Kwali was known for her fashion sense, a blend of traditional and Western styles of dress, mainly via the many demonstrations she carried out while touring Europe and the United States in 1962 and 1972, respectively.⁴ Kwali’s choice in clothing belies the physicality of her work, which required that she thrust her fist into a giant ball of clay and then, while circling it, stretch up what would become the wall of the pot with a scraper. She would go on to build the upper half with thick coils, paddle the whole vessel into shape, smooth and decorate it with roller patterns, and finally, incise it with Gbari figures of different creatures.

At the time of this photo, Kwali was in her late forties and had honed her craft in the Gbari tradition of hand-built pottery. Having demonstrated remarkable mastery, she had gained not only national acclaim but also international recognition for her work.⁵ Her precision and steady hand in using sharp blade-like tools to inscribe the clay resulted in the distinct lines visible on the vessel’s surface. In an interview, British Kenyan ceramist Magdalene A. N. Odundo (born 1950) reminisced about Kwali’s attention to detail, stating: “Oh boy, it was amazing. She would point out the mistakes I had made. It was her eye that had the ability to see, form, and correct it. She had a sense of geometry in her bones.” Odundo recounted that Ladi Kwali would “dance” around her pot as she raised and smoothed it, singing in pleasure at her success.⁶ Odundo had previously recalled meeting Kwali in 1974, when the younger potter began working at the Abuja Pottery Training Centre (now in Suleja). Odundo was introduced to Kwali by Michael Cardew (1901–1983), the center’s founder and a pioneer of the British studio pottery movement widely credited for reviving the slipware tradition in England, whom she had met while a student in Farnham that same year.⁷ This experience profoundly shaped her path and solidified her decision to pursue a career in pottery.

Ladi Kwali was heavily tattooed with symbols, and as Ismay’s photograph records, her name was prominently marked on her inner left arm, where the words “Akou Mista Dase, Ladi Kwali” are visible. In this iconic image, she firmly secures the pot by its rim with her left hand while making an incision down its wide belly with her right. Geometric horizontal bands are visible on the neck of the vessel. In his report titled Ladi Kwali: Nigeria’s Potter Extraordinary, which he prepared for the board of trustees of the Nigerian National Order of Merit, C. O. Adepegba proposes that Kwali’s tattoos are an extension of the decorative motifs that adorn Gbari pottery wares: “Since Ladi Kwali had tattoos of geometric figures on her body, it is easy to identify body markings among the Gbari as the only source of her geometric designs.”⁸ The report also cites observations made by historians Sarah Riddick and Clara Hieronymus that reference geometric-patterned tattoos, notably those on the backs of Gbari women and echoed in the designs on decorative pottery and, in varied form, on calabashes, wood carvings, and leatherwork in Kwali town and other parts of Nigeria. One could also speculate that Kwali’s tattoos and pottery designs reflect her deep engagement with folkloric and cultural symbolism and with the natural world and animals.

Kwali used the direct-pull method, which involves hand-building a waterpot directly from a lump of clay, to create pots like the one shown in Ismay’s photograph. This method enabled her to form a short, plump-bellied vessel with a narrow, flared-lip neck. To make taller vessels of different shapes, she used a makeshift rounded disk to create a small pot, which she then enlarged by adding clay coils. As she built up the body of the piece, she circled it clockwise and then counterclockwise, walking steadily backward while dragging one foot to maintain balance—a technique widely practiced by potters undertaking hand-building because it helps to prevent dizziness.

Ladi Kwali first encountered Michael Cardew in 1954, a few years after he arrived in Nigeria to take up his appointment as a senior potter officer employed by the Nigerian colonial government. Cardew researched Nigerian pottery traditions, touring the country and making extensive notes about methods, techniques, clay bodies, and mineral deposits for glazing. He chose a site in the Emirate of Abuja (now Suleja) for his Pottery Training Centre (PTC), a small-scale workshop intended to train boys and men to be potters by introducing them to modern techniques that would enable them to make wheel-thrown, glazed tableware (figs. 3, 4).

It is noteworthy that Cardew’s biographer, Tanya Harrod; scholar Lisa Bagley; and curator and scholar Susan Mullin Vogel have raised issues surrounding Cardew’s engagement in Nigeria. Bagley takes Cardew and his role to task, describing him as “at the intersection of Africa and the West in ceramics where he could act as a gatekeeper between African ceramists and Western audiences.”⁹ Vogel and Harrod remark on the distinct separation and lack of engagement between Cardew and academic art movements in Nigeria, notably that of the Zaria Art Society, which was active in the 1950s and 1960s. Its members, known as the Zaria Rebels, promoted “natural synthesis,” a concept conceived of and advocated by the group’s founder, Uche Okeke.¹⁰ Natural synthesis called for merging the best of Western and Nigerian traditions. However, in Vogel’s view, many of the artists associated with the Zaria viewed Abuja pottery as old-fashioned and ethnographic.¹¹ Harrod saw Cardew’s position as paradoxical—that of a modernist who disliked modernity and a colonial servant who despised the British Empire yet no doubt benefited from the privilege enabled by colonialism.¹²

Cardew first saw Ladi Kwali’s pots on a customary visit to the palace of the emir of Abuja, Alhaji Suleiman Barau, who had several of her pots in his personal collection.¹³ Though Cardew’s initial plan was for a male-only pottery enterprise, he reconsidered this take after encountering Kwali’s pottery. With the encouragement of the emir, he accepted Ladi Kwali as a trainee and the center’s first female potter in 1954.

At the time of its establishment in the 1950s and mainly through to the 1970s, the PTC gained a reputation in England and internationally due to Cardew’s influence as an established British studio potter. He organized exhibitions at the Berkeley Galleries in London in 1958, 1959, and 1962, which proved pivotal to the recognition of Kwali’s internationalism as Cardew’s connection and the interest garnered from his Abuja pottery project led the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) to acquire one of her waterpots and some of her thrown wares. The waterpot, the first work by Kwali to be institutionally collected, is on permanent display in the Timothy Sainsbury Gallery, which houses part of the V&A’s ceramics collection.

Kwali’s success opened the door to other Gbari women potters, including Halima Audu, who joined the PTC in 1960 (but tragically died the following year). Asibi Ido joined in 1962, followed by Kande Ushafa and Lami Toto, both of whom arrived a year later, in 1963, and were active at the center until around the late 1970s. These women continued the legacy of Kwali and Gbari hand-building after Ladi Kwali’s passing in 1984. The potters were accustomed to pit-fired pottery, but Cardew introduced them to wheel-thrown, high-temperature, kiln-fired and glazed stoneware, which previously was assigned only to male trainees. As Susan Mullin Vogel has noted, “Kiln firing was an exclusively male occupation, while open bonfire was practiced mainly by women and universally used in African traditions where it had a meager failure rate.” While the techniques used by women “have been characterized as technically simple,” Vogel points out that this method requires a hyper-refined combination of a specific clay body, fuel, and firing technique as well as certain atmospheric conditions—a formula derived from local experimentation mainly by generations of women, in other words, through regional and Indigenous know-how.¹⁴

Kwali created both hand-built vessels and thrown wares following Cardew’s method, but it was Cardew’s suggestion that she glaze her traditional Gbari-style waterpots with Chun or tenmoku high-temperature glazes (fig. 5), a finish never before used by Gbari potters.¹⁵ This hybridization transformed her pots from functional vessels to celebrated decorative art objects. As the scholar Emman Okunna observes: “This transition from tradition to modernity was a significant turning point in Ladi Kwali’s life and ceramic art practice. It marked an essential interface between the two domains in this iconic personality’s historical art experience. Ladi Kwali now saw herself in an entirely new domain, a testament to her adaptability and innovation.”¹⁶ Even so—and though she was the PTC’s star potter—Kwali earned less than her male counterparts, as educational qualifications determined wages, and she had received no formal education. This discrepancy reflected the wage structure imposed on the center by the Nigerian colonial government, which determined and enforced salary bands.¹⁷

Kwali’s adaptability, innovation, and agency, as Okunna observes, are evident in a portrait by Doig Simmons taken in 1959 (fig. 6). In Simmons’s black-and-white photograph, Ladi Kwali stands confidently in front of the main kiln, which can be seen at the center. She is dressed in a simple sleeveless sundress and her signature head tie. An unglazed terra-cotta waterpot sits at her feet, indicating that it is on its way to being glazed and then fired in the kiln behind her, a process that was, by then, her usual practice. We see a confident and aware maker standing proudly by her work, one of a series of waterpots adapted from Gbari pot-making tradition. Based on her working methods throughout her career, she clearly approached her “modern” stoneware ceramics not by sketching or inventing unique forms but rather through the creative processes she had learned in her village.

The portraits of Kwali discussed in this essay provide a lens for re-reading her agency as an astute, self-assured Gbari woman potter framed but not defined and contained by the colonial structure that brought about her international fame. As Marla C. Berns observes, although women are the primary producers of pottery in Africa, scholars have seldom attributed the creation of archaeologically recovered figurative ceramic sculptures to them. Moreover, the question of authorship regarding these esteemed ceramics has rarely been explored.¹⁸ It is crucial to consider Kwali’s identity as rooted in place and context and in who she was before and after her interactions with Cardew and his Abuja pottery project. In addressing the methodological challenges of confronting object histories, one must consider Kwali’s Gbari identity and agency, which are imbued in the objects she left behind. Additionally, Kwali’s pottery embodies a pivotal moment of transformation and hybridity, merging Indigenous Nigerian ceramic traditions with British studio pottery and modern Western techniques.

In 2007, Kwali and her pots were immortalized on the reverse side of the Nigerian 20-naira bank note. This national tribute goes to show how important the artist is in Nigeria. Yet, just the same, historical accounts of her artistic journey remain scarce in comparison to her stature. Little public information exists about Kwali’s later years, and no known recorded or printed interviews document her experiences in Suleja and beyond. Her presence within Nigerian Modernism remains paradoxical—both absent and present—primarily overlooked by intellectuals of the period, who were no doubt aware of her. Still, it is peculiar that she is not cited as an influence given the overlapping period. Kwali’s works resonate with concepts of natural synthesis put forward by members of the Zaria Art Society, calling for the merging of the best of Western and Nigerian traditions, forms, techniques, and artistic ideas into a hybrid art-making practice and conceptual framework. Ceramist and scholar Professor Ozioma Onuzulike has argued for recognition of Kwali and other workshop-trained Indigenous female potters who used natural synthesis to achieve works that have contributed to the discourse on African modernism.¹⁹ This marginalization was arguably shaped by Cardew’s deliberate detachment from the broader Nigerian artistic discourse and the fact that his pottery project upheld a colonial vision.

My recent trip to Kwali, the Federal Capital Territory (FCT), and Suleja in northern Nigeria to speak to Kwali’s surviving family members raised more questions than answers about how she is remembered. Only a few photographs of the artist and press clippings about her remain in her family archive (fig. 7). Public sculptures, street signs, and even a convention center named after her exist. However, aside from these visible civic and public markers, the most poignant reminders are the anecdotes. There are oral histories recounting stories of visitors from far and wide whom she welcomed into her home and of the critical support she provided to her family members during her lifetime. Additionally, Kwali’s descendants in Suleja hope that one day, her home will be transformed into a heritage site where visitors from around the world can once again come to learn about her(fig. 8). Kwali’s legacy—especially her waterpots—is rooted in everyday life. Easily recognizable as containers, carriers, and vessels that once simply held water, they nonetheless carry memories of an incredible potter whose work continues to transcend space and time. Ladi Dosei Kwali’s pots remain testaments to her personal story and its connection to town and country.

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Before Nightfall, a 1981–82 triptych by Nilima Sheikh, imagines a scene unfolding at twilight on the campus of the Faculty of Fine Arts in Baroda, a city in the Indian state of Gujarat (fig. 1).¹ The image conjures an otherworldly landscape, with the local flora and fauna painted as swirling forms and sweeping swaths of color. Nestled on the left is the Residency Bungalow, the faculty housing that served as Sheikh’s home for nearly two decades. The open structure of the house reflects the familial nature of the community in Baroda. Artists frequently dropped by each other’s homes simply to chat, conversations in the studio often continued over the dinner table, and students addressed their teachers as bhai or ben (“brother” or “sister” in the local language, Gujarati). 

Sheikh is one of several Baroda artists whose work has been categorized in art historical scholarship as “narrative-figuration,” a term first associated with the Baroda school in the early 1980s.² This designation refers to a distinct mode of figuration adopted by artists like Bhupen Khakhar, Gulammohammed Sheikh, and Vivan Sundaram, who created paintings grounded in sociopolitical critique, images of everyday life, and narratives embedded in local settings (figs. 2, 3). However, this formalist grouping excludes their contemporaries, artists such as Nasreen Mohamedi and Jeram Patel, who were working at the same time but in a decisively abstract idiom. It also reflects a tendency in the art historical discipline to classify artists by singular stylistic affinities. Against this, I challenge the idea that a stylistic label can easily be applied to the Baroda artists and argue that writing a narrative of this school demands a closer look at the collaborations, dialogues, and influences across generations of artists who taught, worked, and lived alongside each other.

During my interviews with artists from Baroda, I expected them to describe their classroom pedagogy or to discuss the development of their visual language. Instead, our conversations turned to anecdotes about gatherings in their homes, jokes about cooking or dancing together, and memories of the “homey” atmosphere on campus. Their words, when read alongside candid archival photographs, portraits of them and their friends, and artworks depicting their shared residential spaces, paint an image of the home as an alternative site of artistic and pedagogical practices, one that was as central to their experience as the classroom and studio.³ By examining these visualizations of social spaces and the dialogues taking place within them, I recontextualize their artistic practices through a lens of community and camaraderie. I propose that this framework has implications beyond a study of the Faculty of Fine Arts in that it allows us to understand postcolonial modernity more broadly as having developed through collective efforts and informal networks of exchange rather than through the stylistic innovations of individual artists.

The Faculty of Fine Arts, founded in 1950, was the first art school established in an independent India. Over the years, the Faculty incubated generations of Indian modernists, many of whom first trained as students and later returned to teach in the same departments in which they themselves had studied. Echoing the artists’ descriptions of a “homey” campus, the college began out of a single residential bungalow called Pushpa Baug (fig. 4). This house provided a bright and open space for the art school, with a veranda and balcony on the first floor, rooms that were used for lecture halls and studio spaces, and a guesthouse that was converted into a pottery studio. In the span of a few years, the campus grew around this central space to include half a dozen buildings housing multiple departments, including painting, printmaking, and sculpture. 

As a witness to these early years, ceramist Ira Chaudhuri described an extemporaneous development of the institution, when both teachers and the administration were navigating what was, at the time, uncharted territory in the newly independent nation-state. Practicing artists were invited from across the country to set up individual departments within the school. As new positions continued to be filled and young families began moving to Baroda, it became increasingly difficult to find accommodation. It was suggested that apartments in one building be combined, so that new faculty members and their families could live together in a common residence. This ad hoc development of the school resulted in an atmosphere where artists like Ira and her husband, sculptor Sankho Chaudhuri, became local guardians for many young students arriving in Baroda, and their houses, gathering places for the growing community. Students recall that they could drop by their teachers’ homes and studios anytime, a precedent likely set by the Chaudhuris. Ira ben explained this with nonchalance, “We just never closed the front door [of our house]. It was always open. People came in and out.”⁴ Despite the Chaudhuris’ meager salaries during these early years and their frequent difficulties in making ends meet, they made their home a refuge for any student seeking a meal, a loan, or a place to stay.

The shared space of community that was inevitably created in these artists’ homes can best be described as an adda, a term translated by linguist Sunitikumar Chattopadhyay as a “place for careless talk with boon companions.”⁵ Conversations in an adda were often long, meandering, and informal. The same could be said of the conversations taking place in Baroda. Nilima Sheikh describes the gatherings at her friends’ homes as fundamental to her time at the school. Yet, when I inquired whether these discussions included pedagogical discourse or feedback on her work, she was quick to say that her peers never taught her anything in that sense. Instead, these get-togethers included “random discussions. Hanging around the college canteen. Staying late in the studio to chitchat.”⁶ These informal hangouts both within and outside of the institutional spaces allowed for a fluid or unconscious mode of pedagogical instruction and a sharing of ideas beyond the constraints of the classroom or studio. 

The recruiting of teachers from schools around the country resulted in a confluence of diverse pedagogical lineages in Baroda. Sankho Chaudhuri and K. G. Subramanyan, for example, introduced ideas and methods from their alma mater Santiniketan, a colonial-era school founded in 1901 by the writer and philosopher Rabindranath Tagore. Santiniketan was modelled after the tapovans, or forest hermitage schools of India, where teachers and students lived together as a community. Tagore’s founding vision emphasized a linking of art and the environment, villages, and folk traditions that surrounded them, and he insisted that artists move out of their studios and into public spaces. Responding directly to the existing models of art education, the Santiniketan faculty integrated community-based practices into their teaching as an ideological and anticolonial tool against the rigid pedagogy of the art schools established by the British government.⁷

In contrast, the Faculty was established in the decades immediately following independence and developed its collective practices as a specifically postcolonial proposition, one fostered by artists seeking like-minded collaborators and, for many, a community different than those they came from. Since its early years, the Faculty had attracted students from both neighboring rural regions in Gujarat and urban metropolises across India. As a result of this heterogeneity, artists moving to Baroda experienced freedoms unlike any in their hometowns. Bhupen Khakhar, for example, noted that he came to Baroda because it would have been impossible for him to stay in Bombay and paint: “My family members would not allow me. . . . At the back of my mind, it also must be my gay attitude.”⁸ Similarly, as a young girl arriving from Delhi, Nilima Sheikh recalls being surprised that she was allowed to stay out and work in the studios until late into the night.⁹ Gulammohammed Sheikh, who had moved from a smaller town in Gujarat, was made to reckon with an unfamiliar kind of cosmopolitanism: “It was a new experience for me altogether. To meet so many people in the liberal environment that the university provided—it was almost like an extended family.”¹⁰ The addas, which enabled artists to retreat into a cosmopolitan bubble on campus in an otherwise provincial town, thereby came to symbolize a mode of sociality that was unique to Baroda’s local context.¹¹ At the same time, as my interviews with the artists revealed, it also led to moments of exclusion, marginality, and difference, despite the close-knit community. I thus argue that this period was entrenched in contradictions and simultaneities—a reflection of the complicated postcolonial climate in which the school emerged.

At the crux of this narrative is also the seemingly anomalous location of Baroda, a small town removed from urban centers such as Bombay or Delhi, which had previously been the primary loci of modernist movements and art schools in India. In many ways, it was this provincial location that encouraged the sense of camaraderie and interdependence among peers. The lack of a commercial gallery system and established collectors or patrons of art eliminated a sense of competition among friends or a desire to cater to the art market. With limited opportunities to exhibit works in Baroda, students would travel together to Bombay—carrying rolled-up canvases on the train, collectively renting out gallery spaces, and installing their works there themselves. Much like the ad hoc trajectory of the institution, the artists’ entry into the art market relied on self-driven labor and collaboration among peers.  

In my conversations with art critic Geeta Kapur, she was particular about using the word “bohemianism” to describe the atmosphere in Baroda from the 1960s onward.¹² Kapur’s presence in Baroda—as one of the first critics to write about its practices—was influential. As the partner of the artist Vivan Sundaram and a close friend of several other Baroda artists, she was uniquely positioned as a witness to both their artistic trajectories and their lived experiences. Reflecting upon her memories from the time, she spoke to me of the kinds of informal and deliberately sparse conditions in which they existed. Over the years, several artists came to inhabit the same residences, often due to the lack of alternative housing, to financial hardship, or through the provision of university accommodations. Artists rarely worked in their home-studios alone and, in fact, would leave their doors open so that friends could come and go as they wished. 

Kapur’s description poetically echoes the title of Sundaram’s 1981 painting People Come and Go, which is set in Paramanand, the bungalow that the artist Bhupen Khakhar built for himself in the middle-class Baroda neighborhood of Chikuwadi (fig. 5). Khakar named the house after his father and the Sanskrit word for “supreme happiness,” foreshadowing the revelry that he hosted there in the years to come. While the house had a separate studio, Khakhar preferred to work in the room pictured above, where he could be surrounded by friends, who dropped in at all hours and engaged him in conversation while he painted. Sundaram hints at Paramanand being a place where the community convened by depicting a welcome mat strategically placed at the bottom of the stairs and showing the door to the house left ajar. Khakhar appears to be in the middle of his painting process, examining a canvas propped up against a wall. British painter Howard Hodgkin, a close friend of the Baroda artists, is shown seated behind him at leisure, with his arms outstretched and his legs casually crossed. The otherwise tranquil setting is interrupted by “glitches” in the composition—a spectral figure of Vallabhai, Khakhar’s lover at the time, floats next to him; Khakhar’s body is painted in translucent hues as if fading into the background; and the picture planes intersect one another, like where a wall panel overlaps Hodgkin’s arm. These idiosyncrasies, combined with the dreamlike pointillist light that floods the room, indicate that Sundaram was not just painting from memory but rather creating a vision of memory—a reminiscence of camaraderie and intimate friendships.

I began my research on Baroda with the awareness that the crux of my argument relied on something intangible—unrecorded conversations, veiled social relations, and ordinary moments of companionship. And although some of this narrative could be gleaned from archival materials and conversations with artists, this research would likely have remained within the realm of the speculative were it not visualized through Jyoti Bhatt’s collection of nearly 1,500 photographs of the campus and the community taken between 1956 and 1999. Much like the formation of the community in Baroda, the development of Bhatt’s photographic practice was by happenstance. Since many students were not able to afford to have their work professionally photographed, Bhatt offered to shoot it for a small sum—in essence, for the price of the necessary film—which allowed him to learn new techniques at little cost. Studying the photographs in his archive chronologically, however, reveals a branching out of his subject matter from documentation of artworks to portraits of friends and contemporaries. Otherwise unassuming photographs of artists in their studios or posing with their work are filled with glimpses of conviviality, playfulness, and collaboration. 

In one photograph from 1970, three students are seated on top of a canvas laid out on the floor, simultaneously drawing different sections of a collaborative artwork (fig. 6). In another, from 1975, more than a dozen students are spread out on a porch, sharing a meal from an array of lunch boxes set between them (fig. 7). In a third, three students sit huddled together, poring over a single book (fig. 8). Lastly, a group shot from 1974 sums up friendships in the studio; amid art supplies, canvases, and frames, we see students holding hands, leaning on one another, and mid-laughter as if caught sharing a joke (fig. 9). 

As a witness to and participant in the formation of this community, Bhatt had untethered access to these candid moments, allowing him to capture the complex undertows of friendship and camaraderie on campus. And yet, despite my place as an outsider to this community, artists spoke to me with the same sense of kinship and familiarity that I describe here. My interviews, which primarily took place in their homes, were replete with nostalgic stories, complicated reflections on the past, and above all, an openness to sharing. Like Jyoti bhai said in response to my request to meet: “ઘર ખુલ્લું છે. ગમે ત્યારેઆવો (The doors of my house are always open. Come anytime you like).”

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In a sketchbook that dates to her early student years at Framingham State College (now Framingham State University) in the mid-1970s, the artist Jaune Quick-to-See Smith (Citizen of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Nation, 1940–2025) wrote, “[I] have a brainstorm . . . to do a series of paper dolls.”¹This annotation shares the page with two drawings: a paper figure with a folded base and the tabbed outfit with which it could be paired. The clothing ensemble includes a crisply starched dress layered underneath an apron embellished with a heart-shaped appliqué spelling “Mom.” Alongside the two drawings, Smith penciled a block of ruled lines as if from a composition book and neatly printed “American Public School Education Series.”

Smith recognized dolls to be powerful pedagogical tools that could shape aspirations, perpetuate stereotypes, and ascribe or reinforce societal roles.²Below the apron-strung mother in her sketch, Smith dotted the edge of the page with words including “doctor,” “detective,” and “lawyer.” These read like a laundry list of professions that most young girls of her generation were discouraged from pursuing. Born in 1940, Smith was herself a parent while completing her postsecondary training in fine art. Well-meaning and condescending instructors alike implored her to consider becoming an art teacher, reasoning it was a more suitable and rewarding line of work for a Native American woman.³

Smith didn’t create the first of the paper dolls until the early nineties, but she never abandoned the idea in those intervening years. Some of her earliest doll works were in fact sculptures, from raggedy cloth moppets to wire figurines. In Tribal Ties (1985), two lovingly hand-stitched and pillowy dolls with button eyes embrace one another.⁴ Later, Smith made use of store-bought toys. The Red Dirt Box (1989) is wooden and pocket-size with a plastic Statue of Liberty affixed to the lid. “Give me your tired, your poor” is handwritten on one side.

The “Mother of Exiles” had come to stand for a compassionate center of power, distinct from the conquering empires of yore. In Smith’s sculpture, she is set askew, revealing the contents of the box beneath her: action figures of Plains warriors, who lay flat on their backs, half-buried in the soil. The configuration of the work suggests that righting her would bury them. The scattered plastic bodies of the warriors are solid blue and white. There are no red men, leaving the would-be trio of patriotic colors incomplete. The expression of “red” as a shorthand slur for Native Americans is reappropriated by Smith to present an image of the United States as partial and unfinished without Indigenous peoples. The Red Dirt Box upends the superficial national story of a land for one and all; colonialism is not so easily disguised. 

Smith’s artistic games are serious. Her work alludes to childhood pastimes but not for fun (although play and humor are important)—or because her professors thought it would be better for her to work with children than in the field of contemporary art—but rather because early development is when the norms of social and cultural life are established.⁵In an unpublished document from the artist’s archive, Smith imagines a conversation between a katsina figure and a Cabbage Patch doll taking place in her studio in Corrales, New Mexico, over the course of two days in 1985. The transcript, titled “Fad or Fetish,” records the speakers politely bickering over their origins and responsibilities: Who is a more American product? Who has been more commercialized? Eventually, they come to realize their similarities, including a shared disdain for the bourgeois aspirations of Barbie and Ken. They also agree that each has a role to “help make order in our worlds” and to “teach children about love, hate and nurturing.” Whether used in ceremonial and religious rites or for secular purposes, “dolls reassured the human place in the universe by acting out what the human could not do . . . but they also involve fantasizing and dreaming which made their world a better place.”⁶Dolls are instruments that can reproduce social codes, but they are also agents of change.

In 1991, Smith created Paper Dolls for a Post-Columbian World with Ensembles Contributed by the US Government, a suite of 13 xeroxed drawings tinted with watercolor and pencil.

Paper Dolls depicts an imagined family of Barbie, Ken, and young Bruce Plenty Horses, as well as the black-robed Jesuit priest Father Le de Ville––a homonym of “devil.” On the Flathead Reservation, where Smith grew up, the Jesuits operated a Federal Indian Boarding School from 1864 to 1972. This was one of more than 400 schools jointly run by missionaries and the colonial government in the United States. Like those that existed in Canada, these institutions aimed to forcibly assimilate Indigenous children into a Christian Euro-American worldview. This was done by separating them from their families, language, culture, and religion. These bitterly hostile places were rampant with abuse, and many children never made it home. Those who did survive were impacted in existential ways that Smith’s artwork carefully records.

Paper Dolls illustrates how boarding schools, land grabs, biological warfare, criminalizing ceremonial practice, and the theft of cultural belongings are interlinking strategies of genocide. As Smith once said, “People think that genocide is just about standing people in front of an open pit and shooting them. . . . They think it’s about murdering people. It’s way bigger than that.”⁷The sheet depicting the outfit for Bruce, the child, is especially demonstrative of this reality. Whereas the hospital gown or the capote or the maid’s uniform are garments alone, the “Flathead child’s boarding school outfit,” as Smith labeled it, comes complete with a figure.

The teacherly style of Smith’s handwritten notations is a direct response to the historical fallacies printed in textbooks and otherwise circulating widely at the time. These were the frenzied years leading up to the Columbian Quincentenary in 1992. Major cultural organizations received grants to develop blockbuster projects and exhibitions, many of which perpetuated a narrative of “encounter and exchange” between Indigenous peoples and European invaders––a perspective that offered a benign and teachable framework of multicultural harmony. To some, this even felt like a progressive step, an update of the older “discover and conquer” model. Students of history would learn that things were bad but that now they’re good, while absolving settler society of wrongdoing. “That’s what 1992 was about,” Smith recalled. “This whole big propaganda machine in America was overwhelming the whole story. Making up a new story. I couldn’t stand it.”⁸Smith’s infuriation catalyzed a few strategic shifts that she began to make at the time.

Paper Dolls is unusual as a drawing in that there are multiple sets.⁹It pushes against the categorical line that separates a drawing from a print. Smith was an expert printmaker, having worked with the renowned Tamarind Institute in Albuquerque, New Mexico, since 1979.¹⁰She could have easily created Paper Dolls as an editioned lithograph, for example, but instead produced the work more like the handbills and fliers that plaster streets and circulate on the ground during times of political activity. Indeed, a reproduction of Smith’s Paper Dolls landed on the cover of How to ’92: Model Actions for a Post-Columbian World.¹¹This interventionist booklet offers a guide for do-it-yourself actions to counter the misinformation of the quincentenary: how to mount a demonstration, how to initiate media campaigns, and how to petition for curricular revisions. By opting to draw Paper Dolls, Smith may have intentionally created some distance from the master matrix that printmaking relies upon. This artwork underscores the violence of enforcing a singular worldview, and drawing allowed Smith to forego identical impressions for a process more intimately connected to uniqueness and individuality. One drawing was maybe not enough to reach the audience she needed, given what was at stake, but perhaps several versions would be.

In 2021, Smith returned to the idea of paper dolls.

Even though her practice had always been invested in contemporary politics, this was an exceptional moment of prescience. The revisitation of this work coincided with the announcement of the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative. The final volume of the investigative report was released in 2024. “For the first time in the history of the United States,” Deb Haaland, Secretary of the Interior, declared, “the federal government is accounting for its role in operating historical Indian boarding schools that forcibly confined and attempted to assimilate Indigenous children.”¹²This comprehensive federal effort outlined recommendations to recognize the legacy of these policies with the goal of addressing intergenerational trauma and providing a path toward healing.

Paper Dolls from 2021 shares its name with the earlier series, but Smith transformed the scale and the material. The installation involves nearly life-size aluminum cutouts of the painted figures and their outfits. Smith designed them so that they come away from the wall, creating a dimension of depth and shadow. The imagery is identical to the earlier work, but the written descriptions are absent. Whereas the paper versions were carriers of explanations and historical facts, the sculptural dolls—which connect to Smith’s earliest approach to doll-making—are physically embodied. It is as if the core of Smith’s lesson to audiences today is one of relationality. The history is important, but so is our position toward it in the present. “My messages are about things that have happened in the past that impact what’s happening today,”¹³she maintained.

Smith was awarded four honorary doctorates over the course of her lifetime and an honorary baccalaureate from Salish Kootenai College, an accredited tribal college founded in 1978 that offers essential services to those in her home community. Smith was a longtime supporter of Salish Kootenai’s library and arts programs. In her speech for the school’s 2015 commencement ceremony she began, “This honorary degree from Salish Kootenai means more to me than all four honorary doctorates from mainstream universities.”¹⁴Encouraging the students seated before her, she continued, “My story is about how a child develops resiliency and coping mechanisms in a difficult and disenfranchised world.”¹⁵Smith’s relationship to the classroom was one she navigated with criticality and determination. Her role as a teacher was neither vocational nor a consolation to her. She was deliberate in how, when, and where she taught, and her artwork became one of most powerful platforms from which she advocated for education. Smith used dolls throughout her practice in service of that wider strategy, as an unassuming yet powerful motif to redress political and cultural injustices.

In Memory of Jaune Quick-to-See Smith (1940-2025).

Jaune Quick-to-See Smith Paper Dolls for a Post-Columbian World 1991 is currently on view in Gallery 208 at MoMA.

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The performances conducted by the late Filipino artist Roberto Villanueva (1947–1995) prompted the effects and the facture of ritual. In 1989, a sprawling circular labyrinth constructed out of eight-foot runo reeds occupied the grounds of the Cultural Center of the Philippines (CCP) in Metro Manila. Inspired by a pattern found in the Cordilleran rice fields of northern Luzon, the labyrinth orchestrated a walk, or dance, toward the center, where one found a circular pit lined with river stones and presided over by totemic figures like the bulul, a carved wooden sculpture representing a guardian spirit. The center was an area resembling a dap-ay, a place for gatherings and rites, traditionally the foundation of Cordilleran learning. Archetypes: Cordillera Labyrinth, like many of Villanueva’s works, combined installation, chanting, magical invocations, and other ritualistic tropes drawn from Indigenous sources.¹ Writer Charlson L. Ong, in a 1989 article for the Daily Globe, articulates a popular impression of Villanueva toward the height of the artist’s prolific practice: “[Villanueva is] most everyone’s idea of a mumbaki—a Cordilleran shaman who invokes ancestral and nature spirits.”²

The events that signaled the opening and dismantling of the maze aspired to states of revelry and trance by way of an eclectic ensemble. Musicians wearing their malong, or tubular garments, played Muslim instruments. Cordilleran elders performed a cañao, a sacrificial ritual. Villanueva’s performative agency assembled a social world through degrees of mimicry and guise. Though not of Indigenous origins, Villanueva wore a bahag (loincloth) and applied white circular patterns on his skin, signaling affinities with Indigeneity through a competently invented self. Certain magical effects were attained through crafty, logistical trickery, while others solicited improbable cosmic interventions. At the closing ceremony, Villanueva performed a borrowed ritual to call rain to the site, expressing the artist-shaman’s ambitions to synchronize spirit and atmosphere. A documentary by Egay Navarro and Rica Concepcion condenses Villanueva’s fascinating duality through its title Showman/Shaman, a duplicitous play between guise and embodiment that parallels what he, in his life, had sought to overcome.  

While the trope of the artist-as-shaman is certainly as alluring as it is ethnographically contentious, it must be seen in light of a sensibility that thrived in the Baguio Arts Guild (BAG), of which Villanueva was a founding member. The Cordilleran region is a mountainous territory inhabited by several ethnolinguistic groups. In the nearby city of Baguio, BAG cultivated a subjectivity that not only sought affinities with the Indigenous but also found, within the halo of that affinity, the aesthetic and moral grounds on which to practice their postcolonial agency. This essay looks at the modern as the discursive milieu that grants the figure of the artist-shaman its historical vitality, which I will also call its anomaly.

In 1992, the Indigenous inclination of BAG was inscribed into a narrative of modernism when three of its members—Villanueva, Tommy Hafalla, and Willy Magtibay—received the Thirteen Artists Awards from the CCP. The Thirteen Artists was first conceived as an exhibitionary project in 1970. Then CCP director Roberto Chabet pinned its lineage to the historical group of Filipino modernists who had turned away from Classical values. The loose metric upon which he based the selection of artists—“recentness, a turning-away from past, familiar modes of art-making”³—expressed the modernist urge for forward traction which oriented succeeding iterations of the awards. The attention given to BAG in 1992, however, suggests other institutional desires. In his notes as CCP director for visual arts, Virgilio Aviado praised the awardees’ use of “old, ancient and traditional methods for modern expression.”⁴ Pointing to pursuits such as “the retribalization of the Filipino” and the search for identity through a recuperation of traditions, this sentiment stresses the national as it draws on the otherness of Indigeneity as a modernist cipher of the authentic.⁵

The term “tradition” is in itself duplicitous, one that assumes diverse uses in countries that share colonial histories. Art historians Geeta Kapur and Leonor Veiga, in tracing fragments of tradition within the largely secularized arenas of Indian and Indonesian art, rethink the notion of tradition as an ancestral practice that has survived modernization. Kapur approaches it as “an ambivalent, often culpable sign,” deployed in post-colonial nation-building, at times conceived and re-functioned for nationalist aims.⁶ Veiga cites British historian Eric Hobsbawm’s argument that the invention of tradition, often prompted by the birth of the modern nation-state, attempts to repair the “social voids caused by secularization.”⁷ Whether enacted on the level of the state or at the grassroots, the process of invention can be essentialist in its appropriations, as it lifts an ideal tradition from a ritual milieu and casts it along the quest for nationhood, identity, and origins.

It is from these discursive frames that I draw the term “invention”—but in conceiving it as a guise, I refer to invention as an activity that is intimate in that it arises out of appearance and bodily enactments. Its pronounced exteriority, commanding recognition through all its elaborate adorning, nonetheless strives for a depth of affinity. Shamanism is traditionally practiced within paradigms of the magical and the religious. The shaman is a medium who brings access to the sacred in communal life. Villanueva echoes this function of mediality and retools it into a poetics. In an undated essay titled “Cosmology in Art: An Experiential Process,” he writes that it “is the unique position of the artist as a go-between of the visual and recognizable world and that of the world that is beyond phenomena that strengthens the artist’s role in the society.”⁸ By rendering sensuous form to “unconscious feelings and thoughts of the social environment,”⁹ the artist-medium, much like the shaman, is seen to perform both a psychic duty and a social one. The artist may not necessarily aspire to summon the sacred but at least to access the subliminal through communal experience.

Early on, Villanueva’s poetics of a world-beyond-phenomena materialized in what several writers had contemporaneously tagged as his surrealist paintings. Taking part in a 1975 exhibition that announced the surrealistic as a common ground, Villanueva relished the ways in which this pictorial modality granted him “a freedom of expression” to mine “dreams, desires, and even fears,” a subliminal repertoire from which he found “a greater sense of realism.”¹⁰ Painting butterflies and arid terrains with winged and “evolutionary beasts,”¹¹ the artist signaled the dreamlike before assuming the register of social allegory, like the painting Aqui descansa el rio defunto, Pasig; año 1985, which divines the degradation of the Pasig River.

In these secular visions, the painter, allied to the prophet or seer, foils a faithful inscription of an external reality; he prefers the clairvoyant register to signal a harboring malaise. The subliminal in Archetypes may refer to the visceral qualities of ritual revelry heightened by drumming and dancing as well as to understandings of the primordial—from Indigeneity to the archetype of a labyrinth. Villanueva notes the archetype’s recurrence “in many ancient cultures—from Ancient Egypt to Neolithic Europe, particularly England, to the American Indians, the Chinese, the Australian Aborigines.”¹² Through the motifs and sociality of ritual, artist and viewer are presumably drawn closer to a primordial consciousness rooted in Indigeneity—an affinity that is nonetheless anomalous as it assumes that psychic license can collapse material difference.

Villanueva was raised in Metro Manila, the urban center of modernization in an archipelago defined by ethnic, linguistic, and cultural diversity. Indigeneity and tradition typically correspond to an imagination of what lies beyond this center, a vision of cultural periphery conceived according to colonial delineations of territory. Ethnolinguistic groups in the Cordilleran highlands, having resisted Spanish colonial efforts, retained significations of otherness during the American occupation as they cast a reverse-image of what was largely seen as a Hispanized and Christianized population in the lowlands. In Philippine modernist painting, this otherness becomes material for an artist’s self-conscious evocations of identity and shared origins, which are at times prone to essentialist portrayals. As Filipino art historian Flaudette May Datuin remarks of modernist Victorio Edades’s depictions of a Cordilleran idyll in Two Igorot Women (1913), “Identity is presented as an eternal and unchanging ‘primitive’ or ‘ethnic’ moment, often associated with the chthonic and submissive female ‘savage.’”¹³

Villanueva’s anomaly rests on a more pronounced representational ambivalence as it is the artist’s body that gestures and personifies, while the otherness of the highlands remains the milieu’s chief source of invention.¹⁴ The fraught territorial divides—wherein periphery and center ideologically align with constructions of tradition and modernity—produce anxieties surrounding the right to represent. Villanueva’s shamanism may thus inspire contrasting attitudes: on the one hand, the celebratory yearning for precolonial identity and then, on the other, the charge of appropriation and self-exoticization. If both these viewpoints spin on tense questions of authenticity, might other readings be possible when we consider what it is about the mediality of the artist-shaman that is fruitfully anomalous?

Villanueva’s biography unwittingly subverts the myth of identity as origin. The anomaly of a body standing in as a medium, proxy, or artifice emphasizes identity’s performativity, one that entails a prolonged process of affinity to stage and to overcome its masquerade. His consciousness of ethnic diversity developed during his childhood visits to Palawan and, eventually, through projects in documentary filmmaking, where he observed and befriended Indigenous groups in several parts of the country. In the late 1970s, dismayed by what anthropologist and BAG member David Baradas has described as a commercialized arts scene that favored homogenizing Western styles, Villanueva moved from Manila to Baguio.¹⁵ This transition brought crushing financial strains; he was then a young father developing an art practice with little commercial or institutional support. What perhaps relieved these precarities was a growing sense of affinity with the thriving cultural and spiritual life he encountered in his visits to the Cordilleras—an affective kinship that differs from systematic ethnography. Scholar Katrin de Guia notes Villanueva’s apprenticeship with an Ifugao mumbaki as well as his visits to healers and mystics in Japan, the United States, and Australia.¹⁶

This affinity with the Indigenous coalesced into a politics of identity through the formation of BAG in 1987. The end of the decade witnessed demands for the state to establish regional autonomy in the Cordilleras. Members of BAG foregrounded cultural identity by inflecting genres of Western origins—film, painting, photography, sculpture, performance—with markers of the local. Materials were sourced from immediate environments and themes carried Indigenous motifs. As an alternative to the secular, commercial, and individualized model of art production in Manila, BAG advanced an ethos of communality: disciplined, spirited organizing—which bred the artist-run international Baguio Art Festival—and a freewheeling camaraderie among travelers, musicians, performers, and artists of all persuasions. The modernist atmosphere of experimentation energized BAG’s postcolonial quest—a quest not just for national origins but also for a real sense of originality, a defining self-consciousness that yielded, for Villanueva, the liberties and the conceit of representation.

In probing the meeting points between tradition and modernity, Geeta Kapur advises us to look “not for hybrid solutions . . . but for a dialectic.”¹⁷ Leonor Veiga then nominates the category of a “third avant-garde” that recognizes the postcolonial agency of artists in using appropriation as a conceptual strategy to capture tradition’s transgressive stance. The “third avant-garde,” in undoing “the taxonomical division between art and ethnography,”¹⁸ fulfills what Kapur has described as a “double-dismantle.”¹⁹ It objects to invented traditions that serve nationalist interests, and it defies the Western monopoly of the avant-garde.²⁰ While much of Veiga’s astute propositions resonate with the conditions of BAG—chiefly, with its ambitions to undo Western aesthetic models and modes of display—Villanueva’s visceral and spiritual performances seem somewhat at odds with the transgressive, radical, and antagonistic edge that defines the vanguardist posture.

The artist-shaman is positioned here as an anomalous figure of postcolonial modernity. What I have been describing as an anomaly is motivated less by the wish to advance than by a long look backward, a nostalgic turning that is naively but also deliberately revivalist in its urges. In working with ritual, however, Villanueva was not only concerned with the symbolic operations that bind it to tradition but also interested in its facture, its design, and its plasticity, recalling the modernist fascination with medium specificity and surface. The artist-shaman thus commits impieties in their revivals, animating the atmosphere of ritual while remaining unfaithful to its ethnographic source.

An anomaly is an instance of irregularity, an improbability, or a moment of anachronism; it derives its effects by virtue of its dislocations. When Villanueva traveled to stage more ritualistic performances in countries like Japan and New York, he seemed more inclined to approach Indigeneity as an activity of invention and guise. It is perhaps the artist-shaman’s more improvised works, like the 1991 project Panhumuko, that reveal another side to his mediality. Largely intuitive, diverging from the elaborate ensembles of Archetypes, Panhumuko foregrounds the shared, symbolic, subliminal space of ritual, which is also a conceptual space to address modernity and its attendant malignancies.

Showman/Shaman documents the performance.²¹ In 1991, the eruption of Mount Pinatubo in central Luzon displaced several Indigenous Aeta communities, forcing them into evacuation camps. Panhumuko, a Sambal word that translates as “surrender,” was prompted by the intention to make an offering that could appease Apo Namalyari, a deity of the Aetas. Around this time, Villanueva had been preparing to travel to New York to serve as an artist-in-residence upon the invitation of the Filipino cultural group Amauan.²² He was conceiving an engagement that could inform his work at the residency. Villanueva, accompanied by documentarians and a linguist, made the trip to Zambales to find Aetas receptive to holding a ritual offering. The plan did not work with one group, but he was welcomed by another, whose elders (whom he described as “shamans of the community”) reacted with enthusiasm.²³

The central element of this project was the ritual atmosphere approximating a collective trance; the making of the installation-offering appeared like a means to achieve this end. Improvisation, play, and eclecticism marked Panhumuko: Cordilleran dances inspired Villanueva’s actions, the Aetas made percussive sounds with bamboo drums and tin cans, and intuitively, the group assembled the installation by an open well by scattering coals, erecting bamboo stems, hanging vegetables, and arranging candles shaped in human form. A semblance of this resulting material form was then constructed as an indoor installation at Lincoln Square Gallery, New York a month after. Villanueva’s impious, eclectic acts seem like an echo of folk religiosity, a cultural response to the colonial imposition of Christian belief. Writing about the human-shaped candles taken from Quiapo Church in Manila, Villanueva relays his fascination with these ritual objects whose “roots are in the animistic traditions of the past” but are now integrated in Christian practices, an integration he regards as “one of the richest points in Filipino culture.”²⁴

Villanueva’s ritual performances may be read as sites of a similar dialectic. Episodes of calamity most sharply manifest an existential rupture, what Villanueva intuits as “man’s alienation from nature,” which brings about environmental havoc.²⁵ The poetics of a world-beyond-phenomena—fulfilled in Panhumuko as a communal experience of psychic release—signal a postcolonial disavowal of modernization’s rational processes. Villanueva favors installations because their assembly calls for communal acts that “quiet the rattles of intellect and allows intuition to reign.”²⁶ For hours in Zambales, drumming, dancing, and chanting ensue as they build the offering. As a performative gesture, Panhumuko attempts to alleviate a collective unease toward modernity’s malignancies, here construed as calamity, loss of community, and ecological disconnect.²⁷

Villanueva held Indigeneity as a modality of being that may yield a cure for modern problems. The artist then assumed the role of a medium to access an eroded subjectivity or to approximate its guise. What he aspired for, it seems, was an exit from modernity, an exit that was never totally fulfilled when modernity created the conditions for his agency and emergence. The anomaly of ritual proceeds from the artist-shaman’s autonomy and invention. Villanueva’s charismatic performances, while sympathetic to Indigeneity, claim a duplicitous worldliness, an independence that appears to keep him unbeholden to one group or spiritual belief. It is through this anomalous position that he performed his dislocations, ruptured categories, and constituted the self as an improbability.

The artist died of leukemia in 1995. The early onset of illness and exhaustion may have manifested in the pain he expressed during the ritual of Panhumuko, which led the Aeta elders to initiate a curing ritual.²⁸ If an anomaly absorbs the time’s contradictions, the modern played out its paradox fully through his body, through to its demise, as though the shaman also absorbed the very malignancy he sought to cure. This emblematic affliction finally makes palpable the contradictory status assumed by the artist and the shaman in modernity, as these figures dwell at the tense point of magicality and marginalization that comes with embodied, material, and terminal pains. To foreground an anomaly is to anticipate such fetishizations, duplicities, and ambivalences. Villanueva’s shamanism was in some ways a show and a representative conceit. It was also a profound affinity, an invention that was, at the same time, his becoming.

The author is grateful to Agnes Arellano, Billy Bonnevie, Rica Concepcion, and Kawayan de Guia for sharing their archives, documentation, and memories.

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Early press reviews of Niati’s exhibitions highlight the artist’s focus not only on gender and violence but also on sound. A review of a group exhibition at the Galerie M’hamed Issiakhem (March 8–April 10, 1987) in Algiers that included artworks by Niati alongside those by Hamida Chellali, Akila Mouhoubi, and Baya Mahieddine notes the artist’s focus on sound or, rather, its absence. “Women are at the heart of Houria Niati’s inquiry. The twelve pastel works on paper and the four paintings on canvas all take the woman as their main subject or, more precisely, the suffering of a woman,” the author observes before adding that the paintings make palpable the “forced silence” to which women have been subjected.² The article draws readers’ attention to the “silence” and “imprisonment” that are discernible in Niati’s depictions of women, many of whom are shown in inhospitable spaces populated by sharp-toothed hybrid creatures and floating masks—as in The Last Words Before the Long Voyage (fig. 1), an oil pastel from 1982. In other works from the same series, which is titled Delirium, women are shown confined in black rectangular and arch-shaped spaces or reclining next to a window and looking into the starry night. Some float through an abstract space in menacing proximity to serpents. The lack of interaction with other figures and their visible solitude submerges them in an overwhelming silence. Yet, while The Last Words Before the Long Voyage depicts a solitary figure surrounded by dangerous-looking animals, the title references the words spoken prior to embarking on a mysterious journey. In fact, sound in the form of poetry and music would become key aspects of Niati’s artistic practice, in effect “activating” the paintings.

The artist is perhaps best known for her series of paintings No to Torture (fig. 2), which she completed as an undergraduate at Croydon College of Art in the United Kingdom in 1982. Recently shown at Tate Britain in the exhibition Women in Revolt!: Art and Activism in the UK, 1970–1990 (November 8, 2023–April 7, 2024), this series is composed of a first painting depicting four women that is displayed alongside four other paintings, each of which focuses on one of the figures. Shackled at their ankles, their faces wounded by rapid incisions, the figures, the artist suggests, personify all women who have suffered colonial torture.³ The thick layers of paint and repetition of the figures across multiple canvases can be read as the artist’s persistent attempt to recover the tortured bodies without concealing the violence they were subjected to. Indeed, the dark smudges of paint that indicate their faces raise alarm about the aggression experienced by Algerian women during the war at the hands of French soldiers.⁴ No to Torture is a direct reference to two Orientalist paintings by Eugène Delacroix (French, 1798–1863), both of which are titled Women of Algiers in Their Apartment, from 1834 and 1849, respectively. Niati’s work retains Delacroix’s composition but replaces his soft, blended brushstrokes with dynamically applied paint and deep incisions—an expression of anger at colonial injustice and violence, Niati explains.⁵

The solitude of the individual women in each of the four canvases makes the silence of incarceration palpable. Even the group painting does not reveal signs of conversation between the women, whose faces are rendered in a highly abstract way, with the green figure’s head immobilized by a rectangular shape that resembles a birdcage. Coincidentally, Niati completed No to Torture only two years after the Algerian writer Assia Djebar published a collection of short stories titled Women of Algiers in Their Apartment (1980). In her introduction, Djebar points to the formidable absence of sound in Delacroix’s artwork, arguing that the women abruptly stopped their conversation when the door opened and the painter walked in. “Sound has truly been severed,” Djebar writes, adding that “only in the fragments of ancient murmuring do I see how we must look for a restoration of the conversation between women, the very one that Delacroix froze in the painting.”⁶ It seems significant, then, that Niati often integrates sound in her paintings and installations, reciting her own poetry and singing Arab-Andalusian songs in front of her works in an attempt to complement the visual experience with a sonic one. While Tate only exhibited one of the paintings, and Niati did not perform in the gallery space, the display of No to Torture at the exhibition Forces of Change: Artists of the Arab World at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, DC, in 1993 was accompanied by the artist’s recitation of her poem “Delirium,” which played from speakers. The poem began with the following words:

I offer to myself the world in a phantasmagorical 

Effort of critical transformation

What is it?

It is the outcome of a mysterious delirium

That contracts my fingers

On the multicolored pastels

Which trace the words and the shapes

That burst on the paper like a retarded fusion

Of pachydermic frustrations

Of transcendental relationships

The ramifications degenerate themselves

The stories are no longer listened to

The tales are not anymore tackled

In a warm and re-comforting impetus

We do not listen we look at

We accept with infected eyes

Swollen by the resignation and the demission

The lyrical evocation of stories and tales that have become nearly obsolete suggests their healing powers could cure the “infected eyes,” the “resignation,” and the “demission.” Recited alongside the No to Torture paintings, the poem commits to restoring the sound muted first by Delacroix and then by the French army when it incarcerated and tortured Algerian women. The detention is addressed in the poem, which mentions “doorless and openingless” walls of rooms from which there is no escape. The call to listen resonates loudly in “Delirium,” as if asking viewers to focus on and try to hear the muted voices of the women in the paintings. 

During the opening of Forces of Change, Niati also sang three songs a capella in front of the No to Torture paintings (fig. 3). All three works were composed by the medieval singer, poet, oud and lute player Ziryab Ibn Nafi, who lived in exile in Muslim Andalusia and whose songs Niati discovered while working at the Algerian Ministry of Youth and Culture from 1969–76. For Niati, Ziryab Ibn Nafi epitomizes the experience of migration. Born in Baghdad, where he was the caliph Hārūn al-Rashīd’s singer, he was forced into exile by his musical master El Mossili, who was jealous of his student’s increased success and power. Upon his arrival in Andalusia, he revolutionized medieval music, became the court musician for caliph Abd ar-Rahmān II, and gained fame as “the poet of Cordoba.” Widely considered to be the progenitor of Andalusian musical cultures in all their forms, his rich poetic-musical compositions have significantly shaped contemporary urban music in North Africa. When the Arabs lost Andalusia to the Spaniards in the late 15th century, they escaped to North Africa, where they continued their musical traditions. Arab-Andalusian music, then, is a cultural expression that survived exile and displacement. For Niati, it forms an eternal memory of migration, which she herself experienced upon leaving Algeria in the 1970s. By singing these songs in front of No to Torture, she articulated her own experience as a migrant Algerian woman, creating a shared sonic, cultural space in which women of different generations can coexist across time and space.

As seen with No to Torture, Niati often mobilizes poetry and music to “speak back” to Orientalist artworks. She shares this concern of confronting Orientalist visual representations with artists such as Brooklyn-based Bianca Abdi-Boragi, who is currently working on a series of 16 paintings in response to Delacroix’s The Women of Algiers in Their Apartment,⁷ and with Algiers-based Maya Benchikh El Fegoun (El Meya), whose recent work reimagines two paintings of Algerian women by Étienne Dinet (French, 1861–1929).⁸ Niati’s use of sound, however, is distinctive within this context. Her installation To Bring Water from the Fountain Has Nothing Romantic About It from 1991, is composed of three large pastel-colored paintings and three pottery vases depicting floating women’s silhouettes, masks, fish, snakes, and the moon. The title refers both to Algerian folk songs that praise the beauty of a girl who fetches water from the fountain and to the abundance of Orientalist paintings incorporating sensual aesthetics to conceal the physical effort of carrying water. By using thick outlines for a woman’s silhouette in one of the paintings and displaying the paintings next to heavy pottery vases, Niati emphasizes the strain on women’s bodies. The poem that plays through speakers as part of this installation touches on a recurring theme in Niati’s work—the lack of freedom and inability to break free due to either colonial oppression or patriarchal social structures—by evoking a “World where the explosion of Revolution” was “blocked up by the walls built by possessive hands.” Addressing “oppressed spirits,” the persona in the poem evocatively says, “The immobility is the repressed dream of the impossible escape to far horizons.” The poem then introduces the figure of a “deformed Orientalist” who “has traveled desperately searching for peace and newness,” a reference to the many Orientalist artists in Algeria who depicted the land and its people as exotic and erotic. In the lines preceding the introduction of the Orientalist, the poem reads:

Not thinking is to burst out laughing

Like a bomb

Obscured by the night

By the incredible misadventure

Of limited freedom

No matter what the silence 

In the illuminated darkness [. . .]

Who are you Women who submit

To sensual passion

In the shadowy houses

With half-opened windows

Looking into interior courtyards

Women fatal and mysterious 

Powerful in their innocence 

Out of the ordinary

Out of time 

Unraveling the Orientalist depiction of Algerian women as mysterious, sensual, and erotic, the poem directly addresses the women fetching water, piercing the layers of Orientalist representation that have fixed a romanticized view of them. The display of To Bring Water from the Fountain Has Nothing Romantic About It also includes the shapes of human hands and feet formed of sand on the gallery floor, evoking the actual bodies of the women whom Orientalist art turned into static images, as well as multiple reproductions of the same photograph showing women fetching water, suggesting the recurring labor. 

Integrating sound into her multimedia installations, Niati works against both colonial and local archetypes of Algerian women by merging their abstract painterly depictions with poems or songs. It is not insignificant that Niati frequently recalls marveling as a child at the stories and fables told to her and her sisters by their grandmother and that she firmly attributes the development of her own plastic language to them (fig. 4).⁹ 
The women in her artworks are always heavily abstracted, as if their bodies are at risk of dissolving into smudges of paint or oil pastel. Yet sound makes their physical presence felt: The poems often address the women directly, while the Arab-Andalusian songs locate them within a distinct cultural heritage. These songs also allow Niati to explore her own position as a migrant Algerian woman for whom sound is a way of forging a precarious relationship with the women she depicts, across space and time. Niati’s expressive way of working and the fact that she never corrects the initial marks made on the canvas suggest that her paintings are deeply performative, as if refusing to be fixed as static images that would delineate the terms under which women can be pictured. Free-floating forms and overlapping colors create vibrant spaces in which the sounds of women’s voices slowly emerge.

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The following essay by art historian Talita Trizoli reveals the influence of a Catholic and spiritual pathos in the work of influential though relatively unknown Brazilian critic Maria Eugênia Franco. Taking as case studies Franco’s writings on artists such as Samson Flexor, Henri Michaux, and Mestre Nosa and artworks attributed to unrecognized Baroque artisans, Trizoli establishes a direct relationship between Catholic motifs and the development of modernity in Brazilian art and identities.

Religion is eminently social. Religious representations are collective representations which express collective realities; the rites are a manner of acting which take rise in the midst of the assembled groups and which are destined to excite, maintain, or recreate certain mental states in those groups. —Emile Durkheim¹

Between 1948 and 1954, Brazilian art critic and curator Maria Eugênia Franco (1915–1999) had a regular column in O Estado de São Paulo, a real achievement given this newspaper, and several others, was marked by misogyny and conservative values.²Over the course of seven years, Franco offered commentary and analyses, predominantly about the art circuit in São Paulo, in addition to lucid criticism of the systemic aspect of the milieu and formal observations on the work of specific artists, most of whom were contemporary.³

Still relatively unfamiliar to the general public, Franco’s critical writings allow us to understand miscellaneous efforts in the modern Latin American context to reconcile form and content—a conflict inherent to aesthetic programs in their various versions and a recurring theme in Brazilian art criticism.⁴

A large part of Franco’s critical work deals with artists and artistic events on the so-called Rio–São Paulo axis, raising structural issues surrounding the organization of the Brazilian art circuit, mainly as it relates to audience formation and cultural institutions.⁵ In terms of the selection of articles commented upon here, the content concerns sacred themes explored by Brazilian artists not only as an object of formal exercise but also as a representation of an affective memory linked to the construction of national identity, since figures dear to popular culture and religious festivals, in this case saints and passages from the life of Christ, have been chosen to allegorize reality in Brazil. 

Embedded in the constitution of Brazilian national identity, the mystical narratives of Catholicism, a fundamental element of Portuguese colonization, formed a set of folkloric entities in the collective imagination that mixed with the mythologies of the various original Indigenous peoples and the shamanic practices of the African subjects exiled by the slave regime. Although the poetic and violent encounter between these cultures generated a rich symbolic ensemble, the Catholic-Apostolic-Roman structure remained the organizing imperative of Brazilian culture.⁶

Coming from a Catholic family, like most of the Brazilian population at the time, Franco was familiar with Christian religious “mysteries” even though she was not a practicing Catholic.⁷Indeed, from the Barroco Mineiro, or Baroque of Minas Gerais, chosen as the first artistic manifestation of the Brazilian spirit, to the religious calendar of collective festivals and the obvious predominance of biblical passages in the history of art, some knowledge of Christian mysticism was almost inevitable.⁸

For Franco, the mystery of the Catholic religious experience emerged as a theme already widely recognized in the artistic sphere rather than as an element of amazement or one of discovery. This aspect can also be seen in the artistic production of her sister, painter Maria Leontina (1917–1984), especially in a series of abstracted representations of Saint Anne (figs. 1, 2) and in banners she presented as objects of scrutiny for the application of chromatic nuance and composition inspired by Giorgio Morandi.⁹

Committed to remaining professionally impartial, Franco did not write frequently about the work of her sister or brother-in-law, Milton Dacosta (1915–1988), who was also a painter. (Rather, her exchanges with both frequently took place in person or through letters). She dedicated some of her columns, however, to the work of partner artists in which the sacred theme is manifested alongside formal investigation and dramatic Christian narratives (the mystical pathos), which are mobilized for the sentimental education of the spectator.¹⁰Of these texts, an analysis of artist Samson Flexor (1907–1971) and his work in the article “Flexor e a arte religiosa” (“Flexor and Religious Art”) is significant.¹¹

Flexor was born in Moldova, in the city of Soroca, but after traveling through Brussels and Paris, he settled permanently in Brazil in 1948. Having earned a degree in painting from the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris and studying art history at the Sorbonne—in addition to holding a degree in chemistry, which he had previously earned in Brussels—Flexor was an artist who was intellectual about his own work.¹²He is considered among the pioneers of abstraction in Brazil, mainly after critical contact with Belgian art critic Léon Degand (1907–1958), first director of the Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo (MAM) and an advocate of abstraction. It is important to highlight that Flexor was in no way a defender of a dogmatic and protocol-based artistic practice; indeed, he believed in the affective and dramatic dimensions of art—as can be seen in his clashes with members of the Concrete art movement, whom he nicknamed “Concretinos” (a mixture of “concrete” and “cretins” in Portuguese).¹³

It is from this sense of religious pathos that Franco approached Flexor’s work. In her article about the artist, Maria Eugênia highlights two solo exhibitions on display in São Paulo, one at Galeria Domus, the other at MAM. She foregrounds Flexor’s technical dexterity and emphasizes his character as a “subject painter,” highlighting the eleven paintings in the series Composições sobre temas da Paixão (Compositions on Themes of the Passion) at MAM. These canvases, with their Cubo-Expressionist treatment of forms and their icy hues, warm blues, and earth tones, represent passages from Christ’s martyrdom, evoking the most moving moments of his suffering and cathartic self-denial (figs. 3–5). 

It is noteworthy that Flexor was born into a Jewish family but converted to Catholicism in France. After the death of his first wife, Tatiana Yablokof, during childbirth, the painter received spiritual guidance and professional support from local priests, who commissioned the grieving artist to produce several frescoes based on biblical events. From then on, biblical passages, with an emphasis on Christ’s crucifixion at Calvary, would be a recurring theme in his work, even in later life, when his artistic focus became more personal (though nonetheless tragic).¹⁴Maria Eugênia comments in her article on the artist: 

Catholic culture has been predominant in Brazil since the territory was colonized, even determining its later structure as an empire and democracy—despite the modern premise of a secular state within the Enlightenment model.¹⁶As far as the artistic world is concerned, the use of mystical drama in sacred art is both a means of catalyzing attention and a strong empathic device in the narrative of suffering and sacrifice in the name of transcendence—not for nothing, the choice of certain passages and figures from the Bible to consolidate values or reformulate contingencies is recurrent in representations. I consider this condition an example of the intense presence in Brazilian culture of variants of Our Lady—widely used as a resource for appeasing and welcoming the suffering of the population—but also the symbolic correlation of Christ martyred on the cross with the figure of Brazilian national hero Joaquim José da Silva Xavier, known as Tiradentes, who in 1792, became the only member of the revolutionary Inconfidência Mineira to be arrested, tried for treason, and publicly dismembered.¹⁷

The search for a dramatic dimension to the Christian mystery is a problem inherent to Maria Eugênia Franco’s critical analyses of artists other than Flexor, but without the loss of focus on the formal and systemic structuring aspect of the milieu. These dramatic, almost passionate elements identified by not only Franco but also fellow writers such as Geraldo Ferraz (1905–1979) and Clarival do Prado Valladares (1918–1983) are reminiscent of the expressionist influence of immigrant artists established in Brazil and their pupils.¹⁸ Moreover, they are applied to the thematic treatment of scenes typical of the country, as is the case in works by Lasar Segall (1889–1957), Cândido Portinari (1903–1962), and Oswaldo Goeldi (1895–1961), among others. Its use by Flexor, but also by painter and poet Henri Michaux (1899–1984), as we will see later through Franco’s perspective, is linked to the experience of collective human suffering during World War II. 

In Franco’s article about Henri Michaux’s watercolors, written during her French stay, one can see by the use of adjectives and a certain psychologizing analysis, her effort to narrate the dimension of anguish and fascinating displacement in the artist’s images, with their washes and autonomist drawing techniques (figs. 6, 7).¹⁹Michaux, of Belgian origin and naturalized French, is still known today for his dramatic forms and investigations of human suffering, which are poetically enhanced by manifestations of the unconscious in the form of dreams and numbing delusions. Portraits and self-portraits made with watercolor stains and thin, tense lines of ink that overlap, forming a suspended plot on the white of the paper, indicate the artist’s proximity to Surrealism or even Dadaism. However, the artist distanced himself from the uncontrolled aspects of these isms, as he was interested in the fissure of human subjectivity, the feeling of lack of belonging intensified by the experience of war.²⁰
Franco describes the paintings on display at the gallery as follows: 

It is interesting that in her articles on Flexor and Michaux, Franco emphasizes the relationship between studies of form and those of composition as they pertain to the dramatic and psychic demands of subject matter. This theme was already present in 1944 in her article²²on the statuary ensemble in Ouro Preto by Antônio Francisco Lisboa (popularly known as Aleijadinho, 1738–1814), her first aesthetic essay, and it is repeated in later articles on the mythical artist and the importance of the Baroque in the constitution of Brazil’s colonial artistic fortune.²³  

Referencing the studies of Mário de Andrade (1893–1945), pioneer in identifying the Baroque of Minas Gerais as the first sui generis Brazilian artistic style, Franco points out the artistic and historical importance of the figure of the crippled craftsman, who suffered like Christ, and calls for a greater presence of his work and state support for its circulation.²⁴In a typed manuscript now in the personal archive of her nephew Alexandre Dacosta, Franco describes an unofficial tour of the Minas Gerais museum complex in 1944.²⁵She writes:

Franco continues her essay with an emotional and qualitative description of the oratorio in question, but what is striking about this youthful text is the description of the scourging of Jesus on the Way of the Cross. As a dramatic, political, and formal exercise, this theme is an exhaustive one for artists, and Franco addressed it repeatedly in her criticism.²⁷The passages of suffering, violence, commotion, and welcome, consisting of fourteen stations, provide a narrative of emotional purging for the faithful, whereby the aim is both to grow closer to the divine through mystical experience and to obtain indulgence for moral failings—in this sense, the formal solution of the unknown artist of the oratory, of begging, of carving the small polychrome figures on a blue background in a narrative of ascendancy through the sacrifice of the son of God, reinforces the idea of ascension and transcendence through the experience of violence.

In 1969, Franco undertook her last public analysis of a sacred and popular representation of Christ’s Calvary, this time not in a newspaper column but rather in an essay published in a limited edition of woodcuts by Mestre Nosa.²⁸The artist from Ceará, whose baptismal name was Inocêncio Miguel da Costa Nick (1897–1983), had recently arrived in São Paulo and was a prominent figure in the movement for the marketing and appreciation of popular culture. His set of fifteen prints, first commissioned by artist Sérvulo Esmeraldo (1929–2017) and then published in two limited editions—the first in France in 1965 by editor Robert Morel through Esmeraldo, and the second in 1969 by editor Julio Pacello—fueled that frisson of the “primitive,” “innocent,” and “pure” of so-called popular art. Franco’s text reinforces these notions of vernacular artistic production but adds her own set of aesthetic predicates referring to the sacred and formal sphere:

It is interesting that in her critical analysis of the oratorio and of Nosa’s woodcuts, Franco emphasizes the ingenuity of the formal solutions in the face of so-called simplistic representations of a classic and consecrated religious theme in the Christian context. The Way of the Cross and the suffering endured by Jesus have historically been mobilized as moralizing devices for the masses, among whom material self-denial and physical submission constitute an imperative condition for the ascension of the spirit—especially amid economic fragility and political turmoil, as was the case during Franco’s time as an arts professional in the critical and curatorial sectors. Whether under the dictatorial New State (Estado Novo; 1937–45) during the rule of Getúlio Vargas or under later military dictatorship (1964–85), artistic productions of a religious nature had, dubiously, the public function of cultural familiarity and of creating critical metaphors for social causes.

However, with regard to this set of articles by Maria Eugênia Franco, religious themes in Brazilian modern art are a bastion of the constitution of national identity, an aspect of obsession in the late modern generation of the Return to Order. Franco seems to have made a circle of eternal return, albeit indirectly and tangentially, to the mystical Christian realm amid her own struggles to construct the artistic environment and the aesthetic-educational formation of the public³⁰ (synthesis of form with content, synthesis of artistic investigative practice, and the dramatization of affections), even though today she is barely remembered by her peers.

Portuguese

O seguinte ensaio da historiadora da arte Talita Trizoli revela a influência de um pathos católico e espiritual na obra da influente, embora relativamente desconhecida, crítica brasileira Maria Eugênia Franco. Tomando como estudos de caso os escritos de Franco sobre artistas como Samson Flexor, Henri Michaux e Mestre Nosa e obras atribuídas a artesãos barrocos não reconhecidos, Trizoli estabelece uma relação direta entre motivos católicos e o desenvolvimento da modernidade na arte e identidades brasileiras.

[…] la religion est une chose éminemment sociale. Les représentations religieuses sont des représentations collectives qui expriment des réalités collectives; les rites sont des manières d’agir qui ne prennent naissance qu’au sein des groupes assemblés et qui sont destinés à susciter, à entretenir ou à refaire certains états mentaux de ces groupes³¹ ― Émile Durkeim 

Entre 1948 e 1954, a crítica de arte, gestora e curadora brasileira Maria Eugênia Franco (1915–1999) teve uma coluna regular de crítica de arte no jornal O Estado de São Paulo, um verdadeiro feito, considerando que este jornal, assim como vários outros, era marcado pela misoginia e pelos valores conservadores.³²Ao longo de sete anos, Franco teceu comentários e análises predominantemente sobre o circuito artístico de artes na capital paulista, além de apresentar críticas lúcidas no aspecto sistêmico do meio e observações formais sobre a produção artística, em sua maioria, contemporânea.³³

Ainda pouco conhecida do grande público, a produção crítica de Franco possibilita compreender os esforços de miscelânea entre forma e conteúdo no âmbito moderno latino-americano, um conflito inerente aos programas estéticos em suas diversas versões e um tema recorrente na crítica de arte brasileira.³⁴

Grande parte da obra crítica de Franco aborda artistas e eventos artísticos do chamado eixo Rio-São Paulo, levantando questões estruturais em torno da organização do circuito artístico brasileiro, principalmente no que se refere à formação de público e às instituições culturais.³⁵Em termos da seleção dos artigos aqui comentados, o conteúdo diz respeito a temas sagrados explorados pelos artistas brasileiros não apenas como objeto de exercício formal, mas também como representação de uma memória afetiva vinculada à construção da identidade nacional, uma vez que figuras caras à cultura popular e às festas religiosas, no caso santos e passagens da vida de Cristo, foram escolhidas para alegorizar a realidade brasileira.³⁶

Incrustadas na constituição da identidade nacional brasileira, as narrativas místicas do catolicismo, elemento fundamental da colonização portuguesa, formaram um conjunto de entidades folclóricas no imaginário coletivo que se misturam às mitologias dos diversos povos indígenas originários e às práticas xamânicas dos súditos africanos exilados pelo regime escravista. Embora o encontro poético e violento entre essas culturas tenha gerado um rico conjunto simbólico, a estrutura católico-apostólico-romana permaneceu como o imperativo organizador da cultura brasileira.

Vinda de uma família católica, como a maioria da população brasileira da época, Franco estava familiarizada com os “mistérios” religiosos cristãos, embora não fosse católica praticante.³⁷De fato, do Barroco Mineiro, ou Barroco de Minas Gerais, escolhido como a primeira manifestação artística do espírito brasileiro, ao calendário religioso de festas coletivas e à óbvia predominância de passagens bíblicas na história da arte, algum conhecimento do misticismo cristão era quase inevitável.³⁸

Para Franco, o mistério da experiência religiosa católica surgiu como um tema já amplamente reconhecido na esfera artística, em vez de um elemento de espanto ou descoberta. Esse aspecto também pode ser visto na produção artística de sua irmã, a pintora Maria Leontina (1917–1984), especialmente em uma série de representações abstratas de Santa Ana (figs. 1, 2) e em faixas que ela apresentou como objetos de escrutínio para a aplicação de nuance cromática e composição inspiradas por Giorgio Morandi.³⁹

Comprometida em permanecer profissionalmente imparcial, Franco não escrevia frequentemente sobre o trabalho de sua irmã ou cunhado, Milton Dacosta (1915–1988), que também era pintor. (Em vez disso, suas trocas com ambos frequentemente ocorriam pessoalmente ou por meio de cartas). Ela dedicou algumas de suas colunas, no entanto, ao trabalho de artistas parceiros nos quais o tema sagrado se manifesta ao lado da investigação formal e das narrativas cristãs dramáticas (o pathos místico), que são mobilizadas para a educação sentimental do espectador.⁴⁰Destes textos, destaca-se a análise do artista Samson Flexor (1907–1971) e sua obra no artigo “Flexor e a arte religiosa”.⁴¹

Flexor nasceu na Moldávia, na cidade de Soroca, e após trânsito por Bruxelas e Paris, estabeleceu-se em definitivo no Brasil em 1948. Com formação em pintura pela Belas Artes de Paris, mas também com passagens pela Sorbonne na área de história, e uma formação prévia em Química em Bruxelas, Flexor foi um artista intelectualizado sobre a própria obra.⁴²Ele é considerado um dos percursores da abstração no Brasil, principalmente após contato crítico com o primeiro diretor do Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo, o belga Léon Degan (1907-1958), partidário da abstração. É Importante frisar que o artista não era de modo algum defensor de uma prática artística dogmática e protocolar, pois acreditava na dimensão afetiva e dramática da obra de arte – como se pode ver nos seus confrontos com os membros do movimento da arte concreta, a quem apelidou de “Concretinos”.⁴³

É a partir desse dispositivo dramático que Franco se aproxima da obra de Flexor. No referido artigo de 25 de abril de 1940, Maria Eugênia nomeia duas mostras individuais do artista em cartaz na cidade, uma na galeria Domus, outra no Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo. Ela coloca em primeiro plano sua destreza técnica e pontuar seu caráter de “pintor de assunto”, mas dando destaque ao conjunto presente no MAM, “Composições sobre temas da Paixão”. Essas telas, com seu tratamento cubo-expressionista das formas e seus tons gelados, azuis quentes e tons de terra, representam passagens do martírio de Cristo, evocando os momentos mais comoventes de seu sofrimento e autonegação catártica (figs. 3–5).

Vale notar que, Flexor nasceu em uma família judia, mas converteu-se ao catolicismo na França após a morte de sua 1ª esposa no parto, Tatiana Yablokof, e o respectivo acolhimento espiritual e profissional de padres, os quais encomendaram diversos afrescos sobre eventos bíblicos para o artista em luto. As passagens bíblicas de Cristo, com ênfase em seu calvário, seriam então um tema recorrente para Flexor, mesmo quando o artista adentra a uma produção tardia mais pessoal, mas também trágica.⁴⁴ Maria Eugênia comenta que:

A predominância imperativa da cultura católica no Brasil ocorre desde a colonização do território, determinando inclusive sua posterior estruturação como império e democracia — apesar da premissa moderna de um Estado laico dentro do modelo iluminista.⁴⁶No que se refere ao mundo artístico, o uso do drama místico na arte sacra é ao mesmo tempo um meio de catalisar a atenção e um forte recurso empático na narrativa do sofrimento e do sacrifício em nome da transcendência — não à toa, a escolha de certas passagens e figuras da Bíblia para consolidar valores ou reformular contingências é recorrente nas representações. Podemos considerar como exemplo dessa condição a intensa presença na cultura brasileira de variantes de Nossa Senhora — amplamente utilizadas como recurso para apaziguar e acolher o sofrimento da população —, mas também da correlação simbólica de Cristo martirizado na cruz com a figura do herói nacional brasileiro Joaquim José da Silva Xavier, conhecido como Tiradentes, que, em 1792, tornou-se o único integrante da revolucionária Inconfidência Mineira a ser preso, julgado por traição e esquartejado publicamente.⁴⁷

A busca por uma dimensão dramática no mistério cristão é objeto que tangencia as analises críticas de Maria Eugênia Franco em alguns artistas para além de Flexor, mas sem a perda de foco do aspecto estruturante formal e sistêmico do meio. Esses elementos dramáticos, quase apaixonados, identificados não apenas por Franco, mas também por outros escritores como Geraldo Ferraz (1905–1979) e Clarival do Prado Valladares (1918–1983) lembram a influência expressionista de artistas imigrantes estabelecidos no Brasil e seus alunos.⁴⁸Além disso, são aplicadas ao tratamento temático de cenas típicas do país, como é o caso de obras de Lasar Segall (1889–1957), Cândido Portinari (1903–1962) e Oswaldo Goeldi (1895–1961), entre outros. Seu uso por Flexor, mas também pelo pintor e poeta Henri Michaux (1899–1984), como veremos mais adiante pela perspectiva de Franco, está ligado à experiência do sofrimento humano coletivo durante a Segunda Guerra Mundial.

No artigo de Franco sobre as aquarelas de Henri Michaux, escrito durante sua estadia na França, percebe-se, pelo uso de adjetivos e uma certa análise psicologizante, seu esforço em narrar a dimensão de angústia e deslocamento fascinante nas imagens da artista, com suas aguadas e técnicas de desenho autonomistas (figs. 6, 7).⁴⁹Michaux, de origem belga e naturalizado francês, é conhecido até hoje por suas formas dramáticas e investigações sobre o sofrimento humano, poeticamente potencializadas por manifestações do inconsciente em forma de sonhos e delírios entorpecentes. Retratos e autorretratos feitos com manchas de aquarela e linhas finas e tensas de tinta que se sobrepõem, formando uma trama suspensa sobre o branco do papel, indicam a proximidade do artista com o surrealismo ou mesmo com o dadaísmo. No entanto, o artista se distanciou dos aspectos descontrolados desses ismos, pois se interessava pela fissura da subjetividade humana, o sentimento de falta de pertencimento intensificado pela experiência da guerra.⁵⁰Franco descreve as pinturas em exposição na galeria da seguinte forma:

É pertinente notar que em ambos os artigos sobre Flexor e Michaux, Franco coloca ênfase na interlocução entre os estudos de forma e composição em relação a demanda dramática e psíquica do tema dos artistas. Esse aspecto já se encontra presente no primeiro ensaio estético da autora em 1944⁵² sobre o conjunto estatuário na cidade de Ouro Preto de Antonio Francisco Lisboa (1738-1814), popularmente conhecido como o Aleijadinho de Vila Rica, e que se repetirá nos artigos posteriores sobre o mítico artista e a importância do barroco brasileiro na constituição da fortuna artística colonial no Brasil.⁵³

Tendo como referência nomeada os estudos de Mario de Andrade (1893-1945), precursor do indicativo do barroco mineiro como a primeira manifestação artística brasileira sui generis, Franco aponta tanto a importância artística e histórica da figura do artesão aleijado, sofredor como cristo, clamando juntamente por uma maior presença e apoio estatal para a circulação de suas obras.⁵⁴Em texto datilografado presente no acervo pessoal de seu sobrinho, há o seguinte material produzido dentro de uma excursão extraoficial de averiguação do complexo mineiro de museus⁵⁵ em 1944: 

Franco segue com um descritivo afetivo e qualitativo do oratório em questão, mas o que chama atenção nesse texto de juventude é a repetição do episódio dos flagelos de Jesus na Via Sacra. Como exercício dramático, político e formal, este tema é exaustivo para os artistas, e Franco abordou-o repetidamente na sua crítica.⁵⁷As passagens de sofrimento, violência, comoção e boas-vindas, compostas por quatorze estações, fornecem uma narrativa de purificação emocional para os fiéis, cujo objetivo é tanto aproximar-se do divino por meio da experiência mística quanto obter indulgência por falhas morais — nesse sentido, a solução formal do artista desconhecido do oratório, da mendicância, da escultura de pequenas figuras policromadas sobre fundo azul em uma narrativa de ascendência por meio do sacrifício do filho de Deus, reforça a ideia de ascensão e transcendência por meio da experiência da violência.

Em 1969, Franco empreendeu sua última análise pública de uma representação sagrada e popular do Calvário de Cristo, desta vez não em uma coluna de jornal, mas sim em um ensaio publicado em uma edição limitada de xilogravuras de Mestre Nosa⁵⁸ (ou Noza, variando a grafia). O artista cearense recém chegado a São Paulo, cujo nome de batismo era Inocêncio Miguel da Costa Nick (1897-1983), foi figura de destaque no movimento de valorização mercadológica da cultura popular, e seu conjunto de 15 imagens primeiramente encomendas pelo artista Sérvulo Esmeraldo, e depois editadas limitadamente em duas ocasiões – a 1ª na França pelo editor Robert Morel em 1965 por intermédio de Esmeraldo, a segunda em 1969 pelo editor Julio Pacello – alimentou esse frison do “primitivo”, “inocente” e “puro” da arte dita popular. 

É interessante que em sua análise crítica do oratório e das xilogravuras de Nosa, Franco enfatize a engenhosidade das soluções formais diante das chamadas representações simplistas de um tema religioso clássico e consagrado no contexto cristão. A Via Sacra e o sofrimento suportado por Jesus foram historicamente mobilizados como dispositivos moralizantes para as massas, entre as quais a abnegação material e a submissão física constituem uma condição imperativa para a ascensão do espírito — especialmente em meio à fragilidade econômica e à turbulência política, como foi o caso durante o tempo de Franco como profissional das artes nos setores crítico e curatorial. Seja sob o ditatorial Estado Novo (1937–45) durante o governo de Getúlio Vargas ou sob a ditadura militar posterior (1964–85), as produções artísticas de natureza religiosa tinham, duvidosamente, a função pública de familiaridade cultural e de criar metáforas críticas para causas sociais.

No entanto, no que se refere a esse conjunto de artigos de Maria Eugênia Franco, os temas religiosos na arte moderna brasileira são um bastião da constituição da identidade nacional, um aspecto de obsessão na geração tardo-moderna do Retorno à Ordem. Franco parece ter feito um círculo de eterno retorno, ainda que indireta e tangencialmente, ao reino místico cristão em meio às suas próprias lutas para construir o ambiente artístico e a formação estético-educacional do público⁶⁰(síntese da forma com o conteúdo, síntese da prática artística investigativa e dramatização dos afetos), ainda que hoje ela seja pouco lembrada por seus pares.

The post Catholic and Popular Mysticism in Brazilian Modern Art: The Quest for Maria Eugênia Franco’s Critique of Sacred Representations / Misticismo católico e popular na arte moderna brasileira: a busca da crítica de Maria Eugênia Franco às representações sacras appeared first on post.

Since the 1990s, the Hindi film industry has undergone several transformations in response to socioeconomic and political changes in India. This is particularly a result of how the Indian nation-state and its film industries have entered into the global market. Though popular Hindi cinema has always circulated internationally through informal, ad hoc networks, during most of the twentieth century what was then known as Bombay cinema catered mostly to local audiences in India where it was central to producing a national identity. However, changes to production, financing, exhibition practices, and aesthetics from the 1990s onwards turned Bombay cinema into a globalized cultural industry in a process that film historian Ashish Rajadhyaksha refers to as “Bollywoodization.”¹ To emphasize this transformation, today’s Hindi film industry is often referred to as “Bollywood” or, for films produced in the 2010s and later, “New Bollywood.” For many, New Bollywood likely conjures up images of song, dance, and melodramatic excess, but as a global cultural industry, New Bollywood addresses audiences across multiple different media and discourses that circulate on a variety of global, digital platforms, and in everyday, local visual culture. In this way, New Bollywood continues to play a crucial part in producing a commodified, national, cultural identity that can be easily consumed both nationally and globally. 

A notable aspect of New Bollywood cinema is that it has created a space for gender and sexual identities that have traditionally been absent from mainstream Bombay cinema. In Indian society, nonnormative sexual and gendered subjects have a long history of stigmatization, marginalization, and criminalization because they were framed as “morally degenerate” – a view that was in large part shaped by the colonial era origins of many laws in India’s penal code that are still in use today. Concurrently with the changes in the film industry, the Indian state’s entrance into the global market has led to a de-territorialization of the nation-state. As a result, geographical location is no longer sufficient to produce a coherent national cultural identity for the state’s subjects. For this reason, as feminist scholar Rupal Oza has argued, cultural expressions of gender and sexuality have become subject to increased surveillance in recent years because they serve as crucial sites for demarcating and policing normative, national values at a time of intensified global cultural flows.² In this context, New Bollywood’s foregrounding of nonnormative gender and sexual identities seems to be in direct contrast to culture’s role in policing gender and sexuality, yet attending to New Bollywood’s diverse local and global entanglements will illustrate how this global cultural industry sutures together heterogenous narratives of social inclusion, consumer citizenship, and national development.

In this essay, I examine the processes that allow New Bollywood to integrate seemingly subversive subjects and topics within a modern Indian cultural identity. For my analysis, I draw on examples from actor Ayushmann Khurrana’s filmography, his global brand as a star, and his participation in advertisements. Khurrana’s career largely overlaps with the rise of global, digital streaming platforms on which New Bollywood cinema can now be watched worldwide. Moreover, Khurrana’s filmography singularly highlights how New Bollywood has positioned itself as a nexus for grappling with anxieties about shifting gender and sexual identities in globalized India through social-message films. In an industry frequently critiqued for its nepotism, Ayushmann Khurrana is also notable for entering cinema as an outsider. In fact, much like the characters he plays, he hails from an ordinary middle-class family. As a result, Khurrana has developed an image, nationally and internationally, as a socially progressive man who at the same time is representative of an aspirational modern, middle-class subjectivity. 

By using Khurrana and his filmography as a case study, I map New Bollywood’s wider entanglements with commodity culture and argue that New Bollywood plays a key role in developing a globally and locally meaningful image of the modern, Indian nation-state as technologically, economically, and socially advanced. My analysis further illustrates that this is made possible by framing the citizen as a socially responsible individual who takes charge of their own and the state’s development through consumption, a category that can encompass historically marginalized sexual and gendered subjects provided they have the financial means to do so.

New Bollywood and the Social-Message Film

From the last decade (2010s) onward, New Bollywood has demonstrated a rising commitment to telling stories centering subjects and experiences that have previously been absent from mainstream cinema. No filmography demonstrates this more completely than Ayushmann Khurrana’s. Since his screen debut in 2012, Khurrana has become known for playing male characters who find themselves in unorthodox situations or who behave in nonnormative ways. His comedies highlight anxieties about shifting gender and sexual roles in India through themes such as sperm donation, infertility, erectile dysfunction, the performativity and fluidity of gender, geriatric pregnancy, premature balding, colorism, same-sex desire, and female health care. In Shubh Mangal Saavdhan (2017), a young man discovers that he has erectile dysfunction when he tries to have sex with his fiancée (fig. 1), whereas in Dream Girl (2019), Khurrana’s character vocally cross-dresses as a woman to work in a call center where his clients are mostly lonely men (fig. 2). Stories like these dramatize a meeting between imaginary, ordinary Indian subjects and new subjectivities and expressions of desire, gender, and sexuality. Narratively, the films negotiate these encounters within familiar vocabularies such as the family melodrama familiar from earlier Bombay cinema. In this way, New Bollywood allows audiences to understand historically marginalized subject-positions in relatable, humanizing terms, and it offers these subjects access to the imaginary of modern India through a shared cultural identity. 

Though topics pertaining to sexuality, gender, and desire are openly discussed in New Bollywood cinema, the social message in such conversations is framed as a challenge to conservative norms and normative gender identities that exist in ordinary, middle-class Indian families while offering a model for reconciliating these seemingly opposing values. For instance, Shubh Mangal Zyada Saavdhan (2020) addresses a gay couple’s struggle to be accepted by their families. The narrative frames LGBTQ+ experiences and desires as unfamiliar to most ordinary Indians. In a scene that is also featured at the start of the trailer, the explicit reference to male, gay sexuality is paired with the incomprehension of a family member whose conception of same-sex desire is so diffuse that he has no words for it (he consistently refers to it as “yeh” or “this”). In this scene, the Anglophone term “gay” as a label for same-sex desire is introduced to both characters and audiences in a comedic way that counters the medicalized language of queer desire and the prohibition against public discussions of sex and sexuality (figs. 3–5). The story of Shubh Mangal Zyada Saavdhan addresses anxieties about how queer subjects might pose a challenge to the institution of the heterosexual family and to normative male identities. The male patriarch no longer has the same authority as the younger, gay male subjects who wear earrings and flaunt their sexuality through public kissing and rainbow flags (fig. 6). But despite the novelty and the potential controversy of the topic, the narrative serves to illustrate how LGBTQ+ subjects can be integrated into the social world of the film. In fact, the plot treats “homophobia” as the “disease” that threatens modern Indian society (fig. 6). 

Generally, New Bollywood cinema has demonstrated a concern with social-justice issues. For instance, Shubh Mangal Zyada Saavdhan is significant for being one of the first mainstream Hindi pictures with an explicit LGBTQ+ plot, and it was the first to be both produced and released after the decriminalization of homosexuality in India in 2018—a historical event that garnered extensive coverage in international newspapers and by global LGBTQ+ movements. This judgment is also cited directly, and repeatedly, in Shubh Mangal Zyada Saavdhan’s promotional material and in its dialogue. In the last few decades, a country’s ability to guarantee its LGBTQ+ subjects equal citizen rights has become an important way to build a positive image as evidenced by the discourse around pinkwashing by nation-states and during mass-mediatized, global cultural events like the Olympics and Eurovision. Both the landmark ruling and its invocation in a globalized screen text serve to publicize modern India’s progressive sexual politics.

Globally, perceptions of national development are often connected with a state’s ability to guarantee vaguely defined “liberal values” and “human rights.” India’s claim to be a modern, well-developed state hinges on its ability to address the stigmatization attached to these taboos and desires while integrating historically marginalized subjects into the modern nation-state. In this context, New Bollywood’s capacity to fold diverse subjects and topics into its vision of modern India through publicity, narrative, and aesthetics plays a crucial part in shoring up India’s global image—even more so as New Bollywood cinema, now frequently financed by multinational companies, often becomes accessible to a broadly conceived liberal, cosmopolitan audience on digital platforms like Netflix, Amazon, and Disney+ after playing in multiplexes in malls in India.

The global significance of New Bollywood and its orientation toward social-justice narratives is further illustrated by considering the labor of its stars who are mobilized to perform cultural diplomacy at events in India and abroad. In 2023, Ayushmann Khurrana was recognized in the American news magazine TIME’s list of “100 Most Influential People” for the second time in less than five years. TIME’s rationale for including Khurrana stresses the actor’s history of playing characters that run counter to gendered stereotypes and his commitment to stories that push middle-class social mores by explicitly addressing societal taboos. Furthermore, the magazine highlights how Khurrana’s filmography is complemented by his off-screen social-justice work, such as his appointment by UNICEF India as a national ambassador to support children’s rights.³ Extending the brand of the star to the nation, Khurrana’s global persona thus underwrites the image of a socially progressive India.

New Bollywood and Commodity Culture

The emphasis on progressive social values, both the actor’s and as expressed within the films, discursively vanish New Bollywood’s entanglements in a commodity culture that nevertheless permeates both screen texts and wider visual culture. The setting of New Bollywood cinema is often deeply localized, with stories taking place in named suburbs of metropoles or bigger cities in northern India: Chandigarh, Haridwar, Bareilly, Allahabad, etc. The diverse geographical locations are supplemented by scenes in call centers, marketing offices, and glossy malls housing national and international brands that produce a cultural imaginary of a nation fully integrated into global financial and technological systems. The stories also illustrate the entanglement between local spaces and the global economy through snappy, intertextual dialogue that invokes imaginaries of a global India that is technologically, socially, and economically advanced. To take three examples from Khurrana’s filmography: in his debut film, Vicky Donor (2012), Khurrana’s character’s usefulness as a sperm donor is contextualized through his enjoyment of shopping, and on two separate occasions, he is stalked at a mall; in Chandigarh Kare Aashiqui (2021), Khurrana’s character encourages audiences to look up the rating of his gym on the search engine Just Dial; and in Shubh Mangal Zyada Saavdhan, the main characters work in a mall, where they promote toothpaste. Service-oriented jobs and real, recognizable brands embedded in the storylines reconfigure commodity culture as a realist aesthetic that undergirds the social worlds of the characters in the film. 

The Bollywoodization of Bombay cinema into a global cultural industry in which identity is commodifiable has enabled an aesthetic shorthand for representing these new subjects in a way that risks flattening the radical political possibilities of New Bollywood’s new representational practices. Specifically, by attending to the emphasis on commodity culture in the films, we recognize a flattening effect as historically marginalized subjects and family patriarchs are addressed equally as middle-class subjects, united by their capacity to participate in commodity culture. Queer subjects move through spaces just as frictionlessly as non-queer subjects because access to malls, cafes, and white-collar jobs are all conditioned on the ability to buy access. The commodified approach to identity representation means that difference is simply something that is “named” rather than an occasion for coalitional, intersectional politics as feminist scholar activists like Sharmila Rege have called for.⁴ Taking Khurrana’s social-message filmography as an example highlights how New Bollywood’s additive approach to diversity is often only skin-deep.

Moreover, the emphasis on commodity and consumption in the cultural imaginary of New Bollywood extends from the cinematic screen into a broader, everyday visual culture in which New Bollywood’s brightest stars advertise consumer goods and—sometimes—developmental government campaigns. For instance, if you had visited India in the latter half of the 2010s, you might have been greeted in the airport by signs and billboards of actor Akshay Kumar advertising tiles by Kajaria. Notably, Kajaria’s tagline promises that tiles made from the soil of the land will build the country (“desh ki mitti se bani tiles se, desh ko banate hai”).⁵ Similarly, train stations and urban roadsides were covered with advertisements featuring then-newlywed actress Anushka Sharma and cricketer Virat Kohli promoting bridal wear and steel for building a “home.” Pictures of yet another acting couple, Ranveer Singh and Deepika Padukone, promised domestic bliss through choosing the right washing machine. Likewise, Khurrana is among these stars. Indeed, you might see his face plastered along the length of buses as he endorses the right shaving cream (fig. 7) or on buildings (along with actress Bhumi Pednekar) selling affordable fashion to the young and hip (fig. 8), and his ads for the smartphone brand realme (fig. 9) might be screened in the multiplex before the start of the film and during the intermission—a place only accessible by passing through a security check that bars those less likely to have money from entering. 

The cultural imaginary of New Bollywood cinema and its stars participates in a larger political project of modern India in which the middle-class subject is mobilized to perform citizenship through consumption. Whereas the cinema activates consumption in conjunction with social messages as a way to promise citizenship and a stake in the cultural imaginary for all who can afford it, in the ads, commodity culture equates individuated social and economic development with the prosperity of the nation. By thinking of New Bollywood as a global cultural industry that operates across screen texts and diverse local and global star-driven discourses that circulate in everyday spaces, we can understand how diverse vectors come together to produce a cultural imaginary in which new gender and sexual identities are integrated into the vision of the modern nation-state through a vocabulary of middle-class commodity culture. But so long as belonging is conditioned on flattening lived experience into a commodifiable identity, this acceptance is not only superficial but also risks foreclosing more radical political possibilities. 

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