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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I offer to myself the world in a phantasmagorical 

Effort of critical transformation

What is it?

It is the outcome of a mysterious delirium

That contracts my fingers

On the multicolored pastels

Which trace the words and the shapes

That burst on the paper like a retarded fusion

Of pachydermic frustrations

Of transcendental relationships

The ramifications degenerate themselves

The stories are no longer listened to

The tales are not anymore tackled

In a warm and re-comforting impetus

We do not listen we look at

We accept with infected eyes

Swollen by the resignation and the demission

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

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

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

Not thinking is to burst out laughing

Like a bomb

Obscured by the night

By the incredible misadventure

Of limited freedom

No matter what the silence 

In the illuminated darkness [. . .]

Who are you Women who submit

To sensual passion

In the shadowy houses

With half-opened windows

Looking into interior courtyards

Women fatal and mysterious 

Powerful in their innocence 

Out of the ordinary

Out of time 

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

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

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This essay by art historian Gabriela Germana Roquez delves into the significance of landscape in the art of the Sarhua community in the Peruvian Andes and the Shipibo-Konibo people in the Amazon. Through her analysis, Germana Roquez illuminates how these artworks depict, embody, and summon the landscape, emphasizing the active role of the natural world in the artists’ creative process. By exploring the interconnectedness of humans and nonhuman actors in artistic expression, Germana Roquez prompts us to reflect on the spiritual dimensions of representing the natural environment, drawing from both rural and urban contexts in Peru as case studies.

The modern Western concept of landscape has traditionally implied the existence of an observing subject and an observed territory. It corresponds to an anthropocentric perspective, in which humans are superior to nature and thus allowed to control the territory and extract its resources. In the arts, this understanding has conventionally meant the depiction of an expanse of natural scenery from a single, detached viewpoint. While artists in recent decades have proposed diverging manners of representing the landscape (or the territory that surrounds them), new critical studies and theories have posed other ways in which it can be analyzed.¹The development of ecocriticism and new materialisms has been particularly instrumental in questioning the centrality of humans in ecological contexts and in highlighting the agency of nonhuman elements.²

However, as Jessica Horton, Janet Catherine Berlo, and Sara Garzón have all noted, we must acknowledge that these seemingly new ideas in fact originated among Indigenous groups and have been a constant presence in their millenarian thought.³ Further, Indigenous artworks that reference the natural environment offer alternative thought models.⁴To understand Indigenous perspectives on the notion of territory, we must engage with diverse Indigenous epistemologies and ontologies. One important subject among many Indigenous groups is the concept of vital materiality and the interconnections between different beings and elements on earth. Indigenous and rural communities in the Andean and Amazonian regions of South America perceive that all entities in nature are interdependent, and yet that each one possesses agency and intentionality all its own. Moreover, many of these elements hold sacred significance.

Building upon Indigenous ecologies and materialisms, this text addresses the ways in which people from the rural communities of Sarhua in the Andes and Shipibo-Konibo in the Amazonia comprehend the material world that surrounds them and how this understanding guides their aesthetic production. First, I analyze painted boards produced in Sarhua and Shipibo-Konibo textiles. I argue that these objects are “embodied landscapes” interacting with human and nonhuman elements that define their material, formal, and iconographic configurations in both sacred and nonsacred ways. Next, I analyze a series of paintings created by contemporary Sarhuino and Shipibo-Konibo artists who have relocated (or whose parents relocated) to the capital city of Lima. This inquiry illustrates how these artists, while adhering to many traditional Western painterly conventions—particularly the use of representational images, cartographic renditions, and the landscape as the background or setting for human activities—are still able to evoke the natural environment from the sacred and animistic perspectives that they inherited from their communities.

Painted Boards and the Power of the Mountains

Sarhua is a rural community located in the Ayacucho region of the Peruvian central Andes. Sarhuinos inhabit a small town in a valley surrounded by big mountains, and they use the adjacent lands for agriculture and livestock labor. Among the community’s most important symbolic objects are the Tablas, long painted boards that date as far back as the 19th century. About 118 inches high and 12 inches wide, they are normally attached to the ceiling of a newly constructed house.

Their main functions are to represent kinship relations and to maintain systems of reciprocity within the community.⁵But Tablas also protect the house and the family that lives in it, together with their lands, animals, crops, goods, and chattels. People in Sarhua, as in other Andean regions, consider the mountains, known as the apus or wamanis, to be agentic, powerful beings.⁶I pose that the Tablas care for the houses in the same way that the apus care for the town. Both the materiality and iconography of the Tablas and their participation in ritual are central to this analysis.

Sarhuinos make the Tablas when a couple is constructing the roof of their new house. The Tablas are read from bottom to top, beginning with a dedication from the compadres,⁷followed by depictions of the Virgin of the Assumption, the patron saint of Sarhua; the couple who owns the house; their close relatives (who appear in order of importance); and the sun.

Sarhuinos obtain the wood to make the Tablas from various trees, including pati, aliso, or molle, all of which grow in the valleys near the town, and use the burned branches of chillka, or willow, also from the valley, to outline the figures. They obtain the colored earths used to paint the figures from the mountains that surround Sarhua. To apply the colors, painters use retama sticks and feathers from local birds, and to fix the colors, they use qullpa, a type of resin they obtain from rocks located in the highlands.⁸ Indeed, the materials necessary to produce the Tablas come from the whole of the Sarhuino landscape. Native American curator Patricia Marroquín Norby has pointed out that in many works of Indigenous art, the source of the materials, the way in which they are collected, and their treatment speak to the relationship between the inhabitants and their territory. These works, therefore, do not represent the landscape; rather, they are the landscape.⁹

When the Tabla is ready, the compadre delivers it to the new homeowners in a ritual called Tabla Apaycuy. He and his wife, family, and friends, together with other local residents, carry the Tabla through the town of Sarhua along with goods such as corn, potatoes, fruits, and ichu, a grass from the highlands that is used for roofing.¹⁰Through the Tabla Apaykuy, the Tabla interacts with the entire Sarhuino landscape. More importantly, after the owners of the house attach the Tabla to the ceiling and celebrate with a great party, the Tabla gets in touch with the apus through a ritual called inchahuay, thereby acquiring the power to protect the house. During the inchahuay, guests walk and dance around the outside of the house wearing cloaks and conical hats made of ichu. Sarhuino painter Primitivo Evanán Poma indicates that through this practice, people invoke the apus for the protection of the house.¹¹Anthropologist Hilda Araujo points out that inchahuay is also the Sarhuino name for a layer of fog that, when it settles on the mountains on August 1, indicates a good year—that is, a year with a lot of rain. Thus, when the Sarhuinos wear these conical hats, they act as “mountains of good luck.”¹²

According to Andean concepts of animism, places and things are sentient entities that have the power to act. Further, as Bill Sillar notes, “Things that have had prior relationship, or evoke similarities, with other places, things or people may continue to have an effective relationship with their origin or referent.”¹³The Tablas de Sarhua, in fact, act like the apus or wamanis. Through their images and materiality, they are connected to and interact with the context surrounding them and have the agency to take care of the house and family, their goods, and their lands.

Shipibo-Konibo Textiles and the Power of Plants

The Shipibo-Konibo, an Indigenous community living in rural towns along the Ucayali River, in the Peruvian Amazon, have a different understanding of their territory and its visual representation in everyday objects. The Shipibo-Konibo consider themselves part of nature and the forest, trees, rivers, and land as entities with agency. Essential to the Shipibo-Konibo culture are the rao plants, or plants with power, which they consider to be intelligent beings.¹⁴Through ritual consumption of these plants, the Shipibo-Konibo connect with them and use them for medicinal purposes. They also use rao plants to guide them through their inner selves and to experience a deep communion with nature.¹⁵

Inspired by the visions formed when using rao plants such as piripiri (Cyperus sp.) and ayahuasca (Banisteriopsis caapi), Shipibo-Konibo women create and apply geometric patterns to bodies, clothing, ceramics, and other objects, materializing the koshi, or positive energy of the plants.¹⁶

Called kené in the Shipibo-Konibo language, these visual designs allude to the spots on the skin of the primordial anaconda ronin, who created the rivers and constellations as well as the paths that beings (animals, plants, spirits, and stars) use to travel and communicate.¹⁷Similar to interconnected labyrinths, they represent the river and the constellations that are central to the community’s worldview.¹⁸The Shipibo-Konibo’s understanding of the territory takes place through ritual and connection with the energy of plants, linking the territory with the cosmos and with human beings and their daily activities.

Among the objects that Shipibo-Konibo women cover with kené is the cloth they use to make traditional garments, such as the chitonte, or skirt for women, and the tari, or tunic for men. They construct these clothes from plain-weave fabrics made of a native variety of cotton that grows in the Ucayali region. Women used to grow the cotton, spin it, and weave it with a backstrap loom.¹⁹Once they have the cloth ready, they paint the kené using vegetal dyes that they make from the bark, fruits, leaves, roots, and seeds of local plants.²⁰Then they cover the cloth with gray clay sourced from the river’s edge and dry it in the sun. When they wash the cloth, the once pale designs are shown to have turned black and colorfast. Sometimes the women add bits of color derived from plants—such as red from achiote, yellow from the roots of the guisador, and purple from the ani plant.²¹ In other cases, they completely dye the new cloth using the bark of the mahogany tree to achieve a reddish tone or river clay, which results in a black fabric they then embellish with colorful embroidery and applied white strips.²²

As in the case of Tablas, Shipibo-Konibo textiles evoke the territory. This territory is not an alien space, as it is intrinsically linked to the body of the person who wears the garment made from the cloth created within it. The materiality of the clothing links the human body to local plants, water, and soil; and the patterns link it to networks—to the roots of plants, the paths of rivers, and the movement of stars.²³Moreover, the energy of the rao plants protects those wearing the clothing from various evils. The whole garment is testimony to a worldview in which the body is directly linked to nature and the territory on both cosmic and intimate levels.

Transitioning to a New Environment

During the second half of the twentieth century, when economic and social crises heavily affected rural regions in Peru, many people living in those areas had to migrate to the big cities, especially to the capital, Lima. There, migrants had to reshape their lives, fight for income and basic rights, learn Spanish, and negotiate the power structures in place. In the same way, they had to reshape their artistic practices to fit the market and the art system and to communicate with an urban audience.²⁴ In the 1970s, a group of Sarhuino painters in Lima began to produce smaller versions of the traditional Tablas and to depict costumbrista scenes of Sarhua for an urban audience. The new Tablas were a success, leading Sarhuinos to also depict social injustices and personal concerns.²⁵Shipibo-Konibo art followed a similar transition. Some of the Shipibo-Konibo who migrated to Lima in the 1980s shared the traditional knowledge of their people through figurative images describing traditional practices and rituals as well as their worldview and, more recently, their political struggles.²⁶In these new paintings, both Sarhuino and Shipibo-Konibo artists adopted Western conventions, transforming their engagement with the landscape. Although intended for other audiences and purposes, many of these pieces managed to refer in novel, clever, and creative ways, to the landscape from the perspective of Indigenous Andean and Amazonian ontologies and epistemologies.

The mountains form the background of many Sarhuino paintings produced in Lima—that is, they are shown as part of the landscape in the Western sense. Some painters, however, have taken an interest in evoking the agency, power, and sacredness of the apus. Since the 1970s, the painters of the Asociación de Artistas Populares de Sarhua (ADAPS) have made several versions of Apu Suyos.

All of them feature the mountains of Sarhua, but in the form of men dressed in regal clothes. According to the inscription on the painting, the apus in the composition eat the offerings (fruits, wine, special bread, coca leaves, cigarettes, flowers, etc.) that the Sarhuinos have left for them on the table after a herranza, or cattle-marking celebration. A central figure, Millqa, receives the products, and invites the other apus to enjoy these “exquisite offerings.” All of them agree to protect the trusted sheep cattle.²⁷This portrayal of the Sarhuino landscape conveys the agency and power of the mountains to an urban audience, which is why the painters decided to use Western conventions and render the apus as human beings dressed like European kings.²⁸

In 1997, Carmelón Berrocal made Mapa del distrito de Sarhua con casitas, in which he represents the territory of his native town based on modern Western cartographic conventions.²⁹

However, this work exceeds the standard models based on precise measurements and instead highlights important places and elements for Sarhuinos—mountains, farmlands, roads, streets, chapels, canals, and rivers—whose proper names are indicated in writing. Also, the urban area is subjugated by the colossal mountains and the starry sky. This map, therefore, not only represents a territory, but also accounts for the power of the apus and nature over the life and culture of the Sarhuinos. Furthermore, Berrocal made the painting with colored soils collected from Sarhua. The painting is an intellectual depiction of the territory and yet also connected to it through its materiality.

In 2023, Venuca Evanán, the daughter of two Sarhuino painters who had relocated to Lima, produced La ofrenda de Francisca.

The composition of this work centers on the artist’s grandmother, Francisca, who is making a pagapu, or offering to the mountains, and giving thanks to the Pachamama, or the earth, for all that she offers. The four mountains in the background represent the four apus of Sarhua, which is Francisca’s hometown. In the foreground, Venuca has depicted the sea and coastal region where Lima is located and where she was born. The elements shown reference the relationship between humans and other natural beings as well as the migration story of the artist’s family. By including colored soils that she sourced from the mountains in Sarhua and sand that she collected from her neighborhood in Lima, Venuca reinforces this aspect of the artwork.³⁰

For Shipibo-Konibo people, the kené, the geometric designs that women visualize when connecting with rao plants, have been a means of reference to the context surrounding them, together with the concepts and knowledge to navigate it. Elena Valera (Bahuan Jisbe), born in the community of Roya, Pucallpa, learned kené from her grandmother and has applied it to both textiles and ceramics.³¹In Lima, she created her firsts paintings with materials and techniques like the ones she used before moving to the capital. First, she dyed the fabric with mahogany bark to obtain a reddish background, and then she painted the images with natural pigments she obtained from mud, plants, and soil from Roya.³²Onanya Baque Raoni (1990s) portrays an onanya, or traditional healer, who is using rao plants to cure a sick child and their mother.³³

Valera, who is also a traditional healer, speaks on different levels of the centrality of plants and their power in the Shipibo-Konibo worldview through the theme of onanya, the inclusion of kené designs in her subjects’ clothing, and her use of plants as a primary material.

Eventually Valera stopped using natural dyes and began painting with acrylic on cloth. She also began depicting the migration of the Shipibo-Konibo people to Lima. In a 2011 painting, the artist addresses the natural environment of the Amazon Forest and the Andean mountains that the Shipibo-Konibo must cross to get to the Peruvian capital.

These places are rendered as interrelated environments, though some important differences stand out. While in the Amazon Forest, everything seems to work in perfect harmony, especially the relationship between women and plants, in Lima all the elements—three Shipibo women, a computer, the San Cristóbal mountain, and the tall buildings—are disconnected from one another. In this complex environment, while two Shipibo women learn new skills to succeed in an industrialized and globalized world, a third woman, dressed in traditional Shipibo-Konibo clothing, represents the connection to knowledge that their mothers and grandmothers learned from plants and transmitted through kené.³⁴

Harry Pinedo, son of Elena Valera and born in Lima, is also an artist. His painting El apu y la danza de Ronin (2022), characteristic of his work about the migration of the Shipibo-Konibo to Lima, shows two men and a woman performing a dance in honor of Ronin on the streets of the Shipibo-Konibo community of Cantagallo in Lima.³⁵

Ronin is the mother serpent of waters, a primordial being who gave rise to the universe and whose skin is the basis of the kené designs.³⁶The Ronin dance and the presence of kené on the people’s clothing and the floor celebrate the harmony of the Shipibo-Konibo world. The San Cristóbal mountain, the main apu of the Lima area, a powerful being before the Spanish invasion and a sacred Indigenous space today reconquered by the Shipibo-Konibo, stands in the background.³⁷ Two big trees, located on either side of the mountain, are also prominent elements in the composition, highlighting the power and importance of plants to the Shipibo-Community in Lima.

These works question the Western anthropocentric conception of the landscape and allow us to conceive new understandings of landscape and territory. Indigenous ecologies and materialisms, therefore, constitute an effective approach to analyzing them. Produced in different contexts, however, they must also be analyzed on their own terms. Elizabeth Burns Coleman points out, in regards to Indigenous art, the importance of knowing “the kind of broad categories that are established in the society in which it [the object] was produced, as well as the category in which the artist that produced the work expected it to be understood or interpreted.”³⁸Sarhuino and Shipibo-Konibo people living in their rural communities are especially concerned with the vitality of matter and the interconnection of different beings in nature. They do not produce objects that represent the landscape or territory around them. Instead, these communities create, in collaboration with mountains and plants, acting entities that interact with their immediate contexts. Sarhuino and Shipibo-Konibo contemporary artworks made in Lima are no longer sentient given that they are made for urban, Western audiences. The artists have conveyed, through images, the power of the mountains and plants and their relationships with other beings. However, by using strategies such as representing natural beings with human traits and incorporating material elements from the natural environment and symbolic references to the knowledge of their respective communities, these artworks continue to be powerful objects that never cease to negotiate their Indigenous epistemologies.

Spanish

El presente ensayo de la historiadora de arte Gabriela Germana Roquez explora la importancia del paisaje en el arte de la comunidad Sarhua en los Andes y del pueblo shipibo-konibo en la Amazonia, ambos en Perú. En su análisis, Germana Roquez nos muestra el modo en que estas obras de arte representan, encarnan y reivindican el paisaje, destacando el papel activo que el mundo natural desempeña en el proceso creativo de los artistas. Al explorar la interconexión de los actores humanos y no humanos en la expresión artística, Germana Roquez nos invita a reflexionar sobre las dimensiones espirituales de la representación del entorno natural, tomando como casos de estudio tanto contextos rurales como urbanos de Perú.

El concepto occidental moderno de paisaje tradicionalmente ha supuesto la existencia de un sujeto observador y de un territorio observado. Esto responde a una perspectiva antropocéntrica, según la cual los seres humanos son superiores a la naturaleza y, por tanto, pueden controlar el territorio y extraer sus recursos. En el mundo del arte, este concepto generalmente ha llevado a representar la extensión del paisaje natural desde un punto de vista individual y distante. En las últimas décadas, mientras los artistas han propuesto diversas formas de representar el paisaje (o el territorio que les rodea), los nuevos estudios y teorías críticas han planteado también otras maneras de analizarlo.³⁹Tanto el desarrollo de la ecocrítica como del nuevo materialismo han sido particularmente decisivos a la hora de cuestionar la centralidad del ser humano en el contexto ecológico y de resaltar la agencia de los elementos no humanos.⁴⁰

Sin embargo, como han señalado Jessica Horton, Janet Catherine Berlo y Sara Garzón, debemos reconocer que estas ideas aparentemente nuevas en verdad surgieron en los grupos indígenas y han sido una presencia constante en su pensamiento milenario.⁴¹ Más aún, las obras de arte indígena que hacen referencia al entorno natural proponen estructuras de pensamiento alternativas.⁴² Para comprender la noción de territorio desde las perspectivas indígenas, tenemos que abordar diferentes epistemologías y ontologías indígenas. Un tema muy importante para los diversos grupos indígenas es el concepto de materialidad vital y la interconexión entre los distintos seres y elementos de la Tierra. Las comunidades indígenas y rurales de las regiones andina y amazónica de América del Sur consideran que, en la naturaleza, todas las entidades son interdependientes y, sin embargo, cada una posee agencia e intencionalidad propia. Es más, muchos de estos elementos revisten un valor sagrado.

Basándose en las ecologías y los materialismos indígenas, el presente texto explora el modo en que los habitantes de las comunidades rurales de Sarhua, en los Andes, y shipibo-konibo, en la Amazonia, conciben el mundo material que les rodea y cómo esa concepción guía su producción estética. En primer lugar, analizaré las tablas pintadas que se elaboran en Sarhua y los tejidos shipibo-konibo. Propongo que estos objetos son “paisajes encarnados” que interactúan con los elementos humanos y no humanos que definen sus configuraciones materiales, formales e iconográficas, tanto a nivel sagrado como no sagrado. Luego examinaré una serie de pinturas creadas por artistas sarhuinos y shipibo-konibo contemporáneos que se han trasladado (o cuyos padres se han trasladado) a la capital, Lima. Este análisis mostrará cómo estos artistas, aunque se han adherido a diferentes convenciones pictóricas occidentales tradicionales –en particular, al uso de imágenes figurativas, de reproducciones cartográficas y del paisaje como fondo o escenario de la actividad humana– siguen siendo capaces de invocar el entorno natural desde las perspectivas sagradas y animistas que heredaron de sus comunidades.

Las tablas pintadas y el poder de las montañas

Sarhua es una comunidad rural situada en la región de Ayacucho, en los Andes peruanos centrales. Los sarhuinos habitan un pequeño poblado en un valle rodeado por grandes montañas, y usan los terrenos aledaños para labores agrícolas y ganaderas. Las Tablas –largos listones de madera pintada que datan del siglo XIX– se encuentran entre los objetos simbólicos más importantes de la comunidad. Miden unos tres metros de alto por treinta centímetros de ancho, y normalmente se colocan en los techos de las casas recién construidas.

Su principal función es representar las relaciones de parentesco y mantener los sistemas de reciprocidad dentro de la comunidad. ⁴³Pero las Tablas también protegen la casa y a la familia que la habita, junto con sus tierras, animales, cultivos, bienes y enseres. La gente de Sarhua, igual que en otras regiones andinas, considera a las montañas –a las que llaman apus o wamanis– como seres poderosos y con agencia.⁴⁴ Planteo, por lo tanto, que las Tablas cuidan las casas de la misma manera que los apus cuidan el pueblo. Tanto la materialidad como la iconografía de las Tablas y su participación en los rituales son fundamentales para este análisis.

            Los sarhuinos hacen Tablas cada vez que una pareja empieza a construir el techo de una nueva casa. Las Tablas se leen de abajo hacia arriba, comenzando con una dedicatoria de los compadres,⁴⁵ seguida de representaciones de la Virgen de la Asunción (patrona de Sarhua), de la pareja propietaria de la casa, de sus parientes cercanos (que aparecen en orden de importancia) y del sol.

Los sarhuinos obtienen la madera para hacer las Tablas de distintos árboles –entre ellos el pati, el aliso o el molle– que crecen en los valles cercanos al pueblo, y usan las ramas quemadas de chillka o sauce, también provenientes del valle, para delinear las figuras. Las tierras de colores que usan para pintar las figuras las obtienen de las montañas que rodean Sarhua. Para aplicar los colores, los pintores usan varas de retama y plumas de aves locales, y para fijarlos, aplican qullpa, un tipo de resina que obtienen de piedras ubicadas en las zonas de más altura.⁴⁶ Así, todos los materiales necesarios para producir las Tablas proceden del paisaje sarhuino. La curadora de arte indígena Patricia Marroquín Norby ha señalado que, en muchas obras de arte indígena, el origen de los materiales, la forma en que son recolectados y el tratamiento que reciben reflejan la relación de los habitantes con su territorio. Por tanto, estas obras no representan el paisaje, sino que son el paisaje.⁴⁷

Cuando la Tabla está lista, el compadre se la entrega a los nuevos propietarios en un ritual llamado Tabla Apaycuy. El compadre y su esposa, familia y amigos, acompañados de otros residentes locales, transportan la Tabla a través del pueblo de Sarhua junto con otras mercancías como maíz, papas, frutas e ichu, una hierba de las tierras altas que se utiliza para techar.⁴⁸Mediante la ceremonia del Tabla Apaykuy, la Tabla interactúa con todo el paisaje sarhuino. Y lo que es más importante, luego de que los dueños fijan la Tabla al techo de la casa y celebran con una gran fiesta, la Tabla entra en contacto con los apus a través de un ritual llamado inchahuay, donde adquiere el poder de proteger la casa.⁴⁹Durante el inchahuay, los invitados pasean y bailan alrededor de la casa con capas y sombreros cónicos hechos de ichu. El pintor sarhuino Primitivo Evanán Poma afirma que, mediante este ritual, la gente invoca a los apus para que protejan la casa. La antropóloga Hilda Araujo explica que la palabra inchahuay también es el término sarhuino que se usa para designar una fina capa de niebla que, si se asienta en las montañas el 1 de agosto, es señal de que vendrá un buen año, es decir, un año con abundantes lluvias. Así, cuando los sarhuinos usan esos sombreros cónicos, están actuando como “montañas de buena suerte”.⁵⁰

Según las concepciones andinas de animismo, los lugares y las cosas son entidades sensibles que tienen poder para actuar. Es más, como señala Bill Sillar, “las cosas que han tenido una relación previa o que suscitan similitudes con otros lugares, cosas o personas pueden seguir manteniendo una relación efectiva con su origen o su referente”.⁵¹ Las Tablas de Sarhua, de hecho, actúan como apus o wamanis. A través de sus imágenes y de su materialidad, están conectadas e interactúan con el contexto que las rodea, y tienen agencia para cuidar de la casa y de la familia, de sus bienes y sus tierras.

Los textiles shipibo-konibo y el poder de las plantas

Los shipibo-konibo, una comunidad indígena que habita en pueblos rurales a lo largo del río Ucayali en la Amazonia peruana, tienen una forma distinta de entender el territorio y su representación visual en los objetos cotidianos. Los shipibo-konibo se consideran parte de la naturaleza y ven el bosque, los árboles, los ríos y la tierra como entidades con agencia. Las plantas rao, o plantas con poder, son fundamentales para ellos y las consideran seres inteligentes.⁵²A través del consumo ritual de estas plantas, los shipibo-konibo entablan una conexión con ellas y las utilizan con fines medicinales. También recurren a las plantas rao para que éstas los guíen por su interior y experimentar una profunda comunión con la naturaleza.⁵³ Inspiradas en las visiones que perciben cuando consumen plantas rao como el piripiri (Cyperus sp.) y la ayahuasca (Banisteriopsis caapi), las mujeres shipibo-konibo crean y plasman motivos geométricos en sus cuerpos, ropas, cerámicas y otros objetos, materializando la koshi o energía positiva de las plantas.⁵⁴

Estos diseños visuales, denominados kené en el idioma shipibo-konibo, evocan las manchas de la piel de la anaconda primigenia ronin, quien creó los ríos y las constelaciones, así como los caminos que utilizan los seres vivos (animales, plantas, espíritus y estrellas) para trasladarse y comunicarse.⁵⁵Similares a laberintos conectados entre sí, representan tanto el río como las constelaciones que son fundamentales para la cosmovisión de la comunidad.⁵⁶ A través del ritual y de la conexión con la energía de las plantas, los shipibo-konibo comprenden el territorio y lo vinculan al cosmos y a los seres humanos y sus actividades cotidianas.   

Entre los objetos que las mujeres shipibo-konibo cubren con kené destaca la tela que usan para confeccionar prendas tradicionales, como el chitonte, o falda para las mujeres, y el tari, o túnica para los hombres. Confeccionan estas prendas con telas de tejido liso realizadas a partir de una variedad autóctona de algodón que crece en la región de Ucayali. Las mujeres solían cultivar el algodón, hilarlo y tejerlo con un telar de cintura.⁵⁷Cuando la tela ya está lista, pintan el kené con tintes vegetales que elaboran con cortezas, frutos, hojas, raíces y semillas de plantas locales.⁵⁸Luego cubren la tela con arcilla gris procedente de la orilla del río y la secan al sol. Cuando la lavan, los diseños que eran pálidos se oscurecen y se fijan a la tela. A veces las mujeres añaden toques de colores derivados de plantas, como el rojo del achiote, el amarillo de las raíces del guisador y el púrpura de la planta ani.⁵⁹En otros casos, tiñen completamente la tela nueva utilizando la corteza del árbol de caoba para conseguir un tono rojizo o arcilla del río, lo que da como resultado un tejido negro que luego adornan con bordados de colores y apliques de tiras blancas.⁶⁰

Al igual que en el caso de las Tablas, los tejidos shipibo-konibo evocan al territorio. Este territorio no es un espacio ajeno, sino que está intrínsecamente unido al cuerpo de la persona que usa la prenda elaborada con la tela que se fabricó en él. La materialidad de la prenda conecta el cuerpo humano a las plantas, al agua y al suelo del lugar; y los diseños lo conectan a otros entramados: a las raíces de las plantas, a los caminos de los ríos y al movimiento de las estrellas.⁶¹ Además, la energía de las plantas rao protege a quien lleva la ropa de distintos males. Toda la prenda es el testimonio de una cosmovisión en la que el cuerpo está directamente unido a la naturaleza y al territorio, tanto a nivel cósmico como íntimo.

La transición a un nuevo entorno

Durante la segunda mitad del siglo XX, una serie de crisis económicas y sociales afectaron gravemente a las regiones rurales de Perú y muchas personas tuvieron que migrar a las grandes ciudades, sobre todo a la capital, Lima. Allí, los migrantes tuvieron que rehacer sus vidas, luchar por conseguir ingresos y derechos básicos, aprender español y negociar las estructuras de poder existentes. También debieron reconfigurar sus prácticas artísticas para adaptarse al mercado y al sistema del arte, y para aprender a comunicarse con un público urbano.⁶²

En la década de 1970, un grupo de pintores sarhuinos en Lima empezó a producir versiones más pequeñas de las tradicionales Tablas y a representar en ellas escenas costumbristas de Sarhua orientadas a un público urbano. Las nuevas Tablas fueron un éxito, lo que llevó a los sarhuinos a representar también las injusticias sociales y sus preocupaciones personales.⁶³ El arte shipibo-konibo siguió una transición parecida. Algunos de los shipibo-konibo que emigraron a Lima en la década de 1980 mostraron los conocimientos de su pueblo mediante imágenes figurativas que describían prácticas y rituales tradicionales, así como su cosmovisión y, más recientemente, sus luchas políticas.⁶⁴En estas nuevas pinturas, tanto los artistas sarhuinos como los shipibo-konibo adoptaron convenciones occidentales, lo que supuso una modificación en su relación con el paisaje. Si bien estas piezas fueron pensadas para otros públicos y con otros propósitos, muchas supieron referirse al paisaje de forma novedosa, inteligente y creativa, desde la perspectiva de las ontologías y epistemologías indígenas andinas y amazónicas. 

Las montañas son parte del fondo de muchos cuadros sarhuinos realizados en Lima, es decir, se las presenta como parte del paisaje en el sentido occidental. Sin embargo, algunos pintores se han esforzado por evocar la agencia, el poder y el carácter sagrado de los apus. Desde la década de 1970, los pintores de la Asociación de Artistas Populares de Sarhua (ADAPS) han realizado varias versiones de Apu Suyos.

En todas se pueden ver las montañas de Sarhua, pero personificadas como hombres vestidos con ropas de la realeza. Según la inscripción en la pintura, los apus de la composición comen las ofrendas (frutas, vino, pan especial, hojas de coca, cigarrillos, flores, etc.) que los sarhuinos les han dejado sobre la mesa después de la herranza o fiesta de marcación de ganado. Una de las figuras centrales, Millqa, recibe los productos e invita a los demás apus a disfrutar de estas “exquisitas ofrendas”. Todos se ponen de acuerdo para proteger el ganado ovino de los leales.⁶⁵Esta representación del paisaje sarhuino busca transmitir la agencia y el poder de las montañas a un público urbano, razón por la cual los pintores decidieron utilizar las convenciones occidentales y representar a los apus como seres humanos vestidos como reyes europeos.⁶⁶En 1997, Carmelón Berrocal hizo el cuadro Mapa del distrito de Sarhua con casitas, en el que representa el territorio de su pueblo natal según las convenciones cartográficas occidentales modernas.⁶⁷

Esta obra, sin embargo, excede los diseños estándares basados en mediciones precisas y destaca, en su lugar, los espacios y elementos importantes para los Sarhuinos –las montañas, las tierras de cultivo, los caminos, las calles, las capillas, los canales y ríos– cuyos nombres propios aparecen indicados por escrito. Además, el casco urbano se presenta dominado por las colosales montañas y el cielo estrellado. Este mapa, por tanto, no sólo representa un territorio, sino que también da cuenta del poder de los apus y de la naturaleza sobre la vida y la cultura de los sarhuinos. Más aún, Berrocal pintó el cuadro con tierras de colores recogidas en Sarhua. El cuadro es una representación intelectual del territorio, pero además está conectado a él por su materialidad.   

En 2023, Venuca Evanán, hija de dos pintores sarhuinos que tuvieron que reestablecerse en Lima, pintó La ofrenda de Francisca.

La composición gira en torno a la abuela de la artista, Francisca, quien realiza un pagapu u ofrenda a las montañas y da gracias a la Pachamama, o tierra, por todo lo que nos ofrece. Las cuatro montañas del fondo representan los cuatro apus de Sarhua, ciudad natal de Francisca. En primer plano, Venuca representó el mar y la región costera en que se encuentra Lima y donde ella nació. Los elementos representados remiten al vínculo entre los seres humanos y otros seres naturales, así como a la historia de migración de la familia de la artista. Venuca subraya este aspecto de la obra incluyendo tierras de colores que obtuvo en las montañas de Sarhua y arena que recogió en su barrio de Lima.⁶⁸

Para el pueblo shipibo-konibo, el kené –los diseños geométricos que las mujeres visualizan cuando se conectan con las plantas rao– ha sido el medio para referirse al contexto que les rodea, así como a los conceptos y conocimientos necesarios para desenvolverse en él. Elena Valera (Bahuan Jisbe), nacida en la comunidad de Roya (Pucallpa) aprendió el kené de su abuela y lo ha aplicado tanto en textiles como en cerámica.⁶⁹En Lima creó sus primeras pinturas con materiales y técnicas similares a las que utilizaba antes de trasladarse a la capital. Primero, teñía las telas con corteza de caoba para obtener un fondo rojizo, y luego pintaba las imágenes con pigmentos naturales que obtuvo del barro, las plantas y la tierra de Roya.⁷⁰Onanya Baque Raoni (década de 1990) retrata a un onanya, o curandero tradicional, que utiliza plantas rao para curar a un niño enfermo y a su madre.⁷¹

Valera, que también es curandera tradicional, plantea en distintos niveles la centralidad de las plantas y su poder en la cosmovisión shipibo-konibo, a través de la figura del onanya, la inclusión de diseños kené en la ropa de sus personajes y el uso de las plantas como materia primordial.

Con el tiempo, Valera dejó de utilizar tintes naturales y empezó a pintar con acrílico sobre tela. También comenzó a representar la migración del pueblo shipibo-konibo a Lima. En un cuadro de 2011 la artista retrata el entorno natural de la selva amazónica y las montañas andinas que los shipibo-konibo deben atravesar para llegar a la capital peruana.

Estos lugares están representados como entornos que se relacionan entre sí, pero se pueden ver ciertas diferencias importantes. Mientras que en la selva amazónica parece que todo convive en perfecta armonía, en especial la relación entre las mujeres y las plantas, en Lima todos los elementos –las tres mujeres shipibo, la computadora, el cerro San Cristóbal y los altos edificios– están desconectados entre sí. En este complejo entorno, mientras dos mujeres shipibo aprenden nuevas habilidades para triunfar en un mundo industrializado y globalizado, una tercera mujer, vestida con prendas tradicionales shipibo-konibo, simboliza la conexión con los conocimientos que sus madres y abuelas aprendieron de las plantas y transmitieron a través del kené.⁷²

Harry Pinedo, hijo de Elena Valera y nacido en Lima, también es artista. Su cuadro El apu y la danza de ronin (2022), característico de su obra sobre la migración de los shipibo-konibo a Lima, muestra a dos hombres y una mujer ejecutando una danza en honor a ronin en las calles de la comunidad shipibo-konibo de Cantagallo, en Lima.⁷³

Ronin es la serpiente madre de las aguas, un ser primigenio que dio origen al universo y cuya piel es la base de los diseños kené.⁷⁴La danza de ronin y la presencia del kené en la vestimenta de la gente y en el suelo, celebran la armonía del mundo shipibo-konibo. Al fondo se alza el cerro San Cristóbal, apu principal de la zona de Lima, un ser poderoso antes de la invasión española y un espacio indígena sagrado, reconquistado en la actualidad por los shipibo-konibo.⁷⁵Los dos grandes árboles ubicados a ambos lados de la montaña también son elementos destacados en la composición, ya que subrayan el poder y la importancia de las plantas para la comunidad shipibo en Lima.     

Todas estas obras cuestionan la visión antropocéntrica occidental del paisaje y nos permiten concebir nuevas maneras de entender el paisaje y el territorio. Las ecologías y los materialismos indígenas, por lo tanto, constituyen un enfoque efectivo para analizarlas. Sin embargo, por haber sido producidas en contextos distintos, también hay que analizarlas en sus propios términos. Refiriéndose al arte indígena, Elizabeth Burns Coleman recuerda que es importante conocer “el tipo de categorías generales que rigen la sociedad en la que fue producido [el objeto], así como la categoría con la que el artista que produjo la obra esperaba que fuera entendida o interpretada”.⁷⁶ Los sarhuinos y los shipibo-konibo que viven en sus comunidades rurales están especialmente interesados en la vitalidad de la materia y la interconexión de los distintos seres en la naturaleza. No producen objetos que representan el paisaje o el territorio que les rodea, sino que crean, en colaboración con las montañas y las plantas, entidades con agencia que interactúan con sus contextos más cercanos.

Las obras de arte sarhuino y shipibo-konibo contemporáneas realizadas en Lima han dejado de ser entidades sensibles dado que fueron realizadas para un público urbano y occidental. Los artistas han transmitido, a través de imágenes, el poder de las montañas y las plantas y sus relaciones con otros seres. Sin embargo, al utilizar ciertas estrategias –como la representación de seres naturales con rasgos humanos, la incorporación de elementos materiales del entorno natural y las referencias simbólicas a los conocimientos de sus respectivas comunidades– estas obras de arte siguen siendo objetos poderosos que no dejan de negociar con sus epistemologías indígenas.

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In the mid-1980s, over the course of three years and across three continents, feminist artist Everlyn Nicodemus (born 1954, Kilimanjaro, Tanzania) gathered together women to discuss their everyday experiences. From these conversations, which took place in Skive, Denmark; Kilimanjaro, Tanzania; and Calcutta (now Kolkata), India, she produced a series of seventy-five paintings and related poems that she called “Woman in the World.”¹Organizing such dialogues as a prelude to the act of painting was a way for the artist to reject her early training in social anthropology at Stockholm University, where she chafed at the idea that researchers could be neutral observers of communities to which they do not belong. With the permission of participants, Nicodemus taped the events. But she did not use these recordings as tools to empirically document what was shared, as one might do in academic research. Rather, through careful, solitary listening, she began to translate the joy, pain, and mundanity of women’s lives into abstracted figurations. Together these works foregrounded something latent in her earlier compositions: a desire to make the relationship between self and non-self (or “other”) a pictorial and poetic strategy based on affinity instead of an anthropological problem rooted in difference.

By her own account, Nicodemus decided to study social anthropology after being “confronted with everyday racialist attitudes for the first time when migrating to Europe.”²She had moved to Sweden in 1973 after spending her formative years in the Kilimanjaro region. Already fluent in Kichagga, Kiswahili, and English, she picked up Swedish quickly and enrolled in Stockholm University in 1978. Anthropology, she thought at the time, “seemed to offer the intellectual means to better understand human behavior,” especially the baser forms she encountered while living abroad as a Black and African woman.³

Once she began her coursework, however, she discovered that the discipline lacked the possibilities she imagined. Social anthropology was a relatively new offering in Swedish academia, but like all anthropological fields, it had deep roots in ethnography, which had itself emerged from the systems and structures of colonialism. About a decade before Nicodemus arrived, the university attempted to loosen these ideological ties by changing the department’s name from “General and Comparative Ethnography” to “Social Anthropology” and by moving away from curricula designed around the Museum of Ethnography collections.⁴Despite these changes, which might suggest a shift from a collection-based approach to studying culture and society to a people-oriented one, Nicodemus grew increasingly uncomfortable with the role of anthropologist—even as she continued her studies.

Her frustrations prompted her turn to art-making. Nicodemus returned to Tanzania in 1979 to do fieldwork while also providing Kiswahili instruction to, in her words, “Scandinavian aid workers.”⁵While living in an international community of expatriates, she met some women who invited her to attend amateur drawing sessions.⁶Nicodemus abandoned the sessions after a few meetings to make time for more serious artistic pursuits, resolving to have her own solo exhibition as quickly as possible.⁷Nicodemus achieved her goal in 1980, when she debuted her paintings and poems in a one-woman show at the National Museum in Dar es Salaam, and preeminent Tanzanian modernist Sam Ntiro gave the opening remarks.⁸

Reflecting on this period of her life in an interview with Belgian curator Catherine de Zegher in 1992, Nicodemus spoke about why anthropology troubled her so deeply and how her emerging artistic practice resolved some of the issues she identified in the discipline’s methodologies: “Anthropology demanded that I look at human beings in a way that was foreign to me. I had to disassociate myself from the humans I was to study, to deal with them as objects.”⁹By contrast, the work she exhibited at the National Museum “was exactly the opposite of the objectifying approach. I exhibited myself as a subject, showing every part of myself, my problems, my hopes, my conflicts, my whole life.”¹⁰These themes included her experiences of pregnancy, childbirth, child-rearing, and romantic love.

The artist’s comments capture aspects of critiques that had emerged among anthropologists and other scholars in the 1980s about the discipline’s operating assumptions and its origins in the enterprise of colonialism.¹¹In brief, these assessments concern anthropology’s historical framework, in which cultures, and by extension peoples, are looked upon as hermetically contained entities that can be studied by supposedly outside, neutral observers and then interpreted for external audiences—often still located in the centers of Western empire. When Nicodemus says she turned herself into a “subject,” she does not mean the position of the anthropologist in relation to the ethnographic “other” as the field’s older conventions might have it; rather, she makes herself the center of the work, exploring her own vulnerabilities. An early example, After the Birth (1980) depicts a female figure curled on her side, a hand resting on—or covering—her face. A sleeping baby, the artist’s infant daughter, lies in front of her. A short poem accompanying the picture reveals the anxieties of a first-time mother both enthralled and overcome by her new responsibility.¹²

While Nicodemus has returned to her own biography throughout her career, she has increasingly framed her experiences vis-à-vis those of other women. Crucially, her paintings can be understood as situating those encounters as a series of mutual exchanges. For instance, she often describes one of her early works Two Black Candles (1983) in terms of a promise she made to acquire the bark cloth on which it is painted. Several years earlier, while pursuing her degree in anthropology, Nicodemus met an elderly woman living alone in one of the Bukoba districts near Lake Victoria.¹³They spoke Kiswahili, and eventually, the woman agreed to trade Nicodemus the bark cloth for some cotton cloth—on the condition that the artist burn two black candles.¹⁴

Why two black candles? Nicodemus does not know exactly, except perhaps for the fact that bark cloth is used in tradition-based burials.¹⁵In the region, the cloth is commonly associated with the Baganda people, whose kingdom in Uganda stretches to the southern border with Tanzania—an area near where this exchange took place.¹⁶Historically, the fabric was produced for various purposes, including for clothing and funeral wrappings. The latter usage, Nicodemus suspects, was the reason the woman had saved it.¹⁷(Incidentally, bark cloth is also the kind of cultural material that earlier generations of Western researchers would have collected for ethnographic museums, such as that in Stockholm.¹⁸)

More than anecdotal backstory, the exchange between the younger and elder women is integral to Two Black Candles. Its two female figures allegorize Nicodemus’s memory of the event—their tapered fingers dripping like wax, their bright white fingernails alight. The geometric and linear patterns of their robes flow into one another the closer they are to the ground, making the figures appear entwined. The soft texture of the bark cloth only heightens the effect. In that respect, the fabric has a dual function: It is the painting’s support, made plain by the untouched background. But it also peeks through the patterning, becoming an integral part of the represented clothes. 

A fluidity of line, in which bodies and body parts appear to meld into one another, marks Nicodemus’s work from this point forward. The resulting interpenetration of forms can be understood as a compositional device as much as a conceptual framework exploring the contours between self and other. Her painting technique is a prime example in this regard. Typically, the artist starts by drawing lines with charcoal, which she then goes over with a brush dipped into a tube of paint.¹⁹She lets the brush empty as she drags it across the surface so that the resulting line skips. Afterward, she paints flat fields of color just up to the edge of these boundaries. Nicodemus’s process leaves caesuras, letting the bark cloth—or, later, the canvas—break through her lines. These lines are not separations or hard boundaries but rather a means of entwining her figures so that one emerges from another. Indeed, Nicodemus’s caesuras might be seen less as negative spaces than as pauses that make room for other kinds of encounters between her subjects, herself among them.

The artist’s initial works for Woman in the World, a set of six paintings titled Tystnaden (The Silence, 1984), suggest that she continued to find conceptual utility in the idea of absence after developing it stylistically in Two Black Candles. The Tystnaden paintings emerged from a lull in the conversation among the participants in Skive, the first of the three gathering locations.²⁰Listening later to the tapes of the group discussion, Nicodemus began to paint on antique linen she had received as a gift from her mother-in-law.²¹Her pictures are not direct translations of the women’s stories, however. As her title suggests, the moments of quiet were just as important to her. The artist saw them as pregnant pauses, conveying what could not or did not need to be said.

Featuring monochromatic silhouettes of female forms, the six compositions that make up Tystnaden evoke but never fully disclose the tenor of the wordless exchanges. The artist describes the silence as having “passed through the conversation like a white thread,” a metaphor that explains the choice of paint color as much as it points to the fine weave of the textile that she left bare in the background.²²The outlines of the figures suggest an array of feelings, with some bodies folding in on themselves and others springing open in balletic leaps and arabesques penchées. Two women are solitary, but the remainder appear in pairs and groups. The swaths of white paint fuse them together so that, in several cases, it is difficult to make out the relationships among the parts. How many dancers, for example, are in the cluster with only seven limbs? Are the pairs of figures merging into one or splitting into two? What intimacies unite them? These questions are perhaps never meant to be answered, but they point to the gender-based affinities that the artist wanted to establish in her work at the time.²³Nicodemus further stresses this sense of commonality—in which one figure appears inextricable from another—in the corresponding poem “Women Silence.”²⁴According to her verse, having to hold secrets and, by extension, one’s tongue are universal undercurrents that unite women, connecting the womb, blood, and milk to the flow of rivers and oceans.

Although the formal resemblance of the figures underscores the shared moment of silence in the gathering, Nicodemus was also keenly aware that not all the women who contributed shared the same life experiences. After all, at every Woman in the World event, the participants came from different generations, class backgrounds, and professions. Several years later, the artist put a sharper point on the project she embarked on in Skive by acknowledging the limits of a feminism that does not account for the circumstances of race and geography:

Here, Nicodemus trenchantly borrows the language of colonial ethnography (“expedition,” “natives,” “study,” “collect”) and of anthropological analysis (“statistics,” “tables”) to reframe her own position and those of her participants. I want to draw a distinction, however, between the way in which she rhetorically presents herself in this passage and the model of the artist as ethnographer, to borrow a helpful formulation from Hal Foster, who used it to describe a slightly later set of practices from the 1990s.²⁶Although her statement can be read as a self-aware critique, anticipating the kind of “othering” that can happen when communities become the subject of an artist’s work, Nicodemus ultimately speaks of an equal interchange in which she too gives and not just collects.

If Nicodemus introduces the idea of reciprocity first through an ironic reversal of roles, in which the African researcher goes to the European indigenes, her framing was in part informed by something that transpired between 1984, when she painted Tystnaden, and 1986, when this statement was published for Woman in the World’s final iteration in Calcutta. “Who owns the knowledge of the Third World women?” Nicodemus inquires above. She also had posed this question as the title of an article she published earlier that year in Economic and Political Weekly, a social sciences journal based in Bombay (today Mumbai).²⁷Her account details the paternalistic attitudes and heavy-handed revisions she witnessed as a jury member and then editor for a planned volume of writings by African women sponsored by a Swedish government aid organization. What she describes, essentially, is the silencing of the contributing authors, whose texts were significantly shortened, reworked, and even retitled without their involvement. For Nicodemus, these interventions were particularly galling because the organization privileged its own agenda over the voices and stylistic choices of the writers—as well as undercut her purview as editor.

Literary critic Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s seminal “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” another text from the period, underscores the broader sense of urgency in Nicodemus’s question. Spivak first presented her ideas in 1983 at the conference “Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture: Limits, Frontiers, Boundaries,” before publishing them in 1988 and again, in revised form, in 1999.²⁸Beyond a general time frame and the complementary formulation of their titles, Nicodemus’s and Spivak’s bodies of work are both concerned with the ways in which the West constructs a notion of the non-Western female “other” through intertwined forms of discursive and economic control that happened first through colonialism and then through global capital. (The latter of the two was a channel for the aid workers and organizations with whom and which Nicodemus crossed paths.) To boil down Spivak’s argument for the purposes of my short essay, the question is less whether the subaltern woman has agency to speak than how institutional, political, and archival structures mute or misinterpret what is said.

Who choses silence, and who is subject to it? Nicodemus’s work proposes different answers over the course of Woman in the World. Notably, while the artist was back in Tanzania for the second iteration of the series in 1985, the problems with the anthology of African women’s writings were coming to a head.²⁹One of the ways that Nicodemus responded was to paint Silenced, a knot of black and brown forms punctuated with features like eyes and extremities. Emerging from this jumble of rounded shapes—heads, shoulders, elbows, knees—is a white hand covering the spot where a mouth should be. By the time she made Silenced, Nicodemus had fully developed the painting process I previously described, in which caesuras are left within and around the lines that form her compositions. In fact, barring Tystnaden, nearly all the works in Woman in the World feature some variation of this technique. That Tystnaden was the exception seems less an aberration than an acknowledgment that the pause, the absence, the silence demand critical acts of interpretation.

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Jean-Michel Atlan (1913–1960)—who signed simply as Atlan in his works—¹is most often considered a representative of lyrical abstraction, an art movement that took root in Paris after World War II. Born in the Casbah of Constantine to a Jewish Berber family (a fact he often emphasized),² his Algerian childhood lent specific forms and colors to his uniquely creative imagination. Atlan’s parents combined tradition and modernity, enrolling their children in both a Talmudic school and a French secular school. Steeped in the mystic readings of sacred texts, his father transmitted knowledge of the Kabbalah to his son, a legacy that would remain important to the artist throughout his life.

In 1930, Atlan left home to study philosophy at the Sorbonne. He became involved in political circles as soon as he arrived in Paris, publishing in Trotskyist journals like La Vérité (The Truth) and attending anti-colonial protests. Concurrently, he began writing poetry, drawing closer to the literary circle surrounding Georges Bataille (1897–1962) and the revolutionary Surrealist movement. He started teaching philosophy but was dismissed when the Vichy regime began to collaborate with Nazi Germany and implemented anti-Jewish laws. Within this extremist context, in 1940, Atlan started to make visual art. Imprisoned under the pretext of “Communist activities,”³ then committed to the Sainte-Anne psychiatric hospital from January 1943 to August 1944, he executed his first paintings on boards and makeshift canvases provided by friends and hospital staff.⁴

Once Paris was liberated, Atlan dedicated himself entirely to painting, declaring: “I’ve made the leap from poetry to painting, like a dancer who has discovered that dance is better than verbal incantations for his self-expression.”⁵ He made his breakthrough in the art scene in December 1944, right after the war, at a time when artists had to reinvent themselves to rebuild their relationship with the public.⁶ Nonetheless, his career and distinctive work have posed a challenge to critics. Atlan was perceived both within the School of Paris and on its fringes, engaging in every pictorial trend—from “Art Informel” to lyrical abstraction—so as to better disassociate himself from all of them.⁷ 

After the war, Atlan was hailed as an innovator by new gallery owners such as Denise René and Aimé Maeght as well as by art critics and historians, including Jean Cassou, Charles Estienne, and Michel Ragon (who would become one of the artist’s closest friends). Like French writers Jean Paulhan, Jean Duvignaud, and Clara Malraux, American writer Gertrude Stein was among his first supporters, purchasing several of his works. As a philosopher, Atlan was comfortable taking stances on issues rocking the art world and in 1945, published a manifesto in the second issue of the French journal Continuity.⁸ In this text, he questioned the concept of reality, and, further, the conception of realism—which, according to him, resulted in paintings that were too literal.⁹ Atlan felt a profound sense of freedom and broke his contract with Galerie Maeght in 1947. After making that decision, which was praised by the French artist Pierre Soulages (1919–2022),¹⁰ Atlan experienced a slower period in his career. However, he continued to paint and exhibit. In 1957, his career gained momentum again with a mature body of work that received international recognition in Europe, Japan, and the United States. He would not attend the April 1960 opening of his solo exhibition at The Contemporaries Gallery in New York, because he died in Paris on February 12 in his studio on rue de la Grande Chaumière. By tracing the trajectory of his unconventional career, from his homeland to his premature passing, one can gain a deeper understanding of this self-taught artist’s distinctive impact on art, transcending predefined categories and movements.

A Gestural Painting Focused on the Sign

The works by Atlan in The Museum of Modern Art’s collection represent both periods of the artist’s activity (which were separated by a reclusive time of low visibility for Atlan from 1947 to 1957, although he was still working): lithographs and line blocks created by Atlan in 1945 for Description of a Struggle (Description d’un combat) by Franz Kafka, an illustrated book published in 1946, and Realm (Royaume), a pastel on colored paper made by the artist in 1957. Despite being created ten years apart, the sign is present in both works.¹¹ While the 1945 prints foreground the plastic potential of the sign, his later pastel establishes its use as a means for the artist to relate to the world around him. 

Atlan progressively developed images incorporating biomorphic forms and strange signs. What were his sources of inspiration? Perhaps Arabic calligraphy, which he had encountered in many forms, including in the epigraphic decors of mosques and Islamic monuments in Constantine, such as in the famous madrassa on rue Nationale by his parent’s house? Maybe Hebrew calligraphy, with its graphic and esoteric dimensions? Or Berber motifs used in the decorative arts and symbols to ward off evil? Indeed, Atlan recalled seeing “Berbers tracing geometric signs, making little triangles or zigzags on pottery.”¹² Or ideograms from Japanese culture, with which Atlan felt a close affinity? In Atlan’s visual world, everything is sign and can truly be grasped only through understanding a mysterious language all his own. Atlan constructed his work over a fifteen-year period under the reign of the sign, using lines that are sometimes sharp but more often supple and cursive—signs that, like language, have endless variations. Everything feels connected, both surprisingly open and yet equally mysterious: black forms emerge as abstract signs, or as stylized silhouettes of humans, birds, and trees, or a combination of all these morphing together in metamorphosis—a process central to the artist’s magical universe. Some of his works evoke the Maghreb,¹³ but the majority make no reference to it, leaving the viewer unconstrained in their visual experience and the enigma preserved.

Movement and gesture are embedded in his work. From his earliest ink drawings to his collection of pastels, Les Miroirs du Roi Salomon (King Solomon’s Mirrors), which was published posthumously, calligraphy proved to be consistently significant for the artist. In his illustrations for Kafka’s Description of a Struggle, Atlan transmuted this calligraphy into his own writing. As part of his first contract with Galerie Maeght, at the suggestion of Georges Le Breton and Clara Malraux (who translated Kafka’s text into French), Atlan created a series of lithographs to illustrate the edition for its September 1946 publication.¹⁴ Working with lithographer Fernand Mourlot proved vital to his work: “My contract with Maeght led me to Mourlot’s lithograph studio, where I worked with stones for a year. This time was incredibly enriching for my painting—the black and white taught me about color. In black-and-white work, I discovered light and matter.”¹⁵

He persistently pursued material investigation, driven by a desire to find the best way to bring his forms to life.¹⁶ He explained his choice of materials as follows: “I needed a medium like fresco or oil paint, which led to my absorbent preparations using sackcloth canvas and to mixing powders, oils, and pastels.”¹⁷ Just as a line cuts across to create a symbol, the direct application of pastels—which cannot be covered or redone—contributes to the expressivity of his gestural painting. Atlan’s large oil canvases from this period owe their sumptuous nature in part to the work he was doing on paper at the same time, including in distemper and pastels. His research on color, such as silver, white and ivory black, as well as the absorbent abilities of his mediums, led to his becoming “a modest yet incredible craftsman,” as Michel Ragon put it.¹⁸ He dedicated himself to pastels when the technique was considered outdated and had become largely obsolete in contemporary art. But Atlan was not swayed by fashion, and he worked in that medium (among others) because of its mineral aspects, which evoked earth colors and the ocher of rock. This was undoubtedly inspired by memories, such as of the magnificent, towering plateau upon which Constantine is built.

Conjuring a mental image of his home city, by then far away, he said of the sketches he made in his notebook, “I have Judeo-Berber origins, like almost everyone there in the old city . . . which was built with stone, gullies, eyries, and cactus.”¹⁹ With his propensity for these techniques, his soot-black lines, his symbols from another age, and his ocher colors, Atlan offered the viewer glimpses of the cultural substrate that inspired him and created a staunchly modern work that nonetheless maintained a firm grip on its cultural references. His friend, the artist and poet André Verdet (1913–2004), used these audacious words when speaking of Atlan: “This undercurrent of Afro-Mediterranean civilizations . . . Jean Atlan bathes in the very humus of eras archaic, beyond neolithic.”²⁰ Therewith related, it is noteworthy that from November 1957 to January 1958, the Musée des arts décoratifs in Paris was showing explorer Henri Lhote’s exhibition on cave paintings discovered in Tassili n’Ajjer, Algeria—an exhibition that resonated with several modern artists. In the case of Atlan, the artist told Pierre Alechinsky (born 1927) that the cave metaphor ran through his work. He admitted that, according to him, art and beauty are to be found deep within it.²¹

While not discounting the primordial role of migration in sparking and intensifying memory, everything points to the fact that for Atlan, these recollections and legacies were more than fixed and inert backdrops; instead, he saw them as pliable material for an inventive imagination, freed by gesture to enter the work, reactivated endlessly in creations in which signs and colors combine to give profound coherence and constant renewal.

Atlan seemed to play with materials and mediums to construct his pictorial space: juxtapositions and superpositions reveal the intense vibrations of his colors. He used the expressive potential of vivid hues to their greatest effect, contrasting them with the black forms that structure and invigorate the space. Indeed, Clara Malraux remarked on how the colors and signs were in tension, bringing a rhythm to the heart of his works.²² In the same period, Atlan himself discussed rhythms in dance and painting as a symbol of life, such as in “Letter to Japanese Friends,” which he wrote shortly before his death.²³ In this text, he calls painting an “adventure that confronts man with the formidable forces within and outside of him: destiny and nature.” The rhythm, tension, and violent expressivity in his works add a tragic dimension that reflects his internal suffering and the impact of the conflicting worlds he had lived through. 

Realm (1957) is among the works he produced in his later period of intense creative activity and public exposure. As with other paintings and pastels from this time, the space has been refined, and the composition focuses on fewer, more majestic signs. The artist stages polysemantic forms that appear to be contemporary and personal interpretations of arabesque decoration. Likewise, the presence of rhythm is felt: The forms dance within the painted field, and the viewer can picture them continuing beyond the frame despite the black line that borders it. These shapes seem backlit in a mysterious procession, connected through an entanglement that evokes the idea of metamorphosis. Ocher, red, chalk white, and a few blue highlights lend a strange and uncertain luminosity contrasting with the foreground’s dark scrim. This tension between light and dark, line and color, is accentuated by the texture and shade of the paper, deliberately left exposed akin to the strokes of a pen.

Characterizing Atlan’s Works: Decentering the Gaze, Moving beyond Categories

The two works by Atlan in MoMA’s collection, along with others that are emblematic of his style, such as the large paintings he created from the mid-1950s until his death, reinforce the idea that his art cannot be confined within the artistic categories of Europe at that time. Although mainstream formal logic opposes figuration and abstraction, this binary thinking does not apply to Atlan’s paintings. Today, this fluidity would easily be accepted, but it was a source of debate in the postwar period.

The terms “lyrical abstraction” and “abstract expressionism,” more suited to postwar tastes, likewise did not satisfy the painter, as he did not embrace either one. Michel Ragon put forth the notion of “other figuration” to describe Atlan’s work after his early Art Informel period. In a discussion, Atlan told him that he preferred the term “other art,” suggesting that he didn’t want to be confined to a trend or to be boxed in stylistically.²⁴ For Ragon, this so-called otherness stemmed largely from the artist’s embeddedness in North African culture and history.

Ragon and other critics then began to use the term “barbarism”—often associated with the idea of rhythm—to characterize his art. This word, as well as “primitivism,” were used to describe Atlan’s output, but each has its own level of ambiguity: the former oversimplified his approach, while the latter decontextualized his original anchoring, placing it within a different cultural arena. Beginning in the 20th century, many European artists attempted to tackle the non-Western universe of signs, seeking to emphasize the notion of primitivism. This idea, embraced by artists such as those associated with CoBrA, including Asger Jorn (1914–1973) and Corneille (Guillaume van Beverloo; 1922–2010)—with whom Atlan exhibited in 1951—does not align with his intentions.²⁵ Similarly, among the practitioners of lyrical abstraction, his approach bore no similarities to that of Georges Mathieu (1921–2012), for example, who was becoming famous in Paris around the same time for extolling a type of gestural painting inspired by the calligraphic arts of the Far East. Without a doubt, the postwar context was a suitable one in which to challenge the supremacy of European art. Still, unlike European artists, who were decentralizing their views to understand the world better, Atlan’s evolution was in colonized Algeria, where he had constructed his visual universe; furthermore, he could speak from within the subjugated societies resisting that domination in their own ways. He was not coming from the outside; he was no stranger to the universe of forms other artists would appropriate and use. He claimed to belong within it, first through his political engagement during his youth and then solely through his aesthetic after the war.

In this decentring of the gaze, the question arises whether Atlan’s works relate in form to the Algerian painters who were also in Paris during the 1950s. Those from the generation born in the 1930s took an interest in Atlan’s work upon arriving in Paris. Among the Maghreb painters in the modern era, there is formal proximity with the so-called painters of the sign (“les peintres du signe”), such as Moroccan artist Ahmed Cherkaoui (1934–1967) and Algerian artists Mohammed Khadda (1930–1991), Choukri Mesli (1931–2017), and Abdallah Benanteur (1931–2017), for whom Atlan was a predecessor. The concept of sign painting, coined by Algerian poet Jean Sénac (1926–1973), was an important aesthetic trend amid Algeria’s decolonization and post-independence period. It was historically aligned with a desire for cultural reappropriation through the spotlighting of Arabic and Berber writing, as well as ancestral geometric signs like those used for basket-weaving, pottery, rug-making, and tattoos.²⁶ In his essay “Elements for New Art,” Khadda stated: “Atlan, the prematurely deceased Constantinian, is a pioneer of modern Algerian painting.”²⁷ We should not interpret this statement as assigning a label or identity but rather as expressing both interest in a new aesthetic and gratitude for Atlan’s work—Atlan paved the way for those artists in that moment in history and helped to legitimize their artistic research. 

The Postcolonial Context: Atlan (and Us)

Once idolized, then overshadowed, Atlan is particularly interesting in the postcolonial context: it is necessary to rediscover the vivid work of this precursor, one who used the power of the sign to claim his place in the world at the beginning of decolonization and who underscored the presence of plural modernities within modern art. Critics in his time spoke of the syncretism of his work. By instead referring to the work of Édouard Glissant on creolization, we can go beyond this syncretic vision and reconnect Atlan’s work to other aesthetic experiences that are the result of the creolization of art in the 20th century, a significant source of renewal and a shared universe, recognizing the contributions of each of these actors without having to resort to the idea of hierarchy or centralization.

Translated from the French by Allison M. Charette and Beya Othmani. Click here to read the French version.

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Jean-Michel Atlan (1913-1960) – qui signait simplement Atlan –¹ est le plus souvent considéré comme l’un des représentants de l’abstraction lyrique, mouvement qui marqua la scène parisienne dans l’après-guerre. Né dans la casbah de Constantine, au sein d’une famille juive berbère, comme il aimait à le rappeler,² son enfance algérienne a contribué à donner formes et couleurs à son imaginaire singulier de peintre. Les parents d’Atlan concilient tradition et modernité, inscrivent leurs enfants à l’école talmudique mais également à l’école laïque française. Imprégné de la lecture mystique des textes sacrés, son père lui transmet aussi la connaissance de la kabbale, sujet qui accompagnera l’artiste tout au long de sa vie. 

En 1930, Atlan part étudier la philosophie à la Sorbonne. Dès son arrivée à Paris, il marque son engagement politique en publiant dans des revues trotskistes comme La Vérité et en participant à des manifestations anticolonialistes. En parallèle, il poursuit une activité de poète qui le rapproche du cercle littéraire formé autour de Georges Bataille ainsi que du mouvement surréaliste révolutionnaire. Il enseigne la philosophie, mais il est révoqué suite aux lois antijuives instaurées par le régime de Vichy qui collabore avec l’Allemagne nazie. C’est dans ce contexte extrême qu’Atlan commence le dessin dès 1940. Emprisonné sous prétexte de « menées communistes »,³  puis interné à l’hôpital psychiatrique Sainte-Anne de janvier 1943 à août 1944, il réalise ses premières peintures sur des matériaux de fortune grâce à la complicité de ses proches et du personnel soignant.⁴ 

Au moment de la libération de Paris, Atlan décide de se consacrer pleinement à la peinture et déclare : « Je suis passé de la poésie à la peinture comme un danseur qui découvrirait que la danse le révèle mieux que les incantations verbales ».⁵ Il émerge sur la scène artistique dès décembre 1944 dans un immédiat après-guerre qui pousse les artistes à chercher un nouveau langage pour renouer avec le public.⁶ Le parcours et les travaux de cet artiste singulier interrogent les critiques. Atlan se situe à la fois dans et en marge de l’école de Paris dont il traverse les tendances picturales, de « l’informel » à l’abstraction lyrique, pour mieux s’en extraire.⁷

Après-guerre, de nouveaux galeristes comme Denise René, Aimé Maeght, de même que certains critiques et historiens de l’art comme Jean Cassou, Charles Estienne ou encore Michel Ragon, qui sera un ami proche, voient en Atlan un novateur. À l’instar des écrivains comme Jean Paulhan, Jean Duvignaud, Clara Malraux, l’Américaine Gertrude Stein installée à Paris compte parmi ses premiers soutiens en lui achetant plusieurs œuvres. Théoricien, Atlan prend position avec aisance sur les questions qui agitent le monde de l’art et publie un manifeste dans le numéro 2 de la revue Continuity en 1945 par lequel il remet en cause le concept de réalité et par là même la conception du réalisme qui produit, selon lui, une peinture par trop littérale.⁸Profondément libre, Atlan rompt son contrat avec la galerie Maeght dès 1947. Survivant tant bien que mal à une période difficile à la suite de cette prise de position saluée à l’époque par Pierre Soulages,⁹ Atlan continue de peindre et d’exposer, puis revient en 1957 avec un travail confirmé qui trouve alors un écho international en Europe, au Japon et aux États-Unis. Il ne verra pas l’ouverture de l’exposition que lui consacre The Contemporaries Gallery à New-York en avril 1960, car il décède prématurément des suites d’une longue maladie, le 12 février, dans son atelier, rue de la Grande Chaumière à Paris. Suivre son parcours atypique et complexe, du pays natal jusqu’à son décès précoce, est une manière de rendre à cet artiste autodidacte, et à son art, toute leur singularité, et de sortir des catégories englobantes.

Une peinture gestuelle qui privilégie le signe 

Ainsi, les deux œuvres présentes dans le fonds du MoMA sont-elles représentatives de chacune de ces deux périodes, séparées par une éclipse au cours de laquelle Atlan est peu visible même s’il continue à travailler : lithographies de ses débuts, créées en 1945 pour illustrer la publication Description d’un combat de Franz Kafka, et Royaume, un pastel de 1957, réalisé après le tournant du milieu des années 1950. Dans les deux œuvres, distantes pourtant de plus de 10 ans, le signe est là, avec l’intuition précoce de son potentiel plastique dès 1945, puis avec une place affirmée comme marque d’une présence au monde. 

En effet, Atlan développe progressivement des peintures dont les formes sont chargées de biomorphisme et de signes étranges. Quelles sont ses sources d’inspiration ? La calligraphie arabe, qui lui fut familière, entre autres, sous sa forme épigraphique, ornant les monuments musulmans de Constantine, les mosquées ou la célèbre médersa proche de la maison de ses parents rue Nationale ? La calligraphie hébraïque, avec ses dimensions graphiques et ésotériques ? Les motifs berbères, à la fois décor ancestral et symboles prophylactiques ? Atlan évoquait lui-même qu’il avait vu des « Berbères tracer des signes géométriques, faire de petits triangles, des zigzags sur des poteries».¹⁰ Les idéogrammes de la langue japonaise, culture avec laquelle Atlan avait des affinités intimes ? Dans le monde peint d’Atlan, tout est signe et ne se laisse saisir qu’au travers d’une langue mystérieuse qui est, somme toute, sa propre empreinte sur le réel. Sur une quinzaine d’années, Atlan construit son œuvre en affirmant, par des lignes parfois acérées, mais le plus souvent souples et cursives, le règne du signe, porteur, comme un langage, d’infinies variations. Tout semble lié, étonnamment ouvert et mystérieux à la fois ; les formes noires apparaissent comme des signes relevant de l’abstraction, mais pourraient tout aussi bien être la stylisation de silhouettes humaines, d’oiseaux, d’arbres ou de tous ces éléments confondus dans une métamorphose qui semble l’une des clés de l’univers magique de l’artiste. De nombreux titres de ses réalisations évoquent le Maghreb,¹¹ mais la majorité n’y fait pas référence, laissant le récepteur libre et l’énigme préservée.

La question du mouvement et du geste va donc être centrale dans son œuvre. Depuis ses premiers dessins à l’encre de Chine jusqu’au recueil illustré de ses pastels, Les Miroirs du Roi Salomon, qui paraît à titre posthume, la calligraphie se révèle une écriture particulièrement importante pour l’artiste tout au long de sa carrière. Les illustrations de l’ouvrage Description d’un combat de Franz Kafka conservées par le MoMA constituent un exemple de la transmutation de cette calligraphie vers la propre écriture de l’artiste. Dans le cadre de son premier contrat avec la galerie Maeght, et sur une suggestion de Georges Le Breton et de Clara Malraux qui traduit le texte de Kafka,¹² Atlan va concevoir une série de lithographies pour illustrer cette édition d’art qui sera publiée en septembre 1946. Il va trouver chez le lithographe Fernand Mourlot un enseignement capital pour son œuvre : « Mon contrat chez Maeght m’a conduit vers les ateliers du lithographe Mourlot, où j’ai travaillé pendant un an sur les pierres. Ce séjour m’a terriblement enrichi sur le plan de la peinture elle-même ; le noir et le blanc m’ont appris la couleur. Dans le travail du noir et du blanc, j’ai fait la découverte de la lumière et de la matière ».¹³ 

Il poursuit obstinément ses recherches matiéristes, motivé par l’impératif du type de rendu qui pourra le mieux faire vivre ses formes.¹⁴ Il expliquait ainsi le choix des matériaux utilisés dans ses œuvres : « […] j’ai besoin d’une matière proche de la fresque et de l’huile à la fois, d’où mes préparations absorbantes, l’utilisation de grosse toile de sac, le mélange de poudres, d’huiles, de pastels. »¹⁵ De même que le trait incisif créant le signe, l’application directe du pastel sur lequel on ne peut revenir contribue à l’expressivité de sa peinture gestuelle. Les huiles sur toile de grand format qui datent de ce moment doivent pour une part leur somptuosité au travail sur papier que mène en parallèle Atlan au moyen d’autres techniques qu’il affectionne, telles que la détrempe et le pastel. Ses recherches sur les couleurs, comme le blanc d’argent ou le noir d’ivoire, ainsi que sur le pouvoir absorbant des supports, concourent à faire de lui un simple mais fabuleux artisan, selon Michel Ragon.¹⁶ Il s’adonne ainsi au pastel à une époque où la technique, considérée comme datée, est largement tombée en désuétude dans l’art contemporain. Mais Atlan n’est pas sensible aux phénomènes de mode et travaille ce médium, entre autres, pour son aspect minéral qui évoque les couleurs de la terre et les ocres des rochers. Ceci fait sans doute écho à ses souvenirs, comme le fantastique rocher surplombant des à-pics vertigineux sur lequel est bâtie Constantine : « […] mes origines sont judéo-berbères, comme un peu tout le monde là-bas dans cette vieille ville […] qui est construite avec des rochers, des ravins, des nids d’aigle et des cactus »,¹⁷ dit-il pour évoquer la présence mentale de sa ville natale, désormais lointaine, dont il dessine le profil dans ses carnets.

Par le goût pour ces techniques, par ses traits charbonneux, ses signes hérités d’un autre âge et ses teintes ocre, Atlan laisse entrevoir quel substrat culturel l’inspire pour créer une œuvre résolument moderne, mais en prise avec ses référents culturels. Son ami l’artiste et poète André Verdet parle d’Atlan en ces termes audacieux : « Ce souterrain des civilisations afro-méditerranéennes […]  Jean Atlan baigne à même l’humus des âges archaïques, par-delà le néolithique. »¹⁸ Rappelons qu’eut lieu à Paris au musée des Arts décoratifs, de novembre 1957 à janvier 1958 l’exposition d’Henri Lhote sur les découvertes de l’art rupestre en Algérie, dans le Tassili N’Ajjer, exposition qui interpella nombre d’artistes modernes. Évoquons également ici la métaphore de la grotte – qu’Atlan livre un jour à Pierre Alechinsky –,¹⁹ au fond de laquelle se trouvent, selon le peintre, l’art et la beauté. 

Sans oublier le rôle primordial de la migration qui potentialise et magnifie les souvenirs, tout concourt à penser que ces souvenirs et héritages ne sont pas pour Atlan de simples arrière-plans fixes et inertes, mais que ces perceptions passées sont les matériaux ductiles d’une imagination inventive que le geste libère pour les faire advenir dans le présent de l’œuvre, sans cesse réactivées dans des créations où signes et couleurs se combinent et donnent à l’œuvre peinte d’Atlan sa profonde cohérence et son constant renouvellement.

Atlan semble jouer avec les matières, le support, pour construire son espace pictural ; juxtapositions, superpositions révèlent les intenses vibrations de ses couleurs. Il exploite au mieux le potentiel expressif de teintes fortes contrastant avec ses formes noires qui structurent l’espace et le dynamisent. Clara Malraux remarquait dans l’un de ses textes que couleurs et signes étaient en tension, mettant la notion de rythme au cœur des œuvres.²⁰ Atlan lui-même, à la même période, parle du rythme dans la danse ou la peinture comme symbole de la vie, comme il le réaffirme peu avant sa mort dans sa « Lettre aux amis japonais ».²¹ Dans cette lettre, comme dans d’autres textes, il parle de la peinture comme d’une « aventure qui met l’homme aux prises avec les forces redoutables qui sont en lui et hors de lui, le destin, la nature ». Rythme, tension, violente expressivité donnent à ses œuvres – qui apparaissent comme des champs de forces antagoniques – une dimension tragique, échos de ses tourments intérieurs et des mondes que le peintre a traversés et qui l’ont profondément marqué par leur conflictualité même.

Le pastel conservé par le MoMA, Royaume (1957), fait partie des œuvres réalisées dans cette période d’intense activité de création et d’expositions en France et à l’international. Comme dans les autres toiles et pastels de cette dernière période, l’espace s’est épuré, la composition se concentre sur quelques signes à la présence majestueuse, qui emplissent le champ peint de manière expressive. Des formes polysémiques se déploient telles des déclinaisons modernes et très personnelles de l’antique arabesque. L’idée de rythme opère, les formes sont dansantes, et on les imagine se poursuivant aussi hors champ, malgré le trait noir qui délimite la scène. Ces formes paraissent vues comme à contre-jour dans une mystérieuse procession, reliées les unes aux autres dans un entremêlement qui évoque l’idée de métamorphose. Les ocres, les rouges, le blanc crayeux, quelques éclaircies de bleu apportent une luminosité étrange et incertaine qui contraste avec les formes au premier plan. Cette tension entre le clair et l’obscur, la ligne et la couleur est servie par le grain et la teinte du papier que le peintre laisse apparaître comme s’il participait à son écriture. 

Caractériser son œuvre ? Décentrer le regard, s’extraire des catégories

Ces deux œuvres et d’autres devenues emblématiques de son style, comme les grands formats qu’il réalise du milieu des années 1950 jusqu’à sa mort, confirment le sentiment que les catégories de l’art européen ne conviennent pas : si la logique formelle et l’usage opposent la figuration à l’abstraction, pour la peinture d’Atlan, ce schéma de pensée binaire ne s’applique pas. Cela est aujourd’hui accepté, mais était, après-guerre, l’objet de débats esthétiques et polémiques. 

Les vocables d’abstraction lyrique, d’expressionnisme abstrait, plus conformes à l’évolution des sensibilités d’après-guerre, ne semblent pas non plus satisfaire le peintre qui ne s’y reconnaît pas entièrement. Michel Ragon avait avancé la notion d’une « autre figuration », pour les œuvres d’après la première période informelle. Dans un dialogue, Atlan lui répond qu’il préfère le terme « art autre », pour montrer qu’il ne veut être enfermé dans aucun courant.²² Pour Ragon, cette altérité tient beaucoup au rôle matriciel joué par son histoire et sa culture nord-africaine. 

Michel Ragon ainsi que d’autres critiques utilisent alors l’adjectif « barbare », souvent associé à l’idée de rythme, pour caractériser son art. Ce terme et celui de « primitivisme », qui fut aussi mobilisé pour parler d’Atlan, ont leur part d’ambiguïté : le premier, pour essentialiser sa démarche, le second, pour décontextualiser son ancrage originel dans une aire culturelle autre. En effet, depuis le début du xx^e siècle, nombre d’artistes européens ont cherché à se confronter aux univers des formes non occidentales, ce que cherche à mettre en évidence la notion de primitivisme. Cette notion, utilisée par exemple pour les artistes du groupe CoBrA, tels Asger Jorn ou Corneille, avec qui Atlan a exposé en 1951 sans faire partie du groupe, ne semble pas convenir à son propos.²³ De même, parmi les tenants de l’abstraction lyrique, sa démarche n’est pas similaire à celle d’un Georges Mathieu qui devint célèbre à Paris au même moment en prônant une peinture gestuelle qui s’inspirait des arts calligraphiques d’Extrême-Orient. Certes, le contexte qui suit la Seconde Guerre mondiale est propice à remettre en cause la suprématie de l’art européen, mais contrairement aux artistes européens qui ont décentré leur regard pour mieux saisir le monde, Atlan a évolué dans l’Algérie colonisée, il y a construit son imaginaire et il parle de l’intérieur de ces sociétés assujetties qui résistent à leur manière à cette domination. Il ne vient pas de l’extérieur, il n’est pas étranger à l’univers des formes que d’autres vont utiliser et s’approprier. Il y affirme son inscription, d’abord, par son engagement politique durant ses années de jeunesse, et après-guerre, uniquement par son esthétique.

En décentrant le regard, se pose la question de savoir si les œuvres d’Atlan ont une proximité formelle avec celles des peintres algériens présents à Paris dans ces années 1950. Les peintres avec qui le rapprochement prend tout son sens sont issus de la génération née dans les années 1930. Et l’intérêt qu’ils ont porté dès leur arrivée à Paris au travail d’Atlan est déjà un indice. Parmi les peintres maghrébins de l’époque moderne, la proximité formelle se situe avec la mouvance des peintres du signe, comme le Marocain Ahmed Cherkaoui, les Algériens Mohammed Khadda, Choukri Mesli, Abdallah Benanteur, pour qui Atlan est un précurseur. Selon la notion forgée au début de l’indépendance par le poète algérien Jean Sénac, cet important courant esthétique, en mettant en avant l’écriture arabe et berbère ainsi que les signes géométriques ancestraux comme ceux utilisés pour la vannerie, la poterie, les tapis, le tatouage,²⁴ s’est inscrit historiquement dans une volonté de réappropriation au moment de la décolonisation et après les indépendances. Le peintre Khadda affirme dans son essai Éléments pour un art nouveau : « Atlan, le Constantinois prématurément disparu, est un pionnier de la peinture algérienne moderne. »²⁵ Il ne faut pas voir là l’assignation à une identité, mais plutôt l’intérêt pour une nouvelle esthétique et la reconnaissance du travail d’Atlan, qui, à ce moment de l’histoire, leur a ouvert voie et a contribué à légitimer leurs propres recherches.

Atlan et nous dans le contexte postcolonial 

Adulé puis éclipsé, Atlan revêt un intérêt tout particulier dans contexte postcolonial : nécessité de redécouvrir l’œuvre intense d’un précurseur qui affirme par le règne du signe, au début de la décolonisation, une présence au monde qui peut être saisie, en termes de modernités plurielles, comme l’un des rameaux de l’art moderne. Les critiques ont parlé en leur temps du syncrétisme de son œuvre. En se référant aux travaux d’Édouard Glissant, on peut aller au-delà de cette vision syncrétique et rapprocher cette œuvre d’autres expériences esthétiques qui sont le fruit d’une créolisation de l’art du xx^e siècle, source majeure de renouvellement et d’un universel partagé, en reconnaissant l’apport de tous ses acteurs sans recourir à l’idée de hiérarchie ou de centralité.

Cliquez ici pour lire la version anglaise.

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Wong Binghao: Julie, Kang, how and when did you meet? 

Kang Seung Lee: I was introduced to Julie by Young Chung, founder of Commonwealth and Council gallery in Los Angeles, sometime in 2016. I think it was right before my second show at the space, titled Absence without leave (2017). I had moved to Los Angeles from Mexico City in 2013 and was not too familiar with Julie’s recent work at that time, though I knew of their¹ work with ACT UP NY; her early collaborations with Ron Athey and others; their involvement with New York’s queer womxn’s space, the Clit Club; and, of course, the famous 1989 “Kissing Doesn’t Kill: Greed and Indifference Do” campaign by Gran Fury. Julie is a legend in many ways.

Julie Tolentino: I remember Young Chung talking to me about Kang’s work; I can’t recall when exactly, but it was long before we actually met. I had lived and worked in New York for twenty-seven years and had just moved to the Mojave Desert. I took a chance to define a practice that had been moving through performance, conceptual, and visual art. My introduction to the gallery exposed me to many local artists. I was immediately caught by Kang’s commitment to re-orientations of representation, presence/absence.

KSL: I vividly remember that my first encounter with Julie’s work was Future Gold (2014), their collaborative exhibition with her partner Stosh Fila (aka Pigpen) at Commonwealth and Council. It consisted of remnants of their recent performance in Abu Dhabi, such as honey, gold thread, and saliva that were “smuggled” to Los Angeles and mixed with silicon and mortar in a glass box with a steel frame. The artwork was permanently installed inside a brick wall in the gallery space, visible from both inside and outside of the building, and it became part of the architecture of the gallery. It almost looked like a fish tank full of amber-colored water lit by sunlight. Through this artwork, I began to understand Julie’s artistic ethos, particularly their consideration of the body as an archive of embodied knowledge.

JT: My first performance-based interactive exhibition at Commonwealth and Council, RAISED BY WOLVES (2013), was actually the basis of Future Gold, the work that Kang mentioned. RAISED BY WOLVES was an outreach to a new creative community, in which I sought out physical and conceptual contributions from fifteen local visual and performing artists that I then transposed into drawings on laminated cards. The audience collectively pulled three to five cards from the deck that I, in turn, responded to through an improvised performance. Each artist’s work would “work on” the other, and thus influence me and the objects and people in the gallery space. The exhibition left behind a permanent wall work entitled Echo Valley, for which we had painted an excerpted text from Shame: A Collaboration by Birgit Kemper and Robert Kelly on a gallery wall. Over time, my partner, Stosh Fila and I would age (that is, darken and blur) the hand-painted text. As an additional transformation, and after we toured the durational performance installation Honey (2013) in Abu Dhabi, we repurposed empty oud perfume bottles and smuggled the performance’s excess honey to create an intervention. Removing a concrete block from the wall, we inserted a handmade thin glass container into the opening. The container was filled with the gold metallic thread, saliva, and honey from the performance. The work was renamed Future Gold.

The first work of Kang’s that I encountered was a wall mural that was part of a collaborative piece with Young Joon Kwak and Candice Lin. It emerged soon after RAISED BY WOLVES. I recall that the collection of work was situated on two walls, with a piece hanging from the ceiling, and a soundscore that accompanied it. It was near a door that is often left open and traversed—a social doorway. This work continues to hold significance for me as it embraces and holds my own wish for intergenerational, interdisciplinary, East-West art-activist-queer collisions, and transnational exchange. It was more “writing on the wall,” carrying collective love and many kindred conversations among us. It was a stunning way to meet Kang as I was already in love with Candice and Young Joon. 

WBH: Kang, what do you remember about the collaborative work/exhibition that Julie mentioned? 

KSL: The artwork is a collaborative installation in a hallway of Commonwealth and Council and was assembled by Young Chung. It consisted of my wallpaper installation Untitled (William Yang_The Morning After_1976) (2016) with Young Joon’s hanging mirror ball sculpture and Candice’s sound piece. I remember Candice’s work was played using a cassette player, and Young had to replace the battery almost every day. 

WBH: In what ways have you collaborated since your first encounter? Are there any ideas or projects that you’d like to embark on together but haven’t gotten around to?

KSL: Julie’s engagement in queer activism, kinship, and care are especially pronounced in her work Archive in Dirt (2019–ongoing). The work, also known informally as “Harvey,” is a living cactus that Julie revived, that had been propagated from its “mother” plant that originally belonged to the activist/politician Harvey Milk. It came from their friend, an archivist in the special collections department at UCLA, who acquired cuttings from one of Milk’s ex-roommates in San Francisco. When I saw the work for the first time in the exhibition Altered After curated by Conrad Ventur at PARTICIPANT INC (July–August 2019), which both Julie and I were part of, the plant was quite fragile, with just one new, pale green leaf sprouting. The plant is a container of multigenerational memories of activism and connections in constant transformation as it grows and multiplies.

In 2020, Julie allowed me to include Archive in Dirt in Becoming Atmosphere, my collaborative exhibition with Beatriz Cortez at 18th Street Arts Center in Santa Monica. I thought of it as a gesture of transference of intergenerational responsibility and care to Beatriz, me, and the staff at the gallery. With the help of Julie and Young, I became a participant in the evolution of the work through making ceramic planters and repotting the plant, taking care of cuttings, and sharing them with other members of the community, documenting the growth of each plant, making drawings and mapping connections, etc. In 2021, I extended this gesture by including Archive in Dirt in Permanent Visitor at Commonwealth and Council, as well as in New York as part of my untitled installation for the 2021 Triennial at the New Museum.

JT: After submitting Archive in Dirt and my accompanying anxious, Siri-mediated catalogue text for Altered After, which was part of Conrad Ventur’s Visual AIDS project, I was pleased to learn that Kang and I were showing together, and that our works were in proximity to each other. I sensed a mutual responsiveness to the intricacy of Kang’s gold-threaded embroidery on the floor of the gallery and the liveness of “Harvey.” As Kang mentioned, Harvey was a cutting, gifted from friend, beloved, anarchist, educator, archivist Kelly Besser from the still-here garden of Harvey Milk in San Francisco. A gift from a friend of his, then a piece shared with me. My best guess after some research is that its genus may be derived from the Schlumbergera russelliana—a species pollinated by hummingbirds. It’s understood that the birds stab the seed with their beak, then rub it off onto the bark of a tree, which is an impetus for germination and, too, that this species often gives pink or reddish flowers. The particularly opaque seed interests me as it is known to not open easily, and thus needs intervention and movement for growth. I resonate with this personally and related this to the Archive in Dirt’s origin as a gift. Community and archival care are both a form of conjuring and a way to see oneself in others.

Harvey, the succulent, had endured plane trips, various re-pottings, and imperfect conditions in an effort to find its roots as an artwork. It was extremely fragile in the post-exhibition transition—a very key moment for its multi-future as it was sprouting and rooting in different locations, under extreme changes. It was shared with Conrad, Kang, Commonwealth and Council/Young, and was eventually returned home to Pigpen and my apartment in Northern California—just seven miles from its original home, the activist Harvey Milk’s rooftop garden.  Everyone received these tender shoots—experiencing the responsibility of the split, transfer, transition, and reach. Kang posts how Harvey is doing and installed Harvey in a show at the New Museum. There is a rich three-way text thread running between Young, Kang, and myself. Conrad touches in from time to time, and we all gasp at the flowers and any tiny offshoots—signs of life. 

KSL: Skin (2021) and Untitled (Skin) (2021) are two other works in Permanent Visitor that came out of our conversations. Drawing from Julie’s consideration of the body, I was thinking about tattoos and scars as bearers of and witnesses to memories, pain, trauma—a mode of knowledge inscribed directly into the body. The two works are my attempts at capturing lifelong transformations through aging. I scanned the skin of Julie and three other friends: artists Jen Smith, Jennifer Moon, and Young Joon Kwak, who are all represented by Commonwealth and Council, trying to map a multigenerational fabric of our community’s embodied experiences. Skin is a video work in which the scanned images from the four artists are mixed together and move from one screen to another, resembling a flow of a river or human text as one collective body. In the floor installation Untitled (Skin), I embroidered these tattoos and scars on sambe cloth in antique 24-karat gold thread and juxtaposed them with fossilized leaves, seeds, and copper from the Pennsylvanian and Eocene eras. Sambe, a woven hemp textile, is traditionally used in Korea for funeral shrouds. Through the use of these materials, I was trying to honor our shared personal histories, address mourning and reverence, and reimagine collectivity through the flows of forces beyond one single life.

JT: Our bodies are laced together in Skin, tracing an opaque history that is built into the way we find ourselves drawn together—both with and onto each other. We are all UNEVEN in our togetherness—key to the way we use the archive. I lean toward the term “COUNTER ARCHIVE” to activate a liveness in oral recollections—that is, the liveness in the work shares the touch of Harvey, not a representation of Harvey Milk. This is not a critique so much as it is allowing terms around and between us that I experience as productive and queer.

I imagine that we take part in artworks and exhibitions as a kind of “forever practice.” Perhaps what I am saying, especially in the proposition in the tender-holding of Archive in Dirt as an archival expansion, is that we will always have opportunities to think with this kind of affiliation—as advocates for those among us and ourselves. This is always-in-process as our terms shift, as our surroundings and bodies change. I believe that Harvey and all the simpatico Harveys are part of a speculative forever-invitation offered to me—and thus, an Archive in Dirt translates as a verb: a care that is active, in action.  

I hope that we can find ways to continue to talk at all the various stages of our encounters with Harvey. I feel like this interview across time, distance, space, caregiving, touring, artmaking, teaching, research, etc. is a form of continued public and privately negotiated dialogue, writing, and rewriting.

WBH: What first drew you to your engagement with queer histories (for example, genderqueer clubs, community organizing, HIV/AIDS activism) in and/or beyond art?

KSL: Growing up in Korea in the 1980s and ’90s, I was very frustrated with the lack of representation of queer people in the mainstream media. My mining of queer archives definitely started from the desire to be connected and to be part of a lineage. It also meant negotiating with Western-oriented hierarchies that shaped the narratives and histories of the queer community, a complex position for queer Asians, who face oppression and homophobia within their own culture while being on the margins of the White Euro/US–centric queer culture.

As I go back and forth between Los Angeles and Seoul, I try to find ways to contribute to the queer communities in both countries from my privileged transnational position. For example, for the past four years, I have worked with QueerArch, also known as Korea Queer Archive, a personal archive of activist Chae-yoon Hahn that was established in 2002 but became public soon after. 

I make use of resources and funding opportunities from the contemporary art world to exhibit collections of books, magazines, newsletters, etc., and items such as ephemera from Pride parades from the archive, collaborate with younger generations of queer artists based in Korea creating new works influenced by our research at the archive, and also include items from their publication collection within my participation in the biennial in Gwangju, among other venues.

My projects are rooted in archival research. I try to reposition queer archives and collections, to connect distinct geographies and experiences to forge new sites of knowledge. For example, in my 2018 exhibition Garden, I juxtaposed the artworks and lives of two activist-artists, Oh Joon-soo and Derek Jarman, who were from two different continents but both died of AIDS in the 1990s. In a series of drawings on paper called Untitled (Tseng Kwong Chi) (2018–20), part of which was exhibited in a recent solo exhibition Permanent Visitor, I appropriated and attempted to create a critical context and history for the Hong Kong–born artist Tseng Kwong Chi’s works. I want to keep the legacies of these artists and HIV/AIDS activism alive to challenge dominant whitewashed narratives.

JT: I grew up deeply impacted by early LGBT and race riots in San Francisco, raised by teen parents and first-generation Filipino and El Salvadoran immigrant grandparents. Language and access bore down on how we navigated progress narratives, access, the reality of living with and among HIV and AIDS, the various forms of belongings and the righteous making of lives through clubs, affinities, drugs, difficulty, disabilities, art forms. . . . In retrospect, I learned to take in isolation as something to address, support, and surround, yet also allow myself to identify and work with. I look at how archives can be challenged to examine and champion other kinds of marks and signs of life—to see into the shape of (im)possibilities. Our experiences are uneven and this is important to remain open to. Legibility can also be elusive, exclusive. Relationships are dreams that need care. Art-making helps us reimagine ways towards another—and along queer lines, past and future.

WBH: How does dance figure (or not) in your artistic practice?

KSL: I am currently working on a new project The Heart of A Hand, which pays tribute to Goh Choo San (1948–1987), an internationally renowned Singaporean-born choreographer who died of an AIDS-related illness at thirty-nine years old. During his lifetime, he performed and choreographed for prominent ballet companies throughout Europe, Asia, and the United States. His legacy remains largely absent from dance history in the United States, most likely due to his diasporic identity. His accomplishments have been slightly more recognized in Singapore, perhaps fueled by nationalism, but his place in global queer cultural contexts is still vague.

The research process for this project has been quite challenging as I had to follow traces of Goh’s inherently ephemeral work and life between worlds. Last summer, I took a very rewarding trip to Singapore, where I met with a group of queer artists and cultural workers who helped me move through the huddles: Ming Wong, Jimmy Ong and, of course, Bing, who made all the connections. It felt like we were on a mission to learn about this queer predecessor and his last years, and I had a realization that the invisible memories of queer lives can only be sustained by this kind of cross-generational curiosity.

Through Janek Schergen, Goh’s friend and ballet master, and his sister Goh Shoo Kim, I learned much about Goh’s last years in New York City; his partner Robert Magee, who died of AIDS-related complications a few months before Goh; and how they were looked after by a group of friends for the last year as they became weak. I am trying to find ways to address these untold memories and to convey the ongoing grief and their bodily experiences of caregiving and resistance. The centerpiece will be my collaboration with Joshua Serafin, a performance artist born in the Philippines and based in Brussels. We are in the process of creating a video inspired by Goh Choo San’s Configurations (1982), a queerer, nonconforming, and clubby version, of course.

JT: Dance—ah, so much to say here. I left capital D dance long ago, having trained via a queer, brown, not-designed-for-dance, classed, and racialized body. Coming up, out, and through formal training in the ’80s highlighted how my formation was imbued with mixed racialization—a kind of triple-dosed consciousness and its special brand of impacting encounters with classism, racism, and homophobia. Though it lingers, forty years ago, being an “imperfect and unrecognizable” body in the dance room, in its skinny mirror and stage that prizes the spectacle, there was always something to work through (resist) and break with (refuse). Movement (and movements) create choreographies of being with and listening for other bodies, speculatively echoing back and forth across time. 

I worked professionally in David Roussève’s REALITY, originally a predominantly Black experimental dance company for twelve years. With many other artists, I contributed as performer/mover in more theatrical settings and this propelled my own practice into movement-based durational performance installation in the mid ’90s, when I experimented with folks like Grisha Coleman and Patty Chang. Years later, for my own work The Sky Remains the Same (2006–present), I archived works of other body-centered artists such as Lovett/Codagnone, Athey, and Franko B, as well as choreographers David Roussève and the late Stanley Love into/onto my body as a form of advocacy and community recognition expressed as curation<!>—while fully acknowledging the inadequacy of such a claim due to my own (disintegrating) body. This leans heavily on the necessity of movement—its weight, space, time, gathering.

Movement always leads, as in the 108-hour durational performance and visual art exhibition entitled REPEATER (2019) or the invitation to float and submerge, one-on-one, with audience members underwater in a gold-lined tent and cedar pool in Slipping into Darkness (2019). In recent collaborative and durational performances ECHO POSITION (with Ivy Kwan Arce, 2022), HOLD TIGHT GENTLY (with Stosh Fila, 2022), and LET’S TALK (with Jih-Fei Cheng and other artist/activist/writers, 2022), I consider the potency of collective movement embedded in light, reflection, and glass to call upon the voices of past and future to help us express stealth learning and the intricacies of public and private mourning, kink, care practices that are moving, and complex forms of love. There is so much more to say about the role of dancing and its material contagion—alone, on stage, slow drags, stuck in things, or just being the last messy one still swaying at the bar. Perhaps it’s the feeling of a kind of melancholic punk lingering, an in-person pulsing that remains. All that submerged melancholy drenched in fierce dancer epaulement. A nod to improvisation, ball culture, and the blues. All that swish. . . There is a kind of loosening I aim to engage in as a form of touch. A rigorous shaking (it up).

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During the event, art historian Svitlana Biedarieva talked about the development and transformation of documentary practices in Ukrainian wartime art, analyzing works by Dana Kavelina, Vlada Ralko, Alevtina Kakhidze, and Yevgenia Belorusets. Researcher Ewa Sułek expanded on her proposal that what happened in the visual arts after 2014 can be named a “postcolonial turn”—a phenomenon based on healing and the acceptance of history and of the past in its hybrid form, without the imposition of imperial or national patterns. Artist Lesia Khomenko discussed her own practice, which is currently focused on ways of looking at the war and the relationship between the digital archives and the materiality of painting. And Nikita Kadan spoke about his own practice, which references the Ukrainian avant-garde and modernism.

This conversation is a continuation of the presentations and conversations commenced that evening.

Inga Lāce: The full-scale war has been going on for more than a year. Could you say where you’re at now, and share a few words about how your surroundings and the cultural landscape have changed.

Ewa Sułek: I am currently in Warsaw, and the city has changed tremendously—Ukrainians have become part of the urban fabric. Works by Ukrainian artists are widely exhibited, and Polish art institutions are making an effort to enable refugee artists to live and work here. When the war started, I was at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, very far from Ukraine and from my own country. While all of my Polish friends were engaged in a massive, beautiful effort to help the millions of Ukrainian refugees arriving in Poland, I felt useless. But my perspective changed once I realized that one of the reasons this war is mainly understood as colonial is that all imperial and colonial powers aim at denying subjectivity to their subjects. This reality has been influencing Ukrainian history and culture for centuries but, once revealed, can become a powerful tool of subversion. So now is exactly the time when art and academic work in Ukrainian studies as separate from Russian ones is important. I have recently completed my PhD on contemporary art centers in Kyiv from the postcolonial and neocolonial perspectives, and I am planning to publish it as a book.

Svitlana Biedarieva: In January 2022, I talked with Ukrainian artists Alevtina Kakhidze, Maria Kulikovska, Piotr Armianovski, and Lia Dostlieva and Andrii Dostliev for October about the wartime experiences of displacement and loss reflected in their art, and we also discussed the then-hypothetical threat of Russia’s attack.¹ Based on their responses, it was apparent that, at that time, such a rapid and violent turn of events seemed completely unlikely. But then the reality proved to be worse than the most pessimistic predictions.

The war-related displacement from 2014 that had affected the cultural landscape of eastern Ukraine and Crimea became the new reality for the rest of the country in February 2022. Violence and destruction in the suburbs of Kyiv reinforced the vulnerability of human life. Many artists and researchers have been forced to continue their work outside Ukraine, but rather paradoxically, this movement provided a new opportunity to globally showcase Ukrainian culture, which until recently, was largely overlooked. 

We saw much more radical forms of antiwar and anti-colonial expression. Artists and curators became more decisive and direct in their discourse, tracing the causes and consequences of the aggression through personal lenses—as direct witnesses to or victims of violence—and they set an important precedent for antiwar resistance through art in Eastern Europe, catalyzing the final dismantling of post-Soviet space together with its postcolonial agenda.

Lesia Khomenko: Immediately following the full-scale invasion, I evacuated my family from Kyiv while my husband joined the Territory Defense Forces. I moved to the United States with my daughter, and we are now based in Miami at an artist residency. Since 2014, a lot of artists from eastern Ukraine and Crimea have moved to Kyiv. There was a very interesting, dynamic exchange in the art community there between those who worked with the issue of war, observing it from outside, and those who had been forced to leave their homes, to run from the war. Now, as of February 24, 2022, there is no such difference.

Before fleeing to the US, I had been deeply involved in developing alternative art education in Ukraine beyond just Kyiv. The institutional landscape was fragile but developing fast. A lot of artists were investing their energy in expanding the context of their practices by curating, teaching, establishing residencies, or opening artist-run spaces. Since February 24, most of these new institutions have been in survival mode or functioning as volunteer hubs.

IL: Svitlana, you have been researching artists’ documentary practices since the beginning of the war in 2014. Could you elaborate on how narratives created by Ukrainian artists have shifted since the full-scale invasion in February 2022?

SB: I wrote in detail about the turn to documentary art in 2014 in the book I recently edited called Contemporary Ukrainian and Baltic Art: Political and Social Perspectives, 1991–2021.² Directly following the Maidan Revolution and Russia’s occupation of eastern Ukraine and Crimea, artists such as Yevgenia Belorusets, Piotr Armianovski, Alevtina Kakhidze, Mykola Ridnyi, Andrii Dostliev and Lia Dostlieva, and Dana Kavelina—among many others—engaged with the effects of war by undertaking documentary practices incorporating photography, text, video, and existing archives and creating new accounts focused on notions of displacement, violence, and trauma.

Researchers Erika Balsom and Hila Peleg point out that this “documentary turn” has emerged globally in response to the postcolonial transformation, when artists turned their gaze away from the centrally produced body of ideas to take up diverse local perspectives, especially through direct, often raw visual language—as has been true in Ukraine.³

Post 2022, there has been another turn in the ways that mediation has moved from social documentation and archival investigation to personal chronicle, in which the different visions of the artist’s diary—in the work of Kakhidze, Vlada Ralko, and Yevgenia Belorusets, for example—have become an emblematic form focused on trauma, the body, identity, and decolonization.

The task of documentary practices now is also to emphatically reflect on the audience’s own traumatic life experiences of destruction and human losses. The question of historical memory has become secondary.

IL: Lesia, you talked about the development of your practice, ending with your recent series Max in the Army (2022). So, I’ll start with that. What was the impulse for making this series, and what does the work open up in relation to digital technologies and images of war?

LK: It’s my first work after the full invasion and my escape from Kyiv. I depict my husband Max Robotov, who is an artist and musician, in the first weeks after he joined the army. I was curious how being a lieutenant had changed him. Early on, he sent me a photo of himself saluting in front of a dark and unclear background. He was in civilian clothes—as were most of the soldiers at the beginning of the war. This image epitomizes my personal experience of the war. The idea of the series is to reflect the merging of civil society and the army.

Since the full invasion, people are no longer allowed to take photos or videos of soldiers or military objects, because sharing them might give the enemy intelligence for an attack. Working on this series of paintings, I have been reflecting on the role and status of the image, which in the context of war has become a potentially lethal weapon. I’m using the photos that I have received from my husband—taken from outside his army unit—as well as footage circulating in the public sphere.

I’m referencing the history of battle painting and, at the same time, thinking about the role of the image and of representation in the context of the cyber war.

IL: Lesia, you and many of your peers got their education in post-Soviet Ukraine. How do you think the local education and museum system has affected your work and imagery and attitude toward painting?

LK: At my alma mater, painting is deeply rooted in the post-Soviet visual tradition, which, for me, is both problematic and productive. The programs in the state art academies in Ukraine are still based in the traditional school of the nineteenth century—corrected just a little during the Soviet period but almost unchanged in the post-Soviet period. By deconstructing the visual language of Soviet figurative painting, I’m rethinking the tools of Soviet propaganda and mythologization by comparing them to recent phenomena in the cyber war. I’m working not only with the idea of narrative but also rethinking the academic approach to producing images and to “realism” by using the method of copying or referencing traditional genres such as landscape, historical painting, or portraiture.

IL: Ewa, you talked about the curatorial strategies employed in Kyiv museums, which are rethinking their own art history, for example, bringing attention to self-taught artist Maria Prymachenko, who was falsely provincialized as the “happy peasant” by Soviet authorities. Can you delve a bit deeper into these curatorial projects and explain the context and intention behind them?

ES: I mentioned three projects in Mystetskyi Arsenal in Kyiv: Kateryna Bilokur. I want to be an artist! (2015) and Mariya Prymachenko. Boundless (2016), both of which were curated by Alisa Lozhkina, and Paraska Plytka-Horytsvit. Overcoming Gravity (2019), which was curated by Kateryna Radchenko. These exhibitions aimed to re-narrate the work and lives of the self-taught Ukrainian women artists who were practicing in Ukrainian provinces during World War II and throughout the Soviet period. Bilokur’s and Prymachenko’s work, although widely recognized, was celebrated mostly for its floral or animal motifs or decorative patterns and thus fell into the category of folk art. In Soviet times, the myth of the Ukrainian village as the source and essence of Ukrainian culture was a state-supported construct that helped in colonizing the country, and so the artists were well supported by the regime.

Bilokur’s and Prymachenko’s work was seen back then as cheerful and optimistic, features that were desired in that they conformed to Stalin’s cultural policy that art should express the joy of the communist system. In fact, the policy of folklorization of Ukraine dates back to the Russian Empire. A similar policy was executed toward the Ukrainian language, which was perceived as a dialect of the main language­—that is, of Russian.

Overcoming Gravity⁠ was devoted to a reinterpretation of Paraska Plytka-Horytsvit’s work. A painter, folklorist, ethnographer, philosopher, and photographer, Plytka-Horytsvit lived and worked in the small village of Kryvorivnia, and she led a solitary life devoted to artistic and ethnographic practices. Her life was also marked by tragedies universal to many at the time—she joined the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, and in the 1940s and ’50s, and spent almost a decade in labor camps and prisons in Germany and Siberia.

IL: Nikita, your projects are dealing with the historical references of avant-garde art and Soviet modernism. Could you elaborate on your strategy for dealing with the past, for unearthing these stories? Why is it important and what is your position with regard to it?

Nikita Kadan: I deal mostly with the ruins of the avant-garde. These ruins are covered with nationalist and neoliberal decorations, which aim to hide too radical universalist and internationalist intentions. I see my task as uncovering or unmasking these avant-garde intentions. “Back to avant-garde” means “back to universalism,” and the latter is no less paradoxical than the former. We have to go back to be able to restart the way to the future.

But local creators of universalist avant-garde work were often imprisoned and executed by the state for being “too Ukrainian.” The state publicly declared internationalist values but, in fact, reestablished a Russia-centric imperial structure for the Soviet republics and their cultural life. “Unearth” is a good word here—really. The remains of Ukrainian avant-garde creators are literally found in death pits in places of mass executions, like Sandarmokh.

The future is to be found in an execution pit—this is the horizon of the new utopia.

IL: There have been attempts across the Central Eastern Europe and Central Asia, especially the former Soviet Union countries to place their histories within the postcolonial debate and decolonial discourse. The recent full-scale invasion of Ukraine has amplified this approach among others with calls for decolonizing Russia. However, even though they share imperial domination with the postcolonial countries, their histories are very different. How, in your opinion, can we use the framework of postcolonialism and decolonization to speak about art in Ukraine?

ES: The story of Russian imperialism in Ukraine goes back much further than the Soviet Union, and a postcolonial perspective can be useful where there are relationships of domination and power that are imposed by imperial structures, like the relationship between Russian and Ukrainian cultures. I also find the concept of “coloniality” proposed by Aníbal Quijano and developed by Walter Mignolo and others helpful. While “colonialism” is a specific historical condition, “coloniality” emerged at the same time (in around 1500), and includes both imperialism and capitalism. It is not as much connected to the prevailing concept of the colony overseas based on geographical distance and racial distinctiveness, but rather to other factors stemming from the rhetoric of modernity, progress, and development. In that sense, the continuous narrative of Ukrainians as “little Russians”—meaning underdeveloped—also finds its place within this discourse. Furthermore, colonization is not only about territory, culture, or economics. There is also the colonization of minds, which likewise stems from the modern “civilizing mission,” and it includes communism.⁴

SB: My most recent research is dedicated to the dichotomy of postcoloniality/decoloniality in contemporary Ukrainian art and culture. I also employ a typology formed by [Madina] Tlostanova, who distinguishes between postcoloniality and decoloniality not only from a paradigmatic point of view, such as the postcolonial theory that was developed by such theorists as Homi Bhabha and Gayatri Spivak and the decolonial theory by Latin American scholars Walter Mignolo and Aníbal Quijano, but also from a chronological perspective. The postcolonial development in Tlostanova’s model immediately follows the anti-colonial resistance and resulting downfall of an empire when a society of a now-independent country reworks its recent colonial experience.⁵ The decolonial process, however, goes one step further in its liberation from any colonialism-related elements, which is exactly what we are witnessing today in wartime Ukraine. I believe, however, that a new theory is needed to describe Ukraine’s complex situation in the post-Soviet space. In my research and the book that is currently under contract with Palgrave Macmillan, I use this theory as a cornerstone for developing a model that would be suitable for the Ukrainian/Russian case.

My position is that art in Ukraine has recorded how Ukrainian society went through a postcolonial stage after 1991 and entered a decolonial stage in February 2022. First, artists are dismantling postcolonial narratives and substituting them with decolonial ones, and second, they are creating new content that conceptually breaks with the imperial legacy of Russia. The current traumatic experience of war serves as the impulse for decolonial transformations—from the anti-colonial calls to cancel Russian culture to the civilized decolonization of institutions of power.

LK: I consider decolonial discourse in Ukraine extremely important. Articulated since 2014, it is in its hottest phase ever. But there is a contradiction among Ukrainian intellectuals: some insist on complete decommunization and on the de-Russification of public space and culture, while others propose rethinking and the reappropriation of certain names and phenomena. I think that the role of artists in this process is very important, because artists build nonlinear narratives and are able to operate within a complex system of paradoxes.

IL: Nikita, in your prompt, you mentioned the changes in the perception of the notion of the avant-garde in post-1991 and post-2014 Ukraine, as well as the (im)possibility of a “national avant-garde.” Could you elaborate on this position?

NK: Early post-Soviet perception was part of Ukraine’s “multi-vector” position in the 1990s and early 2000s, when lots of imperial patterns in culture remained untouched. But the return of the Ukrainian avant-garde to the narrated history was often initiated by people whose position was rather conservative. [Mikhail] Semenko or [Valerian] Polischuk, [Maria] Siniakova or [Anatoly] Petritsky, [Boris] Kosarev or [Vasyl] Yermylov were observed through optics, in which “national” elements in their practices were seen as much better than “cosmopolitan” ones. And this very much differs from the original intentions of most Ukrainian avant-garde and modernist figures. On the other hand, the imperial phenomenon of the “Russian avant-garde” was not really questioned by decolonial thought and was not so problematic for many art professionals and audiences in Ukraine. So narrating avant-garde figures as conjointly Ukrainian, cosmopolitan, and non-Russian was like being between Scylla and Charybdis. 2014 made the “nation-centric” views more popular. At the same time, the field of discussion became broader, and the positions opposing both narrow national-conservative thinking and cultural neocolonialism became more visible.

IL: Could you talk about how your practices as researchers and artists have changed since the full-scale invasion in relation to representing a certain nation state and its art scene. I am thinking of many of our previous conversations, which have been full of ideas of cosmopolitanism, transnational research, and the fact that you are fundamentally international artists and scholars. However, with the war, the pressure to serve national representation seems to be very high. How does it resonate in your art and other activities? How do you negotiate this pressure?

ES: As a non-Ukrainian, I initially found myself doubting my right to comment on art practices in Ukraine now, since it is not possible to fully understand what it means to live and work in a country at war unless one personally experiences it. I have been working with Ukrainian art since 2014, and as a Polish scholar exploring Ukrainian topics, my postcolonial perspective has, at least a couple times, been criticized as a form of Orientalization. An interesting article titled “Explaining the ‘Westsplainers’: Can a Western Scholar Be an Authority on Central and Eastern Europe” was published by Aliaksei Kazharski in July 2022.⁶ It shows that we are maybe even more cautious now about who speaks about what and who is given a voice.

SB: I don’t see speaking about Ukraine or the war as the pressure to serve national representation, but rather as the only means of active protest against the war. Even though, currently, it’s very difficult to make any parallels or comparisons, in 2019, I spoke of the war in Ukraine to Latin American and Canadian audiences as part of the interdisciplinary project At the Front Line. Ukrainian Art, 2013–2019, which took place in Mexico City and Winnipeg. This was the first large-scale research-led project in Latin America focused on the war in Ukraine that addressed the common experiences of conflict, violence, and displacement. When speaking about Euromaidan, for example, we encountered a vivid response from Mexican audiences who remembered or even witnessed the Tlatelolco massacre in 1968; similarly, stories of Russian military violence in eastern Ukraine prompted comparison with the drug cartels’ violent actions in the north of Mexico.

LK: The current attention being given to Ukrainian artists is helping us to better articulate a lot of messages. At the same time, there is very high turbulence in Ukrainian society itself, and a lot of artists are balancing between pure propaganda and critical artistic gestures, between personal stories and general conclusions. These debates, as well as the visibility of artists is very important for postwar Ukraine.

IL: Even though there is this visibility, in the context of the current war, there is a danger that Ukrainian art and artists are reduced to speaking only about the war. How do you deal with that?

LK: I’ve been working with the issue of war for more than ten years. I had been researching World War II and working with the story of my grandfather and Soviet postwar paintings. Now I’m looking at the current war through the perspective of the role of the image and representation—and, of course, I’m thinking about commemoration and the creation of historical narratives. Footage of this war has made me think about how war affects the global civilization in general and what it means to be visible—how security issues and technology are changing our optics. Personally it’s difficult to think about anything else but the war. And, on the other hand, to convey knowledge of the war with nuance is extremely important to resisting the propaganda machine.

NK: Ukrainian artists speak about reality. And reality is impregnated by war. Landscape is a war landscape. Bodies are war bodies. It is a big shift in our sensitivity. Now you even don’t have to show war literally, directly—it is in your work anyhow. I still make work about forgotten and interrupted stories of Ukrainian modernism. About stories of local twentieth-century art history. But these stories are read through the lens of war. There is no other way.

IL: Our discussion takes place in the context of The Museum of Modern Art, thus an important issue for us is to understand how your research and artistic practices impact the art historical narratives and museum practices in relation to art from Ukraine. What is your take on that?

ES: It is important not to engage the norms imposed by the Western point of view, which tends to see Ukraine as “Other” and to exoticize the vaguely defined “East” as a continued form of silencing and trivialization by the dominant discourses. Eastern Europe has been an object of the colonial gaze from both the West and Russia, and a certain image of this place has been imposed. Less interest has been given to art from Ukraine or Poland than to work coming from Russia. Such an attitude strengthens the imperial status quo. Artists and researchers decolonize Ukraine by rewriting the story of the land and region from a Ukrainian as opposed to Russian perspective—discerning its uniqueness, and creating narrations distinct from those imposed in Soviet times and earlier, in the times of the Russian Empire—and, at the same time, recognizing the hybridity that emerged due to decades of existence in the frames of both systems.

SB: I agree with Ewa. For example, many artists, particularly those working in the 1920s–30s avant-garde, who were born or worked in Ukraine, are still labeled “Russian,” which of course is being corrected now with urgency but is still a process often flawed or lacking research. So involving Ukrainian art historians and curators can help a lot.

IL: Is there anything that you feel is missing in the discussion about art in and from Ukraine that you would like to raise here?

SB: Everyone’s talked a lot about the war. I believe that what is missing currently in the international discussion on Ukrainian art is taking into account its heterogeneity, development of the classification of its chronological stages, and critical currents linked to the personal position and style of each artist. Otherwise, in trying to develop a Ukrainian “trademark” in terms of art, we risk overgeneralization. But this art historical systematization needs to be undertaken with a certain historical distance, as it is often impossible to grasp the entire panorama while in the epicenter of war.

_{post presents: Art, Resistance, and New Narratives in Response to the War in Ukraine was co-organized with the Polish Cultural Institute New York and co-sponsored by the James Gallery at CUNY. Promotional support was provided by the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University.}

_{post presents is a series of talks devoted to the cross-geographical consideration of modern and contemporary art. The sessions are an extension of post, MoMA’s online platform devoted to art from a global perspective.}

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In Take My Breath Away, the Guggenheim Museum’s 2018 survey of work by artist Danh Vo (born 1975), Death Sentence (2009) was displayed in a custom shelf wrapping the inner edge of the museum’s iconic spiral ramp. Visitors encountered a sequence of sixty white sheets of standard A4-size paper adorned in blue ink calligraphy (supplied by the artist’s father, Phung Vo) in a script that is at once precise, orderly, and quickly assimilated, as it is florid, flowing, and idiosyncratic. First produced in 2009, the piece is a collaboration between the artist, his father, and his close friend and fellow artist Julie Ault (born 1957). Across the sixty pages of paper, Phung copied a sequence of five texts selected by Ault, each of which meditates, in its own quirky way, on themes of death, mourning, and representation.¹

At the Guggenheim, the pages were placed face up on the horizontal shelf and exposed to the warm natural light flooding the atrium through the building’s oculus. Despite protective glass, the installation risked the work’s integrity since the sun pouring in through the skylight would slowly bleach the ink over the course of the exhibition’s three-month run. The willingness to court the potential destruction of an art object, appropriately titled Death Sentence, through its (re)presentation is a gesture that runs through much of Vo’s practice as he commonly curates, presents, alters, and rearranges objects that are sedimented with historical, cultural, and personal significance. Rather than treating the objects assimilated into his practice as rarefied objects of value to be preserved and protected for posterity, he approaches them as things to be worked with and used in the present.²

My approach employs a soft Marxian analytic regarding notions of use and value.³ For Marx, capitalist value is largely centered on the production of commodities, or things that can be bought and sold in the marketplace. The commodification of art within the art market reflects this position, as the fetishistic assignment of value to a given work is often organized around the work’s physical presence as an enduring art object: something that is to be preserved, rather than used. In Vo’s practice, there is consistent refusal to preserve the commodity/art object as he purchases objects on the market before converting them back into “use values” that he consumes within his own practice. This move doesn’t necessarily subvert or resist the logic of the market, but it does invert and queer these logics as, for example, he cannibalizes these works into his broader practice, before returning them to the market to sell at a dearer rate. But in making use of them, he may alter or even, depending on one’s perspective, destroy, if not kill, them.

To make the wall-mounted installation Lot 20. Two Kennedy Administration Cabinet Room Chairs (2013), for example, Vo purchased at auction two chairs that Jackie Kennedy had given to Robert McNamara. McNamara was one of the chief architects of the Vietnam War. Kennedy gave the chairs to McNamara following the assassination of her husband John F. Kennedy, the president who oversaw the war’s commencement. A refugee of the war, Vo disassembled the chairs and displayed their leather upholstery, padding, and desiccated wooden skeletons as a deconstructed sculptural arrangement. Refusing to freeze these historically overdetermined objects in time, Vo makes use of the chairs in a fashion that rescues them from becoming nostalgic, nationalist relics, while transforming them into a still-life spectacle of vengeful, anti-imperial critique, annihilating and exposing their previous form. By acquiring these historically and ideologically charged objects only to dismantle them, the artist coolly and violently confronts the equally destructive legacy of “Camelot,” before breathing new life into these objects for and in his critical present.

As Vo makes (new) use of and (re)presents objects that are tethered to converging sites of death and mourning (the abstract scale of the death and destruction of Vietnamese life during the war alongside the intimate grieving practices of the people who designed and executed the war), he confronts the spectator with the compresence of life and death and, similarly, a mutually implicated relationship between creation and destruction. These pairs do not form oppositional binaries, but instead are resolved into a state of constant, co-constitutive relation. Life with death, creation with destruction.

Exposing Death Sentence to the sun might have destroyed the work, but it was not the Guggenheim’s to destroy. The piece was on loan from The Museum of Modern Art, which, in 2010, acquired Death Sentence along with two of Vo’s other works. For that acquisition, Vo’s gallery supplied MoMA with an invoice doubling as the artist’s certificate of authenticity, a copy of Phung’s text, an appendix with a bibliography of the five texts comprising the work, and instructions for manufacturing the custom wood, glass, and metal cabinet to be used for its display.⁴

Through the certificate of authenticity, Vo cites the conceptual practice of one of his major influences, Félix González-Torres (1957–1996), who often supplied collectors with certificates of authenticity and instructions for assembling his work, thus forgoing the delivery of an enduring art object. The work’s life, in such pieces, need not exist as ossified commodity. It may exist instead, when it is staged or performed in a given time and place and in relation to a specific public.⁵ As a conceptual work, however, Death Sentence is distinguished by the presence of an enduring object as its central component: Phung’s text. Unwilling to risk the destruction of MoMA’s property via the artist’s ongoing use of the work at the Guggenheim, it was decided that for this particular installation, Phung would produce a new copy of the text, which would be subject to slow death by ultraviolet bath. MoMA would retain its “original.”⁶ By having his father produce another copy, one fated for destruction by way of the Guggenheim’s oculus, the artist quietly questioned where the work lives or even what MoMA has purchased. Does the museum own the concept for the piece, it’s schematics, Phung’s first sixty-page copy of the manuscript, the right to materialize the work, or some combination of these and other elements? Further, the solution worked out for the Guggenheim exhibition raised the question of whether the work could ever truly be possessed or destroyed. I am less interested in resolving these questions than I am in the way Vo’s practice consistently raises them. As he does so, he places pressure on a conception of “value” that is grounded in the preservation of the art object as commodity, and suggests instead a notion of art as a ceaselessly unfolding process/practice of mutually implied creation and destruction. One that appropriates objects and artworks to use and consume them in the making of new work. The impulse is not merely, or not always, destructive.⁷ Rather, it may be instructive insofar as it teaches a powerful set of lessons about living with destruction, if not the universal death sentence that accompanies all forms of living.

It is significant that Phung produced Death Sentence with the same ink and calligraphic style that he used for another ongoing collaboration with his son, 2.2.1861 (2009).⁸ For this latter work, which is also on paper, Phung reproduced a letter sent from French missionary Jean-Théophane Vénard to his father on the event of his beheading, having been condemned to death by the Vietnamese crown for illegal proselytization. In it, Vénard writes that “all [involved] regret that the law of the kingdom condemns me to the death sentence.”⁹ It is dated January 20, 1861. The artwork’s title refers to the fact that the letter was received by the father some days later, after his son’s death, on February 2, 1861. The piece is editioned, but the edition will only be defined by the conclusion of Phung’s own life. As Vo writes, “My father will write this letter repeatedly until he dies,” suggesting that the work itself is a kind of “death sentence.”¹⁰ The number of editions will be determined by the number of times the piece is purchased until Phung dies. MoMA acquired Death Sentence for its collection together with an edition of 2.2.1861. When displayed in relation to Death Sentence, as it did in the Guggenheim’s rotunda in Take My Breath Away, the two works offer a profound meditation on the compresence of a multitude of unfolding presents with the finitude of death: that is, not life versus death, but the mutual implication of life and death (as well as creation and destruction) with each other.

The origins of Death Sentence are based in Vo’s friendship with Ault, one born from the grounds of queer of color loss. González-Torres died in 1996 at age thirty-eight amid the first waves of the AIDS crisis. He has been a major influence on Vo’s practice, and the two share a set of formal and autobiographical similarities. Both are artists who deploy sculptural, conceptual, and performance dynamics in their practices, just as both are queer men and refugees of the Cold War (Cuba and Vietnam, respectively) who incorporate autobiographical matter into their work. But by the time Vo encountered the work of this queer ancestor, or Cold War cousin, González-Torres was already dead.

Ault was one of González-Torres’s dearest friends and collaborators. They worked closely together and, in 1987, Ault helped recruit him to join the conceptual art collective Group Material. In the early 2000s, Ault was briefly in residence in Denmark, where Vo’s family settled after escaping Vietnam by boat when he was a child. He sought her out with questions about González-Torres’s practice and process. According to Vo , she was interested in what the “next generation” of artists would do with González-Torres’s legacy. She was immersed in editing her 2006 compendium Felix González-Torres¹¹ and the two began a dialogue regarding González-Torres. This dialogue led to a deep and ongoing friendship.¹²

As he was preparing for his landmark 2009 exhibition at Kunsthalle Basel, Where the Lions Are, Vo invited Ault to write a text for the exhibition catalogue. She was unsure at first, but they agreed to meet at a film festival in Argentina where they continued the exchange. Of the trip he remembers only the consuming nature of their conversations at the hotel and the films. Ault would later reflect that “the period was exuberant and exhausting; we thrived on and suffered from utter mental saturation.”¹³ From the exchange, Ault curated the five texts to be reproduced at the catalogue’s conclusion in lieu of the traditional catalogue essay, titling her contribution “Death Sentence.” Doing so, she sought to avoid the exegetical form that is the norm for the catalogue essay: “It didn’t ring true for me to interpret or explain Danh’s work. It didn’t make sense to have something like a unified narrative.”¹⁴ Rather, and in Vo’s own words, he “wanted a text that I could use for the future . . . something to learn from. That you can carry with you. I think that’s also what I mean when I think of artwork. No? It just sits there and you keep thinking about it.”¹⁵ Sharing the desire for a text that could be worked with and used over time, rather than explaining and fixing Vo’s work in time, Ault chose texts that “bore a kind of analogic . . . significance to Danh’s way of thinking and working . . . because of the way that they would, together, as a whole, configure, not diagram, but begin to configure, or suggest, a kind of unfolding of the cosmology of Danh’s practice.”¹⁶ Her hope that Vo would continue to work with the texts bore immediate fruits as he absorbed them into a new piece, also titled Death Sentence, which was first displayed at Art Basel in Miami Beach in 2009 before being purchased by MoMA in 2010.

Reading the five texts in sequence, one finds a wide range of resonances with Vo’s practice. In a lushly poetic fragment from a California land survey, for example, one catches descriptive language that seems presciently relevant to Vo’s conceptual approach. The author, John McPhee, lyrically narrates the earth’s story through the analogy of furniture housed in an attic, all in different styles and from different eras. Resonating with Vo’s practice of curating and (re)presenting objects amid shifting contexts and points of reference, McPhee writes that one tells such objects’ stories by moving “backward through shifting space to differing points in time,” before consoling the reader by telling them that “you can’t see the story whole. You cannot tell when each of these items has come, any more than its maker could have known where it would go.”¹⁷ This emphasis on subjective experience and contextual meaning making not only points to Vo’s methods, but also resonates with tactics deployed by Ault and Gonzalez-Torres (as evidenced in Group Material’s seminal AIDS Timeline of 1989).¹⁸

A fragment from an essay by Pier Paolo Pasolini, in turn, dissects the cinematic footage of Kennedy’s assassination. Reading the footage, Pasolini describes the way a sequence of cinematic shots form a multitude of unfolding, subjective presents. Through the effects of montage, he writes, “We obtain a multiplication of ‘presents,’ as if an action, instead of unfolding only once before our eyes, unfolded more times.”¹⁹ The act of cinematic editing (of editing the multiplication of presents into a single, streamlined sequence) will, in turn “render the present past”just as death provides a completed form for a life that is, until that point, unfixable and multitudinous potentiality.²⁰ The Pasolini fragment closes with the insistence that, “It is therefore absolutely necessary to die, because, so long as we live, we have no meaning, and the language of our lives . . . is untranslatable; a chaos of possibilities, a search for relations and meanings without resolution. . . Death effects an instantaneous montage of our lives.”²¹ As curator Katherine Brinson has noted, Vo’s studied interest in questions of death, and his deconstruction of the binary that divides life from death, appear resonant with Pasolini’s conclusion. In her reading of Death Sentence, Brinson remarks, “In an oeuvre predicated on a belief in the incommensurable vagaries of lived experience and the flickering instability of the self, death finally arrests this ceaseless flux and is a perpetual, countering presence in the work.”²² Death functions in two competing ways here. Death is that which arrests the arc of a particular life, but it is also a kind of continuance: what Brinson describes as this “perpetual, countering presence” of death in the mix with the living.²³

By refusing to provide a “unified narrative” of Vo’s practice by way of an exegetical text for Where the Lions Are, Ault sought to avoid the trap of fixing or killing the work. Instead, she provided Vo with a text (or a sequence of five texts) that could continue to live and work for him: “My hope is that ‘Death Sentence’ is something that Danh continues to read and delve into” as the text’s meanings transform and take on new life across different spaces, times, contexts, and utilizations.²⁴ So doing, it is inevitable that old meanings might be destroyed or killed off, making way for new points of connection and entry to emerge. This is a process of living, where death and destruction are not anathemas to life, but “a perpetual, countering presence” within it. ²⁵ This might suggest that when Vo exposed Death Sentence to the destructive rays of the sun, his aim was not to slay the work. In some ways, by becoming a rarefied art object acquired by MoMA and held in its collection, the piece had already been killed. By exposing it to the sun, giving it a new purpose, and giving it away to a new public, Vo sought to give it a new use, to find new life, as his work often does, in a seemingly dead and inert thing.

Vo once remarked to me, “The art world thinks I destroy things.”²⁶ He didn’t finish the thought, but I inferred that he understood this particular “unified narrative” of his practice as incomplete, if not inaccurate. Death and destruction are not, within his work, finite or conclusory. They are not the period delimiting the end of a (death) sentence. They are, instead, a part of the ceaselessly unfolding project of living. Rather, and in keeping with something Sigmund Freud once argued, death here does not run counter to life, so much as it is the realization of life’s aim.²⁷ That is, living is, always and at the same time, a process of dying, and all living matter ultimately comes from, and returns to, the pregnant nothingness that we sometimes call “death.” To put a work of art to use in the present, and presence of the living, as Vo often does, is to risk altering it and wearing it out, if not rendering it vulnerable to death and destruction. But Vo’s work is often an invitation to experience a shift in perspective. Seen otherwise, what appears to be destruction might be an invitation to come to terms with the fact that destruction and death are perpetual companions to creation, life, and the art of living on. As we are all sentenced to die, a death sentence need not necessarily be the opposite of living. As Death Sentence reminds us, it is the art of living with death that gives the act of living on meaning, substance, and stakes. A death sentence, in other words, is a precondition for More Life. It is the negotiation of this contradiction that gives life, and perhaps art, its force of power in the world.

(Boundless thanks to Danh Vo, Julie Ault, Marta Lusena, Binghao Wong, Susan Homer, and Daisy Matias (for excellent research support).

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By clicking on the images, readers can access interactive games, lists, videos, and social media activities that have been designed and/or documented by the artists. The first of its kind on post, this commission contributes to C-MAP Asia’s ongoing research and discussions about models of cultural work in Southeast Asia.

With lock-downs and slowdowns due to COVID-19 around the world, many arts organizations moved their exhibitions and programming online. This project started with two questions: how can we approach the Internet as a medium, and not just a platform, for artistic work, and how can digital archives generate new research and ideas? I invited two artists to collaborate on this project: S. Yi Yao Chao, a librarian at Asia Art Archive in Hong Kong, and Poklong Anading, an artist who has been involved in the Manila contemporary art scene for more than two decades and whose works feature in the Roberto Chabet Archive, the Green Papaya Art Projects Archive, and the Manila Artist-Run Spaces Archive. These three collections at Asia Art Archive feature many of today’s well-known contemporary artists from the Philippines. A spirit of collective aspiration runs through these archives, and seeded this collaborative project. We had many conversations one-on-one and as a group over half a year: to learn about each other’s practices, to explore and meander through the collections, and to find space for collective thinking and imagination.

—Chương-Đài Võ

Dear Chuong-Dai, with a u in front of an o,

Poklong and I don’t know if there is a story, or if we are the ones to tell it. Maybe there are multiple stories and ways to evoke a happening. To enter and reenter. But I like sitting with the ambiguities of what has been documented. In my first encounter with Poklong, we talked about prolific residencies, not remembering. We talked about documenting performance. Honestly, when we documented for our friends, we didn’t know what the documentation would be used for. Documentation is buried in hard drives, revealed online in an archive, with many peoples’ backs and blurred-out nuances.

What and when do we see decisions for retractions?

As informative as an archive should be, we want to focus, or be out of focus, on the ambiguities. Moments when we recognize revisions and changes, or just chase unrealized thoughts. I think we don’t care much for what happened, or feel the need to verify these revisions. But it’s the act of someone, a distant hand and their pencil marks, that remains on a work in process.

We share notes on Wednesday nights. Even without a time difference, the night catches Poklong earlier, while mine is an ultramarine blue. Our talks are very long, with many sidetracks and unused notes in duration, like experiencing and setting up makeshift screenings.

Sometimes we capture the impression of our dialogue in forms of attentive collages and drawings, photographs, videos with a small lens in our phones and multiple sunsets and moons, some telephone lines in between, new sprouts of plants drawing lines and spirals of a snail that was a pest and now traces of a pet’s pace.

An intermediate proposal,

S.

Written on some non-immediate days

***

[S.] Routinely through dispersed digitized folders, we began by sharing what I saw in the archive and what Poklong recalls, traces of himself and his friends. In Quezon City from 2004 to 2005, Big Sky Mind hosted two residencies: the inaugural Big Sky Mind Annual I¹ and the closing 18th Avenue: Art and Life.² There is some photo documentation that is out of focus but artfully captured³ of Poklong and MM Yu’s artist talk during the first residency. It is inconsistent at any angle but eye level. There is no overview. It’s interpersonal: There is a shared living and studio space. There are many ambiguities. Maybe we can only describe, maybe there is something new. We are not going back or preserving or recalling this moment. We are meeting in the present. There’s a meeting at 7:30 p.m. on Skype. With a bad connection, you move to a designated spot, the kitchen.

[Poklong] What came to my mind after seeing that short documentation was the plastic fillers that I use to store printed documentation for my portfolio. The documentation that leads to a video of the collaboration with MM Yu shows how PowerPoint was used to present artwork. Since the software has become a common ground for presenting work on the computer, I thought of hanging the plastic fillers on my studio walls, to catch traces of dust accumulated through time. Instead of showing physical art documentation, there would be physical traces of dust—a collection of my activities in the studio. I reflected over some questions for this project: What’s an archive? What are these records for? Where did it all start? Because of its grid-like pattern, these plastic fillers resemble the 300 Drawings of [Roberto] Chabet, which was the inaugural exhibition at Big Sky Mind in 1999, six years before I hung the plastic fillers on my studio walls.

Alternative artist-run spaces thrived in the contemporary art community of 1990s and early 2000s Manila. As an artist who has participated in some exhibitions at these spaces and platforms, for this collaborative piece with Sam and Chuong-Dai, I gathered some material on selected group exhibitions held in these spaces. The process of archiving and filling in the gaps is an integral part of documenting. This has led me to continue collecting unrealized ideas and aspirations from the artists who were running these spaces for a project called AVoidWork, an audio-video compilation that uses video as a tool for expression. As part of my process, I ask to visit the artist and record their voice while they share their unrealized ideas. I then combine the recorded audio with video footage I took that relates to their ideas and their immediate environment while they were sharing their ideas. In this project, the idea is the actual work. Some of the ideas that they shared were related to the sustainability of their previous spaces, programs that they wanted to accomplish, and other ideas that they conceived after the closure of their spaces.

[S.] Sometimes Poklong and I talk about making lists as notes from our meetings. Other times it’s a drawing game generator to escape and randomize the list at the length of a waterfall. Sometimes we watch movies or documentaries about plants. Connected are loose leaves. Asia Art Archive’s collections are organized into a tree structure, a metaphor, a network in a cloud that’s actually in Singapore. There are fallen leaves on the floor and we draw them. We make pots and the materials we use sometimes make us allergic and overwhelm us.

[Poklong] As Sam and I moved the conversation forward, these lists grew, seemingly endless and ambiguous. These ideas gradually conceived as I contemplated the artist residencies I had attended. A week at Freies Museum Berlin, Germany, 2010; 38 days at Galerie Zimmermann Kratochwill, Graz, Austria, 2010; 26 days at Cité internationale de Arts, Paris, 2014; and 16 days at Centre Intermondes, La Rochelle, France, 2014. Towards the sky, it seems that the branches of the tree are cracks when looking up from underneath. I would use these images and scrape on the backside of the mirror and make it into dining tables that reminded me of manhole covers. I thought about what was underneath these connections of human activities—the aftermath of eating, drinking, communicating, gathering—where all human activities flow: the sewage that is covered by manholes as if a reverse mirror. Some questions came to mind: What are artist residencies for? What are the connections between the place where I was and where I am now?

[S.] In the Roberto Chabet Archive, the artist Yolanda Laudico (Yoli) hangs banana leaves in a grid on a wall⁴ and exposes photosynthesized paper to light as a way to draw.⁵ There is an Acer cappadocicum by a pathway near Asia Art Archive in Hong Kong, where people hide for a smoke break. If you can spot it, there are 2 papier-maché leaves that mark the pressing of the flowerpots for an Asparagus setaceus and a “left hand aromatic” 左手香 office plant.

[Poklong] Drawing with light is what photography literally means. I am curious about the idea of how leaves can be like a lightproof box for a pinhole camera, where they capture light during photosynthesis, producing food for the plant. Like our list-less page, the ideas and notes that go on and on can be written or drawn on leaves as additional insight, feeding the whole plant, the whole archive. A cross-reference to this idea is Gary-Ross Pastrana’s early work at Big Sky Mind about leaves and manuscripts, The Fall of Meaning (2000).

A hand may resemble a vessel—as if that of our own body, a host. An artist residency is also a host. Underneath the urban landscape and dwellings is a man-made channel hidden from plain sight. The leaves capture light, just like a hand can be seen and overlooked.

[S.] I don’t know how to end this text as I’m walking. Maybe in living there is no end but sameness, walking the same route but seeing something different. A rearranging. A new leaf growing. Another one withering. Feeding some new pests and pets.

[Poklong] There are certain things that we act on without knowing how we would translate them into words. This was what we sought to address with the idea behind missing vocabularies, a group exhibition I organized at Green Papaya. Gathering with friends to have a group show together reminds me of Tom Marioni’s work The Act of Drinking Beer with Friends Is the Highest Form of Art.⁶ In our current era of accelerated production and social-media interaction, our ways of interacting with each other have changed. When we wanted to drink with friends before, we would hang out at gallery openings. Nowadays, my friends will send messages and invite me for e-numan (from the Tagalog word inuman), which translates “to drink on Zoom online meetings.” It seems like other informal acts of exchange and collaboration may never happen again like how it was before.

On September 21st of 2003, during the anniversary of the 1972 martial law declaration in the Philippines, a group of artists including MM Yu, Lena Cobangbang, Louie Cordero, Jayson Oliveria, Jun Sabayton, and I held the first iteration of the food pest project at a canteen at Big Sky Mind’s Cubao 18th Avenue compound. All of us, with the exception of Jun Sabayton, were in residence there at the time. It was an act of coming together on a day that signaled the start of one of the darkest periods in Philippine history, a time when even the most basic civil liberties, like the act of gathering with people, could easily become suspect. We invited people to come and bring or prepare any dish or food they wanted to, and to share those dishes with everyone. For the second iteration of food_pest, now during a pandemic in which movements are restricted and meeting with people is almost impossible (and under a corrupt and dictatorial Philippine government as in 1972), in earnest solidarity, we are inviting people on Instagram to share a food recipe: it can be a text, a video, an audio recording, a series of drawings. And if anyone would like to send a prepared dish to someone, we would gladly facilitate the delivery to their intended recipient.

[S.] People believe archives are depositories for potential afterlives. Ephemera are saved for make-shift and guerilla-style events to be revisited. From a lived experience to a document, to a collision of both and maybe something new.

[Poklong] The past can make sense of the future. Archiving as how we are with social media has become our palpable presence. The depository list of ephemera is timeless. We are uncertain when it will end or start anew again. As Umberto Eco said, “We like lists because we don’t want to die.”⁷

[S.] Forgetting or a list and very fragmented processes to remind

No structure

Noninvasive and just focusing on the material

Looked

less on the subject and the narrative

They are just spaces and loose fragments

Residues and brief pausings

(A nap, a walk and this lake which isn’t the same river but just a body of water)

Remove and rearrange all the labels into loose leaves

In passing

The influence of material—here are many and all together. In looking through the archive, I can see remains, bits and pieces. Its navigation is vast and open. Its fragments can be rearranged and have a different orientation each time. We write to remember and we draw to mark where we left off so we can forget.

What I have to say changes but there are some pinpoints . . . it is really not important and preferably disposable when it becomes materialized. I don’t want to influence or guide you too much. That will distract you from getting lost. Don’t trust me too much. I don’t remember and I know in bits.

[Poklong] Like plants, ideas grow. It begins with the process of seeding, flowing in our sensory nerves, and expanding like branches of a tree or sprouts like a rhizome on the ground. It withers away as our memory may remember anything or may forget. Our body’s response is either to make a move or make a mark / unmarked.

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