With two images, I preface this speculative meditation on artistic (re)mediations of encounters with curators and with the curatorial. Both are paintings by Svay Ken (1933–2008), who began painting in 1993 at age 60, without formal training, having worked since the 1950s in a luxury hotel in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. In his autobiography, he wrote that he became an artist “in order to have money and be able to give offerings and do good deeds,” referring to common Buddhist practices.¹ Despite his unusual beginnings, Svay Ken is widely celebrated as among the “first” contemporary artists in Cambodia.² 

An untitled painting made in 2005 depicts two museum curators who, portrayed with cameras in their hands, are visiting from a major museum in Japan (fig. 1). They are keenly photographing paintings by Svay Ken, which hang in two rows in the upper half of the canvas. The curators were conducting curatorial research for the 1st Fukuoka Asian Art Triennale, a major exhibition held in 1999 at the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum that sought to convey what its curators described as “the free form of expression corresponding to the situation of each Asian region.”³ While greedily documenting Svay Ken’s singular practice, the curators appear in the painting to be completely ignoring the artist himself, as well as his wife, Tith Yun. The visitors look away from their hosts and rudely point their elbows sharply toward them. Curatorial research is presented here, from the artist’s perspective, as being instrumental, extractive, and perhaps even hit-and-run.

In this work, equally as conspicuous as the curators’ narrow fixation on the paintings rather than the painter, is the nakedly perturbed expression on Svay Ken’s lined and weary face. The artist’s knitted brows, clenched jaw, pursed lips, and slight squinting of one eye convey his tense feelings of discomfort with the encounter. Although slightly more inscrutable, Tith Yun also appears wary and withdrawn. Her eyes, like the artist’s, do not quite meet ours; instead, the couple stares vacantly off to one side, as if lost in the uneasy, perhaps unhappy experience of hosting these unfamiliar international curators. 

By contrast, in I in Hotel Room (2004), the artist stares confidently, calmly, and contentedly at viewers of the painting (fig. 2). His wide eyes meet and hold our gaze even while he is also hard at work polishing a shoe, one of his duties as a hotel employee. In this painting, the green background visually links Svay Ken to all the surfaces and objects around him, including the walls and floors of the hotel bathroom and bedroom. With his head grazing the upper edge of the picture, the artist dominates the scene, his prominence in the composition implying that he gladly reigns over this domain of green. Here, we see a happy and self-possessed man who is proud of his work, which he does to support his family and facilitate his devotional practices. 

In many of Svay Ken’s paintings, the setting is rendered in a conspicuously flat and uniform green. This verdant background serves in one work as a stage for the artist’s discomfort and humiliation while meeting with international curators (fig. 1) and, in another, for his dignity and assurance while carrying out humble manual labor (fig. 2). The discrepant compositional function of the green background in the two paintings emphasizes the starkly different affective tenor of these two moments in Svay Ken’s long life. The color commingles fern and celadon, reflecting the naturecultures in which Svay Ken lived and worked. During the artist’s lifetime, these environments and contexts had shifted from easeful and peaceful to violent and pained and back again. I in Hotel Room portrays the artist harmoniously at one with his workplace environment. In the painting depicting the museum curators, however, the green background operates instead to separate the artist from his camera-wielding guests. The empty expanse of green marks a gulf between the artist and the curators that is not only spatial but also symbolic. The painting suggests that Svay Ken’s first encounter with curators was undignified, perhaps even injurious. 

That the same shade of green background can invoke congenial harmony in I in Hotel Room and hostile isolation in the painting depicting the museum curators suggests that for Svay Ken, the experience of being an artist vacillated between divergent emotions. The green also reappears in several of the paintings seen hanging on the wall in the painting of the curators. This suggests that the use of green was a constant in the artist’s practice, while the experience of interacting with curators was an unusual interruption. 

When the two museum curators from Japan visited Phnom Penh in 1998, it was the first time Cambodia had been included on the itinerary of the then-emerging class of international curators in Asia.⁴ Their visit came less than two decades after the overthrow of the Khmer Rouge regime, which between 1975 and 1979 had killed a vast majority of Cambodian artists along with a substantial portion of the overall population. With these circumstances in mind, it is therefore unsurprising that Svay Ken was palpably uncomfortable. 

In the years since then—and particularly after the participation of several “Cambodian artists” in biennales and other major international exhibitions during the 2000s and 2010s—Phnom Penh has become a regular stop for curators on research trips in the region. This opportunity is welcomed by many but may nevertheless remain an ambivalent experience. Svay Ken was certainly proud of attracting the curators’ attention and being included in the Triennale—as he would later boast, “In 1999 my name was known throughout Asian art circles”—but his pleasure was tinged with distress, as intimated in figure 1.⁵ 

This visual record of Svay Ken’s encounter offers a rare insight into how it might feel for an artist to meet with curators—who are often strangers—visiting from a distant and unfamiliar location, and how this uncomfortable experience might manifest in an artist’s practice. Such encounters with curators often initiate larger and more amorphous engagements with the curatorial: a mode of practice and province of discourse that encompasses not only studio visits and exhibition-making, but also many other kinds of relating and mediating between practitioners and publics. 

* * *

Artistic practices narrate, mediate, and sometimes fabulate histories: This is as well known in Southeast Asia as it is elsewhere.⁶ Curators present and occasionally misrepresent artistic practices: This too is clear in this region and beyond. And artists can also be curators: This phenomenon has taken on special prominence in the history (and historiography) of contemporary art in Southeast Asia, particularly since the 1970s.⁷ 

But how do artists represent and even historicize the curatorial and the experience of being curated? Beyond visits to artist’s studios and the preparation of museum exhibitions, in what ways does the curatorial manifest? What image of curation is immanent in artistic practice? These questions, seemingly straightforward enough, may elicit a surprising realization. Despite the inescapable ubiquity of the curatorial in global discourses on contemporary art, including in Southeast Asia, curation is rarely made visible within artistic practice. 

In this short essay, by focusing on accounts of the experience of being curated that appear within artworks—rather than in written form—I propose that artistic practice can also constitute a form of critical and (art-)historical commentary. This claim is prompted, in part, by the influential and widely cited Southeast Asian art historian and curator T. K. Sabapathy who, as early as 1979, recognized that with art, “critical activity need not necessarily be defined in terms of, or limited to, literary forms.”⁸ 

As well as rejecting the false binary cleaving theory from practice and creativity from commentary, with this statement, Sabapathy is also insisting on the intelligence and criticality that inheres in artistic practice. His notion of “critical activity” positions the work of an artist or a curator as always already a dynamic and vital intervention in the world: Never only a static object, but instead a perpetually unfolding activity. Moreover, Sabapathy does not disavow the importance of textuality, which he calls “literary forms,” but he nevertheless affirms the need to transcend the textual even while encompassing it. These qualities of Sabapathy’s “critical activity” are also paradigmatic of the curatorial.

My discussion here addresses artists’ encounters with the curatorial, but in a forthcoming book titled Artistic Art Histories in Southeast Asia: Modernisms in Contemporary Practices, I discuss a wider array of ways in which artists engage with the art-historical within their artworks.⁹ I argue that art-historically engaged modes of practice proliferate globally but take on particular importance in Southeast Asia, where art history as an academic discipline remains relatively nascent and where, since the 1960s, many foundational texts on modern art have been written by artists (and more recently by curators). 

Although I have argued elsewhere for the need to “deprovincialize” Southeast Asia’s art, in this essay I have chosen to draw exclusively on sources emerging from or explicitly related to the region, and thereby to center and amplify work being done in and on this part of the world.¹⁰ Like many commentators and practitioners engaged with Southeast Asia, I view the region not as a fixed geography but instead as a dispersed imaginary that is—in the words of curator and art historian Patrick D. Flores—“in the process of constant forming” and always contingently connected with “the vaster world of which it is a vital part.”¹¹

* * *

In the paintings discussed above, Svay Ken mediates his early encounters with curators; by contrast, more recently another generation of artists has mediated their own experiences and understandings of the curatorial. 

Curators are individuals, often working for institutions; in Southeast Asia, many of them feel that they must “play different roles” to “build our own infrastructure” through various forms of what Bill Nguyễn calls “engagement, facilitation and attention.”¹² In turn, the curatorial is a method, a practice, and a mode of thinking. In Flores’s articulation, the curatorial is “able to simultaneously particularize and generalize.”¹³ Thus, the curatorial may be practiced by curators, but it nonetheless transcends the individual and the institutional. 

An exemplary case is 82 131 39, an installation initiated by the Hanoi-based Nhà Sàn Collective (est. 2013) in homage to their predecessors, an artist-run collective space called Nhà Sàn Studio (1998–2010), which was also located in Hanoi (fig. 4). Although the installation is credited to several makers, chief among them is Mẹ Lương (Lê Thị Lương): Her kitchen table—whose physical dimensions inspired the title—is at its heart, and she curated the accompanying cookbook, which is illustrated by other artists.¹⁴ Beyond this physical facticity, the installation imaginatively mobilizes the kitchen table, cooking equipment, dishes, and stools as a fertile allegory for the hospitality and affective labor that underpin artistic and curatorial practice. 

The installation was made for and first shown in the 2017 exhibition Spirit of Friendship, which focused on “artist groups” like Nhà Sàn Studio and Nhà Sàn Collective. The curators Zoe Butt, Bill Nguyễn, and Lê Thiên Bảo describe the project as seeking “to highlight the role and contribution of artist friendships in furthering the development of experimental languages in Vietnam, since 1975.”¹⁵ A text made to accompany 82 131 39 begins by introducing Nhà Sàn Studio: 

Considered one of North Vietnam’s most resilient independent art spaces, over the last two decades Nhà Sàn has continuously shape-shifted and endured the challenges brought about by both the artistic and social landscape of Vietnam, never once ceasing to maintain its status as a ‘home for the arts’ and a haven for the odd ones out in Hanoi; having nurtured generations of artists, while always keeping its doors open to those inspired enough to step in.¹⁶

This statement insistently and insightfully aligns resilience with nurturing, emphasizing hospitality as a cornerstone of creative practice and community. These enmeshed qualities—which are both affective and embodied—are then related to the curatorial, as the text continues: 

As the status of art and artists in Vietnam today continues to be challenged (i.e., more and more we see artists responding to both past and present historical issues with their work), similarly the practice of the curator is expanding as a necessary role. The specificity of the sociopolitical and educational contexts of Vietnam means that a curator is to take on a myriad of other roles besides just an exhibition maker—as a study partner who shares knowledge, researches and debates with artists; and a mediator who negotiates and connects artists with the public, the authorities and other agents in the cultural field. It is no longer about what or who to curate, but rather, how.¹⁷

With this context of the enlarged and layered function and reflexivity of the curatorial established, the culinary materials used in the installation are explained as being not only supplementary to curation, but also more profoundly connected to the practice and discourse of the curatorial: 

Nhà Sàn Collective proposes a different look into the (grand) history of Nhà Sàn by presenting one of the often undiscussed micro-histories of Mẹ Lương (wife of Nguyễn Mạnh Hùng, one of the cofounders of Nhà Sàn Studio) and her kitchen space. Lovingly called “mẹ” (mother) by all, Mẹ Lương welcomes, cooks and tends to all artists, visitors, or any passersby; her motherly presence maintaining the organic and family-oriented soil upon which Nhà Sàn exists and flourishes. Her kitchen space is . . . enabling the more private and humble, but no less significant chitchats to take place. Inviting Mẹ Lương to use her kitchen space and self-curated cookbook as source materials, Nhà Sàn Collective metaphorically points to, and reiterates, what it means to make art and to be artists in the context of Vietnam today, while continuing their own legacy in further complicating and opening up our (as well as their own) perceptions of the other forms that art, art history, and curation can take.¹⁸

This statement makes clear that 82 131 39 is not only an artistic mediation of the curatorial, but also a meditation on the corporeal and maternal labors of sustenance and care that underpin all forms of creative and critical practice, including the work done by artists and curators. As well as prizing “more private and humble” exchanges within creative communities, the installation positions that practice as productively contingent and perpetually fluctuant. 

The installation was positioned near the heart of the Spirit of Friendship exhibition, with Mẹ Lương’s cookbook displayed on the same wall as paintings and other more conventional artworks (fig. 4). This unassuming yet effective gesture proffers the possibility that although artists’ encounters with curators may be fraught—as Svay Ken’s paintings make palpably plain—they offer abundant potential for affinities. Respect, sincerity, hospitality, care, and sustained engagement may be some of the necessary foundations for the curatorial to be experienced—and artistically mediated—as generative, and even generous, as opposed to extractive. 

* * * 

The labors and cares of artists and curators often overlap. As noted above, the figure of the artist-curator has been particularly prominent in Southeast Asia and important in the development of the region’s contemporary art and its dispersal into other discourses, including those in the North and the West. Nhà Sàn Collective epitomizes an increasingly prevalent mode of practice, one that is both artistic and curatorial. The distinctions between these modes of “critical activity” have begun to dissolve in recent years. But what are some antecedents of this conjoining of the artistic and the curatorial? How have artists mediated their own practices in contexts without well-developed infrastructures? 

Svay Ken offers some answers to these questions. When he began painting, less than 15 years after the end of the genocide that annihilated Cambodia’s artists and intellectuals, the country still had almost no galleries in which to exhibit contemporary artworks, almost no art market, and almost no other infrastructural supports for “critical activity.” The memory of violence—which Svay Ken also painted early on (fig. 5)—was still fresh. 

In stark contrast to painted scenes of violence, I Showed Guests at the Swimming Pool My Paintings (2001) offers a record of Svay Ken’s early experience of showing and selling his artworks to guests at the luxury hotel in which he worked (fig. 6). 

In a substantial and detailed autobiographical text, Svay Ken recalls the scene: “When foreign guests came now and then to swim in the pool of the hotel, I would take my pictures and try to show them to them. Some guests were annoyed and didn’t want to look, but others who loved art looked at my paintings and smiled, praising the pictures.”¹⁹

Looking at I Showed Guests at the Swimming Pool My Paintings, it is impossible to discern whether the pink-skinned man to whom Svay Ken is showing his painting is a guest who feels “annoyed and didn’t want to look” or is instead someone “who loved art” and was “praising the pictures.” What is unmistakable, however, is that the artist is resolute in his determination not only to make art, but also to make it public, to mediate its reception, and to textually annotate these procedures. 

Thus Svay Ken was a curator of his own artwork. That he chose to memorialize and historicize this experience among all of the other moments that made up his turbulent life indicates that it was meaningful to him. The curatorial was, for Svay Ken, not only a form of “critical activity” but also a kind of becoming, even of liberation. From him, we still have a lot to learn.

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Morocco’s first fine arts school, L’Institut national des beaux-arts (The National Institute of Fine Arts; hereafter INBA), is located in Tetouan—a city in the northern region known as the Rif (fig. 1). The school was founded in 1946 by the Spanish colonial government as La Escuela preparatoria de bellas artes (The Preparatory School of Fine Arts; hereafter EPBA) and served as part of military dictator Francisco Franco’s mission to formulate a more positive image abroad after the Spanish Civil War (1936–39).¹ While fine arts courses were offered in primary schools during the French and Spanish protectorate era (1912–56), the EPBA, led by the Spanish painter Mariano Bertuchi Nieto (1884–1955), was the first of its kind to provide Moroccans with the opportunity to extensively study fine arts, obtain scholarships to study abroad, and envision a career as an artist or fine arts instructor (fig. 2).² To this day, Bertuchi is recognized by many Tetouanis as the “Spiritual Father” of “La Escuela Pictórica de Tetuán” (The Pictorial School of Tetouan) or “La Escuela de Tetuán” (The Tetouan School)—labels coined by Spanish art critics Carlos Antonio Areán González and Dora Bacaïcoa on the occasion of a group exhibition of Tetouani artists at the Ateneo de Madrid in 1967.³

In the 1950s, the best Moroccan students having completed their studies at the EPBA were awarded scholarships by the Spanish government to continue their education at institutions such as Madrid’s Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando or Seville’s Royal Academy of Fine Arts of Saint Isabel of Hungary.⁴ As in most of the formerly colonized world, the first group of artists studying in Europe—equipped with fine arts as a tool for building a “modern civilization”—returned home to their newly independent country to spearhead a “cultural renaissance.”⁵ In Spain, Franco maintained a conservative environment and retrograde cultural agenda throughout his dictatorial reign (1939–75).⁶ In higher education, he eliminated “decadent” influences, foreign emulation, Russophilia, effeminacy, and the dehumanization of art and literature, instead looking to Spain’s Golden Age, or the neoclassical eras of the 16th through 18th centuries, as models for the artistic values he encouraged.⁷ As a result, the environment in which Tetouan’s modern painters studied was a restrictive one in that all personal freedom of thinking and imagination had been eliminated.⁸ According to scholar Fernando Labrada Martín, individual creative pursuits were undertaken only after students had developed a sound academic foundation at one of the Spanish art academies.⁹ In addition to cultural conservatism, Franco promoted education in “practical and utilitarian fields” to prepare students for nation-building. As a result, Moroccan students also obtained teaching degrees and were, for the first time, equipped to professionalize themselves as instructors of fine arts.¹⁰

While the INBA’s contemporary artists have gained attention in the art market and the international exhibition circuit, the school’s modern period, which I designate as the 1950s through the 1970s, remains largely an enigma. Contemporary artists from Tetouan are therefore presented as if emerging from a void.¹¹ The Francophone hegemony of Morocco’s cultural discourse has centered Casablanca’s modern artists, while Tetouan’s cultural scene has been superficially discussed, sidelined, or absent altogether.¹² Artists such as Ahmed Amrani (b. 1942), Saâd Ben Cheffaj (b. 1939), and Meki Megara (1933–2009) not only trained at the colonial-era EPBA, but they also became instructors at the ENBA in the postindependence period. Mohamed Sarghini (1923–1991) would bypass the preparatory school to become the first Moroccan to enroll at a European art academy. He then returned to Tetouan to serve as the school’s first Moroccan director. Meriem Meziane (1930–2009) would also bypass the EPBA and become the first Moroccan woman to enroll at an art academy abroad. Though she never taught or studied at the Tetouan art school, her trailblazing career as a woman artist is important to Tetouan’s art history.¹³ Their work, among that of many others, shows that Moroccan modern art is multifaceted—both within a Tetouani context and on a national scale. In their personal practices, they experimented with a diversity of formal styles, thereby breaking away from the conservatism for which the Tetouan art school was known.

After Morocco’s independence in 1956, Spanish instructors and students gradually departed the school, and Sarghini began his tenure as director—a post he held until 1986. To consolidate the institution into the larger national project, King Mohammed V re-inaugurated the EPBA as L’Ecole nationale des beaux-arts (The National School of Fine Arts; hereafter ENBA) in 1957 (fig. 3). The immediate postindependence period has been described as a time of “Moroccanization” or “valorization of Moroccan identity,” with the end goal of creating a “purely” Moroccan school through the appointment of a Moroccan director and enrollment of a Moroccan student body.¹⁴ Unlike at Casablanca’s art school, where Farid Belkahia (1934–2014) became director in 1962 and led his peers through a pedagogical overhaul, the ENBA maintained an approach to fine arts inherited from Spain. I argue that there are many reasons for the ENBA’s slow shift away from the metropole of Madrid. Tetouan, and the greater Rif region, was disenfranchised by the central Moroccan government in the years immediately after independence—leaving it politically, socially, and culturally disconnected. One response to this subjugation is the Rif Revolts of 1958, which shaped the conditions under which the institution evolved.¹⁵

Despite this turmoil, the decades following independence in Morocco were a time of openness and study in search of emancipation due to the atmosphere of cultural and patriotic movement.¹⁶ It was a moment of renewed energy and creativity, with debates over authenticity playing a central role in artistic circles. Bouabid Bouzaid (b. 1953), an alumnus of the art school and later an instructor there, wrote that this was a difficult stage in the country’s history as many first- and second-generation artists were preoccupied with the question of originality, how to define modernity, and the search for identity.¹⁷

Art historian María Dolores Jimenéz Valiente wrote that after independence, the ENBA maintained Bertuchi’s pedagogical model, albeit with slight modifications including an increase in courses, workshops, and teaching hours.¹⁸ From the 1960s onward, course load and study hours increased from 16 to 45 hours per week.¹⁹ Students completed preparatory coursework across drawing, anatomy, art history, decorative arts, and perspective before choosing a specialty in their second or third year.²⁰ The most significant change, perhaps as part of the king’s nationalization project, was that the school was now recognized at the secondary education level, thereby affording students the opportunity to receive a diploma at the end of their three-year study. 

In Casablanca, Belkahia and his peers believed that arts education in Morocco at the onset of independence was deficient, incompatible with the needs of Moroccans, and shaped by imported, outdated colonial models. Indeed, they referred to it as “backward” and “bastardized.”²¹ Mohamed Chabâa (1935–2013) lamented that colonialism had “corrupted” Moroccan society’s taste, while Jilali Gharbaoui (1930–1971) believed that Moroccan arts education was “incomplete” and failed to teach students “how to see.”²² The artists associated with Casablanca’s art school had a very different experience from those in Tetouan. In the 1960s and 1970s, the former led a pedagogical overhaul, moving away from fine arts teachings inherited from Europe and toward a greater exposure to local Moroccan arts and crafts, particularly the visual culture of the Imazighen, in order to form an inherently Moroccan visual culture.²³

Although the ENBA’s pedagogy remained unchanged, its first generation of artists was equally preoccupied with formal innovation and a quest for a Moroccan identity in their individual artistic practices. In the colonial period, emphasis on Orientalist subject matter or stereotypical scenes of daily life depicting an unchanged, timeless Morocco akin to Spain’s Andalusian past were used as mythmaking and propaganda to justify Spain’s presence in northern Morocco.²⁴ By the postindependence period, it can be argued that Sarghini, Meziane, Megara, Ben Cheffaj, and Amrani continued painting scenes of local people, heritage, folklore, and landscapes as a strategy in their search for national identity. They drew from a multitude of formal approaches and image traditions, including Islamic calligraphy, ancient mythology, cosmology, abstraction, and figuration, as well as from Cubism and Expressionism. They synthesized their local culture with forms inherited from multiple sources, thereby affirming Tetouanis as artists in a modern, connected world. For the sake of space, this essay will highlight several examples, but it is in no way intended to be an exhaustive review of all the artists associated with the institution and the city’s artistic scene. 

As the ENBA’s first Moroccan director, Sarghini is a central figure in Tetouan’s modern art history (fig. 4). Despite his role as an administrator and upholder of colonial-era fine arts pedagogy, he was experimenting with radically new forms to represent his culture and identity. In his 1958 Cortège de mariée (Bridal Procession), for example, he depicted a wedding procession through a natural landscape (fig. 5). Sarghini has reduced figures, animals, and objects to geometric forms—to triangles, rhombi, ovals—straying from academic realism and instead utilizing a daring formal approach. His subjects appear to chaotically merge with the tranquil background. Ultimately, Sarghini’s Cortège de mariée borrows the compositional structure and subject matter of Orientalist paintings only to deconstruct them. 

This geometric rendering can also be found in L’homme et son univers (Man and His Universe), an existential painting created just one year after Morocco declared its independence (fig. 6). At the center of the composition, a man stands alone, dressed in Moroccan attire, appearing to float in front of a mass of multicolored shapes. He looks directly at us through eyes made of dark black brushstrokes, while his hands and feet blend into a geometric background composed of colored blocks. Sarghini’s more cubist approach here emphasizes the two-dimensionality of the canvas and reduces, fractures, analyzes, and rearranges his subject, thereby presenting a new way of seeing. By the mid-to-late 1960s, his work had become increasingly abstract.

Like Sarghini, Meriem Meziane bypassed training at Tetouan’s EPBA to directly enroll in 1953 at Madrid’s Royal Academy of Arts. Born in Melilla, a Spanish enclave on the African continent connected to northeast Morocco by a land border, Meziane came from a prominent military family, a privileged position that undoubtedly granted her this institutional access. Despite this, she is considered a key figure in Tetouan’s art history—a reflection of the specificity of Tetouan’s artistic milieu. Indeed, the art community in Tetouan was relatively small and tightly knit, and so artists were integrated into its history not only through formal training or teaching, but also through sustained presence—through friendships, regular exhibitions, and active participation in the local scene. Meziane, who had a studio in the nearby Spanish enclave of Ceuta during this period, was deeply embedded in the artistic network.²⁵ She also was the first Moroccan artist in Tetouan to ever have a gallery exhibition, making her undoubtedly an important part of the city’s artistic ecosystem. It is important to distinguish between the institution itself and what has been more loosely described by Areán and Bacaïcoa as the “Tetouan School” or “Pictorial School of Tetouan”—a critical category akin to the Casablanca Group, also known as the Casablanca School—that designates a broader artistic tendency rather than a formal affiliation with the ENBA. 

Much like Sarghini, Meziane monumentalized the commonplace. According to art historian Samir El Azhar, Morocco is omnipresent in her paintings—particularly the beauty of its landscape, the generosity of its people, and its ancestral traditions.²⁶ Meziane was especially interested in women’s performance of social, ritual, and festive activities and borrowed her subjects, colors, and forms from her home in the Rif Mountains.²⁷ Art historian Mohamed Adib Slaoui has noted that her “realistic” paintings were particularly focused on Imazighen, jbali (people of the mountains), and Tetouani women and their costumes, jewelry, and social traditions, thereby giving the work a special “ethnographic and cultural vision.”²⁸ One such example is the Jebilat painting from 1950 in the permanent collection of the Mohamed VI Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMVI) in Rabat (fig. 7). Farmworkers were a common motif in modern painting across the Arab world, and here, Meziane presents them as the backbone of a newly independent Morocco.²⁹ According to Meziane, she wished to reflect her country in her work, especially “people of my own kind, of my own race, born between the Mediterranean and Black Africa who illustrate a great ethnographic richness including all aspects of Africa, Arab, and Berber civilizations . . . a picture that is born and ends in Morocco.”³⁰

Meziane has noted that her decision to study in Madrid’s art academy was due to her desire to adopt the “figurative style” that remained a dominant artistic approach throughout her career.³¹ While loyal to figuration, she also included more experimental formal elements in her work. In an undated oil painting titled Femmes à la fenêtre (Women at the Window), she has presented a landscape that moves away from realism, favoring a more geometric style (fig. 8). The colors are bold and exaggerated, with each element of the scene heavily outlined and brushstrokes left visible. On the left-hand side of the composition, two women in white headscarves and monochromatic dresses stand side by side, one gazing outward, the other turned inward with anxiety. We can interpret this painting as a commentary on the role of women in the newly independent nation, with the seemingly anxious woman serving as a metaphor for Morocco’s past while the woman in orange represents a more optimistic future, one in which Morocco is fertile, lush, and blossoming. We can also interpret these women as symbols, or guarantors, of future generations.

The artist Meki Megara utilized a variety of formal approaches, including the artistic tendency known as hurufiyya, or “letterism,” which merged modernist abstraction with Arabic calligraphy. He was consistently in dialogue with other Arab artists throughout the 1950s and 1970s via pan-Arab conferences, biennials, and exhibitions. Of all Tetouani modern painters, Megara was perhaps the one most championed by Spanish art critics and media outlets (fig. 9). They often presented him as the perfect example of the compatibility between so-called Moroccan sensibilities, such as calligraphy, and Spanish training. Scholar and friend of the artist M’hammed Benaboud has described Megara as “always open to the West but his life was a typical Tetouani one.”³² In his 1973 text Cinco momentos en cien años de arte español: 1874–1973, Areán expresses that what is most interesting about Arab artists like Megara is that “they all master the European ways of processing matter, eroding it, and applying it with refinement”; they use “occidental” techniques yet maintain “a deep-rooted loyalty to the Arab spirit.”³³ He goes on to present Megara as an artist familiar with Spain and the “technical procedures” that “any good European painter” would know but ultimately a “man of the Islamic world” who is naturally and innately “concerned with calligraphic ease and the free flow of lines.”³⁴ This is arguably a simplistic and essentialist reading of his work. Placed in the context of postindependence Morocco, Megara’s work is radical in its engagement with artistic trends of the larger Arab world and its break from academicism. 

Saâd Ben Cheffaj, who was particularly concerned with conveying a unique Mediterranean identity, has often described himself as “of the Mediterranean”—rather than African, Arab, or Moroccan.³⁵ I view his adoption of religious iconography and signs and symbols of the ancient civilizations as a desire for mythmaking in order to equate Tetouani identity with a sophisticated Mediterranean culture. By associating with ancient civilizations, Ben Cheffaj is aligning himself with the Western world and its artistic canon—a subject he taught at ENBA (fig. 10).³⁶ He adopted figuration, expressionism, neorealism, and abstraction while exploring this unique subject matter. In the mixed-media work Composition from 1976, we see Ben Cheffaj’s signature style combining nude figures and references to ancient mythology emerge for the first time (fig. 11). The composition is structured in four sections: In the upper right, the repeated word “Amosis” references the Egyptian pharaoh, while pyramidal forms appear below. To the left, a statuesque female profile recalls the stylization of Minoan frescoes. Ben Cheffaj’s choice of subject matter aligns him with pan-Arab artistic trends of the time. Artists of the modern period were looking to ancient civilizations and regionalism; Lebanese excavated Phoenician culture, while Egyptian artists referenced the Pharaonic past.

Last but certainly not least, Ahmed Amrani is perhaps the most enigmatic figure of this generation. After returning to Morocco in 1965, he began teaching drawing, and by 1976, he had been named deputy director of ENBA, a position he held until 1984, when he left to assume his new role as director of Tetouan’s Ethnographic Museum. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Amrani’s work was the most politically charged and formally diverse of all his peers. His painting Protesta (1969)—the subject of my forthcoming monograph with Anthem Press—was a response to the Rif Revolts. I argue that other paintings, such as Adelante (1979) and Palestina (1978), serve as expressions of solidarity with the Palestinian cause and as metaphors for domestic turmoil in Morocco during the Years of Lead (1962–99).³⁷ In 1979, with the help of Bouzaid, Abdelkrim Ouazzani (b. 1954), and Habiba Bouhoumou, Amrani would launch the Spring Exhibitions in Tetouan, thereby introducing installation art to the city and changing the course of the institution for good.³⁸ 

Moroccan art critics and art historians have not been kind to Tetouan’s modern artists. In his seminal text Peinture et identité, Khalil M’Rabet deems the alumni of the school “hispanized” in their training and comments that “in the end . . . nothing special stands out, except that each one aims at a personal style.”³⁹ He goes on to argue that Tetouan’s artists were “more connected to the metropole [Madrid] than to the rest of Morocco. It is not by chance that ‘The School of Tetouan’ was for years pampered in isolation.”⁴⁰ M’Rabet’s belief that “nothing special stands out” is an example of a popular pervasive attitude among Moroccan curators, collectors, and critics that Tetouan’s art school is “conservative,” “an island,” and even “a prison” where artists regurgitated a Spanish style of art-making.⁴¹ For Mohammed Melehi (1936–2020), who studied at the EPBA before becoming a central figure in the Casablanca Group, what he and his peers were doing was a “far cry from the decrepit academic dogma” found in Tetouan’s art school.⁴² These words portray Tetouani artists as not upholding the celebratory narrative of the decolonial artist that has come to be expected of those working in postcolonial contexts. 

The Tetouan art school’s slow transition away from the conservative arts pedagogy inherited from Spain coupled with the Rif region’s disenfranchisement by the state are reasons why the city’s modern artists have been understudied, misinterpreted, and sidelined in Morocco’s national art history. Although artists like Megara, Ben Cheffaj, Amrani, and others were experimenting in their own work, as demonstrated above, a pedagogical shift at the institution did not take place until the 1990s, when a young Faouzi Laatiris (b. 1958) launched his Volume and Installation workshop in 1993. Tetouan’s artists of the 1950s through 1970s, with their diversity of formal approaches, demonstrate that Moroccan modernism is multifaceted and challenge the singular definition of Moroccan modernism that has prevailed in the rapidly developing historiography of the past few decades. 

Every effort has been made to contact the copyright holders for Figures 3 and 8 in this article. If you hold the rights to any of the material used and have not been contacted, please reach out to contact_c-map@moma.org so that proper credit can be attributed or the material removed.

The post An Alternative Moroccan Modernism: Tetouan’s National School of Fine Arts from Independence to the 1970s appeared first on post.

Ananya Sikand: Vrishchik, which means “scorpion,” was a little magazine that you founded and edited with Bhupen Khakhar in Baroda. Published monthly or bimonthly from 1969 to 1973, it featured an array of content including poems, stories, critical essays, and folios of printed artworks.

In her 2001 article “Signatures of Dissent,” Geeta Kapur notes that Vrishchik “spoke in the many voices of those artists, critics, [and] poets” that it spotlighted, serving as an active forum for contemporary artistic and literary expressions as well as a catalyst for artists’ views on their field, on art institutions, and on social concerns.¹ Sheikh Sir, as you’ve noted in the past, Vrishchik was the need of the day, as there were hardly any communication channels through which artists could speak and raise issues at the time. To get started, could you speak about the story behind the name of the publication and about its form and materiality.

Gulammohammed Sheikh: You have rightly noted that there was a dire need for a communication channel among the artists of India, since there was only one journal—Lalit Kala Contemporary—which was very irregular. There was no other channel through which we could communicate with one another. This was an issue that bothered many of us.

I was with friends at our home in the Residency Bungalow in Baroda. About six or seven people had come for a party, and we were discussing this, and we all agreed we should do something about it. One thought was to bring out a journal, and everybody agreed wholeheartedly—but then asked, “How do we do it?”

Let me give you some background. When I was in England, I had become aware of small magazines published across the world. I used to go to bookshops and find publications by small presses, including collections of poems—such as Allen Ginsberg’s Howl. These were not well-known publishers; sometimes they were just individuals publishing their own work.

In India, the poet Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, who lived in Bombay in those days, had started a small journal called Damn You—a radical literary journal with a critical take on what was going on. Then J. Swaminathan, another artist and friend, brought out a journal called Contra from Delhi. He raised a number of concerns in Contra—mainly about the National Art Academy, the Lalit Kala Akademi (LKA), and its functioning. The LKA was a government-sponsored organization whose members were nominated by the government, and we all felt there was insufficient representation of artists from across India. Vrishchik took up this subject at a later stage.

But let me start with how we began. The first issue was printed at a press in Baroda called Miraj Printery, where I once had a catalogue printed. We asked them if they could print directly from a linoleum block, which they were unfamiliar with but agreed to do. In those days, printing blocks were made of zinc, fixed on a wooden block, and then printed on a letterpress with movable type. Each letter of every word had to be set by hand before the page could be run through the press with a roller. 

We chose brown packing paper because it was cheap and because we loved the color. Printing on tinted paper was far more interesting than printing on white. I had previous experience using lino blocks while working on a Gujarati literary journal called Kshitij (1959–67), which was edited by my literary mentor Suresh Joshi. For a journal of limited resources, I devised a method of producing original prints by taking linoleum to Baroda-based artists—K. G. Subramanyan, my teacher, and Jyoti Bhatt, my senior—and having them hand-cut the block. I would then mount it on a wooden block of the same gauge as a letterpress block so that the hand-cut lino could be printed on the letterpress. This meant that 500 copies could be printed at once, and the lino block remained undamaged. The advantage was that it was an original linocut print that could be made available to 500 people simultaneously. I used to go to the press and sit there while each issue was being printed, checking every copy to see whether the print came out well, whether the ink showed through on the back of the page—which sometimes happened with poor printing in those days. You had to learn to work with the printers to bring out the best result. This is the approach we brought to Vrishchik. 

As we were discussing possible names for the journal, somebody asked, “What is your rashi—your zodiac sign?” It turned out that four people in our larger group were Scorpios, including my wife, Nilima. We thought it was a good idea to call it “Scorpion” because it could have its own life—and a little sting. So Vrishchik emerged, and we put a linocut of a scorpion designed by my friend Vinod Ray Patel on the cover (fig. 1).

The purpose of Vrishchik was to reach out not only to visual artists but also to artists of all denominations. We made a list of filmmakers, writers, painters, etc., of about 250 people, and thought we’d just send it out.

The first issue had six pages. Bhupen [Khakhar], my coeditor, produced a little gem of notes on the visual scene, mocking and relishing popular taste—he called them “visual notes.” Geeta Kapur contributed a poem. Would you believe it? Arvind [Krishna Mehrotra] shared a poem from a series about his wife called “Bacchi Chakra.” After that, poems appeared in several issues. On the last page, I wrote a short editorial about current events. As you know, 1969 was a period of great upheaval because of the communal riots that were raging in Ahmedabad and Baroda and causing great turbulence across Gujarat. I began my first write-up by reflecting on the situation that prevailed at that time—a rumination called “Afternoon.”

Suresh Joshi had written [an essay] on the poet Rajvi Patel—one of the finest Gujarati poets of my generation—which had originally been commissioned by the journal Books Abroad. We reprinted it in the second issue. For the third issue, Vinod Ray designed another cover—this one featuring a hippie-like man and woman with their hair down; both had bodies of scorpions (fig. 2). That issue included writings on cinema, including a delightful riposte by Bhupen in Gujarati on Bollywood films (this was the only non-English write-up in Vrishchik) as well as drawings by an artist friend of my generation, Nagji Patel.

Lucy Gallun: Could you point out some of the contributors to the early issues of the magazine—the types of things they were wanting to circulate among the community and what you chose to include, as you have already started to do. 

GMS: I ran a little office from my home, writing letters to poet friends, writer friends, painter friends, telling them about Vrishchik. Those who received my letters became interested in contributing. Initially, only artists and writers based in Baroda contributed. But later on, I met, for example, a visiting Greek writer who had written about the coup in Athens. I asked to read her piece and found it worthy of publication. She agreed but wanted her identity concealed and chose the pseudonym Erato—the piece was called “A Greek Story.” Vinod Ray made an illustration to accompany it.

Then Bhupen and I were up to some mischief. We decided to buy a popular landscape poster—the kind sold on footpaths—roughly double the size of Vrishchik. We bought 200 or 300 copies and, on the blank reverse side, concocted a dialogue between an artist and an art critic. We came down rather heavily on absurd stories circulating among artists about their role and that of art critics and criticism. It was part gossip, part serious critique, and as expected, it angered many people. We thought it was a way of communicating with our community with no holds barred. We received a number of letters in response; some enjoyed the tongue in cheek humor, but others found it hard to stomach.

The subsequent issue reproduced letters from GIs in Vietnam. It was followed by an issue featuring a dialogue on the state of contemporary printmaking between Jagmohan Chopra, who started Group 8 in Delhi, Bishamber Khanna, Zarina, Jyoti Bhatt, and me. This issue carried ten prints by the aforementioned artists and by K. G. Subramanyan, Jeram Patel, Bhupen, and Anupam Sud—all well-known artists of the day. 

After that, Arvind sent a long poem “Song of the Rolling Earth,” which we published. Adil Jussawalla, another well-known poet, submitted a poem called “Dog.” I wrote “Miniature Purana”—a critical view of how art history in India was being written at the time. 

In issues that followed, we focused on saint poetry. I came across translations by Arun Kolatkar—a bilingual poet who translated Muktabai, Janabai, and Namdev—and was deeply moved by them. My favorite poem, by Janabai, goes:

I eat God 
I drink God 
I sleep on God 
I buy God 
I count God 
I deal with God 
God is here
God is there
Void is not devoid of God 
God is within
God is without
And moreover, there is God to spare.

Arvind had also begun translating the great 15th- and 16th-century poet Kabir. One of his best poems, in Arvind’s translation, reads:

The kings shall go, so will their pretty queens
Courtiers and all proud ones shall go
Pandits chanting the Vedas shall go and go with those who listen to them
Masochist yogis and bright intellectuals shall go
Go the moon and the sun and the water and wind
Thus, only those can remain whose minds are tied to the rocks.

My friend Gieve Patel—the painter, poet, and playwright—had visited Baroda in the early 1960s and met Suresh Joshi, who had written on the Gujarati medieval poet called Vasto. Gieve sat with Joshi, took extensive notes about translating Vasto, and from these notes, produced three poems, which we also published.

The next issues raised the question of the impending Triennale—the international exhibition planned by the LKA (fig. 3). Many issues were devoted to artists’ letters questioning the relevance of the Triennale. Artists from all over the country wrote in with their views on the impending event—K. G. Subramanyan from Baroda; Pranab Ranjan Ray from Calcutta; Krishen Khanna, Swaminathan, and Roshan Alkazi from Delhi; K. K. Hebbar from Karnataka; and Akbar Padamsee from Bombay. Eventually the Triennale did take place—along with protests and controversy. Vrishchik became a forum for protests against the LKA and its reform. Most of us boycotted the Triennale and the LKA, and so the government was obliged to appoint a commission of inquiry headed by Justice Khosla. After traveling around the country to consult artists, [Khosla’s] suggestion was that the LKA implement a process by which artists themselves elect representatives to serve on its general council.

These issues also raised other questions—such as the implications of internationalism. Geeta wrote on this subject, and Vivan Sundaram, her partner at a later stage, wrote a rejoinder. We published both. So, these conversations on the Triennale and on what kind of internationalism India should have eventually led to the reformation of the LKA.

Our main interest was to arouse awareness of issues within the artist community. We were dealing with multiple generations of artists who were active in those days—K. K. Hebbar and Krishen Khanna belonged to the first generation, Swaminathan and I to the next, and then there were younger artists. The basic purpose of Vrishchik was to create that kind of awareness across generations. 

Lanka Tattersall: Could you tell us a little more about the state of printmaking in Baroda, which you mentioned was the focus of one of the issues?

GMS: In Baroda, printmaking was an important part of the syllabus right from the beginning—from the 1950s onward. Students of painting took printmaking as a subsidiary subject. I learned printmaking in the graphic arts department of the Faculty [of Fine Arts]. The Smithsonian Institution hosted a printmaking workshop in Delhi in 1970, inviting 100 artists from across India and providing facilities to work on the best papers and zinc plates. Over a month, we learned etching and aquatint under Paul Lingren. On returning to Baroda, I bought an etching press, set it up in my home, and worked on a series. Jyoti Bhatt took to printmaking intensively, and it eventually turned out to be his principal métier. Others who took to printmaking and produced exceptional works were Laxma Goud, Devraj Dakoji, D. L. N. Reddy, and Purushottam and Rini Dhumal—all of whom worked at the Faculty under the guidance of N. B. Joglekar, who headed the graphic arts department.

AS: As additional context, each handcrafted issue of Vrishchik was supplemented by a free original artwork—modest in scale—whether a linocut, woodcut, or lithograph. Sheikh Sir, could you speak further on the artworks that accompanied each issue?

GMS: I had seen four issues of Contra that printed artworks using machine-made blocks. This made me think that Vrishchik could introduce linocuts, woodcuts, and other printmaking mediums. So, while we printed an artwork on the cover, we also included a loose copy of it inside Vrishchik—so that those who wanted could mount and preserve it or put it on display.

As for how Vrishchik was produced: as I said earlier, I was running a little office from my own home, writing letters, keeping correspondence in big files, and sometimes getting my students to help. We had 500 copies per issue, and 250 to 300 had to be sent out, which meant writing addresses, stuffing printed copies in envelopes, and posting them all—which was conducted entirely from the Residency Bungalow. I enjoyed it. I asked Bhupen to handle the accounts, which he did—he was a chartered accountant.

The press we used from the third issue onward, 3-A Associates, was run by N. B. Joglekar and he was amenable to any kind of experiment we wanted to try. First, we gave him linocuts to print. Then I said, “Mr. Joglekar, you also have an offset press.” Offset is like lithography but on a plate—you draw directly on the plate. So, Bhupen and I and others made drawings right there, which were then transferred and printed. Bhupen made a drawing of a tailor, among others (fig. 4).

LG: You’ve discussed your office at the bungalow, working with Bhupen Khakhar, the head of the graphics department, who served as printer, and your students helping with the mailing. Could you say more about the setting at MSU Baroda—and at the same time, your relationship to other artists in other cities, particularly Bombay, given our group has been discussing the art scene there at length?

GMS: As you know, the artist community in India is like an extended family—we all knew each other. I used to travel to Bombay, meet friends there, see their exhibitions, and the same applied to Delhi. I had also been to Santiniketan, to Calcutta, and to several other places. I had personal friendships with many artists, so I asked them for contributions for Vrishchik, and they offered willingly.

LG: Was there something specific about Baroda that enabled this kind of journal to happen in a particular way?

GMS: Baroda was very special among art schools in India at that time. It was one of the most liberal institutions, which allowed all kinds of activities, and we had students from all walks of life and sections of society.

The pioneers of the Faculty had Gandhian ideals—of building something they could handle without hankering after what was beyond their means. The institution was built on basics: painting, which needed a good studio; sculpture, which needed casting facilities; printmaking, which needed an etching press, a litho press etc.; and art history, [which was] taught to every student regardless of department. The Story of Art—a history of world art—which I taught for almost eighteen years was key to every student’s education. I had very young and bright students; they included Vivan, who came from the elite Doon School, while others came from small towns and tribal hinterlands. I taught the Story of Art in English for degree students and in Hindi for diploma students. At some stage, students who knew I was Gujarati asked why I didn’t teach it in Gujarati, so then I taught three classes on the same subject. In the first, Vivan would bring up Jackson Pollock; in the second, students only knew what was happening in their part of India; and in the third, some had not even heard of the Mona Lisa. That was the big challenge—how to teach all of them. It opened my eyes to the diversity of the world of artists coming to the Faculty.

But I will also go back to my background. I grew up in a small town called Surendranagar in Gujarat, where I started writing poetry, drawing, and painting. In those days it was customary for good schools to have a hand-painted, handwritten annual journal. One of my teachers—a poet who led me to write in Gujarati—decided to make such a journal to be placed in the public library every week. He decided that we would produce it together. We went to the Khadi Bhandar—khadi is the hand-spun cloth associated with Gandhi—which produced a very rough handmade paper that I enjoyed working on. Today, all artists love such papers because they are resilient and receptive to paint. On them, I would paint the cover, draw the titles of articles, and illustrate a picture story for children, while my teacher wrote short stories, a thought of the day, and poems. This ran for a year when I was about fifteen. I still have some copies—I showed them recently in an exhibition of my printmaking.

Jay Levenson: You mentioned Vrishchik was addressed primarily to artists. Were there also collectors who were involved?

GMS: No. Our list included visual artists, writers, musicians, and filmmakers—about 200 people, many of whom we knew personally. I think there were hardly any collectors in those days. Those who may have collected works by [M. F.] Husain or Krishen Khanna were not accessible to us.

In those days, if we wanted to exhibit, we did it ourselves. No gallery would pick up our work. We took our paintings to Bombay or Delhi, mounted the exhibition ourselves, printed our own catalogues, and tried to sell the work by sitting in the gallery. I remember my first exhibition in Bombay: I had learned from my seniors that canvases had to be rolled up, so all our canvases were rolled. We took our stretchers, bound everything up, and booked a first-class train for the occasion. In Bombay, we couldn’t afford taxis, so we used horse carriages to transport everything to Jehangir Art Gallery, a public gallery that only opened around 11 o’clock. We’d arrive at six in the morning, wait for hours, then unpack our things, put the frames back on the canvases, and mount the show. A carpenter helped, if we could afford one; otherwise we did it ourselves.

As for collectors, I remember that Air India was a major buyer in those days. There was a gentleman called Jal Cowasji who made the rounds of galleries—and everybody would trail him, because he was the main person acquiring work for the airline. By 1969, the situation had improved with a few more galleries, but private galleries were still very few.

Rattanamol Singh Johal: Could you reflect on the relationship between Vrishchik during that very productive period from 1969 to 1973 and your painting practice at the same time. Reading the editorial from the first issue— “Afternoon”—I was struck by how much it resonates with paintings like Returning Home After Long Absence (1969–73; fig. 5) and Speechless City (1975; fig. 6). Could you speak to the threads that connect your poetry, your narrative writing, and your painting?

GMS: All of it—my writing on communalism, on silence, on isolation; my painting; my publishing of Vrishchik—were connected. 

When I returned from England in 1966, I took a long, nearly three-month journey, traveling by road from London to Bombay via Europe—buses, trains, walking, everything. That journey allowed me to discover India, and I began to look at everything with fresh eyes. I remember being on a bus near Jhansi, watching the landscape change as the bus moved so fast that distant trees appeared to rush toward me and mountains shrank. Experiences like this were accumulating. It was also when I felt I should write my memoir. I was on a train heading home to Surendranagar, and on whatever scraps of paper I had, I started scribbling notes on returning home. That memoir in Gujarati is now published, and hopefully an English edition will appear soon.

At the same time, I began the painting Returning Home After Long Absence. My memoir and my painting went hand in hand, opening pages of each other. In the painting, I brought in my mother, images of the town I grew up in, an Islamic backdrop with an image of the Prophet, a big wall—I wrote an entire chapter in my memoir on a wall—and trees, particularly the peepal tree, the Ficus religiosa, which was a beautiful tree that I could see from my window at the Faculty. All these things combined during those years.

By 1973, I was painting both from within myself and from what I saw around me—I painted two works called Man I and Man II (figs. 7, 8). Man I is a metaphorical work in which a man is seated, with his head on his lap. In Man II, a man holds another man [who is tied up] as an object of public display. That was when my eyes opened to the politics of India—which eventually led to Speechless City, painted while the Emergency was in effect. The roots of many paintings that came later were sown during that same period, while I was also publishing Vrishchik and writing poetry. 

AS: I’d like to close by asking about your commitment to multilingualism across your writing, poetry, teaching and publishing practices. 

GMS: I do not really know how to explain it—all three languages come to me naturally. I knew Gujarati because it is my mother tongue, and so if I want to write poetry or creative prose, like my memoir, I choose Gujarati. I learned Hindi on my own—and everyone in India knows some Hindi because of Hindi cinema. And English, I learned in school and college.

Vrishchik was, in part, a kind of lesson for me: It allowed me to polish my English. I did not know English very well at the start, but those four years helped me learn it properly. I was communicating with a large number of people, writing and receiving letters, editing contributions, proofreading—and when Adil or Gieve wrote in perfect English, I had to ensure that every word was printed exactly as they had written it.

All of this was part of my life, [as was] living within a family with my children and Nilima. I cannot really describe myself. I can only say that all of this is part of me—not something I took on as a challenge or as a duty, but something that came naturally. It was all part of my makeup.

Every Indian speaks two or three languages: the local language, Hindi, English or another language. We are plural by nature, multilingual. We think in multiple languages simultaneously. That is the makeup of the average mind, and thus, I am not so different. By writing in multiple languages, I have learned that I have to find myself in each of them.

The C-MAP Bombay/Mumbai Group would like to express its sincere thanks to Gulammohammed Sheikh and to the team at the Asia Art Archive in India for making Vrishchik available to us. The magazine’s various issues can be accessed via the following link.

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

The post On <em>Vrishchik</em>: A Conversation with Gulammohammed Sheikh  appeared first on post.

The Triangle Network is a global network of artists and visual arts organizations that supports professional development and cultural exchange among artists, curators, and other arts professionals worldwide. It was initiated in 1982 by Anthony Caro and Robert Loder in New York City with the first Triangle Artists’ Workshop, and over the next two decades, grew into an international network of workshops using the “Triangle model.” Held in over 20 countries, the workshops put artists in touch with their peers in other countries and relied on donations in kind and grants for funding. The Triangle Arts Trust coordinated workshops internationally and raised funds to develop the network.¹

The following is an edited transcript of a talk by Berry Bickle (fig. 1) delivered at a meeting of the Contemporary and Modern Art Perspectives (C-MAP) Africa group at MoMA in November 2024. Bickle was invited to discuss her role as an organizer of the second Triangle Network Pachipamwe workshop in Zimbabwe (August 12–26, 1989), known as Pachipamwe II, and her subsequent participation in various Triangle Artists’ Workshops in Africa in the 1990s.

I’d like to begin with an introduction to Pachipamwe—both as a project and as it was introduced to fellow Zimbabwean artists and to me.

In 1988, our first gathering, the first Pachipamwe workshop, took place in Murewa, Zimbabwe, about 120 kilometers north of Harare. By way of background, the Triangle [Artists’] Workshops had been initiated in South Africa in 1985. Robert Loder had a network of Zimbabwean friends, including Pat Pearce, a wonderful artist in her own right and an early supporter of Zimbabwean stone sculpture.

In a conversation between Pat and Robert, Robert introduced to Pat the idea of the possibility of a workshop in Zimbabwe. From there, the contact was made with Tapfuma Gutsa, who at that stage had recently graduated from City & Guilds in London and had returned to Zimbabwe—actually returning to live in Murewa. The initiation of the workshop really came about through this triangular relationship between Robert Loder, Pat Pierce, and Tapfuma Gutsa.

We were invited to Murewa, and our host and venue was the Murewa Culture House, which had been built post-independence. It was intended as a kind of blueprint that would be replicated throughout the country, although in reality, I don’t think the initiative ever really extended beyond Murewa itself. Even so, it was a very interesting proposition: to place contemporary artists within a culture house that had been conceived around localized cultural practices.

In other words, the space was primarily oriented toward music and other forms of cultural production rooted in local traditions. So the introduction of a group of contemporary artists into that space became a very interesting proposition—raising questions about where contemporary art practices might be situated in relation to more traditional conceptions of a cultural venue.

The initial workshop at Murewa had some quite extraordinary elements. We were welcomed in a very traditional sense, within a very specific ceremonial framework. Not only were we introduced to the culture house itself, but also we were introduced to the ancestors. The ancestors were told what we were doing there. That created a very powerful sense of linkage—between something that operated within a known cultural and spiritual framework and something that was, in many ways, unknown: a group of contemporary artists gathering to work together.

There were 14 artists in total. The emphasis of the workshop was very much on sculpture, because the initial sensibility was to somehow invigorate what was perceived as a somewhat moribund stone sculpture movement. The idea was that the workshop might introduce a new dynamism that could move that practice forward. So there was both a focus and a kind of urgency around sculpture.

Three artists from Bulawayo were invited: me, a painter; Rashid Jogee, also a painter; and Adam Madebe, who worked in metal. We came not as outsiders, but with a different sensibility. Similarly, David Koloane [and] Bill Ainslie, both from South Africa, and Willard Boepple, who came from America, brought additional perspectives. Meanwhile, the other sculptors and participants were deeply engaged in the Zimbabwean stone sculpture movement. So the presence of painters and artists working in other mediums introduced another dimension into the workshop.

It was very dynamic—extremely interesting. What was particularly compelling to me was the intergenerational dimension of the conversations. There was an exchange between very established, well-known stone sculptors and a much younger generation. Figures like Tapfuma Gutsa and Brighton Sango had already begun to break away from what stone sculpture had been in the decades since the 1960s. That internal tension and expansion made the workshop especially dynamic.

The workshop itself was full of revelations. It was inspiring, energetic, and transformative. Murewa became, in a sense, the beginning—the heartbeat—that brought Pachipamwe, or at least the need for further workshops and continued interaction between artists, into sharp focus.

The link between what happened in Murewa in 1988 and Pachipamwe in 1989 came through an exhibition titled Artists on the Frontline, hosted at Konstnärshuset in Stockholm. This exhibition brought together artists from Mozambique, Angola, Zimbabwe, and South Africa. At that time, this was a very contentious proposition, because we were still in the midst of the struggle against Apartheid in South Africa. The inclusion of South Africa alongside so-called frontline states was politically sensitive.

Having met Bill Ainslie in Murewa, I had a conversation with him in Stockholm. I asked:  “What is the point of meeting our Angolan, Mozambican, South African, and Zimbabwean counterparts in Stockholm? What we need is to meet in Africa.”

Because we had both participated in Murewa, the idea emerged that we could apply for funding to expand the workshop. We wanted to create a situation where artists from across the region could come together, get to know one another, and strengthen their ties on African soil, in Africa itself.

This was also deeply tied to the political realities of the time. South Africa was still under Apartheid. It was extremely important to support South African artists by inviting them into a space where they could participate freely—something that would not have been possible within South Africa itself. Workshops like Thupelo had limitations under those conditions. Pachipamwe, by contrast, offered a space in Zimbabwe—at Cyrene Mission (fig. 2)—where artists from across the region could gather.

The choice of Cyrene Mission was shaped by multiple, layered considerations. One of these was the significance of place. Cyrene is located near the Matobo Hills (fig. 3), a World Heritage site known for extraordinary rock art—paintings that are millennia old. These works were created by migratory artists, and this idea of migration resonated deeply with us. The artists who had painted those caves had moved across regions that are now divided into separate nation-states.

In our postcolonial moment, we were trying to recover narratives that had been fractured by colonialism and war. The proximity to a site of such deep cultural, historical, and artistic significance made Cyrene a powerful location. The second element was Cyrene itself. Established in 1939 under the Anglican Church by Canon Paterson, it began as an art school for people with disabilities. Over time, it expanded due to demand. The murals in the chapel—created by successive generations of students—are particularly significant. Canon Paterson encouraged his students to interpret Christian iconography through their own vernacular forms. These murals remain today and are quite unique.

There is also a lineage connecting Cyrene to later artistic training in Zimbabwe. Many artists who trained under Paterson went on to teach at the Mzilikazi Art & Craft Centre in Bulawayo. The artists who participated in Pachipamwe were, in many cases, students of those teachers. So Cyrene represented an important historical node in the development of art education in Zimbabwe. 

Finally, there were practical considerations. As a school, Cyrene could be used during holidays. It provided accommodation, studio space, classrooms, and large communal areas. Artists could occupy classrooms, work in halls, or use outdoor spaces. All of these factors contributed to making Cyrene an ideal site. 

At Pachipamwe, the workshop expanded from 14 artists in the first Murewa edition to 22 in 1989. There was a strong emphasis on inviting regional artists—from Botswana, South Africa, Angola—as well as international participants. Communal spaces played a crucial role. The dining area, in particular, became a central social space (fig. 4). I believe very strongly that the ability for artists to socialize easily—to move between formal and informal interactions—was essential to the flow of the workshop. Studio environments were intense and focused, so these moments of gathering, eating, and conversation were equally important in building relationships.

Sculptors often chose to work outdoors, while other artists occupied interior spaces. There was also experimentation across mediums. Voti Thebe introduced a papermaking workshop, bringing in new techniques and materials. This created opportunities for interdisciplinary exchange—sculptors, for example, engaging with paper as a material.

Materials in general were limited. One of the solutions we found was to use industrial packaging paper, which came in large rolls. This allowed artists to work on a much larger scale than they were used to. Many artists did not have access to personal studio space, so this sense of expansiveness—of being able to work big—was transformative (Fig. 5).

At this stage, Zimbabwean stone sculpture (fig. 6) remained a dominant force, but it was also being challenged and expanded. Tapfuma Gutsa (fig. 7) was particularly important in this regard. He broke many of the established conventions of stone sculpture, incorporating mixed media and developing forms that moved beyond carving into construction. He worked with welders, stone carvers, and materials such as cement, building rather than subtracting.

International artists also had a strong influence. Sokari Douglas Camp (fig. 8), for instance, had a significant impact on artists working in metal, including Adam Madebe (fig. 9) and David Ndlovu. The scale of Sokari’s work opened up new possibilities for these artists.

Bill Ainslie’s presence was also crucial. As the founder of the Johannesburg Art Foundation—a key institution for Black artists during Apartheid—he brought both experience and political weight. His return to Cyrene, where he had taught in the early 1960s, was deeply meaningful. Helen Sebidi (fig. 10), introduced by Bill, was another important presence. The inclusion of women artists was a key aspect of Pachipamwe.

Evenings were dedicated to discussion. Artists brought slides and presented their work. These sessions lasted one to two hours and were highly discursive. Rather than formal critiques, the exchanges were more akin to open conversations or studio visits. Participation was voluntary, and the format remained organic. The workshop itself functioned as an intense, immersive environment—almost like a pressure cooker. Artists stepped away from their everyday lives and worked intensely for two weeks within a collaborative framework. 

The impact of Pachipamwe extended across the region and beyond. Artists from Botswana went on to establish Thupelo Botswana. Namibian artists created Tulimpamwe. And then Mbala was created in Zambia. These are direct linkages from artists who visited the Zimbabwean workshops and then went on to create workshops in their own countries. 

The Mozambican artist Fatima Fernandes came to the Pachipamwe workshop in 1990. This was a workshop that was held outside of Harare. She then returned to Mozambique and initiated the Ujamaa workshops (fig. 11). I assisted her in an organizational capacity in Mozambique.

The Ujamaa workshops were held in Pemba. At that stage, Mozambique was still in the grips of a civil war, so Pemba was effectively the only safe place where we were able to host artists. What we are seeing here is the group, and also the environment of what Pemba was like—and where we were able to host the workshop.

Another important point is that the linkages through Mozambique brought us very close to Lusophone Africa and also to South America. There were, for instance, artists from Peru and from Brazil. The dynamic of the Mozambican workshops extended into South America, into Brazil, and into the Lusophone context. This became a very dynamic and interesting example of how the interconnectivity of workshops had an extraordinary capacity to extend intercontinentally.

Ujamaa, I think, had three editions. After the initial workshop in Pemba, there were two further editions in the city of Maputo, in which I was still engaged as a participant. 

We are also looking here at the exhibition from the Ujamaa workshop (fig. 12). We had to transport all of the work from the very north of Mozambique back to Maputo in order to host the exhibition. Exhibitions were an important part of the workshops. Not always—only when it was possible to formalize them—but when we could, it was very important to have an audience view [them] and to make the work accessible and open to audiences.

We were able to do that with the Pachipamwe exhibitions as well. We mounted exhibitions through the national galleries of both Bulawayo and Harare.

The final Pachipamwe workshop at Cyrene was held as a tribute to Bill Ainslie. We were able to invite his two children, and we inaugurated a small library that still today is attributed to Bill. So the last Pachipamwe at Cyrene in 1993 had that commemorative dimension.

Bill died in a car accident returning from Pachipamwe in 1989. It was extremely tragic. It was also something very close to us, because we had been working with him intensively for two weeks. Following that, we established a remembrance library at the Cyrene Mission—the Bill Ainslie Library.

This became part of the final Pachipamwe workshop held at Cyrene in 1993: both a memorial to Bill and an opportunity to invite his two children, who are both artists in their own rights, to participate in the workshop. It was the final Pachipamwe workshop in which I was directly involved as a participant.

After that, Pachipamwe went on to have another life. It passed into the hands of younger Zimbabwean artists, who continued to organize workshops. I believe they hosted workshops in Mutare, in the eastern part of Zimbabwe. It became an initiative for a younger generation of artists—artists who perhaps had different needs and expectations from those that shaped the original Pachipamwe and its initial formation.

The workshops continued until around 1996. And then, in a sense, their necessity was no longer there. So they came to an end—quite organically. I think that this is perhaps how the workshop movement should function, that it [should come] to a natural end when artists no longer feel the same urgency or need for what the workshops once provided.

An important development that followed is how artists who had been involved in the workshops began to build their own residency programs. These programs allowed them to invite international artists to come and work in more sustained environments—spaces that were structured more as residencies than as short-term workshops.

This is also a very important point: In a sense, out of the workshop experiences came Robert Loder’s investment in longer-term spaces. First, the Bag Factory in Johannesburg, which continues to be an important site for artists’ studios, and then Gasworks in London.

The sensibility of the workshops—their dynamism, their intensity, their openness—had a profound influence on these later developments. It led, in a way, to the idea of creating permanent working studio spaces for artists. From there, the network evolved further, becoming centered on residencies, enabling exchanges between African artists and international artists, and facilitating opportunities for artists from Africa to work in places like London.

The Bag Factory, for example, remains very dynamic today. It continues to offer space for visiting artists to take up studios and participate as residents.

Personally, I have taken a great deal from the workshops. The works of my own that I have included here are from around 2000–2001. I think that the introduction to new ideas around materials and media came directly from the workshops.

Having watched artists working in metal, I became very interested in expanding what had previously been, for me, a largely two-dimensional practice—drawing, painting, collage. From there, I began to move into other materials. My interest in metal, in particular, came directly from working alongside artists who were engaged in that medium (figs. 13, 14). That was a direct influence of the workshops.

I will never forget watching Sokari Douglas Camp work. That experience has stayed with me for a very long time. I returned to it later, carrying the memory of having shared that creative environment—an environment that was marked by generosity.

And I think that this is one of the defining aspects of the workshops: the generosity of artists in sharing their ideas, their knowledge, and their space.

These elements never left me. I have included my own works here to reflect that sense of curiosity—the desire to explore different mediums—which emerged from working alongside artists who were themselves working across different forms and materials.

When I think back on the broader context—the histories and conditions that had separated these nations, these Southern African countries—I am struck by how necessary it was to begin breaking those separations down. The workshops created something else: a space based on linkages rather than borders.

And I think that this was one of the most important and compelling motivations for being part of the workshops.

The 2024 C-MAP Africa research program was conceived and organized by Beya Othmani (C-MAP Africa Fellow) and Ugochukwu-Smooth Nzewi (The Steven and Lisa Tananbaum Curator, Department of Painting and Sculpture, and C-MAP Africa Group Leader). Read more about C-MAP here. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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1.

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

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

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

2. 

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

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

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

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

3. 

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

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

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In this essay, I approach the intimate configurations captured in Finger Ornament as a site of artistic expression that reworks local ornamental production, dissolving categories of high and amateur, domestic and public, visual and haptic. In so doing, I highlight that the artwork accentuates the conceptual potential of its primary reference: the ornament of textile associated with the pre-Soviet culture of Kazakh nomads. In order to align with the artistic intention to foreground regional creative forms, my essay proposes a speculative turn: adopting a relational reading and an intertextual analysis between the artwork Finger Ornament and traditional textile ornamentation. Through an intertextual reading of Blinova’s work and traditional ornamentation, I trace and disentangle how Finger Ornament recontextualizes textile art.

Kazakh ornament is a nonfigurative aesthetic sign associated with carpets and textiles produced domestically by women in nomadic society. Kazakhs lived as pastoral nomads from the 17th century until the early 20th, when Stalinist modernization policies forcefully sedentarized nomadic polities in the Soviet Union. The atemporal dialogic proximity of Finger Ornament and the semantic figure of traditional ornament serve as precursors to the postindependence cultural shift toward regional creative practices and their media, while operating across divides of fine and folk art, of high and low, of visual and haptic modes of perception. Relational reading enables us to shed light on conceptual characteristics of pre-Soviet textile art, previously obscured by its epistemic and institutional positioning as craft and folk art. 

Haptic Ornament 

Finger Ornament is one of the few surviving works from the partly lost and, by nature, fragile and ephemeral, body of work by Blinova. Formally trained as an architect at the Kazakh Polytechnic Institute, Blinova had worked at the architectural bureau in Almaty. Together with her husband, Rustam Khalfin, she organized apartment exhibitions and gathered together a small community of like-minded artists. In the mid-1980s, the couple abandoned formal positions as architects to commit themselves to their artistic practice. Unlike her life partner, a prominent figure in the Central Asian contemporary art scene, Blinova left behind a modest artistic heritage: scattered pencil and watercolor drawings, a book, “A Poem about a Learned Cat” (1994), several wooden sculptures, photo-documentation of her plastic jewelry, and Finger Ornament. The latter is a series of ten black-and-white photographs of figures and signs composed by the artist using her own fingers and palms. By turning, twisting, opening, and closing her hands, Blinova made new spatial forms, which she had photographed, and then she assembled the pictures into a two-row grid, creating an ornamental structure. This corporeal and intimate reenactment of visual patterns invokes a haptic aesthetics—a visual register where the boundaries between sight and touch collapse into a single mode of perception.

Blinova was interested in what she called “elementary sculpture,” or the basic form that exists before the hand touches a material.¹ In the early 1990s, she was experimenting with plastic jewelry, crafting sculptural and wearable objects for possible sale. She undertook this domestic, kitchen-based production of small jewelry pieces to help sustain herself and her husband during the economic upheavals and social uncertainty of the early 1990s. Figures of Finger Ornament sprang from the artist’s tactile practice of molding soft plastic and her exploration of the notion of basic form. Blinova stripped away the material and instead modeled her sculptures from her own hands. The artist’s friend, the architect Larissa Andreeva, photographed them at Blinova and Khalfin’s flat. The artwork is composed of a series of fragile and transient sculptural forms, each of which embodies the dissolution of the previous sign. By flattening spatial objects into an ornamental pattern, Blinova sensed and exposed the haptic aesthetics coded in traditional carpets and their ornamental vernacular. Haptic reenactment of the ornamental grid shifts the focus away from the prolonged vision-centered discourses that have constricted textile practices to minor and applied arts. 

The ornament is intrinsic to textile objects such as carpets, tapestries, and garments, which constituted the core of the material culture of nomads in pre-Soviet Central Asia. In nomadic culture, creative practices were deeply enmeshed into the process of living—as opposed to separated into the distinct and detached realm of autonomous art. In the 1930s, along with the forced sedentarization, Soviet modernization policies introduced and institutionalized the pictorial tradition of oil painting. Simultaneously, a wide range of local creative practices was academically narrated and institutionally contextualized as folk and applied art. After the demise of the Soviet Union, while both cultural practitioners and institutions turned to the reassessment and reimagination of regional cultural heritage, its forms, and media, the previous analytical tradition continued to maintain the split between art and craft. Decorativeness served as the main signifier for practices that involved ornamentation, confining them to the category of craft. It should be noted that the notorious notion of the “decorative” was one of the organizing principles in the prolonged hierarchy of art and craft not only in the former Soviet bloc, but also more widely in Euro-American scholarship and art criticism. Juxtaposed with modernist pictorial and conceptual innovativeness, the decorative served as a rhetorical device to distinguish between high art and minor arts, which were often associated with gendered and racialized practices in postwar North America.² In post-Soviet Kazakhstan, one of the first academic books focused on the exploration of Kazakh ornament urged artists, artisans, and scholars to overcome the indulgent standpoint and to extricate ornamental practices from the limiting notion of the decorative.³ Drawing on Vladimir Propp’s structural analysis of Russian folk tales and Soviet Kazakhstani archaeologist Alan Medoyev’s formal analysis of petroglyphs and cave paintings, Karlygash Ibrayeva suggests approaching folk ornamental production as a system that models and is directly related to the surrounding environment.⁴ The architect Almas Ordabayev, who contributed to the volume and provided graphic materials and photographs, was a professor in the department of architecture at the Polytechnic Institute when Blinova and Khalfin were students there and later became friends with Blinova. Indeed, she was familiar with Ordabayev’s studies of ornamentation in architectural monuments in Mangyshlak, a region in southwestern Kazakhstan.

Finger Ornament was first exhibited in 1995 at the Parade of Galleries, an event that marked the emergence of private galleries on the post-socialist institutional landscape. The Parade of Galleries, also titled Independent Galleries of the City, hosted by the Abylkhan Kasteev State Museum, was in itself a novel platform that celebrated the spirit of the transition period in society, its aspiration to expanded civic freedom and to opening up new market relations. More than simply introducing market mechanisms, The Parade functioned as a diverse semi-institutional space for artistic and cultural producers’ experiments across dozens of private galleries. The event showcased an array of artistic practices that sought to move beyond the stylistic traditions of official art and its Soviet legacy. The emergent aesthetics of transition manifested in experimental and expanded media and material choices, as well as in time-based and performative practices. Blinova’s delicate Finger Ornament both anticipated and participated in the strong trend of exploration and reimagining of regionally situated cultural and creative practices and forms by official and nonofficial artists and art institutions. The ornament has become a recurrent visual trope in artistic production, design, and architecture, solidifying its status as a vernacular expression. What distinguishes Finger Ornament is its non-mimetic yet haptic reenactment of traditional ornamentation, which both elucidates and recalibrates its conceptual code as well as alludes to its codependency on the wider cultural and environmental webs of relations.

Haptic aesthetics, a recently emerging academic field, examines the implications of touch, tactility, and sensorial interactions across disciplines, from art history to anthropology. Film scholar Laura Marks theorizes haptic images as ones that, by reducing the distance between the viewer and the image, generate embodied response, evoking memories of physical sensations and drawing attention to texture and proximity rather than distant contemplation.⁵ Haptic registers in Finger Ornament sense the co-constitutive interaction between vision and tactility, foundational in the process of producing textile ornamental objects and in their perception. It is difficult to say whether Blinova was familiar with traditional methods of carpet-making, which involve stages of felting the wool by hand and subsequently rolling a pattern of colored wool into the base of semifinished felt (fig. 2). However, Blinova experienced tactile operations of kneading and molding plastic and the work of one’s body in making a visual form. 

If we adopt an intertextual reading of the traditional ornament through the haptic registers of the artwork, we are able to highlight its structural affinities. In traditional carpets, patterns trace corporeal movement and the sense of touch: The wool is transformed into felt through the physical pressure and movements of the entire body. The photographs in Finger Ornament do not mimetically reproduce the visual referent; instead, they capture the dynamic process of creating a new sign through lived, bodily gesture. The artwork alludes to the ornament’s non-referential and nonmaterial characteristics. Shifting emphasis from the visual to the tactile, the indexicality of Finger Ornament reveals what is not visible in traditional ornamental production—such as the corporeal performativity of its making. In pastoral nomadic culture, felting and carpet-making included individual but more often collective women’s creative labor. It played a vital role in the transference of knowledge and familial stories along maternal lines. Nurbolat Masanov (1954–2006), a scholar of nomadism, argues that pastoral nomadism, its economic organization around cattle breeding, and its material culture were determined by the geo-ecological and climate systems in the arid territory of Kazakhstan.⁶ The textile object stands within the intricate web of codependent relations between the ecosystem, social and economic organization, and women’s sensibilities and creative practices. Finger Ornament restages the ornament as a coded system rather than as merely a decorative sign. The artwork’s performativity emphasizes the flow of creative energy and ideas that guided domestic ornamental production. 

According to the recollections of friends and artists from the Almaty art scene, Blinova was a modest person and a rather unknown artist. Almas Ordabayev has stressed that though she was very gifted and could research themes in linguistics, history of art, and culture, she did not want to limit herself to either the restraints of official institutions or the framework of particular media.⁷ He added that Blinova had preferred the intellectual intensity of coining and thinking through ideas and the creative interplay to finalized and polished art objects (fig.3). Various memoirs recurrently describe Blinova as the one who quotidianly lived within the flow of unbounded imagination.⁸ After leaving her job at an architectural bureau, she participated in several exhibitions. The period of the early 1990s was marked by a loose institutional infrastructure and a lack of support for independent and experimental practices. In 1995, the artist presented her “A Poem about a Learned Cat” at the Kokserek gallery in Almaty, mounting lines of its verses along the walls at a very low height from the floor—that is, at a cat’s-eye level. The playfulness of her practice was accompanied by the conceptual exploration of tactility, spatiality, and bare form. The nascent art market, probably, contributed to her ephemeral creative labor. Although few of Blinova’s works have survived, her artistic presence endures in oral histories, artistic projects, and publications by a circle of friends, artists, and peer members of the Almaty underground art scene in the late 1980s and 1990s.⁹ These guardians of memory portrayed her as an artist whose life was guided by the power of imagination and whose legacy shimmers and resonates in the work of others, most notably that of her husband. 

The dialogic interplay between Finger Ornament and traditional ornament explores how the haptic is entangled with the social and relational in everyday, uncommodified female creative practices. The artistic fate of Blinova gestures toward the larger question of the art-historiographical positionality of numerous women whose creative labor formed the core of the material culture of nomads. The process of mark-making in ornamentation is intuitive, gestural, and even chance-driven. The performativity of Finger Ornament echoes the process and passion-driven nature of ornamentation and its deep immersion in the flow of crafting a new form. Thus, Finger Ornament presses into the continuity of local creative traditions while expanding their medium and conceptual code. In postindependence Kazakhstan, where artists sought to reimagine cultural forms rooted in the region, Finger Ornament is a delicate exploration of haptic knowledge and practices guided by a love of crafting and making. If the dialogic reading of the traditional ornament and the artwork of Blinova should arrive at a concise conclusion, it is the one that charts mutually formative connections between the high and the vernacular, between pattern and thought. 

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

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

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

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

On Mohamed Chabâa 

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

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

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

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

Ksenia Nouril, Assistant Director, International Program

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mother, Ship

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kate Lewis, The Agnes Gund Chief Conservator

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Following Algeria’s independence in 1962, a group of artists aspired to create a new visual idiom, one that could carry collective memory while moving beyond state-sponsored art movements—particularly Socialist Realism—and breaking away from colonial representations.² This impulse developed as a momentum shaped by the urgency to redefine modes of artistic production within a postcolonial framework. Among the designations used to describe it, the “School of the Sign” remains the most ambivalent, at once reductive and generative. The term itself is often misunderstood in two ways: First, it implies the existence of a unified movement based on a shared aesthetic. Second, it risks confining a broad concept to a form of formal nationalism, suggesting that the turn to the Sign is a retreat into identity or the revival of a dormant tradition.

The “School of the Sign” refers to a conceptual and material proposition concerned with how the Sign can be mobilized as a critical space through art and literature. Far from constituting a school in the institutional sense, it is more aptly understood as a constellation of artists who explored the “Sign”—a term they preferred to “letter” or “symbol”—as a dense visual structure capable of articulating a grammar of liberation.³ Guided by the thought of writer Jean Sénac, Algerian artists such as Mohamed Khadda (1930–1991; fig. 1), Choukri Mesli (1931–2017), Denis Martinez (b. 1941; fig. 2) and, later, Ali Silem (b. 1947) contributed to a conceptualization of the Sign as a palimpsest that is simultaneously abstract and situated, mystical and insurgent.⁴ This concept must also be considered in relation to the visual frameworks that have long shaped the reception of North African art, ranging from Orientalist projections to patrimonial models. Rather than reiterating colonial categories, these artists treated the Sign as a site of critical engagement against academic norms.

A central figure in Algeria’s postindependence cultural scene, Jean Sénac was primarily known as a poet and art critic, but he also played a crucial role as a mediator among artistic, intellectual, and political circles. In 1964, he founded Galerie 54, the first independent exhibition space in Algiers, which he conceived as a platform for experimental practices. Here, Sénac presented the work of artists such as Khadda and Martinez and coined the term “École du Noûn” (Noûn School). At the height of the postcolonial cultural revival, he made a first attempt at theorizing his observations, writing: “The Sign, rising from centuries past, from remote douars, from the songs of the meddahs [storytellers], bears witness to the permanence in the Maghreb of what could be called the École du Noûn.”⁵ The “École du Noûn,” according to him, arises from the sensuality of the letter noûn, drawing on its dual resonance as a sacred character in the Qur’an and a visual form associated with desire. Sénac’s interpretation posits the noûn as all at once a female breast,⁶ an open beginning, a Sufi promise, and a corpoème (body-poem)—the latter a figuration in which poetry and corporeality are inseparable. This fusion of corporeal pleasure and textual creation lies at the heart of his poetry.⁷

Rather than defining a unified movement, Sénac sought to name a shared sensibility he perceived across the practices of several artists. From the late 1960s onward, he increasingly referred to this sensibility as the School of the Sign. The Sign, in his view, constitutes a living matrix rooted in Algerian heritage while remaining open to contemporary invention. While some artists—most notably Mohamed Khadda—engaged closely with Sénac’s writings and shared his conviction that the Sign could catalyze an artistic renewal,⁸ others maintained a more distant or independent relationship to his theoretical framework. Indeed, the School of the Sign did not emerge as a self-declared collective or common agenda but rather as Sénac’s own critical reading of converging artistic trajectories connected through dialogue and proximity. Artists of the Sign drew inspiration from Amazigh and Arabic scripts, prehistoric petroglyphs, and vernacular forms, aspiring to create a simultaneity of heritage and revolution. They did this by, for example, fragmenting cursive letters into angular modules, overlaying layers of script until legibility dissolved, or embedding geometric motifs from woven textiles into abstract chromatic fields. 

The School of the Sign resonated with other artistic strategies in the region, such as Hurufiyya, an aesthetic movement that emerged among artists reinvesting ancestral signs as a means of resisting folklorization and gesturing toward plural modernities.⁹ Emerging across the Arab world from the late 1940s onward, Hurufiyya designated a broad tendency that reintroduced the Arabic letter into modern artistic practice, often emphasizing its calligraphic and spiritual dimensions. While artists associated with the School of the Sign shared this refusal of folkloric repetition, they approached the letter less as a calligraphic form and more as a destabilized visual structure displaced from its conventional function. The turn to rock paintings, desert lines, and marginal alphabets did not aim to produce a nostalgic aesthetic; rather, it sought to reactivate the semiotic depth of these forms by working their internal tensions between figuration and abstraction, legibility and opacity. In Algeria, this engagement developed largely outside formal Hurufiyya circles and was instead shaped by local postindependence debates and artistic networks. Later figures, such as Rachid Koraïchi (b. 1947), would more explicitly align with Hurufiyya principles, albeit within a different historical moment and a transnational framework.

The School of the Sign was not devoid of internal frictions—notably, artists debated the very definition of popular art. The tensions ranged, on the one hand, from opposition to approaches that understand popular art as a shared visual heritage to be stabilized and made socially legible to, on the other hand, positions that emphasized abstraction and formal experimentation as a necessary break from inherited and imposed models. Multiple approaches to the Sign coexisted without canceling one another. These divergences became particularly visible in the distinct ways individual artists positioned themselves in relation to abstraction, spirituality, and the use of the letter. Artists such as Abdallah Benanteur (1931–2017) gravitated toward lyrical abstraction infused with an Islamic sensibility.¹⁰

Born in Western Algeria, Benanteur followed an artistic path shaped by close personal and intellectual affinities rather than formal group affiliations. His long-standing friendship with Mohamed Khadda, forged in the mid-1940s when the two painted together around Mostaganem before traveling together to Algiers and later to France, was formative in this respect. Benanteur also maintained close ties with Jean Sénac, whose work he illustrated on several occasions and with whom he shared a commitment to postindependence cultural renewal.¹¹ Taken together, these relationships situate Benanteur within the same generational and cultural milieu as the artists associated with the School of the Sign, even though his practice gradually shifted toward a more autonomous lyrical abstraction.¹² His work draws on the iconoclastic heritage of Maghrebi Islam and articulates a dynamic sense of universality. Although he occasionally deployed letters in his work and engaged in debates surrounding the Sign, Benanteur remained wary of prescriptive frameworks, privileging an approach grounded in individual spirituality and a universal conception of modern art.¹³

For his part, Sénac emphasized the proximity and divergence of Benanteur and Khadda in terms of their relationship to the Sign and to Islamic visual heritage. Referring to Khadda’s audacity in “reintegrating the Signs into the Body”¹⁴ and seeking to “reincarnate the arabesque of his ancestors,”¹⁵ Sénac notes that Benanteur, for his part, “having started from the Sign, seems to want to preserve only its trace, its aura,” bringing the noûn back “to its point of preciseness,”¹⁶ whereas Khadda carried it toward a lyrical transcendence. This distinction sheds light on Benanteur’s singular position: situated within the same generational milieu, yet gradually moving toward a more autonomous and meditative abstraction.

Others, like Choukri Mesli (1931–2017), worked the letter as a sensual form in its own right, one saturated with ambiguity, and explored the representation of the female body. His engagement does not follow the conventions of the academic nude; it is an allegorical image of the nation itself, tattooed, inscribed, and resilient, carrying cultural memory and strength in the face of war and historical trauma.¹⁷ In the later Les Protectrices (1991), he continued to work the Sign in close relation to the female body, intertwining fragments of letters with corporeal forms (fig. 3). Here, writing does not appear as an autonomous calligraphic pattern but instead as an inscription borne by the figure itself—tattoo-like marks and the Arabic title al-ḥāmiyāt (the protectresses) fold the letter into the body, suggesting language as something carried and worn. The painting shows that even decades after the emergence of the School of the Sign, Mesli maintained an interest in the Sign as a lived and embodied language rather than a purely formal device.

Mohamed Khadda, by contrast, approached the Sign as a political project.¹⁸ In his collection of essays Éléments pour un art nouveau (1972), he insists on the need to create a plastic writing that is neither subjected to Western abstraction nor limited to a rigid tradition.¹⁹ This position was shaped in part by his experience as a typographer in France, as well as by his artistic training at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris, where he was exposed to modernist debates while remaining attentive to the materiality of writing. In this same collection of writings, Khadda describes his creative process as one shaped by layers, rhythm, the interplay of positive and negative spaces, and the tensions between surface and depth.²⁰ He emphasizes the plastic transformation of writing and its capacity to convey spiritual, poetic, and political dimensions, evoking letters as “male or female, solar or lunar,” and animated by a suggestive power akin to incantation.²¹

A photograph of Khadda’s atelier (fig. 4) provides a more concrete understanding of this process. This image shows a space filled with canvases at different stages, placed side by side and often overlapping. Signs reappear in one painting after another, shifting in scale and density. Tools and materials remain visible. The studio reflects a practice based on repetition, layering, and gradual transformation, which is consistent with Khadda’s background in typography and his sustained attention to the potentials of the Sign.

Some artists associated with the School of the Sign decided to further expand their reflection on the Sign by founding the Aouchem group (aouchem means “tattoo”) in 1967. Initiated by Denis Martinez, Choukri Mesli, and Mohamed Benbaghdad, among others, the group proclaimed in a groundbreaking manifesto that “the Sign is stronger than bombs.”²² Aouchem approached the Sign as a trace of ancestral gestures and collective memory. They drew from the prehistoric cave paintings of Tassili n’Ajjer, popular talismans, and sacred scripts, introducing a decolonial interplay between art and ritual. The group asserted a lineage that was both African and Arabo-Berber and bound together less by formal doctrine than by friendship. Aouchem was, above all, a circle of close friends who met regularly, particularly in Blida, where long discussions and moments in everyday life contributed to their cohesion. These ties were not limited to exhibitions: Members also collaborated on texts, radio programs with poets, and the drafting of the manifesto. Alongside their collective initiatives, they informally circulated symbolic gestures, such as emblems or amulets bearing the group’s name, without ever imposing a uniform aesthetic.

Jean Sénac, acting as a mentor, encouraged the inclusion of other Algerian artists, such as Baya (1931–1998) and Arezki Zerarti (1938–2024). He also played an important role as a mediator between artists and writers, maintaining close ties with members of the group and supporting the circulation of their work through exhibitions, publications, and broadcasts. In Algeria, where figuration could be perceived as either an academic colonial inheritance or propaganda, Aouchem chose abstracted figuration, opting for hybrid and interstitial creatures. Their refusal of both illustrative imagery and pure abstraction became a gesture of emancipation. The covers of the 1967 Aouchem exhibition catalogues (figs. 5, 6) reflect this stance. Both compositions bring together signs, fragmented figures, handwritten elements, and ornamental motifs, which are arranged without a clear hierarchy or focal point. Figurative references appear and dissolve without settling into a stable image or legible scene. Printed with a mimeograph, the catalogues preserve traces of their production: irregular lines, uneven lettering, visible overlaps. These material imperfections distinguish them from institutional graphic formats. The covers do not present a coherent visual statement; instead, they allow disparate marks, images, and gestures to coexist on the page.

Within Aouchem, the Sign became a means of activating a form of visual consciousness grounded in collective practice. While the group shared common concerns with the artists associated with the School of the Sign, it did not operate as its continuation. Rather, Aouchem developed in parallel, shifting the emphasis to material processes, ritual gestures, and collective experimentation. The materiality of the works themselves played a part in this effort. Some artists treated the canvas as a ritual surface, layered with ochers, earth, ash, natural pigments, and ink—materials that evoke an ancestral and vernacular register (such as henna or mineral earths), linking the pictorial gesture to imagined precolonial practices. For them, the Sign was no longer confined to drawing or inscription, but instead embodied in matter itself, making materials carriers of meaning. In addition to sourcing ancestral materials, Aouchem artists drew from their recent historical experience to develop a new vocabulary of the Sign. The barbed wire—a recurrent motif in the works of Denis Martinez, for example, emerged as a charged symbol: at once border, carceral memory, and visual marker of the constrained body.²³

Denis Martinez’s Le petit miroir (1967; fig.7) illustrates how the precepts of the School of the Sign materialized within Aouchem as an expanded artistic practice. The piece is a mixed-media assemblage made of three branches, animal bones, and paper, among other materials, and stands somewhere between an image and a sculpture. Across the surface, there are silver, calligraphy-like motifs—dots, geometric patterns, short gestural arabesques, and words drawn from Algerian dialect—that are placed on fractured planes and roughly human-shaped forms. These Signs do not organize themselves into writing; indeed, they remain dispersed, uneven, and materially present. The combination of painted wood and raised forms gives the Sign a totemic presence, grounding it in artisanal practice. Here, it is no longer conceived as a system of visual forms to be read, but rather as a physical presence embedded in the object itself. Freed from its function as writing and reconfigured as an element of the assemblage, the Sign emerges through matter and volume, extending its logic beyond the pictorial field into a material and experiential register.

Ali Silem is another Algerian artist who built on the concept of the Sign. He defended the idea of a Sign in motion and of an open visual alphabet that rejects both identity-based assignment and state appropriation. He once remarked, “When you take a bird’s feather, for instance, you notice that it has the shape of the [Arabic letter] alif.”²⁴ For him, the task was to move beyond the “School of the Sign” as a label or myth and to reimagine it as a fluid space of creation nourished by the friction between ancient forms and contemporaneity. While Silem’s work remains in dialogue with the concerns articulated by Mohamed Khadda and the artists associated with Aouchem, it unfolds along a distinct register. The Sign, in Silem’s view, does not reference a glorified past.²⁵ Moreover, although his practice—like that of Aouchem—reflects his interest in nonrepresentational Signs and a refusal of academic figuration, it is not positioned as a rupture and ritual confrontation. In one untitled work, for example, calligraphic fragments dissolve into color, rhythm, and painterly gestures, preventing the Sign from settling into meaning, keeping it in a state of visual flux (fig. 8).

Whereas Benanteur tended to preserve the Sign as an evanescent trace or aura, while Mesli embedded it within figuration, Silem approached the letter through restraint and compositional measure. As Khadda observed, Silem’s surfaces are structured by carefully “mastered trajectories,” a “cascade of noûn,” an “ascension of lâm,” and the discreet presence of alif as tutelary linear anchors, so that the Sign functions less as an embodied or atmospheric motif than as a controlled calligraphic architecture oriented toward balance and serenity.²⁶ For Silem, the Sign functions as a phenomenological event that is experienced before it is interpreted.²⁷ This emphasis on color, vibration, and poetic resonance is reinforced by the artist’s parallel activity as a poet, a pursuit he shares with artists such as Denis Martinez, for whom the Sign also circulates between visual and textual registers. In his lecture “Peintres et poètes d’Algérie,” Silem situated Algerian visual practice within a long continuum of “written stones” (hajarat el maktûba), where alphabets and drawings have been intertwined for millennia, and where contemporary artists continue to seek an embodied memory of inscription.²⁸ In this lecture, Silem reflected on the long-standing entanglement of poetry and painting in Algeria, situating contemporary practices of the Sign within an older culture of orality, and tracing the role of artist-poet collaborations and bibliophile editions in the postindependence period.

What is singular in the way these artists engage the Sign is its semiotic operation. It is neither purely symbolic (in the Saussurean sense) nor reducible to index or icon. Beyond repeating motifs from pre-Islamic, Islamic, or Amazigh visual repertoires, these artists have transformed the Sign into a language charged with symbolic meaning that has been polished and displaced from its original function. It is often syncretic, combining plastic elements from disparate image regimes—magico-religious, vernacular, calligraphic, modern—within an unstable grammar. The point for these artists was not to convey a clear message but instead to unsettle the gaze, to demand a mode of reading that remains open, partial, and unresolved. These practices echo critical semiotic theories (such as those of Roland Barthes or Umberto Eco), which consider the Sign not as a transparent translation of content but rather as a surface of friction between the visible and the sayable.²⁹

If the Sign once served as a tool of decolonization, it has also, over time, been absorbed, recontextualized, and periodically emptied of its initial function. The legacy of the so-called School of the Sign has been transmitted in fragmented ways—celebrated as a landmark of Algerian modernity, yet often reconstructed retrospectively through teleological narratives.³⁰ Over the decades, some artists have claimed this lineage. The very use of the term “school” has contributed to a partial museification of their artistic gestures, transforming what was a critical impulse into a closed chapter in the national art historical canon. This shift must also be understood within a broader context: the rise of postcolonial cultural policies, the globalization of art markets, and the rebranding of the Sign as a “cultural marker.” Displayed in this context, the Sign risks becoming precisely what it once resisted: an inert ornament rather than a living grammar of liberation. 

In this sense, the School of the Sign is more than just a historical episode or an art movement. It is a critical horizon ready to be reactivated within other struggles and that stands as a philosophy of making and an ethic of form. In his essay “Sur L’olivier,” Khadda compares the Sign to an ancestral olive tree: a living structure, as opposed to a fixed form, in a steady process of growth and resistance, continually reshaped by time and experience.³¹ For Khadda, the olive tree stands as a point of origin, a genesis from which Signs and writing emerge as traces (and not representations) bearing the memory of endurance, erosion, and continuity. With his conception of the Sign, Khadda proposes a method to inhabit Signs without either taming or submitting to them.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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