Paul Galloway: An aspect of your work that intrigues me is that it is steeped in the visual culture of India—and Mumbai, in particular. Can you give us a bit of information on your upbringing, and how the rapid changes you witnessed growing up in the 1980s–90s impacted your development as artists?

Sameer Kulavoor: We grew up in the northern suburbs of Bombay, a small world in the 1980s–90s. But things changed very fast after 1990. That’s when the government introduced economic liberalization that created major changes that meant, suddenly, there were brands we had never seen in India—like McDonald’s or Levi’s or MTV. A lot of younger people also started getting more interested in what was happening outside the country. So, I think [that] that period of the ’90s was very critical to a lot of these cities around India, not just Bombay. The farmlands gave way to more housing apartments and infrastructure. The road that used to be kind of like the grazing patch for donkeys became a major thoroughfare, and today there is a metro line passing [through] there. And our family was unique because we come from a Hindu-Muslim interfaith marriage.

Zeenat Kulavoor: Our personal background also shaped our perspective. We come from an interfaith family—a Muslim from South India and a Hindu, a Gujarati from Bombay—and there was a class difference between our parents as well. Growing up in that environment taught us acceptance at many levels. Even language played a role: My maternal side used the Gujarati language and script, while my father’s side spoke Beary Bashe—a dialect that is a mix of Malayalam, Kannada, and Tulu, but it has no written script. At home, we spoke English, mixed with Gujarati and Beary Bashe, while outside, we used Hindi in daily life. Later, at art school, we picked up Marathi, which we now use regularly to maneuver the city. And after I married my partner, whose Mangalorean family speaks Tulu and uses Kannada, the linguistic mix expanded even further. This multicultural and multilingual context is inseparable from who we are and inevitably influences how we see and create.

PG: Can you give me a sense of your professional lives before you started Bombay Duck Designs? Sameer, you worked in advertising, right?

SK: Before I got into art school, I used to do a lot of cartoons and illustrations for my college magazine. Between 1998 and 2000, during the dot-com boom, I joined a design team on a website. I ended up learning a lot of software, and I started to understand animation using Flash. At that point I continued freelancing with advertising agencies working for brands. Simultaneously, I was also involved with the indie music scene in Bombay. That led to me designing album covers during that decade for friends and the circle. I continued freelancing until 2008, when I formalized Bombay Duck Designs. 

ZK: Pre art school, I was drawn to scripts and languages through my family and loved collecting everyday objects and visual ephemera—labels, wrappers, tickets—elements that later informed the Everyday India project. At art school, I majored in typography, which brought these interests together, and focused extensively on Urdu—a natural choice given my background and fascination with scripts carrying layered histories. After graduating, I worked on Urdu-related projects with various agencies before freelancing with Sameer. We began with an album cover and soon moved on to larger projects, including one of the early large-scale independent music festivals of India, where we designed everything from the identity to the stages and environments.

PG: I think the name “Bombay Duck” (a commonly eaten fish native to the waters in and around Bombay) perfectly encapsulates your design ethos, which is rooted in the everyday culture of India. This ethos comes across in your amazing zines, and I wonder . . . what drew you to that format? 

SK: I think it came from a general frustration with how design projects work. Many times, I felt that a certain thing I had created for a commercial project wasn’t doing the idea justice. That drew me to the medium of zines, where I could talk about something that means a lot to me without compromising on how I’d like to express it. In a sense, self-publishing laid the foundation for my own art practice.

ZK: The first one we made was Zeroxwallah zine, which talks about Bombay photocopy shops. I remember [that] when we started making this book, it was simply because the subject, the format, and the effort excited us. We decided to make about 50 copies, show them to people, and see how it went.

SK: Our college was very close to Fort (a neighborhood in the city), which has a high concentration of photocopy shops. And we found it fascinating because all of these shops have the same branding and color scheme. Every one [of them] sticks to yellow and black; every one [of them] has a similar way of using bold type. So, the idea of creating a photocopied zine that talks about photocopy shops felt very meta and interesting. 

PG: What did the people working in these shops think when they were printing this book about themselves?

ZK: While photocopying the first few pages, they didn’t understand what we were doing. Eventually, when we were binding the book together, they asked, “Why are you doing this? Who’s going to buy this?”

SK: We took pictures of the exteriors of certain shops from that area, and the workers spotted rival shops. “These guys are our competitors . . . why have you featured them?” And then there is this very interesting phenomenon where people in India use the [company name] “Xerox” as a verb or a noun “Can you xerox this?” or “Please give me a xerox of this sheet.” The Xerox company objected to the use of their name on shops, and so shop sign makers simply repainted the X with a Z.

PG: A theme that comes across in much of your work is a focus on taxonomies of visual culture of India—an indexing of commerce and architecture and social life. What is it about this everyday visual experience that fascinates you both?

SK: When you look at any city, you’re trying to decode [its] layers. So, the first thing that you see is shop or road signage. And then there are walls covered with graphics, posters, or public art; building facades and surfaces that may be of a certain material—brick, concrete, tiles and so on—or construction sites covered by metal sheets, debris protection fabric, or blue tarpaulin sheets. There are several layers depending on your vantage point. While it may seem like absolute chaos to someone who is not familiar with it, for us it became a way to understand the logic and chronology of how things form. When your senses are overloaded, you want to break it down into understandable parts. 

ZK: We’re simply trying to make sense of the country and the city in our own way, and that comes out in the form of zines, artworks, and murals. Take the blue tarpaulin sheet, or tadpatri as we call it locally, for example.

SK: The blue tarpaulin sheet is omnipresent when you’re going through the daily rigor of life in Bombay. But no one has the time or the mental bandwidth to dwell on these things. 

ZK: Yet, you can look at this piece of blue plastic and see that it’s significant. It reflects socioeconomic conditions, ways of living, and the resourcefulness of people who adapt and creatively use this material.

PG: Your practices make me think of others who have tried to tackle the complexities of urbanism. In his research for the font Gotham, typographer Tobias Frere-Jones photographed thousands of building addresses and signs across Manhattan, documenting the diversity of letterforms in the wild in order to distill vernacular typography into one typeface that would represent the ethos of New York City. You two take an alternative approach and embrace the diversity and wide range of not only typefaces and languages but also visual cultures that you find. I think that, in a way, that’s an embrace of chaos. 

SK: We never consciously set out with the idea to embrace chaos, it just happened. The other aspect to this is that there is currently a politically rooted attempt to homogenize culture in India—like imposing Hindi in the South Indian states, for example. Such impositions or blanket rules, we feel, are dangerous. It becomes a responsibility to show people the richness of this so-called chaos. There is a lot of work to be done to make Bombay and India more livable in certain parts, but this aspect of plurality or multiplicity is part of our DNA.  

PG: In the dramatic structures of your Metromorphosis project here, we see the churn of history, architecture, and community that happens in all urban environments sped up, with chaotic accretions and evidence of past lives. What do you think we risk losing when we pursue order and homogeneity to its furthest extent?

SK: Architect and academic Rahul Mehrotra in his text about Metromorphosis notes a kind of emulation that is commonly occurring: “The presence of the ‘edifice complex’ in Manhattan, New York, that grew naturally out of the accumulation of capital then circulated around the globe. Singapore wanted to be the Manhattan of Asia and then Shanghai wanted to be the Singapore of China. Politicians and Capitalists in India want to make Mumbai Shanghai and then, for example Nasik aspires to be Mumbai and the small towns near Nasik then aspire to be Nasik and so on.”¹ Homogenization can consume culture and texture—and not just within India. This loss of identity in design is a complicated issue and needs a nuanced understanding and more conversations. We talk about this in our work, trying to show people that the richness of what India is is at risk in this flattening of everything from architecture to graphic design. 

PG: I think your interest in the visual taxonomy of India functions similarly to the many efforts across the world to preserve endangered languages. Particularly with [the exhibition] Everyday India, it’s like you’re documenting a visual dialect. Is this something that you see as a mission for yourselves?

SK: Recognizing multiplicity and plurality is a recurring factor in our work—while also not getting nostalgic or sentimental about the past. And I think we want to keep that factor alive in our work, especially in this atmosphere, where there is a real risk of things being wiped out. We are excited about the future and how it can be shaped.

ZK: We feel that deeply these days, which is why Everyday India felt so important. It gave us a chance to do something we might not have done otherwise—to make people notice the multiplicity around them. We’re always photographing things, posters, architecture, fragments of design that catch our eye. It’s part of our daily rhythm, something we both do in our own ways. The show allowed us to share that, spark conversations, and see how everyone else was feeling. 

PG: I think a strength of your practice is this idea of looking at the world from the ground up rather than from an aerial view. Because, as you say, when viewed from above, everything becomes flattened, whereas from the ground, everything is rich and full of texture and variety. 

SK: Having such a vantage point becomes important in these kinds of scenarios. We walk a lot. We’re on the ground level a lot. We don’t live in a 40-floor high-rise; we like to be grounded and keep our eyes and ears open to what’s happening at the street level. It’s very easy to find ways to cut off the chaos and have a very comfortable life. A lot of decisions we make in our day-to-day life, like where do you want your studio to be or where do you want to go for a trip—those kinds of very personal decisions are shaped by the logic of not wanting to be cut off from the ground level. It percolates into our daily lives. It’s a habit that you want to live a certain kind of life, to be able to do a certain kind of work. As we grow older, I think, for us, it becomes important to hold on to that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Read the first part of the series here.

Anthropologist Gregory Bateson believed that a systematic understanding of other cultures was important for a peaceful postwar world order. He also believed that the museum, particularly The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), was the ideal institution to undertake this work. In MoMA’s press release for the exhibition Bali, Background for War: The Human Problem of Reoccupation (1943), Bateson notes that “there is one common ground between the scientific world of the anthropologist and the world of art: the idea that in some sense the artist expresses himself. The exhibition is based on that idea which, in time of war, may become as grim as a mathematical equation in ballistics.”¹

Bali, Background for War captured the social science and art networks that were brought together during World War II by the war effort and an institution of modern art. In turn, the exhibition became an important constellation of global history. At MoMA, Bateson’s notion of the museum as a common ground for science, art, and social engineering dovetailed with Bauhaus thought on the shaping of visual culture and perception, leading to a historical confluence of proto-cybernetics, regional thinking, and the New Bauhaus within the modern art museum in the service of military goals and postwar rebuilding. The influence of Bali, Background for War resounded in the postwar years, possibly contributing to the formation and intellectual history of Southeast Asian modern art networks in terms of how the exhibition foreshadows but is also informative in reading the postwar rehabilitation of the US cultural Cold War in Southeast Asia.

During World War II, the Museum executed 38 contracts for various government agencies. Among these contracts and programs, Bateson found work in the Film Library developing cultural intelligence studies of Axis countries through film.² While Bateson was not a film specialist per se, it was his work in Bali and his use of still and motion photography in analyzing cultures that attracted the attention of Iris Barry, first curator of MoMA’s Film Library (now the Department of Film), and led to his employment.³ Prior to joining the Museum, Bateson believed that MoMA had a specific and important role in the war effort, particularly in producing wartime subjectivities through exhibitions. This resonates with how scholar Fred Turner has described the exhibition-form’s compilation of material and the vistas from which viewers could freely discern cultural patterns and navigate the exhibition as a “democratic surround.”⁴ This experience of moving from image to text, of observation, inference, and deduction, could lead the audience to become more psychologically flexible and democratic in nature.⁵ In this regard, Bali, Background for War was an occasion for viewers “to exercise democratic choice.”⁶ This was an exhibitionary logic that provided a counterpoint to Nazi Germany’s instrumentalized modes of communication and power associated with fascist propaganda. Turner notes that Mead and other members of the Committee for National Morale, of which Bateson was secretary (while still at MoMA), envisioned the museum as the proper setting for a new kind of propaganda that could nurture both the individual democratic personality and a collective sense of national purpose.⁷

As an institution, MoMA was committed to these same ideas. In addition, some of the emigrant Bauhaus artists who had made their way to the United States after the closing of the Bauhaus by the Nazis in 1933 were committed to ideas of producing psychological agency through vision. Bauhaus artist Alexander Schawinsky was invited by the Museum (as opposed to Bateson personally) to design Bali, Background for War. Turner has noted that the museum was an important wartime node, one that mobilized Bauhaus methods. Victor D’Amico (founding director of MoMA’s Department of Education), for example, mobilized László Moholy-Nagy’s ideas for treating and resocializing veterans through the Museum’s War Veterans’ Art Center, which opened in 1944.⁸ MoMA likewise employed Bauhaus artist and designer Herbert Bayer’s techniques for extending field of vision by hanging photographs below and above eye level to give viewers of wartime exhibitions a field of visual choices.⁹ Bayer designed MoMA exhibitions Road to Victory, which was curated by photographer Edward Steichen in 1942, and Airways to Peace: An Exhibition of Geography for the Future, which was planned and directed by Monroe Wheeler in 1943.¹⁰

Schawinsky attended the Bauhaus and studied with Moholy-Nagy, Vasily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Walter Gropius, and Oskar Schlemmer. At the invitation of Josef Albers, he taught from 1936 to 1938 at Black Mountain College, where he developed the “Spectodrama,” a multimedia stage design. In response to MoMA’s interest in Bauhaus ideas of how vision might inform subjectivity, on October 28, 1943, Monroe Wheeler, then director of Exhibitions at MoMA as well as the Museum’s first director of Publications, wrote to Schawinsky to solicit a proposal for an exhibition based on the artist’s notion of “perspective,” which Schawinsky explained in terms of the “changes in visual conceptions with the climax of today’s formation of new visual experience in the making.”¹¹

Bateson’s correspondence with Schawinsky in May 1943 indicates a highly collaborative exhibition-making process, wherein Bateson sent detailed notes, expanded the list of artwork to be included, and solicited feedback.¹² However, in July 1943, Bateson wrote to Wheeler and James Thrall Soby, then director of the Museum’s Armed Services Program, to request that Schawinsky be removed from the project. Bateson complained that Schawinsky lacked “respect for the material” and that he was “trimming . . . photographs to fit in with his scheme of rectangles regardless of the internal composition of the pictures.”¹³ Ultimately, Schawinsky was kept on, and in the press release for the exhibition, he is credited as designing the exhibition.¹⁴ Despite their differences, Schawinsky’s Bauhaus training was evident in the exhibition. His design employed Bayer’s extended field of vision techniques—with images placed at different proximities to eye level—and performatively staged modern Balinese art against linear fields in a way that recalled the Spectodrama.¹⁵

These affinities between Schawinsky’s Bauhaus ideas and Bateson’s interest in social engineering subjectivities through vision and aesthetic experience would take on an expanded and international vision through Bali, Background for War and Bateson’s work at MoMA. As part of his job at the Museum, Bateson attended a conference that, held in Chicago in March 1943 by the army’s Military Government Division, brought together faculty from Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, and universities in Wisconsin and Michigan to develop training for the Army Specialized Training Program. Upon returning to New York, he and MoMA Film Library founding director, John Abbott, drafted a proposal to set up a Wartime Regional Materials Unit within MoMA that would be responsible for circulating artworks, cultural objects, graphic materials, photographs, and films to college campuses hosting the army program and eventually to nongovernmental agencies involved in postwar reconstruction. Bali, Background for War was an exhibition that attempted to put these ideas into operation. In his letter to Mortimer Graves, then executive director of the American Council of Learned Societies in Washington, DC, Bateson identifies the exhibition as a basis for setting up a Wartime Regional Materials Unit at MoMA.

Bateson’s papers include notes regarding who would be part of the unit and how it would be constituted through MoMA’s infrastructure. Bateson focused on the diversity of artistic and cultural material at the Museum, including graphic design and film, as well as on its public programs.¹⁶ He considered the Museum an ideal institution to host the unit because it dealt “both with the Arts and with the Sciences.”¹⁷ The notes draw defined lines from Abbot, founding director of the Film Library, to Alfred Barr, founding director of the Museum, and Elodie Courter, who would organize circulating exhibitions, which were seen as fundamental to this unit. The unit was imagined to mobilize the different departments of the Museum, with dotted lines drawing different divisions across the institution into the unit. The inclusion of Barr in Bateson’s notes and Bateson’s supposed attempt at writing a Balinese modern art history point in turn to the transmutation of the currency of modern art history to military value. Bateson’s exhibition expanded the visions of modern art history that Barr had mapped out in his diagrams on the development of abstract art.¹⁸ The anthropologist’s vision for MoMA was that the Museum would be an apparatus that produced intelligence derived from exhibitionary experience and the visual analysis of art. This intelligence during the war represented a convergence of the anthropological and the art historical as these were mobilized toward militaristic ends. Ultimately, however, Bateson’s proposal to develop a Wartime Regional Materials Unit within MoMA was not realized.¹⁹

At first glance, Bali, Background for War was not a particularly successful venture. Yet, it can still be considered an important exhibition of its time and one that is significant in a Southeast Asian modern art history. At the close of the exhibition in 1943, Bateson joined the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), an American wartime intelligence agency. This was an unusual achievement given Bateson was a British national. Created in 1942, the OSS was the first centralized intelligence agency in the United States. It was the institutional predecessor to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).²⁰ David Price, an American anthropologist who has spent his career studying the historical and contemporary military uses of anthropology, has noted in his archival research on Bateson’s wartime work that the OSS was interested in the techniques of visual anthropology.²¹

An OSS memo Bateson authored in November 1944 suggests strategies for maintaining the long-term interests of the United States in South Asia.²² Bateson’s position paper envisions the postwar period as an extension of the prewar colonial system. His memo posits a moderation of the dynamic of “exhibitionism” and “spectatorship” to manage possible rebellion from independence movements—concepts that Bateson had first deployed in explaining child-rearing norms in different cultures. In the memo, Bateson elaborates:

The most significant experiment which has yet been conducted in the adjustment of relations between “superior” and “inferior” peoples is the Russian handling of their Asiatic tribes in Siberia. The findings of this experiment support very strongly the conclusion that it is very important to foster spectatorship among the superiors and exhibitionism among the inferiors. In outline, what the Russians have done is to stimulate the native peoples to undertake a native revival while they themselves admire the resulting dance festivals and other exhibitions of native culture, literature, poetry, music and so on. And the same attitude of spectatorship is then naturally extended to native achievements in production or organization. In contrast to this, where the white man thinks of himself as a model and encourages the native people to watch him in order to find out how things should be done, we find that in the end nativistic cults spring up among the native people. The system gets overweighed until some compensatory machinery is developed and then the revival of native arts, literature, etc., becomes a weapon for use against the white man. . . . If, on the other hand, the dominant people themselves stimulate native revivalism, then the system as a whole is much more stable, and the nativism cannot be used against the dominant people.²³

Bateson suggests that if Indigenous peoples are encouraged to exhibit and celebrate their culture, as opposed to being encouraged to model themselves on Western culture, then “nativism cannot be used against the dominant people.”²⁴ Taken at face value, Bateson’s comments read as patronizing prescriptions for how to manage the postwar decolonizing process. Yet at the same time, an inverse relationship of cultural relations of “occupation” was being brought to the fore. In Bali, Background for War, Bali defined the region that the American soldier was to reoccupy. In this framework, the exhibition established an exhibitionism-spectatorship dynamic in which American soldiers were the spectators celebrating the culture of a region that they were liberating. In theory, American soldiers were placed in an exhibitionism-spectatorship dynamic that prepared them for the more benign reoccupation and postwar worldbuilding that they would have to enact in the Pacific.

Price detailed that when he declassified Bateson’s documents under the Freedom of Information Act in the 1990s, Bateson’s memo from November 1944 was found in the CIA archive and not the OSS archive. This suggests that Bateson’s advice for intelligence gathering was influential beyond World War II and perhaps formative to the CIA. Indeed, in 1951, only four short years after its founding, the CIA outlined a policy on Cold War weapons. The classified report considers culture a “Cold War Front” and advocates for private foundations to patronize and issue commissions to artists “who could create works of art symbolical of the struggle against tyranny in their native lands.”²⁵ The CIA would also infamously fund cultural organizations around the world, including the Congress for Cultural Freedom and the Asia Foundation.²⁶ Both organizations contributed to the advancement of modern art internationally in the postwar years. From 1951, the CIA put into effect a program code-named DTPillar to influence the development of nationbuilding in Asia as a means to limit the growth of communism. Stirred by a public exposé in Ramparts magazine (in circulation from 1962 to 1975), the CIA ceased funding of cultural organizations in 1967.²⁷

Bateson was also strategic in targeting individuals who should see Bali, Background for War. He wrote personal invitations to the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University and to individuals at the OSS.²⁸ Particularly telling is a loose list that includes Cora Du Bois (OSS, 1942–45). Du Bois was chief of research and analysis for the Southeast Asia Command by 1944 and, after World War II, influenced the framing of Southeast Asia through her positions as chief of the Southeast Asia Branch of the US State Department’s Office of Intelligence Research (from 1945 to 1949) and as an academic at Harvard University. The list also includes Charles Fahs (OSS, 1941–45), who became chief of the Research and Analysis Division (Far East) of the OSS in 1942 and director of the Humanities Division of the Rockefeller Foundation in 1950, where he was directly involved in allocating Rockefeller grants and providing critical support to individual artists and intellectuals as well as to museums and art spaces in Southeast Asia.²⁹ In 1947, as if telegraphing Bateson’s comment about regions as a sane orchestration of the world, Du Bois, having returned from her service in the OSS and been asked to speak about cultural anthropology and Southeast Asia, stated at Smith College: “Regions and areas, like fields of academic learning, are artificial boundaries which we erect around our curiosity. They do not represent limits of integrated reality, but defenses built to encompass the frailties of human comprehension.”³⁰ This correlation and the constellated network of Bali, Background for War raises complex questions about US postwar and postimperial worldbuilding and intelligence, as well as about Southeast Asian modern art.

After the war, Bateson would advance his ideas on visual anthropology in other fields. In 1947, he addressed the United Nations, giving a speech titled “Atoms, Nations and Cultures” to argue for the urgency of social engineering based on the cultural analysis derived from visual anthropology.³¹

Twenty-four years after Bali, Background for War opened, in 1967, Bateson published the essay “Style, Grace, and Information in Primitive Art.”³² In this text, he performs an analysis of Balinese art as information coded in style, material, composition, and skill. He emphasizes the profundity of art in terms of its relational quality. Thus, he argues, Balinese paintings, under the influence of traditional and Western art forms, encapsulate the communication process between these societies. Furthermore, the text resonates with Bateson’s interest in addressing differences in international relations, which could also be read as laying out the framework for data to remake the world.³³ In this sense, Bali, Background for War in many ways foreshadowed Bateson’s work on cybernetics in the 1960s and throughout the Cold War.³⁴

The cross-cultural relations based on aesthetic experiences with modern art that defined Bali, Background for War were echoed in MoMA’s contributions to the postwar construction of modern art in Bali. In 1953, the foundation Puri Lukisan was set up to establish a museum of modern Balinese art in Ubud. Tjokorda Gee Agung was its founding chairman while Rudolf Bonnet was its curator. The museum sought support from patrons of Balinese art in Holland, the United States, and England. Monroe Wheeler answered the call. Beyond sending a book on the care of artworks, he supported the development of the museum by soliciting donations from American foundations. The first organization he approached was the Asia Foundation, which would contribute to the building in 1956 of Museum Puri Lukisan, the oldest museum in Bali. Wheeler might not have known at the time that the Asia Foundation received funds from the CIA. Nevertheless, the networked triangulation of capital flows from the CIA as well as the belief in aesthetic experience being able to mold subjectivities is important in the intelligence-making project of modern art in the Cold War.³⁵ In his letter to the Asia Foundation, dated July 10, 1955, Wheeler notes that a financial contribution to the Indonesian government to complete the building of the museum would be an admirable “token of American concern with the fine arts, which is too little understood in Asia,” extending MoMA’s wartime concern for Balinese modern art and Southeast Asia into the postwar period.³⁶

Bali, Background for War, when read against its possible influences on the cultural Cold War in the region and Bateson’s postwar accomplishments, anticipates exhibitions of Southeast Asian modern art as forms of intelligence-making, marrying the regional as a method in structuring the world with “modern art” and as a product of international exchange. Thus, Bali, Background for War offers a vista onto early cybernetic entanglements between Southeast Asia and modern art. It is important to keep in mind that MoMA did not set out to make a regional art exhibition with Bali, Background for War. Neither did the Museum set out to influence the policies of the cultural Cold War in Southeast Asia that Southeast Asian modern artists (like the Balinese modernists) would later navigate in seeking support for their own development through the Asia Foundation and other CIA-funded organizations. As an exhibition that predates Southeast Asia as a field of area studies, Bali, Background for War is an exhibitionary method: it is at once a field of relations, a feedback loop, and an open-ended imaginary produced from comparatively looking at modern art. Bali, Background for War foreshadowed future articulations of the relations that have come to define cybernetics as a field. As this essay argues, the exhibition also expands our understanding of MoMA’s influence as a museum and center for a global history of modern art, a critical part of the construction of a postwar world order.

*This essay has been adapted from and expands on an unpublished chapter from the author’s dissertation titled “Exhibiting Southeast Asia in the Cultural Cold War: Geopolitics of Regional Art Exhibitions (1940s–1980s),” Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, 2023.

**With special thanks to Ana Marie of the Archives, Library, and Research Collections Department and Ottilie Lighte from the Imaging and Visual Resources Department of The Museum of Modern Art.

The post Bali, Background for War (1943), Part II: A Proposal for Wartime Regional Materials Unit at MoMA; A Proposal for the Cultural Cold War appeared first on post.

The whites of eyes and the glint of teeth, the only discernible features in the otherwise dark shape of the Balinese shadow puppet of the witch Rangda in her supernatural form, were probably the first things visitors encountered when they entered the 1943 exhibition Bali, Background for War: The Human Problem of Reoccupation. With its fiery head and tendril fingers, the shadow puppet is a totem for a ferocious “other.” Encapsulating the anxieties that contextualized this exhibition, which coincided with World War II, the shadow puppet embodied the sensibility of the exhibition-form—an elusive sensemaking of a culture oceans away.

A wartime exhibition curated by anthropologist and cybernetics pioneer Gregory Bateson, Bali, Background for War opened at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in late summer 1943 and then traveled to universities and museums across North America.¹ Unlike MoMA’s other wartime exhibitions of the early 1940s, such as Road to Victory (1942) and Airways to Peace (1943), Bali, Background for War did not visually represent the efforts of the Allied Forces. Instead, it presented Balinese sculpture, paintings, puppets, and idols—Balinese modern art—collected by Bateson and Margaret Mead, his wife and collaborator at the time, as well as a selection of photographs from the more than 25,000 images taken during their joint anthropological expedition to Bali in 1936–39.²

Designed by Bauhaus artist and designer Xanti Schawinsky to be portable, the exhibition’s display system relied on wooden structures composed of thin vertical poles on which artworks and cultural objects were hung or otherwise installed in a variety of ways and at different heights. Balinese cultural objects were installed to facilitate distinct sight lines, which Bateson referred to as “vistas,”³ with the individual pieces appearing to float relative to one another. The exhibition presented works and objects on the same ground, alluding to how the artist and their making of the artwork were the material products of a society in which they lived and worked.

Bali, Background for War was an anthropological exhibition of Balinese modern art and culture conceived as a technology for producing a necessary subjectivity in the American infantry and civilian administrators who would oversee the “reoccupation” of Japanese-captured territories, such as Bali. The exhibition sought to cultivate the ability to recognize cultural patterns so as to foster understanding of “those habits of thought and behavior” characteristic of a particular people.⁴ In turn, it represented a weaponization of the then emerging methods of visual anthropology. Bali, Background for War was, in this respect, an exceptional exhibition. Bateson’s only curatorial effort while he was employed at MoMA (from 1942 to 1943), it encapsulated aspects of Bateson and Mead’s most influential work in visual anthropology—at the time, a new subfield of anthropology that would, in part, lead to a break from the racial codification informing exhibitions of Balinese culture in Western museums in the 1930s, wherein biological markers identified race as a defining paradigm of a people’s identity.⁵ Mead and Bateson’s use of film and photography in their fieldwork in Bali has been interpreted by scholars such as Urmila Mohan as a move away from such racialized logic.⁶

After their fieldwork in Bali, Mead and Bateson developed this inquiry into a method that became a “leading social-scientific strategy in World War II” through what Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan has described as “a new alliance of federal and foundation sponsorship with university and industrial partners.”⁷ This included the Committee for National Morale, which the couple joined in 1939, and the Council on Intercultural Relations, which they co-established in 1942 to coordinate research projects among an interdisciplinary group of anthropologists, sociologists, and psychologists interested in analyzing contemporary cultures to benefit the war effort.⁸

Mead and Bateson cowrote Balinese Character: A Photographic Analysis (1942) based on their findings from their fieldwork in Bali. In this book, they lay out their new methodology of visual anthropology.⁹ Photographs capture “behaviors” that are seen as logics or patterns that were registered across a society and found in individual actions or objects. The book explores the social relations that form the basis of larger social patterns. However, this study of Bali by visually surveying the cultural other has been critiqued by scholars such as Geoghegan as indebted to a Dutch colonial policy of turning Bali into a “living museum,” that is, of looking upon it as an idyllic “primitive” society—the assumption being that Balinese culture remained unchanged and thus could be essentialized and understood through visual codes. To be sure, Mead and Bateson’s lack of analysis of the Dutch administration renders their documentation and analysis problematic.¹⁰

Bali, Background for War (1943) was, in essence, the physical manifestation of the method of visual anthropology fleshed out in Balinese Character. Indeed, the exhibition itself became a space in which anthropological methods produced a sense of knowing and relating through the visual encounter with art and cultural artifacts; yet, at the same time, it did not end up being solely an ethnographic representation. In one of Bateson’s many drafts of a press release, he explained that the exhibition would promote “[a] greater realistic understanding of the differences between peoples, of the ways in which each people has developed its own customs and its view of life” and that “if different people are to work together . . . and appreciate each other, some of these special peculiarities must be recognized” and “labelled and pointed out partly so that we may avoid stepping on each other’s toes but also so that each people may have opportunity to make its own special contribution to an organized world.”¹¹ These ideas formed the groundwork for an exhibitionary logic in which the artwork is understood as indexical of a culture and people. Furthermore, it anticipates the belief in postwar art exhibitions as visual arguments for cultural affinities and thus the basis of a shared identity and political consciousness.

Bali, Background for War was the first “regional” exhibition of art from Southeast Asia. In 1943, the imagination of Southeast Asia as a region was a product of World War II. An offshoot of the India Command and formed in response to the Japanese conquest of the region, the South East Asia Command was created by the Allied Forces in August 1943, the same month that Bali, Background for War opened at MoMA.¹² Southeast Asia is referenced in MoMA’s exhibition press release as the “conquered countries” of the Japanese.¹³ The Japanese occupation during World War II had been articulated as the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, an economic, military, and cultural bloc of occupied countries in East and Southeast Asia that supported the Japanese war effort. In wartime propaganda, the Co-Prosperity Sphere was framed as part of a larger historic aim of resisting Western colonization and manipulation. Seeding a regional identity through a cultural program that included the establishment of “modern” arts education, it championed the revitalization of local, traditional, and Asian aesthetics across the region.¹⁴

As a regional exhibition, Bali, Background for War was less a geographic understanding of the region as a proof of concept of Bateson’s theorization of a world order based on regions of cultures. While he does not explicitly point to it, Bateson’s presentation of modern artworks alongside anthropological materials advanced an aesthetic argument about the role of art in navigating cultural differences. It reflected an understanding of the region that was sensitive to the effects of war, one that offered an alternative visual logic to “Asian” aesthetics advanced by Japanese wartime propaganda.

Bateson’s notes about the exhibition indicate “Southeast Asia” alongside other themes such as “Problems of Overseas Administration,” “Problems of National Character,” “Intercultural Relations and Propaganda,” and “Problems of Visual Presentation.”¹⁵ His conceptualization of the region was a framework for organizing and ordering the world—one based on visual identification of “cultural patterns.” In memos regarding the exhibition, he commented that “in the organization and orchestration of the postwar world [,] many different types of technical insight will be required—political, geographic, economic and cultural.”¹⁶ Furthermore, he highlighted that a key failure of the Treaty of Versailles was the lack of regional knowledge and warned that in the postwar epoch, there was a real risk that the cultural aspects of the various regions would “be ignored or imperfectly understood.”¹⁷ Bateson believed that this would lead to conflict. In a letter to Mortimer Graves of the American Council of Learned Societies in Washington, DC, sent in April 1943, four months before the opening of Bali, Background for War, Bateson explained that he and Mead were “trying to arrange in the museum an exhibition of Balinese material (native paintings, carvings, observational films, and observational photographs of native behavior) as an example of what a single culture would look like when worked out in this way.”¹⁸ He concluded by claiming the exhibition was part of a larger framework that was “the next logical step towards a sane orchestration of the world’s regional culture.”¹⁹ If regions were a framework for organizing the world and integral to international relations and building a peaceful world, then the ability to read the cultural patterns found in art and its relationship to a society was crucial.

Bali, Background for War sought to represent “the patterns of thought and behavior” of the Balinese people through “works of art and [Bateson’s] photographs of daily life on the island.”²⁰ Developed with MoMA in mind, the exhibition set out a methodology of viewing that made the exhibition-form a generative site for producing “intelligence.” Intelligence in this regard took multiple forms, including the conversion of anthropological information on Balinese culture into “military intelligence,” wherein the viewer learning to read Balinese culture through the exhibition develops a skill necessary for the successful American “reoccupation” of Bali. The exhibition was firstly a collection of material and anthropological information that in the context of World War II had military value. Secondly, it was mobilized to cultivate skills and subjectivities for military application. In turn, the exhibition as a historical object points to an emergent “cultural” military industrial complex centered on modern art and anthropology.

In this context, the “regional” exhibition was a technology that converted anthropological intelligence into military intelligence, both in terms of apprehending a cultural other but also as a way of organizing the world through cultural regions. How was modern art integral to this convergence? How was the production of a modern subjectivity and exhibitionary logic of Southeast Asia entangled with the writing of modern art at MoMA, and how was it distinct from the colonial aesthetics of the census that scholars have pointed out in discussing Balinese Character?²¹

The artworks that Bateson and Mead presented in Bali, Background for War were procured from three main painting centers in Bali: Ubud, where most foreign artists in Bali had settled from the 1920s onward; Sanur, where some foreign artists lived and most vacationed; and Batuan, which tourists rarely visited. Bateson and Mead seemed to have been most interested in Batuan, where most of the paintings in Bali, Background for War were sourced from.²² By the time Mead and Bateson were in Bali, there was a thriving business of Balinese artists making tourist paintings for a Western audience. As products of transnational exchange, these works of art were quintessentially modern.

Hildred Geertz, in her study of Bateson and Mead’s collection of Balinese paintings and, more generally, of Batuan paintings, describes the paintings produced in Batuan as “bicultural” and “bound up in the meaning systems and aesthetic ideas of several cultures at once.”²³ She notes that only a few of the Batuan painters were directly taught by German artist Walter Spies and Dutch artist Rudolf Bonnet, both of whom lived in Ubud. For the most part, Batuan or Balinese painters at the time encountered Western images in textbooks, in foreign magazines, and in the form of small commercial images distributed within the Dutch colony.

Prior to Bateson and Mead’s arrival in Bali, there were already precedents of exchange and modernism on the island. The year 1928 is marked as the first time Western observers recorded art in Bali as consisting of new forms of representation. These observers went on to cultivate a tourist economy for such images.²⁴ The Pita Maha, an artist society committed to modern art in Bali, was established in 1936 and active until 1940. It became associated with modern art of Bali, with Bonnet, a member of the society, organizing exhibitions of Balinese modernists in Indonesia and in Europe, including exhibitions in 1937 and 1938 in Amsterdam and London²⁵

The modern style that emerged from this period in the 1930s and which defined the artworks that Bateson presented in Bali, Background for War was thus informed by engagement with Western art. As Adrian Vickers has noted, Balinese modern art in the 1930s was seen as exotically primitive and distinctly different from Western modernism. And yet, art dealers such as Dutch gallerist Carel van Lier sold Balinese modern art in Europe alongside European modern art.²⁶

Walter Spies housed Bateson and Mead upon their arrival in Bali in 1936 and provided their first introduction to Balinese paintings, influencing Bateson’s perspective on Balinese modern art.²⁷ For MoMA’s installation of the exhibition, Bateson considered an additional section devoted to Balinese modern art.²⁸ In the anthropologist’s personal papers, there is a memo to Xanti Schawinsky about the wall text alongside instructions regarding which photographs and artworks were to be installed. In addition, Bateson scribbled down several possible configurations for the works. A section called “History of Modern Balinese Art,” for example, was to be arranged in a straight row, suggesting a linear historical narrative. The selection of works would include one or two paintings by Spies and about ten artworks from Bateson and Mead’s collection. The wall text focused on the genealogy of the making of the artwork and described how artists made their works as part of a loose art history of modern Balinese art development, information that was then interspersed with short stories and mythical accounts such as how Spies gave paper and black ink to Balinese artist Sorbet and a whole school was born. The genealogy privileged Spies and his position in Balinese modern art at the expense of other influences, implicitly reflecting Bateson’s own perspective of Balinese art.

Bateson claims in the written guide that accompanied the traveling exhibition that all the artworks were of the artists’ “spontaneous invention,” with the exception of a painting by Ida Bagus Made Togog, who was asked to make pictures of his dreams.²⁹ In this regard, Bateson’s mobilization of artworks might seem to speak to how Balinese artists authentically represented their inner lives and society. This was not necessarily the case, however. In her study of Bateson and Mead’s collection, Geertz found that the two anthropologists deeply influenced the Balinese artists. Throughout their fieldwork, the couple was in contact with Balinese painters who would not only travel to see them but also made art specifically to sell to them.³⁰

While Bateson intended the artworks to be seen as sources of information about the inner lives of the peoples they represented, their makers were aware of the Western anthropological gaze of Bateson and Mead, which informed their process and, in particular, their subject matter. Thus, the Balinese society that Bali, Background for War pictured was one already in dialogue with an international world order and a modern art history.In this sense, Balinese modern art in the exhibition was relational, not just representative of a faraway culture. The photographed Balinese man and more generally the people whose gaze met those visiting the exhibition was thus returning a gaze that was part of a cultural exchange that spanned back to the 1930s and was a critical part of the definition of Balinese modern art. The regional imagination captured in Bali, Background for War was, in turn, an emergent international order framed by an encounter with modern art. This nexus of the anthropological and militaristic sensemaking that took shape as an exhibitionary technology of worldmaking during the Cold War will be unpacked in the second part of this essay.

With special thanks to Ana Marie of the Archives, Library, and Research Collections Department and Ottilie Lighte from the Imaging and Visual Resources Department of The Museum of Modern Art.

The post Bali, Background for War (1943), Part I: A Regional Exhibition of Balinese Modern Art as a Military Technology of Worldmaking appeared first on post.

Writer Gyula Muskovics looks at the Georgian avant-garde fashion scene from the postcommunist transition, which began in 1991, to the present. He sets out by giving a few examples of how traditional values are called into question in the experimental collections of young designers while briefly describing the social reality giving rise to their queer fantasies. He then shows that despite the implications of the recent trend to refer to this generation of artists as rootless, there is a rich history to be discovered. Based on interviews and rarely seen archival footage, he gives insight into Tbilisi’s avant-garde fashion circles in the 1990s with a special focus on the Avant-garde Fashion Assembly.

A Rootless Generation?

The end of the 2010s saw the emergence of post-Soviet fashion, which drew inspiration from the Eastern European vibe—or, perhaps, the Western fantasies of it. Many have already described the global tendencies that have heightened interest in the cultural landscapes of the former communist bloc—from the capitalist market crash in 2008 to the events in Kyiv’s Maidan Square in 2014.¹ It is remarkable, however, that post-Soviet fashion, while feeding the commercialization of the fashion industry and producing labels like “New East” that imply the rootlessness of the current generation, has given international visibility to the region’s lesser-known creative scenes.²

This article takes a closer look at the art and fashion community in the Georgian capital of Tbilisi, introducing designers and artists who in their analysis of the post-Soviet condition move beyond the surface (beyond, for example, Lenin’s bust, the red star, the hammer and sickle, etc.) to examine the challenges specific to the society in which they live. Among the issues that countercultural efforts in the South Caucasian country have responded to since Georgia’s break from the Soviet Union in 1991—as Vija Skangale suggests in a recent article for post³—are homophobia and discrimination against the LGBT+ community. Therefore, my text focuses on how fashion, especially the more experimental, avant-garde endeavors from the postcommunist transition in the 1990s to the present, has become a platform for queer sensibilities.

Queering the Catwalk

In talking about fashion in Georgia, the biannual Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week Tbilisi (MBFT) is unavoidable.⁴ The MBFT, in addition to helping local designers establish themselves internationally, offers the youngest generation a great space for experimentation. It has also played a role in shifting the focus from marketability to artistic vision and presentation, bringing the avant-garde trends of the 1990s to fashion.

Akà Prodiàshvili (born 1995), one of those young fashion designers who moves beyond the binary, made his MBFT debut in 2018 with his spring/summer 2019 collection, which drew inspiration from drag culture and cross-dressing. Although discrimination against LGBT+ people is forbidden by law in Georgia, members of the community still face attacks. Prodiàshvili has stepped out of heteronormative reality in different ways and transformed this pain into energy and protest.⁵Similarly, fashion designer Levau Shvelidze (born 1996) utilizes his work as a form of activism in order to make his experience of Tbilisi more visible to the conservative society within Georgia.⁶ His grotesque and gender-fluid works of art are sometimes inspired by folk tales and the artist’s pink, bloody nightmares and, at other times, by anime, eco-horror, metaverse, 3D art, and sexual fetishes. While sustainability and upcycling are important to Shvelidze, ethical fashion’s most notable representative in this generation is Nini Goderidze (aka God Era; born 1997), who recently created biodegradable vegan leather. In her work, which ranges from fashion and costume design to installation, she sees the body as an “object and inspiration for developing an organic art medium.”⁷ In God Era’s technologically queered, futuristic universe, humans are genderless cyborgs, hybrids of the natural and the synthetic.⁸

“We feed and grow on poison.”

To see the subversive potential of these gender-skewing visions, one must understand the social context that gave rise to them—for example, the events leading up the 2021 Tbilisi Pride parade, which were so extreme, they hit the world press. Scheduled to be held on July 5, 2021, the event had to be cancelled due to violent counter-protests in which several civilians were injured in the street rampage of extremist gangs and far-right groups incited and recruited by the Georgian Orthodox church. The homophobic mob attacked people they considered incompatible with the heterosexual male ideal, those wearing earrings or with dyed hair. A television cameraman Lekso Lashkarava lost his life.⁹

In a social reality where being different can be a source of trouble to such a degree, fashion and style—as a form of communication—can have a role in resistance.¹⁰ This explains why Prodiàshvili, Shvelidze, and God Era appear often in the context of contemporary visual and performing arts and as important actors within the city’s queer community.

Tbilisi’s queer culture, like a mushroom, feeds and grows “on poison, [on] toxic waste” yet thrives “in damp and dark places,” as the manifesto of Fungus,¹¹ a recently formed interdisciplinary queer art collective, underlines. The amorphous organism composed of emerging and mid-career artists not only embraces the fields of visual arts, fashion, performance, and poetry but also has become interwoven with the city’s vibrant party scene—another important pillar of queer resistance in Georgia. Indeed, the world-renowned Tbilisi nightclub Bassiani and smaller venues¹² play a pivotal role in the life of the community. They are utopian spaces of radical self-expression, creativity, collectiveness, and sexuality, offering a different kind of future than what the conservative establishment has imagined.¹³

In the Decade of Darkness

The person who forms the bridge between today’s queer art scene and the avant-garde fashion circles of the 1990s is multimedia artist and costume designer Uta Bekaia (born 1974). In 2017, after spending twenty years in New York, Bekaia returned to Tbilisi, where he became one of the leading figures in the community that founded Fungus. When I spoke to him in 2019, he mentioned Aura, a club that opened in 1996 (before he immigrated to New York), as (one of) the prototype(s) of today’s safe spaces, where party culture meets performance art and fashion.¹⁴ This unofficially queer venue was located on the minus-third floor of the catacombs under Republic Square (today, First Republic Square), and as I discovered during research visits to the Georgian capital, is only vaguely remembered by a few people.

“Everyone was dressed as the opposite sex; girls wore moustaches, boys were in wigs,” recalled LGBT+ activist Paata Sabelashvili (born 1978), who told me that Aura was a safe haven for many musicians, artists and punks, as well as for the gay and lesbian community.¹⁵ Besides the weekly Madonna parties and drag shows, choreographer Ramaz Shamanauri (aka Ramazo Roma or Madlena) held dance performances and Bessarion Razmadze (born 1978) of the brand BEssARION organized fashion shows. The latter was the gayest event of the week, according to Sabelashvili.¹⁶ From time to time, Bekaia—often joined by his friend Zaliko Berger—hit the catwalk of Aura with a glittering collection that was created from found and recycled materials and took inspiration from the 1987 film Wings of Desire by German filmmaker Wim Wenders (born 1945). “It was fascinating to think that just by putting wings on someone, they would turn into a magical, poetic creature,” he explained.¹⁷ Some of the pieces from this collection appear in a music video by Irakli Charkviani (1961–2006).¹⁸ Yet, the “unbelievably crazy” vibes of Aura, as Bekaia remembered it, were contrasted with the dark atmosphere of the outside reality: “The streets of Tbilisi were scary in the 1990s; there was no taxi or public transport, and so on our way there, we covered our outfits with long coats and hid our makeup with large hoods.”¹⁹

It was the “decade of darkness,” the period after the Georgian civil war,²⁰ which followed the country’s break from the Soviet Union. The mood of the nineties was marked by mourning, fear, drug addiction, and armed criminal gangs. Since on the streets it was not uncommon to encounter people with Kalashnikovs, the avant-garde youth gathered underground and in private apartments. One such place was the home of rock musician Lado Burduli (born 1964), which also served as a venue for gender-bending fashion performances. The “catwalk” through Burduli’s living room was sometimes lit with candles, because back then, the electricity could be out for several days in a row. Besides the unconventional use of shapes and fabrics, the queering of Soviet symbols and the ironic degradation of them into playthings were striking features of the improvised fashion creations that were debuted in Burduli’s apartment. The photographs taken at a show of work by Natia Bakhtadze in 1995 by Guram Tsibakhashvili (born 1960)—who documented Tbilisi’s underground art circles in the 1990s—clearly demonstrate this. Bakhtadze presented five pieces, including two otherworldly, glittery silver evening dresses, a red dress worn by a little girl, and two androgynous outfits covering the model’s upper bodies with transparent plastic foil and communist red stars.²¹

In certain parts of the Eastern bloc, such irony in art was already common by perestroika (1985–91), the period leading to the collapse of the Soviet Union.²² In Georgia, however, the weakening of the regime, which left little room for alternative culture, brought about the rise of nationalism.²³ The imprisonment of world-famous filmmaker Sergei Parajanov (1924–1990) in the 1970s and then again in 1982 on account of homosexuality and for his poetic films subverting Soviet Realism illustrates the regime’s rigidity during this time.²⁴ At the end of the 1980s, the artists of the Marjanishvili Theatre collective, such as Oleg Timchenko (born 1957), Niko Tsetskhladze (born 1959), and Mamuka Japaridze (born 1962), were among the first to experiment with the role of costumes in performance art.²⁵ Part of the reason for this was that they had plenty of material available in the theater where their studio was located. For example, the costumes in Stand Against, a public performance in 1991 by Timchenko and Tsetskhladze, were important elements of the composition. In this work, like two mafiosi or questionable politicians of the time, the artists were dressed in suits and sunglasses as they stood motionless in an empty shop window in the underpass at Kolkhoz Square (today, Orbeliani Square). Their faces painted gold, they silently watched the passersby like mannequins, before suddenly breaking the glass and stepping out of the window onto the street. This action was not a fashion experiment but rather a way of drawing attention to the urgent need to resist what had become an increasingly stagnant and repressive society.

By the mid-1990s, fashion designers were also beginning to respond to the mood of Georgian society in different ways—some with more irony than others. An example of an artist who pursued the latter tack is Nino Chubinishvili (aka Chubika; born 1969), whose 1996 Dead Army collection of approximately thirty pieces was inspired by the omnipresent chaos. The dresses, which evoke the Chinese Terracotta Army in color and style, were made of bluish-gray impregnated canvas, which also recalls the texture of the water-repellent tablecloths ubiquitous in Soviet households, and they covered the whole body, including the head. Each model had a black-and-white photograph depicting an everyday scene attached to their chest. These images of sweet yet painful scenes of life amid devastation²⁶ were taken by Giorgi Sumbadze (born 1976) as part of a photo series depicting blind and androgynous models walking among abandoned tanks and landmines in the Gareji desert near the border of Azerbaijan. As the artist commented retrospectively in a conversation about her intuitive and inventive process, “Georgians have a fixation on death.”²⁷ At the beginning of her career, due to her limited knowledge of the unconventional materials that would later become central to her practice at the intersection of sculpting and fashion, this approach was essential. Dead Army was the first collection Chubika presented at the Avant-Garde Fashion Assembly.

“The only bright spot:” The Avant-Garde Fashion Assembly

The Avant-Garde Fashion Assembly (AMA) was a grandiose multidisciplinary event dedicated to electronic music, art, and fashion, in which not only bodies but also artistic genres were queered to illuminate the city anew, amid the postwar chaos that defined Georgia throughout the 1990s. According to many, it was a light in the darkness. “This one-week celebration, a mix of the Carnival of Brazil and an artistic hangout, was the only bright spot in the otherwise gray environment,” is how Tsibakhashvili, whose photo archive served as the visual foundation for this article, recalls it.²⁸ The assembly, which brought together Georgian and international fashion designers and artists, mostly (but not only) from the post-Soviet countries, was held only three times—in 1995, 1996, and 1999. The venue was the Georgian Expo (VDNKh). The catwalk, which was suspended as a bridge above the lake in front of the main building, is still there today. In a way, this can also be seen as a queer gesture: Where else would the parade of the young generation exploring possibilities of self-expression after the social and economic collapse have taken place if not in an exhibition complex dedicated to the achievements of the Soviet Union?

In 1995, the jury included Christophe Girard (born 1956), executive vice president of Yves Saint Laurent; Lithuanian designer Sandra Straukaite (born 1970); and Japanese artist Shozo Shimamoto (1928–2013), among others. The event was supported by George Soros’s Open Society Foundations, as I learned in an interview with poet and performance artist David Chikhladze (born 1962), who developed the theoretical concept of the first AMA under the title “Land of Venus.”²⁹ The idea was to demystify fashion, a theoretical concept that, according to Chikhladze, could not be fully translated into practice. However, it was clear that the real goal was not to counter high fashion, which did not exist in Tbilisi at the time, but rather to be “the embryo of an independent sociocultural performance.”³⁰

The five-day event, held in eleven pavilions, gave hope to both the public and participants that everything would soon be back in place. As nothing like this was happening in Tbilisi at the time, at least on this scale, people were craving culture, and the AMA encouraged them to step out of the “survival mode” of their daily lives and start dreaming, celebrating, and organizing themselves. Avant-garde fashion emphasized the power of togetherness and the need to speak out, to make a statement, as opposed to revolving around conceptual and theoretical questions in art. The artists—who by now were familiar with glamorous video clips from the West—were promoting the idea of having fun while laying the foundation for a cross-disciplinary platform based on collaboration.

It was all about experimentation and creativity, and the participants, alongside fashion designers, included architects as well as visual artists. Zaliko Berger, for example, took the play with genres so seriously that he cut the dresses he showed at the 1996 assembly from paintings in his collection. For Bekaia, who studied industrial design (as had Berger and many other artists not originally trained as fashion designers), the 1996 AMA provided the opportunity to create what would be his first fashion collection. It was inspired by nineties techno, which accompanied the show; as the dance music played, models in brightly colored monochrome outfits, their hair painted to match, walked down the runway in platform shoes with wooden soles.³¹ The main prize in 1996 went to visual artist Maya Sumbadze (born 1972), who designed six dresses made of transparent plastic lined with hay and wildflowers from Dusheti, where she is from.³² The short show was set to music by Nika Machaidze (born 1972) and Gogi Dzodzuashvili (born 1971), with whom Sumbadze, alongside Chubika and others, would later form the multimedia artist group Goslab.³³

The popularity of this form of expression among visual artists was partly due to the fact that though wearable fashion requires a certain level of expertise, the AMA did not have such expectations of its participants. In fact, the event seems to prove that the less skilled you were, the crazier the creations you put together. Furthermore, as shown above, it did not require any particular material resources. Despite the difficult conditions, these fashion shows, in highlighting the transformation and abstraction of the human body, and demonstrating the subject in the process of becoming, can be interpreted through the lens of feminist and queer discourses of the 1990s.

The AMA, through its international roster of guests, has only further encouraged such cross-pollination, cultural exchange, and the clash of perspectives and contexts. Artist and avant-garde fashion creator Alexander Petlura (born 1955), already well-known in Moscow’s alternative fashion circles as a collector of trash, attended the event twice.³⁴ As photographs of the event show, in 1999, he was accompanied by his muse, seventy-five-year-old Pani Bronya (1924–2004), who had won the Alternative Miss World award in London the previous year. This “beauty” contest, which is held every four to five years, was founded by British sculptor and performance artist Andrew Logan (born 1945) in the 1970s and has celebrated such queer icons as Derek Jarman (1942–1994), Leigh Bowery (1961–1994), and Divine (1945–1988).³⁵ Logan was closely involved with the avant-garde fashion community in the Eastern bloc, and so it is no surprise that he also participated in the last edition of the AMA, injecting a booster shot of camp sensibility into the 1990s Georgian art scene.

The AMA was the brainchild of young designer Gela Kuprashvili (born 1972), who modeled it on the Untamed Fashion Assembly (UFA), a similar event that took place in Riga almost every year between 1990 and 1999.³⁶ The UFA was the region’s first large-scale fashion show in which Eastern and Western designers and artists joined forces in confronting the mainstream with unconventional sculptural creations. In 1994, Paco Rabanne (born 1934) also participated. Andrey Bartenev (born 1965) who, along with Katya Filippova (born 1958), is perhaps the best-known figure in Moscow’s alternative fashion scene, debuted in 1992 with the Botanical Ballet —a giant papier-mâché costume collection. To a lesser extent, but a few years earlier, similar efforts had been made in the Soviet satellites. Ceremoniously preparing for the inescapable fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989, Hungarian fashion designer Tamás Király (1952-2013) staged his avant-garde fashion shows at the Petőfi Music Hall in Budapest.³⁷ Király was one of the few avant-garde designers in Central and Eastern Europe, and the only one in Hungary, but he compensated for this with the size of his events. He brought his visions to life, if necessary, through more than a hundred garments, with contributions by alternative music bands, as well as the onstage presence of child models, bodybuilders, and animals.

Builders of Utopia

The AMA and similar events are enlightening in two ways: On the one hand, they show that despite the assumptions of the dominant art historical narrative, which superficially compares the “belated” East with the “progressive” West, postmodern and queer ideas about body and identity were not absent in the former Eastern bloc.³⁸ Yet, a closer look at the socioeconomic context in which these avant-garde visions took form reveals an important difference: In the West, DIY, bricolage, and inventiveness in fashion stood in opposition to consumer capitalism and mass production. In the East, however, in the vacuum that preceded and followed the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the main source of artistic imagination was scarcity—that is, the absence of a stable economy with a functioning industry and material resources—which fostered a certain freedom in terms of creativity.³⁹ Nevertheless, avant-garde fashion in Eastern Europe in the 1980s and the 1990s offered delicate and fresh takes on gender, fashion, and the values that have come to define beauty.

As the UFA’s main organizer Bruno Birmanis has noted, “The nineties is the period that everyone remembers, but that nobody has precise memories of,”⁴⁰ which my own research confirms. In this text, I weave local fashion phenomena in Tbilisi with the larger network of similar events in the former Eastern bloc as well as with global trends to show that the line separating East and West is not as clear as mainstream art history implies. Furthermore, in response to the post-Soviet fashion trend, I would like to suggest that the artists of the 1990s have already exhausted the notion of post-Soviet, in the sense that they responded in various ways to the fall of Soviet ideology and the turmoil that followed it.⁴¹ As schizo-analysts of rootless societies in a turbulent decade, they opened windows onto realities that existed merely at the level of dreams and fantasies. They also laid a foundation for the new generation, which has an equally important role to play, especially in the highly charged sociopolitical environment of Tbilisi: They are the builders of a utopia that allows us to imagine that something beyond what we accept as reality is possible. And this is essential to bringing about change in society. Although, there will always be new challenges, the work should never start from the beginning. The experiences of our ancestors are fundamental to such world-building projects.

The contributor would like to thank David Apakidze and Nikoloz Nadirashvili for their extensive help in navigating Tbilisi’s contemporary art and fashion circles during his research visits and beyond.

Exhaustive efforts have been made to confirm the accuracy of the information provided in the article; omissions brought to our attention will be corrected accordingly.

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November 2021

Thuy-Han Nguyen-Chi: I thought we could start with something personal. One of the points of connection I have observed throughout our conversations over the last months is our relationship to our mothers.

Wong Binghao: Yes, we just realized that last week was both of our mothers’ birthdays.

THNC: Yes, that’s such a sweet coincidence.

WBH: Could you tell me more about the new video that you’re making in collaboration with your mother about her life experiences, among other things?

THNC: I actually just finished the script, but the project is still in its embryonic stage. So I can’t share anything concrete yet, but I can talk about the various conditions that may have brought this project, which is part of a trilogy I began working on in 2016, into existence. The In/Extinguishable Fire (2019), the second part of the trilogy, opens with this image: An unidentifiable figure stands alone at the beach at night in Hội An, Vietnam, illuminating the waves with a torch in search of something unknown to both themself and the viewer. I decided to shoot this opening scene at that particular location after an encounter in December eight years ago. On that hot and humid afternoon, I was sitting with B—an essayist, political activist, and philosophy professor—in his office, listening to him speak about his youth and adulthood, the things that moved and shaped him, from the period of French colonialism to American imperialism to present-day Vietnam. He told me he began speaking French in elementary school, and how deeply he was influenced by French culture and literature. He told me how his thoughts on freedom [tư tưởng về tự do], paradoxically, were nurtured by the very education that was meant to colonize him. He told me that he was a member of the anti-French resistance youth group in the 1950s and once attempted to burn down a French school. He organized Central Highland tribes into guerrilla units to fight the French. He told me about the first time he saw the corpse of a friend. I was shaken to the core when I left his office after three hours of conversation. I was so moved by his presence, his actions, his experiences, and the idea of a colonizing tool being transformed into a tool of liberation. Later that week, I went for a night walk with him on the beach in Hội An. We walked in silence for a long time until we stopped to observe the movements of the dark waves. After a while, he said something like, “Whenever I look at the ocean, I think of all the corpses lying on the ocean bed. I was not brave enough to flee this country. They died and I survived.”

A few years later, again in December, I was sitting next to my mother in the darkness of the cinema, when I witnessed her being overwhelmed by a feeling of nausea as rays of light entered her eyes. She was looking at an image of a spaceship moving through a wormhole, when she told me, “It reminds me so much of being on a boat when I escaped Vietnam.” In the film being screened, the protagonist goes on an interplanetary odyssey in search of a habitable planet necessitated by an impending apocalypse on Earth. In that moment, the collision between memory and cinema created some kind of wormhole through which her present mind/body traveled. I realized that a work of science fiction and speculative futurism has the potential to activate archives experienced as somatized trauma—memories of the future. 

Speaking of memories, a moving image that has haunted me since I was a teenager is the image of a jump, although—or because—it is an image I have never seen but have only imagined. After stepping onto a fishing boat in Long Xuyên in the spring of 1979, my mother spent three days floating across the South China Sea. She was without food for three days because the mung bean cubes and citrus fruits she had brought along were stolen. Three days of talking to the captain to keep him awake. Three days of taking care of those who were feeling sick. Three days of looking at the celestial sphere every night with a sense of wonder, with a sense of uncertainty. Three days of oscillating between possible freedom and possible death. On the third day, they were accompanied by a pod of dolphins while approaching Songkhla, Thailand. On the third day, death possibly equaled freedom, my mother—who, back then, was not able to swim—decided to jump into the ocean. I won’t elaborate on the circumstances here, but you will understand once you see the film in a few months.

The idea of freedom really intrigues me because of how B uses the term within the context of anti-colonial resistance and because of how my mother uses it when she recounts her escape, specifically in the moment she jumped, surrendering to death. I’m not interested in the liberal discourse of freedom¹—I’m searching for a different conceptualization of freedom, one that includes a recasting of freedom in refugitude², but I haven’t quite figured it out yet. A few years ago, I came across this set of questions in Hélène Cixous’s essay “We Who Are Free, Are We Free?”³ which really resonated with me: “What am I in relation to freedom?⁴ What are we? What are you? Am I free? Have I ever been free? Have we? Have you? Where is freedom to be found, where does liberty find refuge when it is under threat?”⁵ And I like to think about these questions in relation to this particular imaginary that Angela Davis addressed during a conversation with Toni Morrison: “How do we think about freedom? It is about the deeply historical character of our own imaginings of what it means to be free… Because I think we won’t ever reach a point where we can say, ‘We are free.’ It seems that in the very process of struggling for, reflecting on, and writing about freedom, we constantly challenge the framework, within which we develop that imaginary of freedom.”⁶—the imaginary of freedom is continuously metamorphosing as it moves through time and space! I wonder what this imaginary meant for our grandmothers and mothers, what it means for you and me now, what it will mean for generations to come, and how these imaginaries, conditioned by various personal, political, cultural, historical conditions and contexts, generate different meanings when you reflect on them in relation to each other. 

I’m really fascinated by our imaginaries of freedom and of death, by the potential entanglement between these imaginaries and how they shape us. On another level, I’m also preoccupied with the death/birth of a perception, an imaginary, a narrative, an image of a self; and experimenting with memory, imagination, performance, and moving images is my attempt to think and live through these questions.

November 2022

WBH: The film titled Into The Violet Belly (2022), commissioned by the 12th Berlin Biennale, curated by Kader Attia, has been completed. Picking up from our earlier conversation, Han describes the centrality of breath and the act of breathing to the film.

THNC: Some years ago, I was in a car on the highway to Munich with my mother and her friend when an immense force moved my body forward and cloudy smoke emerged from within the car. Lying on the car floor, I was suffocating and desperately gasped for air. Later on, in the hospital, I learned that my lung was ruptured and bleeding. I experienced weeks of breathlessness following the car crash. I was dependent on an oxygen mask and a breathing exerciser until I regained full lung capacity. During this period, I spent most of my time practising and contemplating the act of breathing—the conditions that create the im/possibility to breathe. And I began to ask myself: How can I find ways to tune into the collective breath/lessness through my own individual breath/lessness, and vice versa?

This project was very much anchored in the notions of respiration and embodiment. During the film shooting, my mother and I performed the jump multiple times. First, she recalled her memories of the moments before the jump; her emotions, and the conditions that led to her decision to jump. Then she demonstrated the jump to me. When she emerged from the water and climbed back into the boat, I jumped into the water based on her instructions. She gave me directions on where to turn my gaze before the jump—to turn it toward an imaginary person—how to shift my body, how to step to the edge of the boat with one foot, and how to enter the water with my feet first. She emphasized that she didn’t jump headfirst into the water as she didn’t yet know how to swim. We performed—I consciously use the term “performance” and not “reenactment” here because I think that it is impossible to reenact the past—this jump again and again.

During the editing process, our editor Liyo Gong intercut footage of our jumping bodies into one synchronized movement, which was repeated seven times with variations. I wanted to interweave the movement of her body with the movement of my body—two bodies that have existed in an environment where it was difficult, if not impossible, to breathe; bodies that condense all the events that have happened, are happening, will happen—to the point where you can no longer clearly perceive the identities of these bodies, where you can no longer make a clear distinction between director and performer. My mother and I then watched this edited footage projected onto the screen in the post-production studio and reflected on what we saw, felt, thought. There is one sentence during these moments of reflection that she repeated in every variation of her story of being underwater that I left out in the final edit of Into The Violet Belly: “How was I able to open my eyes and see underwater like that? I was not suffocating at all. I felt like a marine mammal.” The fact that she could breathe underwater is surreal, somehow—

WBH: Miraculous.

THNC: Exactly. She always says it was “supernatural” that she could breathe underwater! And I imagine it as a moment where reality and fiction collapse into one another. Perhaps we can address these terms later—I’m digressing now, but do you know that whales evolved from a terrestrial ancestor and made a gradual transition from land to sea in the early Eocene?⁷ During the first lockdown, I spent quite some time reading papers about the evolution of whales.⁸ It was mind-blowing to read about the major changes in multiple physiological functions required for them to move from being terrestrial to semiaquatic to fully aquatic. Whales continue to breathe air using lungs and nurse with mammary glands, as land mammals do.⁹ But the lung capacities of marine mammals are larger than terrestrial mammals, especially when compared on a lean-weight basis. When diving, marine mammals can supplement body oxygen stores by increasing the oxygen storage capacity of the lung, blood, and muscles.¹⁰

So when writing the last scenes of the script and conjuring the images of this jump in my mind, I began to imagine a woman completely surrendering to death/life, to the ocean, putting aside her anthropoid ways,¹¹ and gradually metamorphosing into a marine mammal¹² capable of seeing and “breathing”¹³ underwater. I imagine my mother encountering and turning into her human and more-than-human ancestors underwater. I imagine her migrating from land to sea within three days, three weeks, three months, three years, three decades, three centuries, three millennia, thirty thousand years, three hundred thousand years, three million years, thirty million years. I imagine millions of human and more-than-human beings migrating from land to sea to land at this very moment. I remember twenty-six-year-old Phạm Thị Trà My migrating from land to land to land, stuck in a truck with thirty-eight other young people when she sent a text message to her parents in the final moments of her life—a message that they received when her mobile phone found a signal again, long after all the occupants of the truck had taken their last breath: “Mom and Dad, I’m so sorry. I didn’t make it. Mom. I love you both. I’m dying because I can’t breathe. Mom, I’m so sorry.”¹⁴ I imagine an environment where humans and more-than-human entities are given the possibility to expand their lung capacities and are liberated from the conditions that suffocate them. I imagine freedom of movement for all living beings, and the dissolution of borders between land and land, land and sea, sea and sea; of membranes between humans and humans, humans and more-than-humans; of the boundaries between where you begin and where I end. I imagine us speaking to each other, like whales speak to other whales, in a language of abstruse mathematical poetry.¹⁵ I imagine the collapse of sky and earth, of space and time, of self and self, and the evolution of beings, languages, images, and worlds we are incapable of imagining.

But whenever I look at the ocean, I think of all the corpses lying on the ocean bed, I become aware of the thousands, the millions of migrants at sea whose lungs were not prepared to breathe in an aquatic environment, whose voices are inaudible to us. When a human being drowns, “liquid enters their airways and prevents them from breathing. Submerged in water, one’s breath can be held voluntarily for some time, but without the ability to take in oxygen and to eliminate carbon dioxide, uncontrolled muscular contractions of the vocal folds ensue. One then experiences circulatory arrest, multiple organ dysfunction, and in the absence of rapid intervention and resuscitation, death.”¹⁶

For the animation scene—the penultimate scene in my film, where we see a close-up of the protagonist’s face underwater—I worked with the artist Dalena Tran. Our point of departure was the image of a human lung transforming into a whale lung capable of breathing underwater. After having intense conversations with Dalena about our family’s histories and questions in relation to, but also beyond this project, over several months, she created an organism, a movement, a metamorphosis that is much more complex, open, multi-layered, and dimensional. It is amorphous. It embodies something I tentatively call an aesthetic of uncertainty.

Beyond thinking about breathing merely in its biological aspect, I’m also reminded of an essay by Achille Mbembe in which he conceives of breathing as that which “we all hold in common, that which, by definition, eludes all calculation”: the universal right to breathe¹⁷—a right that has been violated by the conditions and forces of patriarchy, capitalism, imperialism, and colonialism. There is a paragraph in Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks where he writes about the anti-French resistance during French colonialism in Vietnam: “It is not because the Indo-Chinese has discovered a culture of his own that he is in revolt. It is because ‘quite simply’ it was, in more than one way, becoming impossible for him to breathe… It is for the sake of the present and of the future that they are willing to die.”¹⁸ What could resistance mean in society, life, and art now? Can we find a commonness in how we breathe that would correspond to a commonness in that we breathe?¹⁹ And within the context of filmmaking: How can I create a structure, a language, a rhythm that gives an image the possibility to breathe?

WBH: Two things stuck out to me. Firstly, that your work does not simply recount a biographical story through documentary. It’s not purely factual in that way. To go back to what you said earlier, you are interested in liberatory practices that, as I interpret it, involves an ongoing process of negotiation and aspiration instead of a finite outcome or indisputable narrative. The second thing that stood out to me was the word “reality,” in particular how your mother described as “surreal” the moment of miraculously being able to swim and breathe underwater despite never having learned to swim. Janet Mock succinctly writes that “‘realness’ means you are extraordinary in your embodiment of what society deems normative.”²⁰ This applies of course to embodied transgender politics, but I’m also interested in what this then says about our sense of perception and scale, and the possibilities inherent in these codes of life. Reality is always embedded in surreality, which makes the latter even more magical and illusory. Was your mother actually able to see and breathe underwater, or was it a divine miracle? Maybe it was a bit of both.

THNC: Yes, absolutely. Reality and fiction interare.²¹ What I’ve attempted to do with this film is to create a structure, conditions, and methods for these realities/fictions to unfold, to converge and collide with each other. Thinking in dualistic terms, one may say that the film oscillates between various modes of reality/fiction: memory and imagination, documentary and (auto)fiction, mythology and science fiction, the process of filming and the film itself. I don’t know if I’ve succeeded in doing this, but my aspiration is to dissolve these distinctions, to make the viewer experience these different realities/fictions as rising and falling waves within a body of water.

I have a dear friend, a theoretical and experimental quantum physicist with whom I have talked about quantum physics and cinema on a regular basis. We have often contemplated the observer effect, a phenomenon in which the act of observation alters the reality you’re observing, i.e., the behavior of the particles being observed. It really fascinates me how ontology and epistemology are entangled within this context. While trying to avoid being simplistic and drawing direct parallels between these two drastically different fields, we have asked ourselves how the presence of a camera shapes the realities/fictions we’re observing through the lens. How will being conscious of the fact that our dialogue, our (inter)action will be recorded with a camera and observed by an audience shape the way my mother and I talk to and interact with each other? Being conscious of the fact that this exchange between you and me will be published and observed by a reader—how does that shape the way we conduct and edit the conversation? Does our (inter)action become a form of performance? Does this performance make visible a certain reality/fiction? What kind of reality/fiction do we observe when we’re filming the protagonist before we say “action” and keep filming after we say “cut”?

There is a scene in the film where you can hear the protagonist talking to the chicken she’s holding in her arms, while the cinematographer changes the lens. You can see how the image changes after the new lens has been installed. The director then asks the protagonist to wait for a few seconds before the actual scene begins, before they dive into a mnemonic space. Gradually, it becomes clear that the protagonist is a mother telling the story to her child. Toward the end of the scene, she says, “In challenging times, you have to be a good actor. The better you are, the more likely you are to get yourself out of dangerous situations.” The moment she says that, something strange, perhaps even surreal happens. This scene is probably a condensation of some of the ideas and questions I previously addressed.

Finally, although the film takes my mother’s individual experience as a point of departure, I hope to expand that experience and create a cinematic ecosystem by layering multiple oral and written (non)narratives, realities and fictions, events and agencies shaped by both human and more-than-human forces across space and time.

WBH: Another word that came to mind is performance. With regards to the performance of motherhood in your work, I thought specifically of how Joshua Chambers-Letson describes performance as “a way to reproduce our losses in the present and defer the second killing of our loved ones.”²² Writing about Danh Vo’s 2012 exhibition I M U U R 2, an extensive and curated display of almost four thousand objects collected by the late artist Martin Wong and his mother, Florence Wong Fie, Chambers-Letson further argues that through “performance’s quite queer mode of reproduction . . . queer of color life is reproduced by an aesthetic gesture, rather than biological process,” suggesting that “a mother need not be of biological relationship to the child to be a mother, nor must her status as mother be determined by her, his, or their biology.”²³                                                    

As you were talking about quantum physics, I also thought of an essay by Karen Barad, in which she writes, “It is not that electrons sometimes engage in such perverse explorations: these experiments in intra-active trans*material performativity are what an electron is. . . . Ontological indeterminacy, a radical openness, an infinity of possibilities, is at the core of mattering. . . . Matter is never a settled matter. It is always already radically open.”²⁴

I thought this could also be a good point to talk about how your work embodies the radical openness of matter. At some point in our conversations, we realized that we each have a very representative color. Yours is blue and mine is pink. You once described color as not just a superficial aesthetic choice. It is a core conceptual and theoretical point of our research and practice. Pink is something that I can’t fully rationalize. It has been with me since I was a teenager. When we pointed out blue and pink as each other’s go-to colors, it got me thinking about how they are loaded with cultural ideologies, the most obvious being sex and gender norms. In his book Chromophobia, the artist David Batchelor argues that “colour has been the object of extreme prejudice in Western culture,” and that these presumably skin-deep, cosmetic prejudices are in fact codes for deeply entrenched fears and anxieties, for example, of contamination and corruption by unknown, foreign entities including migrants, the queer, the feminine, the Oriental, and so on.²⁵ For Batchelor, the prejudice against color “conflate[s] the sinister and the superficial.”²⁶ Funnily, Batchelor, when referencing philosopher C. L. Hardin’s extensive studies on the science of color, mentions, almost as an afterthought in parentheses, that “the entire existence of pink” is an “anomaly.”²⁷ I love that there is no disguising the iconic irrelevance of pink. As a non-binary person, I think my work is so defined by lurid, blooming pinks because it hints at the gendered experiences and expectations that I’ve been excluded from but that have, and remain, palpable to me in different ways. Pink is my negotiation with worldly impositions. Could you talk more about how the color blue performs or does the work of imagination in your practice?

THNC: That was amazing. I love the interconnections you’re creating. Have you, as a child, also asked yourself why the sky is blue? There is a paragraph in Maggie Nelson’s Bluets I really like: “The blue of the sky depends on the darkness of empty space behind it. As one optics journal put it, ‘The color of any planetary atmosphere viewed against the black of space and illuminated by a sunlike star will also be blue.’ In which case blue is something of an ecstatic accident produced by void and fire.” Produced by darkness and light, void and fire, wow!

One of my favourite films is Derek Jarman’s Blue. It’s a meditation on his experience with AIDS, color, and the void through an intricately layered landscape of voices, sounds, and music set against an unchanging field of blue.²⁸ Jarman states in a proposal for the film, “The monochrome is an alchemy, effective liberation from personality. It articulates silence. It is a fragment of an immense work without limit. The blue of the landscape of liberty.”²⁹ Although liberty may hold different meanings in our works, I, too, aspire to move into a “landscape of liberty” at the end of Into The Violet Belly.

For the last scene, I collaborated with Frankie (Franziska Aigner) who composed, produced, and performed a song based on “Learning Late Letters,” a poem written by Quyên Nguyễn-Hoàng.³⁰ Frankie reduced the second part of the song—in which she recites various forms of dying—to two elements: the sound of my mother’s breath and her own voice. I was deeply moved by her process of recording my mother’s breathing. Fujiko Nakaya speaks about the interval between an inbreath and an outbreath as an “empty void” that contains the “largest potential.”³¹ In the last moments of the film, all images die: the viewer is invited to become “an astronaut of the void”³² by immersing themselves in a field of blue—perhaps an interval between life and death—while listening to my mother’s breaths and Frankie’s voice.

But like your relationship with pink, I can’t fully rationalize mine with blue. So let me tentatively close this conversation by saying:  She who jumps into the void owes no explanation to those who stand and watch.³³

The post Into The Void of Metamorphosis: Thuy-Han Nguyen-Chi and Wong Binghao in conversation appeared first on post.

As the entrepreneurial co-founder of the Société Zin, a modernist design company, Farhat contributed to the visual aesthetics of civic spaces during the formative period of Tunisian socialism and state feminism. In the 1960s and early 1970s, the artist created numerous murals and decorative programs to enhance the architectural environment of newly built schools, hotels, factories, banks, and government buildings. This essay introduces Farhat’s key role in sustaining a mural tradition among Tunisian modernists, and describes a selection of the artist’s monumental designs in which her characteristic hybrid creatures predominate. Crafted in ceramic tiles, paint, stone, iron, and wool, Farhat’s artistic corpus portrays animated scenes of laborers and artisans, geometric patterns associated with textiles and pottery made by women, nude female bathers, coastal motifs, and elements of industry. Hybrid organisms composed of flowers, birds, and artisanal symbols populate these fantastical environments. Many of the monumental works remain in situ across Tunisian civic spaces, serving as muted backdrops for the activities of students, teachers, tourists, laborers, and bureaucrats. What subdued histories might Farhat’s composite creatures, made up of anthropomorphized artisanal motifs associated with femininity, reveal? 

A nude woman bather floats along a current of stylized motifs, forming the focal point of a ceramic tile wall designed by artist Safia Farhat circa 1963. Decorating the reception area of the Hôtel Skanès Palace, located on the waterfront of the coastal resort area of Monastir-Skanès, the bather turns her oval eye toward passing guests and employees. The curvature of her breast and fingers mirrors the undulations of waves (fig. 1). She emerges from an imaginary seascape of floating elements: the rooftops of mosques, zigzags from carpets, triangular fish, flowering plants, and jewel-like biomorphic shapes. Two inset panels depicting gazelles and mythical composite creatures rest against the backdrop of deep blue and coral tiles. A few kilometers away, along the same beachfront, Farhat composed similar designs for the stone panels that decorate the bar in the restaurant of the Hôtel les Palmiers. Situated in a hotel adjacent to the presidential palace in the city of Monastir, the bar’s counter features two rows of geometric and biomorphic designs (fig. 2). Farhat’s evolving iconography may be characterized by such fantastical motifs drawn from women’s textiles, tattoos, jewelry, and ceramic wares. These designs germinate and sprout in Farhat’s decorative programs in Monastir’s secondary school and civic assembly hall, as well as in other sites across Tunisia. The artist’s composite creatures and artisanal motifs animate her compositions and reveal the entwining of gender, labor, and art during the 1960s.¹

Safia Farhat worked across several professional domains as she sought to breathe new life into art forms associated with women’s artisanal production.² She created these decorative programs in the post-independence environment of the late 1950s and early 1960s, when family law reform in 1956 enacted a regime of state feminism, while broader initiatives aimed at women’s social and economic development endorsed the transformative power of creating art.³ As larger numbers of women enrolled in secondary school and pursued higher education, in particular at the École des Beaux-Arts in Tunis, feminist narratives drew on the symbol of the woman artist to promote female creativity and independent thought, and to serve as a gauge for societal progress (figs. 3, 4).⁴ Moreover, the nationalist quest to establish a Tunisian modernist aesthetic gave momentum to the ennoblement of art forms subordinated as “handicraft” under the French protectorate. By the early 1960s, art forms such as weaving and ceramics came to represent possibilities for enhancing women’s social, economic, and intellectual autonomy.

A professor of decorative arts at the École des Beaux-Arts, Farhat joined Abdelaziz Gorgi (Tunisian, 1928–2008) to become the school’s second Tunisian instructor in 1959; Gorgi taught ceramics from 1956 onward (fig. 5). Both artists were also members of the École de Tunis, a group of Tunisian, French, and Italian painters who increasingly turned to craft-based mediums in their explorations of material and heritage. As professors, Farhat and Gorgi shaped a beaux-arts curriculum that sought to elevate art forms categorized diminutively in colonial discourses as feminized craft. They sought to instill in a new generation of Tunisian students creative, entrepreneurial approaches to the modernist reinvention of art forms connected to local patrimony, as well as the confidence to propose innovative designs executed using craft processes. Under Farhat’s leadership, students in the atelier of decoration gained new perspectives on reviving “artistic craft” through field trips to artisanal centers. She also partnered with the National Office of Handicraft, and specifically weavers in the textile ateliers, to teach technique and design. A feminized bureau whose workforce was 80 percent female, the National Office of Handicraft attracted thousands of young, unmarried women into its pilot training programs because “handicraft,” especially weaving, represented an acceptable profession for lower-class women who, past primary-school age, sought opportunities for education and employment. Farhat’s experimental pedagogy endeavored to support collaborations between artists and artisans, and to cultivate female relationships across social classes.⁵ As she undertook teaching and administrative responsibilities that integrated art and artisanal production, she simultaneously trained a new generation of women creators who would go on to bridge institutional divides.

In 1963, Farhat and Gorgi co-founded a design company, the Société Zin, that put their pedagogical approaches into praxis. This company took its name “Zin” from the Arabic word zīn, which denotes beauty, decoration, and the power to enthrall. Together, Farhat, Gorgi, and their collaborator Claude Béja designed and delegated orders for decorative programs that often overlapped with architectural commissions mandated by law. Specifically, the One Percent Law, reinstated in 1962 by presidential decree, required that a portion of every civic building’s budget be allocated to decoration.⁶ This law underscored president Habib Bourguiba’s emphasis on the arts as a product of societal and cultural advancement. It also enabled participating artists to capitalize on the so-called development decade as the government commissioned artworks for the building of dozens of centralized, state-run offices, the tourism and hotel industry, the redesign of Monastir (Bourguiba’s natal city), schools, and impermanent displays for trade fairs. New construction, concentrated in the capital and coastal regions, centered on tourist and bureaucratic infrastructures. Artists, frequently members of the École de Tunis and their artisan collaborators, were subcontracted to decorate civic buildings, producing more than a hundred murals, mosaics, obelisks, friezes, and tapestries in wood, ceramic, iron, glass, stone, and wool in the decade following the law’s reinstatement. A journalist with the newspaper La Presse elaborated the mission of the Société Zin: “Their goal, they tell us, is to attempt to renovate Tunisian decoration with a utilitarian intention in seeking to employ as many artisans as possible. We have an array of artist-artisans in Nabeul, Ksar Hellal, Kairouan, Hammamet, and elsewhere, such as ceramicists, stonecutters, nattiers [plant-fiber weavers], weavers.”“⁷ Commissions for decorative programs not only created the conditions under which artistic collaborations across social classes could occur, but also brought visibility to these relationships.

Due to its strategic importance in the Ten-Year Plan, which underpinned Tunisian socialism and the Bourguibist struggle against underdevelopment, tourism was an early and vital source of artistic patronage.⁸ The Tunisian Tourist Hotels Company (Société des Hôtels Tunisiens Touristiques, or SHTT) was a public corporation established in 1959 to build a tourist infrastructure. The Société Zin facilitated many decorative projects for SHTT hotels by providing clients with architectural plans and proposing designs for decorative programs. Depending on a project’s size, scale, and medium, Farhat and Gorgi hired collaborating artisans for its execution and employed iconographic references to dramatize the budding artisanat artistique (artistic craft industry). Hotels also purchased handmade objects such as rugs, ceramic vases and ashtrays, and wrought iron candelabras to complete the decor. The tourism industry promoted the concept of uplifting the artisan, stating in its bulletin, “In Tunisia as elsewhere, the craftsman must learn new skills to become both an able technician and creative artist. The 20th Century has assigned him a new and appropriate role: that of enriching daily life by beautifying useful and functional objects.”⁹

The blend of fantastical, animate elements and symbols of feminine labor, which characterizes Farhat’s ceramic tile wall in the Hôtel Skanès Palace, in fact threads her decorative commissions of the period. In partnership with Gorgi, Farhat designed the reception area of the Hôtel l’Oasis in Gabès and the restaurant-bar of the Hôtel les Palmiers in Monastir to be self-referential. Both seafront hotels feature ceramic tile murals, pierced ceramic walls, and sculpted stone decor that whimsically echo their particular decorative characteristics. Farhat’s stonework in the Hôtel l’Oasis, though now partially dismantled, includes fragments of geometric and vegetal motifs abstracted from women’s textile designs and tattoos. In one panel painted by an unknown renovator, a tattooed peasant woman holding a pomegranate wades through knee-deep water (fig. 6). Schools of fish bearing delicate geometric and floral patterns dart around her ankles; these oval creatures resemble the opaline shapes drifting through the bather’s seascape in the Hôtel Skanès Palace. Above, the fronds of a palm tree turn into resplendent jewelry-like patterns, accentuating the triangular fibula pinning the woman’s dress; similar fibulae spring to life in other compositions.

Other examples of hybrid artisanal creatures are visible in Farhat’s bar in the Hôtel les Palmiers, built by presidential architect Olivier-Clément Cacoub for the hotel adjoining Bourguiba’s summer palace (fig. 7); her stonework depicts animate fibulae and geometric and biomorphic designs similar to those in Gabès and Monastir-Skanès. Highly stylized triangular fish and aquatic creatures (like phytoplankton) swim and float across the bar’s frontispiece. These auspicious symbols re-create the orderly structure of a woven grid. Linear motifs, like small propellers, protrude from the triangles; the “arms” and “hands” of the central anthropomorphic design suggest feminine patterns and a bridal motif found in weaving (fig. 8). In addition, Farhat and Gorgi decorated both hotels with pierced, undulating ceramic walls in vivid orange and in pale turquoise and green. In the Hôtel les Palmiers, Gorgi’s luminescent screen of gazelles, horses, and birds morphing into flowers separates Farhat’s bar from the dining-lounge area and encircles the restaurant (fig. 9). The installation of these artworks in new spaces of economic and ideological power situated them in development discourses, especially, as Tunisian scholar and artist Aïcha Filali (born 1956) has articulated, during a period when hotels officially served as “windows into the country.”¹⁰ While tourism constituted one significant source of patronage for Farhat, she also created monumental works featuring hybrid creatures for state offices and factories.

Farhat’s stone monument L’homme et le travail (Man and Work), which she designed in 1964 for the entrance to the National Institute of Productivity in Radès, amalgamates motifs that exemplify their collective inscription in the institutions of economic and gender reform (figs. 10, 11). Sculpted in low relief by stonecutters from Dar Chaabane, this triangular post displays images on three sides. The composition on the first side depicts a stylized male figure in profile sniffing a mashmūm (bouquet of jasmine buds), which he grasps with pointed fingers. On the second side, a sturdy plant, rooted firmly in the ground, sends up curling leaves and a flower bud, which cups a fish. One bird, which stands atop the flower, is personified with flowing hair and a large, oval-shaped eye. An arched doorway frames these hybrid creatures. On the third side of the post, archetypal plants grow in three-dimensional layers above a cogwheel, a symbol of Bourguibism. Farhat’s iconography elicits the sociocultural and agricultural programs of the National Institute of Productivity, the developmental aims of which she interrogated through her own collaborations with artisans and art students.

Farhat installed friezes in iron and enamel on the facade of the central office of the Tunisian Sugar Company in Béja that invite powerful comparison to her realist mural inside the main entrance (figs. 12–14). The abstract imagery of the exterior friezes consists of stacked lines, zigzags, half-moons, and geometric shapes evoking the core elements and colors of an unraveled tapestry. The dynamic shapes and lines bend, suspending animated crescents and triangles resembling Farhat’s hybrid birds and angular fish. In the building’s interior, the artist painted a socialist realist–style mural depicting male workers holding tools (fig. 15). While at first glance the metallic iron compositions bear scant formal resemblance to the realist portrayal of heroic masculine workers, the thematic content of the murals and the forms and materials of the friezes bespeak the gendering of labor. Artisans and laborers occupied the same discursive fields related to societal advancement. Farhat drew regularly from the symbols, motifs, and materials associated with women weavers in probing the alignment of artistic and economic revivals, and she employed the labor and ingenuity of women artisans in her work. Her triangles, bouquets, and zigzags suggest those found in other women’s artistry, particularly textiles woven in Kairouan and regions of the southern interior, which were targeted by the National Office of Handicraft in its reorganization. Moreover, in official discourses, the laborer (epitomized by the woman weaver) represented the citizen deemed in need of social uplift. In the case of the Tunisian Sugar Company, an ironworker executed Farhat’s designs in a collaborative process between artist and artisan. In evoking the feminized artisanat, Farhat conjured the class-based, gendered division of labor inherent in the production process of the decorative commissions.

Textile motifs comprise the content of Farhat’s largest ceramic frieze, a culminating example of a decorative program in which diverse artistic genres and industries converge. Around 1964 Farhat and Gorgi received a commission from SOGICOT (Société Générale des Industries Cotonnières de Tunisie, or General Company of Tunisian Cotton Industries). At SOGICOT’s main factory in Bir Kassaâ, they merged artisanal and coastal themes for an audience of bureaucrats, designers, and textile workers. Farhat designed a vast ceramic tile mural to wrap around the exterior facade of the building, while Gorgi created a monumental stone obelisk to be set within a courtyard fountain. Farhat’s winding panels portray a mythical world in which feminine motifs are suspended in a watery blue seascape populated by human and animal figures and composite creatures made from anthropomorphized artisanal designs. Across the right wall facing the entrance, these designs interlace female figures, male figures in a boat, fish, flowers, and horses (fig. 16). The left wall bears some of these whimsical elements floating alongside hybrid artisanal creatures; landscapes composed of geometric elements evoking patterns of five (khumsāt), weavings, silver fibulae, and candlesticks (shamʿdan); and men’s bodies composed of geometric-patterned rugs (figs. 17, 18). Composite creatures made of flowers, birds, and textile motifs, patterned into a vivid blue, purple, and red garden, decorate the main entrance (fig. 19).  

Seen as a trailblazer in economic development, SOGICOT was a strong employer of wage-earning women in the 1960s and 1970s. Bourguibist discourses equated the burgeoning industrial textile industry with handicraft, and emphasized its capacity to cultivate an “uneducated” female workforce. As Sonia Maarouf wrote for Femme in 1965, “Yesterday, this woman, who was a custodian of a generation characterized by nomadism, managed to find stability, and today we see her contributing to the building of a new society based on social justice.”¹¹ Sixty-eight women designers, including Beaux-Arts graduates and factory workers alike, were to gain autonomy and professional experience in convergent textile industries perceived as intimately connected to women’s hands and bodies. Farhat’s portrayals of feminine artisanal production, animated by her composite creatures, are discursively linked to embodied labor, constituting an insightful visual record of the interface between fine art and craft in their evocation and materialization of gendered hierarchies of production. These linkages, in turn, delineate the works’ inscription in the infrastructure of gender reform and economic growth, and in an aesthetic of self-referentiality characteristic of the artist’s work of the period.

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In 2011, Heman Chong (Singaporean, born 1977) predicted the future.²

He debuted a work titled Calendars (2020–2096), a collection of 1,001 images of emptied–out void decks, IKEA showrooms, airport terminals, shopping centers—public spaces in Singapore devoid of people. From 2004 to 2010, Chong photographed spaces he described as “susceptible to change, to every sway of policy, to every new wave of capital”³—and by laying them out as a calendar that starts in January 2020 and runs through 2096, he used these images, each of which represents a month, to map the future onto the present and the past onto the future. Chong’s decision to start the calendars in 2020 was informed by his fascination with 2020 being “the year when all the problems in the world could possibly be solved,”⁴ and the inherent mix of disappointment and optimism of such an impossible promise.

Nine years after they were first exhibited, these images proved both prophetic and ironic as the COVID-19 pandemic emptied out public spaces and plunged the world into a year of government-mandated sheltering in place. Heman Chong had made pictures of a future no one could have predicted. Using the calendar format, Chong visualizes a circuiting of the past-present-future through a mechanism of accumulation. In projecting forward images of emptied public spaces, Chong prospects a potential future. I contend that in their ambiguity and open-endedness as banal everyday public spaces, these images hedge the future. They are hedges in terms of being deliberate strategies to systematically limit the risk of becoming irrelevant. Moreover, I contend that these hedges are an artistic strategy that arises out of Chong operating within Singapore’s system of authoritarian capitalism and his global awareness of conceptualism. Given that the histories of authoritarian capitalism and conceptualism arise out of the Cold War expansion of the American empire, these hedges offer a lens through which to consider post-conceptualism from Southeast Asia.

Hedging as Artistic Strategy in Heman Chong’s Work

The term “hedging” generally refers to a risk–management investment strategy undertaken to protect against loss. It can also mean the limiting or qualifying of something by conditions.⁵ In the context of this essay, I have both meanings in mind as I describe Chong’s practice. The open-endedness of the photographs in Calendars (2020–2096) and the appropriation of the calendar format to decontextualize the images into myriad possible futures, create a visual system and a hedge that ensures the work will always produce “new” meanings regardless of how the future plays out. In this sense, how Calendars (2020–2096) literally works is encapsulated in the complexity of its surface—in images of emptied–out public spaces as calendar pages.

Chong’s artworks can be read as both systems and strategies that mirror (and critique) the technocratic systems that define Singapore’s brand of capitalism. Chong has referred to this “surface complexity” as a key facet of his work.⁶ The term is an oxymoron in that it refers to the work’s surface encapsulating the complexity of the work as a generative visual system. In the case of Calendars (2020–2096),the visual register of the calendar is the system, and the images of the emptied–out public spaces are the open-ended components of this system onto which various possible meanings can be ascribed. The images, and the system they embody, beg seductively to be overread. In this way, the surface of Chong’s work is a prime place in which indeterminacy can be managed toward the most “generative” ends.⁷ The point is not that Chong predicts future events like COVID-19—Calendars (2020–2096) is a visualization of a long game: its imagistic system will always predict something—but rather that he manages the indeterminacy of the future.

This form of hedging, or the systematic management of indeterminacy, is an allegory of the larger meta strategies endemic to the Singapore state.⁸ Chong’s choice of subject matter directly points to Singapore’s land management and lauded public housing program, a technocratic system of “hedging” on the future that structures much of life on the island. The nation’s housing program is a form of land management in which land is transformed into public and private spaces and, in turn, into assets. The sale of homes directly contributes to the state’s income. At the same time, the value of those homes is protected from unbridled speculation. The funding of mortgages for public housing through social security savings in particular has been described as “a closed circuit of financial transaction between the Housing Development Board (HDB) and the social security savings boards, the Central Provident Fund (CPF), established in 1955.”⁹ Integral to Singapore’s governance, capital from the CPF is used to purchase government bonds for national development programs and is the foundation of the Government Investment Corporation (GIC), Singapore’s first sovereign wealth fund for global investments.¹⁰ This capital has prevented the Singaporean government from becoming dependent on international financial agencies like the World Bank, unlike many other states in Southeast Asia, and has enabled Singapore to become one of the richest countries in the world.¹¹ It is a networked system of capital accumulation based on forecasting and the realities of operating as an island-nation in an international marketplace. Hedging, understood broadly (and according to the expanded definition used in this essay) within this system, is a strategy of national interest that manages risk by structuring the national system to always be generative and by using any surplus in an international market. In turn, the national system/market is protected from the volatility of the international market.

In a report for ArtAsiaPacific, Chong links his conceptual practice to the material conditions of working within Singapore’s authoritarian capitalism:

“I have always argued that every piece of art produced is embodied in a larger political reality, and that much of what we do as artists in Singapore is linked to our country’s own political realities. As such, all art is political, no matter how much we want to distance ourselves from that fact. How then can I, as an artist, influence these sets of political realities? I am not interested in being a politician, but in many ways there are more possibilities in Singapore for an artist to work politically than for an actual politician. . . . I feel strongly that the answers might lie in the resources that we have in Singapore: namely, an incredibly strong economy that allows for a large budget surplus every year, which, in turn, is channeled in part to art and cultural activities and institutions. As an artist, I have access to these funds, and it is relatively easy for me to come up with art projects that do not involve any form of object-making. I can use this money to organize workshops or informal residencies, all under the guise of an art project. This, of course, is nothing new and I’m not the first to think of this.”¹²

Chong’s “hedges” are artistic strategies that arise from his experience of operating out of Singapore’s authoritarian capitalism, as it fits within larger global systems and histories of capitalism. In a transparent yet totalizing technocratic system of governance, one has to be able to read between the lines that exist in the public sphere to perceive the underlying operations at play. An individual’s agency comes from navigating these systems and manipulating the material byproducts of the system—literally working through and with the surfaces of meta governing systems. In Calendars (2020–2096), one is compelled to read into emptied-out spaces in order to “see” the system at work as it extrapolates into the future, but it is this very compulsion to “read into” that is generative and enables a speculative system that allows Calendars (2020–2096) to “predict” the future.

The Politics of Art and Authoritarian Capitalism

In 2015, the popular Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek published an essay titled “Capitalism Has Broken Free of the Shackles of Democracy,” an ode as it were to Singapore’s brand of capitalism.¹³ Zizek opens the essay with a prediction that one day the world will build monuments to Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore’s founding prime minister, as the creator of authoritarian capitalism.

This ideology, Zizek claims, is “set to shape the next century as much as democracy shaped the last.”Ibid. Seeming to fulfill this projection, Singapore has been the national development goal of the likes of Paul Kagame, Rwanda’s president, who once stated that he hoped his country would become “the Singapore of Africa.”¹⁴ This sentiment has been echoed by vocal Brexiteers who dream of turning Britain into “Singapore-on-Thames,” as well as by American Republicans who want an American healthcare system modeled on Singapore’s.¹⁵ Moreover, authoritarian capitalism, since the publication of Zizek’s essay and with the increasing anxiety over China’s rise, has gained currency.¹⁶ Yet, even as it found its way into President Joe Biden’s first congressional address, authoritarian capitalism is difficult to define. There are many different and unique forms of authoritarian capitalism. In this regard, it should not be a read as a derogatory term. What the term essentially refers to is a system in which the presence of a capitalist economy exists alongside the absence or erosion of civil liberties.¹⁷

Zizek and other intellectuals have noted that authoritarian capitalism has increasingly become the norm rather than the exception.¹⁸ Yet for the most part, this material historical reality has not been considered within art world discourses or in the art historical examination of post-conceptual practices like Chong’s, which are products of, as much as responses to, these operating systems. In this regard, much has been made of the Singapore state’s censorship, and yet much less attention has been given to thinking about the kind of cultural landscape and society that is produced by this brand of authoritarianism.¹⁹

According to data from 2016, up to 85 percent of Singapore’s art scene is funded by the state.²⁰ Richard Carney’s in-depth study of Singapore’s authoritarian capitalism illustrates how the prevalence of state-owned enterprises is part of the ruling party’s capacity to stay in power.²¹ This extends to the island’s cultural landscape and is most evident in Singapore’s Visual Arts Cluster, a strategic leadership body that consists of the National Gallery Singapore and Singapore Art Museum, museums of modern and contemporary art respectively, and the Singapore Tyler Print Institute (STPI). This centralization of resources transparently ties together the public and private spheres, whose alignment can benefit the ecology of Singapore contemporary art. Arguably the country’s most successful and well-networked commercial art gallery, STPI is itself a government limited company.²² Artists like Chong thus develop their practices in a system in which the public and private spheres are, to a degree, centrally “regulated,” if not centrally “aligned.”

Considering how this has informed his artistic practice, Chong wrote in a feature on the Singapore art scene in 2018:

“Looking back, my entire journey as an artist has been heavily assisted by cultural policies, which have produced the institutions that have served as cornerstones in the evolution of my practice. . . . Since 1999, Singapore’s National Arts Council (NAC) has supplied me with grants to participate in art fairs, biennials, conferences, exhibitions and residencies abroad, enabling me to build a network that allows me access to even more of these art events and festivals. The Substation, an independent art space founded in 1990 by the late theatre doyen Kuo Pao Kun, was the first building funded by the NAC’s Arts Housing Scheme and was also the first place where I showed my work. There, I tested out many of the ideas behind my subsequent exhibitions. The NAC is also commissioner of the Singapore Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, where I was invited to represent my country at the 50th edition in 2003. The list goes on.”²³

Chong’s development as an artist is entangled in the acceleration of the state’s investment in contemporary art.²⁴ Between 2000 and 2002, with one of the first bursaries from the NAC, Chong studied at the Royal College of Art in London, earning a master’s degree in Communication Art and Design. Shortly after, then Singapore Art Museum (SAM) curator Ahmad Mashadi selected Chong’s video installation Molotov Cocktails (Grey Aquarium Remix) (1999) to represent the country at the 10th India Triennale 2001, where it was one of nine works awarded a jury prize. After receiving his master’s, Chong was the first Singaporean artist selected for a one-year residency (2002–3) at the Künstlerhaus Bethanien (KB), again with the support of the NAC. Also in 2003, at the age of twenty-five, he was one of three artists to present work in the 2nd Singapore Pavilion at the Venice Biennale.       

Beyond the litany of achievements enabled by the state, the KB residency facilitated a turning point in Chong’s practice. In Berlin, Chong was introduced to an international network of contemporary art and artists, whose discourses and agents would become elements in his practice as he began to operationalize systems beyond those within Singapore. As a testament to his success in doing this, in 2005, as part of its promotion of the 3rd Singapore Pavilion, the NAC commissioned him to organize the pavilion’s opening party at the Palazzo Pisani Moretta. Chong’s savvy, flexibility, and ambition are not just characteristic of a global neoliberal creative class, but also the defining attributes of his capable navigation of Singapore’s authoritarian capitalism.

However, despite this, Chong should not be mistaken for a lackey of the state or a dilettante of the international art world. After moving to Berlin, he shifted his focus from the cinematic to the conceptual, and more specifically, to an interrogation of Western conceptualism. This interrogation paralleled Chong’s development of a reflexive language that spoke to power. In 2004, he organized his own solo exhibition Snore Louder If You Can at the Substation. In an accompanying statement, he describes the works in the exhibition as a series of ideas about negotiating access and authority:

“I have always been fascinated by how a person is allowed or rejected into a space or a situation based on specific criteria of authoritarians, e.g., club bouncers, art jurors, electronic ticketing gates at train stations—and along the lines of this concept . . . I have generally appropriated concepts and styles from conceptualism and minimalism, and it is this strain that I wish to expand on in my work; an endless reworking of ideas inherited from the transmission of other works from exhibitions (real experience) and information (represented experience), in order to see how the works could stand the strain of being copied and realigned, creating different meanings in their forms.”²⁵

This extrapolation of conceptual art strategies to speak intelligently to overarching governing contemporary systems that order human life is perhaps no more apparent than in Chong’s Monument to the people we’ve conveniently forgotten (I hate you) (2008), an expansive installation of one million blacked–out business cards that, when installed, expand into a sea of shimmering black, taking over floors of an exhibition space or bursting forth from a closet, in effect intervening and remaking the architecture of the exhibition space and how people engage with it. The work recalls some of the prominent strategies employed by Felix Gonzalez-Torres (American, born Cuba, 1957–1996) in his emotive installations of luminous candy spills or stacks of imprinted paper, which themselves recall the work of Carl Andre (American, born 1935) and Donald Judd (American, 1928–1994).²⁶

Incidentally conceived during, but not inspired by, the global financial crisis of 2008, the blacked–out business cards can be read as analogous to the ensuing economic devastation and subsequent fundamental restructuring of the world. The one million cards point to a disposable connection or business identity, to the lost and forgotten opportunities that effectively colonize the spaces that they occupy, and could be subconsciously inspired by, the crisis of confidence in the neoliberal capitalist system that was triggered by the 2008 financial crisis.²⁷

In many ways, Chong’s works are successful because they respond and adapt to material conditions of the systems that govern the making of a work and its travel. His blacked–out business cards, for example, accumulate into a dark, tidal mass that viewers have to push through with their feet. Each step upon the cards is deliberate if you do not want to fall. The gallery sitter holds his breath as he watches you, and agonizes over when he should intervene to mitigate the museum’s risk of an accident. Chong re-disciplines viewers’ bodies and social relations through his disproportionate extrapolation of the scale of the blacked-out business cards. He is astutely aware of the material parameters and affects that govern how we navigate the world.

In this sense, the politics of Chong’s work are real and make themselves known in material ways. This was especially evident when he leveraged the opportunities presented by Singapore’s authoritarian capitalist system and operationalized his art world networks as deft critiques. In 2012, the National Arts Council of Singapore—in perhaps the most post-colonial and yet ill-conceived move it has made in its lifespan—decided to withdraw Singapore from the Venice Biennale.²⁸ Gillman Barracks, a designated arts cluster, was scheduled to open that year alongside other initiatives. It could, therefore, be argued that 2013 was the year that Singapore needed to flex on an international stage. Chong, with Ho Rui An, a younger Singaporean artist, authored a public petition to call for the return of the Singapore Pavilion. Leveraging his international network, Chong created CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE (SINGAPORE PAVILION / 55TH VENICE BIENNALE / 2013), an image of a broken file link, which he published in an issue of AsiaArtPacific magazine as an advertisement, bringing a largely provincial protest into regional discourse. The image of a broken link spoke not only to how there had been a breakdown in the marketing of Singapore but also to how art is a system of information, an idea that he had articulated in 2004.²⁹ In 2013, then Minister of Community, Culture, and Youth Lawrence Wong announced that Singapore would return to the Venice Biennale and went so far as to commit to the long-term lease of a pavilion within the Arsenale.³⁰

Post-Conceptualism: Histories of an Authoritarian Future

There is more to the cloth of conceptualism that Chong wears. The artistic strategies that he employs not only speak to the political-economic systems he navigates, but also reflect upon the duplicitous history of Western conceptualism itself. Chong’s painting practice, for example, grew out of Cover Versions (2009– ),an ongoing work comprised of paintings of book covers based on recommendations from friends. For the last eleven years, Chong has engaged in a daily ritual of painting on the same-size canvas with the same brand of commercially produced paint. This practice recalls a similar one by On Kawara (Japanese, 1933–2014), an artist whose legacy, along with that of others, like Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Chong has inherited, making his own artistic practice fundamentally post-conceptual.³¹

Each of Kawara’s date paintings, otherwise known as his “Today” series, straightforwardly notes the date of its making on a monochromatic ground of gray, red, or blue. Each painting was developed through a series of steps that never varied and that were inspired by the conventions of recording the date of the place in which it was made. However, often forgotten in discussions of Kawara’s date paintings is that, as part of the artwork, the artist fabricated a cardboard box in which to store each work. Some of the boxes are lined with cuttings from the front page of the local newspaper.³² Interestingly, the series grew out of a triptych self-referentially titled Title, which consists of paintings that spell out, in sequential order, “One Thing,” “1965,” and “Viet-Nam.³³ The monumentalizing of the small and specific events in Kawara’s date paintings is inseparable from the procedural accumulation of artistic labor reflected in the objects. Yet the roots of this practice are tied to a conflict in Southeast Asia that would rattle the Cold War convictions held in the West.

In channeling the legacies of Kawara’s conceptualism, Chong’s post-conceptual practice implicitly speaks to the twofold relationship between international histories of conceptualism and authoritarian capitalism. Lucy Lippard’s canonical definition of conceptual art, in relation to the American context, the dematerialization of the art object, and the democratization of the art world, as “the era of the Civil Rights Movement, of Vietnam, the Women’s Liberation Movement and the counter-culture,” has often been used as a historical reference in aligning post-conceptualism.³⁴ Marked by the “art of everyday life,” the trajectory of conceptualism in the West took the artwork out of the gallery and into the street, enfolding it in the larger social fabric.³⁵ However, alongside these developments in the West, certain strains of conceptualism in Southeast Asia became embedded in authoritarian regimes placed in power by the United States during the Cold War.³⁶

During the Cold War, authoritarianism was seen as a necessary evil to limit the expansion of Soviet influence and further projects of decolonialization.³⁷ It was believed, at the time, that in order to have agency on the international stage and a place alongside Western states, domestic political struggles and contestations had to be contained.³⁸ Marian Pastor Roces, in her essay “Conceptual Art, Authoritarianism, 1970s, Asia,” notes that in this historical milieu, conceptual art offers the possibility of hidden or coded messages, but could also be mere “window dressing for fascism,”³⁹ as in the case of the first two directors of the Cultural Center of the Philippines.⁴⁰ While Roces does not directly refer to Singapore in her text, the historical and geopolitical milieu that she paints of the Cold War is one that informs Singapore’s history as a nation-state.⁴¹

While different threads of conceptualism evolved alongside and in different ways from authoritarian regimes around the world, the West’s discourse on conceptualism in the 1980s and 1990s expanded the understanding that art need not be aesthetic, freeing up what might constitute artistic material, or what Rosalind Krauss has called the “post medium.”⁴² “Post-conceptual art,” an extension of this trajectory, is a term that, coined by Peter Osborne, refers to an expanded art practice blending art practices from performance to installation to painting.⁴³ Although it has since been defined in a number of different ways, the key tenets of post-conceptual art are its ahistoricity, a condition of high capitalism, and its double-coded nature as both conceptual and aesthetic in form.⁴⁴ As such, post-conceptualism cannot be understood through a linear chronology of post-1960s art movements. As Osborne describes, “It denotes an art premised on the complex historical experience and critical legacy of conceptual art, broadly construed in such a way as to register the fundamental mutation of the ontology of the artwork carried by that legacy.”⁴⁵ The term has been used by Singaporean intellectuals such as C. J. Wee Wan-Ling in relation to contemporary aspects of Singapore’s condition of rapid modernization.⁴⁶

Chong’s post-conceptual practice can be described through either Osborne’s or Wee’s definition. Yet, these readings of post-conceptualism do not address the significance of Chong’s claimed inheritance of conceptualism and the situated histories of authoritarian capitalism from which his practice has developed.⁴⁷ From the cultural value of a painting to a business card and an advertisement in a magazine, Chong occupies the systems and material codifications of our world, and then mobilizes, contorts, distorts, and ultimately explodes these systems from within. The hedges in Chong’s work—the systematic operationalizing of the surface of the artwork—are subversive and duplicitous. They are generous in artistic affinities and yet deftly mercantile in insuring their relevance.

With the pressures of COVID-19 and our reliance on global platform technologies promising to exponentially feed the growth of authoritarian capitalism as a world-system, it is this unpoetic language of the hedge, a facet of Chong’s practice located at the intersection of the Janus-faced histories of global conceptualism and authoritarian capitalism, that speaks directly to a politic of the future that has long since arrived.

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In the 1970s, a new generation of artists involved in industrial design and architecture in Soviet Estonia was beginning to reconceptualize the practice of art-making. These artists/designers were interested in the surrounding environment—the Soviet reality, with its specific aesthetics—and searching for ways to comment on, analyze, and visualize the changes taking place in both the material culture and the built environment around them. The exciting amalgamation of different disciplines within the practices of several young artists at the time resonate today. One of the notable representatives of this phenomenon is the artist and designer Sirje Runge [Lapin].¹

Runge graduated in 1975 from the Estonian State Art Institute (ESAI).² Though she majored in industrial art, she positioned herself in the 1970s not only as a designer but also as a visual artist. She actively exhibited her artwork, in which she incorporated design principles—and at the same time, approached her design work as a form of art. Indeed, throughout the decade, Runge undertook several design projects parallel to the artworks she was exhibiting and, in one way or another, tried to open up possibilities to synthesize the two. A case in point is Runge’s ambitious thesis project Proposal for the Design of Central Areas in Tallinn. Comprising ideas and plans for a range of artistic interventions in the Estonian capital of Tallinn, it suggests visual, technical, and spatial changes to the city, including ways to alter the cityscape itself and designs for modular structures that could be easily erected within a given space. The diversity of her chosen locations reflects the artist’s versatility and interest in different layers of the urban environment. Indeed, her proposal considers abandoned industrial areas to be as interesting and important to the city’s fundamental structure as its center, the historic and iconic plaza known as Victory Square.³

Up until the day she presented it, Runge was unsure if the defense of her unorthodox thesis would be a success or total failure.⁴ The fact that everything went well is testament to the progressiveness and foresight of the industrial art department. It is noteworthy that the project was re-exhibited on the walls of the ESAI in the mid-1980s. As a student from the class of 1986 recalls, Runge’s colorful, visionary, playful project was in stark contrast to the overly gray atmosphere of late-Soviet Tallinn—visible through the windows of the Institute.⁵

Runge’s thesis imagines and visualizes a more attractive, thrilling, and inclusive urban environment than the actual city at the time. Her suggestions range from repainting houses to enliven the existing architectural system, and thereby create a new, independent aesthetic structure, or layer,⁶ to more conceptual and fantastical ideas. For example, she envisions building cylinder structures that symbolize chimneys in what would be huge installations in abandoned industrial sites, explaining, “These cylinders periodically emit fumes of a certain color. The fumes are harmless and pleasant smelling, and they reduce through their consistency the pollution of the surrounding air. The smoke-producing and air-cleaning chimneys refer to the possibility that by changing the content of industry, we might also change its harmful impact on people.”⁷ Runge has recalled that she did not consult with any scientists back then, hence this idea was purely conceptual, i.e., a way of visualizing the problematics involved with polluting the environment in the process of production.⁸

In addition to repainting houses and altering urban industrial sites, Runge proposes modular structures that would be easy to assemble and un-assemble, move, and reconfigure, as well as monumental objects that could be erected in different parts of the city. These ambitious projects are intended to promote use of unused or abandoned parts of the city or to revitalize areas that do not have a dominant architectural structure—such as slums, parks, or beaches. The function of the modular constructions is both aesthetic and utilitarian. For example, by incorporating multimedia components, like a television screen or radio, they could be used to inform people of news regarding city life. Others might integrate vending machines stocked with essential goods. These playful modular and multifunctional objects encourage new ways of using the city space. For example, it would be possible to climb their different layers to listen to music in a personalized music center,⁹ interact with others, and enjoy light effects. It is also important that these pieces could be reconfigured, or otherwise altered in response to city alterations or changes in the habits of citizens. Ultimately, the goal was to improve city life, because, as Runge explains, since the city is the concentration of material and mental resources of humans, it should first and foremost serve people as opposed to the urban mechanism.¹⁰

Because the environmentally and socially conscious ideology of Runge’s project is characteristic of contemporary Soviet design theories of the 1970s, it offers insight into Soviet design ideas of the period, highlighting the problems inherent to their implementation. The study program of the ESAI industrial art department, which was established in 1966, supported and enhanced Runge’s interest in the artist’s role in a society defined by technical-industrial culture.¹¹

The main reasons for establishing the design study program were the changes taking place in Soviet society. Industrialization and the rise in production volumes in the 1960s created an opportunity and need for new product designs, packaging, and advertising, etc. The department was headed by the energetic and enthusiastic interior designer Bruno Tomberg (1925–2021), whose focus was the universal study of creativity. Inspired by leading design schools of the first half of the 20th century—by the Bauhaus in Germany, and Vkhutemas and the Institute of Artistic Culture in Moscow (INKhUK¹²)—as well as by Le Corbusier and De Stijl and concepts of contemporary design, the work of the department centered on the relationships between design, environment, and society. Within the program, the universal ideals of the Bauhaus were combined with contemporary design ideology based on notions of social responsibility and synthesis.¹³ Tomberg strived to teach his students to integrate contemporary science, technology, and aesthetics in a way that created a harmonious material environment.¹⁴

An important source of inspiration within the department in the beginning of the 1970s was the book Design for the Real World: Human Ecology and Social Change (1971) by Austrian-born American designer Victor Papanek (1923–1998).¹⁵ Papanek states that because the main role of design is a formation of individuals and societies, a designer must be socially and morally responsible.¹⁶ He advocates that design should be an innovative, creative, and transdisciplinary practice to satisfy the real needs of people and, moreover, that the work of designers should be based on scientific research. He argues that poorly designed objects and structures in fact contaminate the environment.¹⁷

The records of the ninth congress of the International Council of Societies of Industrial Design, which took place in Moscow in 1975, reflect a similar emphasis on the need for ethical and ecological design. In that congress, theoreticians of the Soviet technical aesthetics concluded that “contradictions between nature and technology, laws of nature and human activities of production and technology are the results of one-sided and imperfect development of industrialization and the logics of capitalist societies.”¹⁸ It is significant that Soviet design theoreticians made an ideological distinction between capitalist and socialist design objectives. They put forward that the main function of the former was to shape consumer expectations, while that of Soviet design (at least in rhetoric) was to realize the most socialist and progressive ideas.¹⁹ Moreover, they argue that societal relationships under socialism are principally different than those under capitalism. Because the income gap in socialist countries is smaller, there is no need to produce objects that convey social status, and so the focus can remain on creating a more harmonious and humane environment.²⁰

These idealistic notions are fundamental to the rhetoric that design should contribute to the formation of the Soviet people, that is, the Soviet subjects necessary to build up society.²¹ But the economic situation of the 1970s did not support redesigning and modernization of the built environment in the way that was theorized. It was the so-called Era of Stagnation, when Leonid Brezhnev was in power (1964–82) and social, political and economic problems were worsening in the Soviet Union. There was an ever-deepening deficit in consumer goods and materials, and the country was far behind in terms of technological development. Nonetheless, though the overall economic and political situation did not support implementation of the most interesting and progressive proposals for improving the environment or product development, it did not stop designers and artists from envisioning alternative means of production, city planning, and living—as Runge’s ambitious thesis.

Runge’s thesis is testament to her early interest in physical and abstract structures, in relationships and everyday life within the urban space. Her project takes into consideration the perspective of a pedestrian, because in her point of view, the city should be built and evaluated first and foremost with the people who use it daily in mind, taking into consideration not only their physiological-psychological requirements, but also their aesthetic needs.²² The work presents the idea that the urban environment should not define the actions of its users, but instead, exist as an egalitarian, open field that allows for different modes of usage. In effect, by creatively combining design and visual arts, she suggests a new city environment, one that engages people empathically through visuals, sounds and tactile objects, transforming their relationship with the urban setting by making it more actively engaging and integrated. Mari Laanemets has suggested that “Runge’s aim was a specific ‘complicated order’ that was intended to create irrational and chaotic moments within the functional organization of the city and thus result in greater engagement, in a more (inter)active relationship between man and his surroundings.”²³ So, on the one hand, Runge’s proposal suggests a possible solution to an overly standardized cityscape of the Soviet period that created fragmentation, alienation, and pollution in the city center, by making it more livable and putting environmental concerns in the forefront of city planning. On the other, her suggestion for a city space offers a democratic vision of a sustainable space for different groups of people equally taking part in and with equal access to the built environment.

Although many of Runge’s visionary ideas could not be implemented at the time they were proposed, which she herself recognized at the time, the issues that she addresses are still relevant today. The problematics of designing an aesthetically exciting city that is environmentally considerate and provides a space for different groups of people with different needs remains at the very heart of the discussions around urban space. Hence, Runge’s vision from the past remains an inspiration for the future.

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“How can we learn from an organism or a natural process and how can we collaborate to create a co-authored piece of work?”¹ This is how architect and designer Neri Oxman described her approach to design during a recent conversation with Paola Antonelli, Senior Curator of Architecture and Design at The Museum of Modern Art, in conjunction with the exhibition Neri Oxman: Material Ecology² (Fig. 1). Featuring seven projects and series of projects from Oxman’s twenty-year career, the show focuses on the materials and processes that she has developed along with her team at The Mediated Matter Group—a multidisciplinary group of researchers based at MIT’s Media Lab.³ At the core of all the projects is Oxman’s theory of Material Ecology, which she defines as “the study and design of products and processes integrating environmentally aware computational form-generation and digital fabrication.”⁴ The field, she states, operates at the intersection of biology, material science and engineering, and computer science. Both a design approach and an associated collection of tools and techniques, Material Ecology seeks to bring the built environment closer to the natural and the biological environment. It attempts to create buildings and objects that are alive, directly responding to their natural surroundings and changing as they age.

The Materialecology series (2007) was the first set of objects to materialize Oxman’s approach. Shown for the first time in a museum setting in 2008—during MoMA’s Design and The Elastic Mind exhibition curated by Paola Antonelli (Fig. 2), and acquired into the permanent collection shortly after—the series is composed of four projects, Cartesian Wax, Monocoque, Raycounting, and Subterrain, that explore natural phenomena and the ways in which computation can act as a tool to recreate and enhance them at larger scales.⁵ Each of the objects that make up the series is a demo of the process that Oxman is developing. Raycounting, for example, is a computational code that generates 3D-printed objects by measuring the intensity and orientation of light rays (Fig. 3 and 4). Inspired by nineteenth-century photo sculpture, this process allows the designer to relinquish a certain degree of control, working instead with the computational code, which manipulates the object’s material properties such as thickness and curvature, and with the natural phenomenon, which dictates its shape. The result is a process that creates, as Oxman describes it, “sunshades perfectly suited to their environmental conditions”⁶ and which can be employed at the product and architectural scale (Fig. 5). 

With the Materialecology series, Oxman cemented her position as a designer, in both the practical, conceptual, and historical realms. She stands firmly within the modernist tradition, citing architects such as Friederich Kiesler and R. Buckminster Fuller as key influences (Fig. 6), while simultaneously questioning and expanding it. Modernism, she has said, advocates for static design that is reliant on mass manufacturing, the homogeneity of material properties, and centralized fabrication. Material Ecology in turn proposes a dynamic approach to design in which the merging of computation and nature can allow for mass customization.⁷ While the assembly lines of modernity dictate a world made of parts, Material Ecology envisions a world in which we might not be able to differentiate between what is made and what is grown.⁸ This is Oxman’s idea of a new materiality⁹: one in which the novel computational technologies that emerged during the recent Digital Age allow designers and architects to transition into what she calls the “Biological Age.”

Oxman further frees herself from a classic homogenized modernism—rooted in Le Corbusier’s open plan and the use of steel and concrete (Fig.7)—by grounding Material Ecology equally in technology and craft. “That matter is secondary to shape constitutes the fallacy of design after craft,” she writes, drawing on Gottfried Samper. “By nature, and in its rite, the material practice of craft is informed by matter, its method of fabrication, and its environment.”¹⁰ The idea that craft is able to interweave process, material and form is a key factor in The Mediated Matter Group’s process-first approach to making. The team’s goal is not to produce a beautiful finished object—although each one of their works is indeed beautiful. Instead they begin by developing a technology that will allow them to achieve a material process through which they, and eventually all architects and designers, can create a variety of forms that are informed by and react to their environment.¹¹ This vision echoes architect and academic Malcolm McCollough who, already in 1996, argued that the digital had the potential to restore craft’s relevance within architecture and design. “In digital production,” he wrote, “craft refers to the condition where people apply standard technological means to unanticipated or indescribable ends.”¹² In this context, to craft involves a partnership with technology that can open the door for customization at a much larger scale. 

At the time of McCollough’s writing, however, there was still a concern with whether the digital tools available then allowed for enough direct manipulation—a term coined in 1983 by software designer Ben Schneiderman to describe the interaction between user and software through the computer mouse, and which has expanded to include other forms of dialogue between the two—for the process to be considered craftsmanship.¹³ This has grown less relevant with the development of more advanced technologies, but more important in this case is the fact that Neri Oxman and The Mediated Group easily overcome this concern by expanding the nature of their collaborations beyond those between the (human) user and the digital technology to include other biological agents. Here, animals, bacteria, and robots can be direct manipulators.¹⁴

In the Silk Pavilion II (2019)—a site-specific installation commissioned for the Material Ecology exhibition at MoMA—17,532 silkworms worked together with The Mediated Matter Group to produce a hyperboloid structure, in a process that questions the role of the architect or designer as the sole form giver (Fig. 8). The project was a continuation of the research started with the Silk Pavilion I in 2013, when the team found that, by varying the environmental and spatial conditions, they were able to direct silkworms to spin in specific patterns. More accurately, they realized that when silkworms were able to reach an altitude of 13/15 inches (21mm) they would spin three-dimensional cocoons, but at a lower altitude they produced flat patches (Fig. 9).¹⁵ The primary structure of the Silk Pavilion II, therefore, consisted of a jig made of stainless steel and wire rope with a rotating mandrel (Fig. 10). The secondary structure was a water soluble textile in which the silkworms were placed (Fig. 11). For ten days, the animals moved horizontally over the textile—aided by the rotation of the jig—spinning their silk within a rearing facility in Abano Terme, Italy.¹⁶ As in previous experiments conducted by the group, the density of the silk varied depending on the environmental factors surrounding the structure. A chemical reaction caused by the silkworms’ excretions created holes in the knot fabric, thus releasing some of the structure’s tensile stress, and creating a “metabolic canvas of organic waste.”¹⁷

The process behind this project promotes a fairer and more sustainable method for harvesting silk, which is traditionally harvested by boiling the cocoon to dissolve the adhesive that attaches the silk to the layers below. This kills the larva, disrupting the development of the organism. The silkworms working on the Silk Pavilion projects, on the other hand, were able to complete their life — turning into moths at the end of their spinning cycle and laying eggs, which could allow for the construction of more structures.¹⁸ The research behind it also highlights the increasing importance of collaboration in Oxman’s work. In the Silk Pavilion I—where the shape of the structure was dictated by the designer and inspired by Buckinster Fuller’s geodesic dome (Fig. 12)—the silkworms acted as construction workers; in the Silk Pavilion II, they are not only architects and designers but also artisans. They provide the skilled hand and, through it, are able to determine the shape and physical properties of the result in a process that advocates for a different way of making and building in the context of climate change. “What all crafts share,” McCollough writes, “is not just technique or hard work on form, but also a probing of their medium’s capacity, a passion for practice, and moral value as an activity independent of what is produced.”¹⁹ By rooting their work in craft, Oxman and her collaborators propose an alternative modernism: one in which modern tools and technologies allow architects and designers to step away from the limelight, and instead embrace new, more sustainable, collaborations with animal and robotic hands.

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