Art historian and curator Margarita Tupitsyn analyzes Balloon, a 1977 action by the Moscow-based Collective Actions Group (CAG), which entered the MoMA Collection in 2008 as a video work.
The very first scene of the video Centro Espacial Satelital de Colombia, by the art collective La Decanatura, depicts a mother cow slowly, even lovingly, stroking with her tongue a newborn calf.
Film historian Ashish Rajadhyaksha discusses major moments in the study of early Indian cinema, a history that is punctuated by fires both on the screen and off the screen.
Cuban artist Tania Bruguera uses performance as a means to interrogate relations of power and control, particularly in regards to the history of Cuba. Untitled (Havana 2000), a pivotal work in Bruguera’s career, has been recently acquired by MoMA. In this text, Elvis Fuentes discusses the importance of the piece and comments on the peculiarities of the…
In this essay, Jennifer Tobias, Reader Services Librarian, MoMA Library looks at the history of MoMA through the direct engagement of the artist. This research was presented in her exhibition Messing With MoMA: Critical Interventions at the Museum of Modern Art, 1939–Now (July 1–November 29, 2015), which documented seven decades of interventions by artists, the general public,…
In this video, Roxana Marcoci, Senior Curator in the Department of Photography, interviews artist Olga Chernysheva at the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow during the C-MAP Central and Eastern European group trip in June 2015. Olga Chernysehva is a mid-career artist based in Moscow who works across media. Born in the Soviet Union…
Art historian Daniel Quiles focuses on examples from the Transmissions exhibition to show how Argentine conceptualists of the late 60s converted information from one medium to another. This phenomenon shifted to the transmission of social and political information, causing artistic practices to leave national borders and connect beyond the region. One of the earliest Argentine…
Since around 1977 when Gilbert and Lila Silverman began to develop their Fluxus Collection, Jon Hendricks has played a central role in fostering the formation of that renowned collection that bears their names.
This essay concerns the “south of the south, the south of South America,” written from the north of the north, the north of North America. Drafted from a position of physical distance between author and subject, and troubled by the power dynamics of north gazing south, this selection…
Tomislav Gotovac—the influential avant-garde filmmaker, conceptual artist, and anarchist leader of Croatian performance art—occupies an authorial position within the alternative New Art Practice of the late 1960s in the former Yugoslavia. After studying film directing at the Academy of Theater, Film, Radio, and Television in Belgrade, Gotovac made his first experimental films, inaugurating the golden…
At what moment did artists in Korea show work that was considered experimental, underground, and contemporary? How are the first Korean Happenings, from the late 1960s, seen from today’s perspective? These questions were addressed by Kim Mikyung at a C-MAP presentation at The Museum of Modern Art in April 2014. Her talk, published below, surveys…
Although postwar Japanese avant-garde art is considered to have ended in the year 1970, Julian Ross contends that projection installations in the 1970s took on many of its characteristics, namely, an engagement with the concepts of “environment,” “intermedia,” and “display.”
