To begin with, I want to stay with the title.¹ All of its terms are plural, and this matters. My concerns are not the singular, canonical, capital H History or the capital A, capital H Art History—the forms of knowledge claimed by the state or by national narratives, academic institutions, market logics, or whatever capital is able to extract value from them. Histories, convivialities, art practices: These are multiple, distributed, often contradictory, and they don’t require elaborate justification in the context of what I want to unfold here.

The idea of conviviality that I often return to comes from Paul Gilroy, a theorist of race and racism whose work continues to shape how we understand coexistence in postimperial worlds. Gilroy uses “conviviality” not as a slogan or a more cheerful synonym for multiculturalism, but to describe how people in postimperial cities actually live with difference: the ordinary, improvisational mess of everyday life. People who, despite long histories of race, empire, and inequality, still find ways to eat together, borrow sugar, share the same streets, laugh at the same jokes. He is drawn to those small negotiations—those moments in which what might have divided people (language, skin, faith, memory) ends up coexisting with what they share: a bus ride, a football team, the weather, the city itself.²

When Gilroy’s book first appeared in Britain, it was titled After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture?—a diagnosis of a nation unable to let go of its imperial past. But when it crossed the Atlantic to the United States, the title was quietly changed. Columbia University Press published it as Postcolonial Melancholia.³ “Empire” disappeared. “Convivial culture” was deemed too cheerful, too opaque, perhaps too British. Instead, “melancholia”—the mood of something lost but not admitted—fit the American atmosphere of the early 2000s. This was the period after 9/11, when the United States was in the thick of the “War on Terror” and attempting to police the world while insisting it wasn’t an empire. The new title spoke to that anxiety: a grief that follows power but refuses to name itself.⁴

Gilroy was, of course, writing about postimperial Britain, where the residues of empire cling to everyday encounters—in accents, in skin, in smell, in gesture. And yet he observed how, despite all of this, people still manage to live side by side: joking, arguing, sharing food, improvising a common life out of uneven materials. This, for Gilroy, is conviviality. Not harmony, but the practice of staying with differences. And it is this practice—with all its messiness, its harshness, its in-your-face realities, its tragedies and anxieties and dramas, and its inseparability from humor, generosity, kindness, and the continuous effort to make not just a life but a livable environment for oneself and for others—that resonates so deeply with the archipelago now known as the Republic of Indonesia. A place where coexistence has long been ordinary and difficult at once, where differences are not exceptions but conditions of life.⁵

Allow me to briefly outline what I mean by “modern Indonesia.” I do not mean a tidy timeline or a national story one finds in textbooks. I mean something provisional: the ongoing, unfinished effort of learning how to live together across differences—ethnic, linguistic, religious, ecological—and under changing regimes of power and imagination. This definition is not final, and it will never become final. It is subjective and temporal, crafted for the purposes of this moment, and one I would likely contest in another conversation. But it is a starting point—a way to think about how conviviality, histories, and art practices intersect in this archipelago and its many modernities.

Let’s say that the “modern Indonesia” began around 1908, with the Sumpah Pemuda—the Youth Pledge.⁶ The moment when Bahasa Indonesia (Indonesian) was declared a unifying language across the archipelago that was colonized by the Dutch. It is important to note that even today, Bahasa Indonesia is the first “foreign” language most Indonesians learn in school. More than 700 languages continue to be spoken across the archipelago; for most people, one or two of these remain their mother tongue—some of the languages have their own scripts, their own cosmologies, their own epistemologies of the world.

The decision to adopt Bahasa Indonesia as a unifying language, the way I see it, was an invitation—not a solution or a magic key. It was a proposal for an experiment in speaking and being together across islands, tongues, and lifeworlds. Around this same period, in the arts, painters such as Wakidi (1889–1979), Abdullah Suriosubroto (1878–1941), and Mas Pirngadi (c. 1878–1979) were producing the mooi-indie (beautiful Indies) landscapes—colonial-era images of ordered nature, picturesque tranquility, and the comfort of distance. By the 1940s, other forms began to surface: the untamed figures of Emiria Sunassa (1894–1964)⁷, the expressive sculptures Tridjoto Abdullah (1917–1989)⁸—gestures that argued, questioned, and refused to remain fixed within the available vocabularies. What, then, begins to shift in these works? Is it a matter of representation, or something else—perhaps a reconfiguration of relation, of subjecthood, of how bodies and environments hold one another? I will now introduce you to two of Emiria’s works that I have encountered and (re)staged. Even as they appear here within exhibition space, these figures do not fully settle into the distance of representation. They retain a proximity that resists being reduced to image alone.

A male figure poised in mid-action. His archer’s bow drawn, body leaning back, muscles taut as he prepares to release an arrow. His dark-toned skin is accentuated by ornaments—large earrings, a feathered headdress, and a red sash at his waist. He stands within an environment dominated by the enormous vivid pink and red lotus leaves and blossoms that are blooming around him. The contrast between the earthy tones of the archer’s body enveloped in a dense vegetal field and the saturated hues of the lotus flowers creates a heightened sense of drama.

Emiria often painted figures from across the archipelago—from Balinese and Tidoreans to Dayaks, Bugis, Papuans, Javanese, and Sundanese—but here the figure’s identity is imagined, a creation of the artist’s vision. The surreal scale of the lotus plants transforms the scene into a suspended, almost mystical moment. Painted around 1941–46, during the final years of colonial rule and the dawn of Indonesia’s independence, the work conjures questions of identity, perception, and the Other, framing a human presence within a lush, dreamlike world on the threshold of a history in the making.⁹

A female figure from Sulawesi. But let’s talk a bit about Emiria in around 1910–20. She entered Jakarta’s artistic and political circles in the 1940s and 1950s. Before then, she was remembered otherwise. Oral accounts suggest she was identified not as a princess of Tidore but rather as Emmy Pareira (a Minahasan woman from the Manoppo-Pareira clan), who was raised in Manado and educated in Christian missionary schools. In the mid-1910s, she and one of her sisters were known as musicians—a pianist and singer, respectively—who performed in Dutch society circles in Ternate and, briefly, in Europe (1914–15). There she went by the name “Sunny.” Later, in the 1920s, she described herself as a “girl from the East” who was studying Dalcroze eurhythmics (a musical pedagogy based on body movement) in Brussels and Vienna.¹⁰

In the late 1940s, art schools began to open, bringing Western curricular structures. What is now the Institut Teknologi Bandung (ITB) was established as the Technische Hoogeschool te Bandoeng in 1920 under Dutch colonial administration. After independence, its art-related programs developed within this technical and pedagogical lineage, eventually forming the Faculty of Art and Design in 1984.¹¹ Meanwhile, the Institut Seni Indonesia—Yogyakarta (the first of its kind, now replicated across the archipelago) emerged from a series of institutions founded by nationalist artists—many left-leaning and largely self-taught—including ASRI (Indonesia Academy of Fine Arts, 1950)¹², ASDRAFI (Indonesia Drama and Film Academy), and AMI (Indonesia Music Academy). One might expect that this Yogyakarta group of founders—known for critiquing their predecessors’ idealized depictions of Indonesia in the style of colonial painters—would create a curriculum of their own. Mind you, they did not. The Jogja art school, too, adopted a Western structure and orientation. What is now the Institut Kesenian Jakarta (IKJ), which only formed in the late 1970s, is perhaps the only one that openly stated its grounding in the approaches of Santiniketan.¹³ Yet even there, the national education system surrounding it remained thoroughly Western in design, imagination, and form.

This quick sketch of these schools—their differences, their genealogies—is meant to show that the “modern” in Indonesia was never singular. With their establishment, people’s sense of what counted as “high art” shifted from wayang and temple reliefs toward painting, sculpture, and other forms taught in majority art schools all over the Western world. But the older forms never vanished. As long as they remained functional within their communities, they continued to circulate, inspire, and complicate any neat narrative of artistic progress. In speaking about “modern Indonesia,” I am thinking less in terms of chronology or style and more in terms of conviviality as practice: the everyday negotiation of languages, traditions, faiths, empires, merchants, farmers, rulers, and neighbors. The “modern” was—and remains—about relations: how to live together, how to keep conversations open, how to practice care even when histories, hierarchies, and inequalities persist.

Another example, from a different time, might help to make this more tangible. These are images I often return to—of artworks and people being with them. Not just looking, but talking, pointing, laughing, pausing. There is curiosity there as well as a kind of ease. A willingness to stay with the work, and with one another, without needing to resolve anything too quickly. If we stay a little longer within these situations of looking, certain works begin to hold our attention differently. Not as examples of a period, but as presences that gather and redistribute how people stand, point, speak, and remain.

The first photograph was taken within As if there is no sun, an exhibition that was part of the 58th Carnegie International: Is it morning for you yet? in Pittsburgh (2022).¹⁴ The other is from a more recent exhibition at Gajah Gallery in Yogyakarta titled Kebebasan Manusia Perasa (Freedom of the Sentient Beings, 2025).¹⁵ Research-wise, the latter extends the former, continuing Hyphen—’s inquiry into the practices, rhythms, and daily worlds of mid-twentieth-century painters often left out of national and mainstream narratives. Both titles are not newly coined.¹⁶ They arrive from writings produced alongside the works themselves—from observers of their own time. In this sense, the exhibitions do not simply look back. They carry forward ways of sensing that were already in circulation, allowing them to meet the present again.

In the photograph from the Carnegie, one such work draws a more focused kind of engagement: Two viewers stand close to it; one points toward the lower part of the canvas, the other follows. The gesture is small, but it reorganizes the encounter. Attention narrows, slows, becomes directed. The painting is not simply seen; it is entered into through another’s indication. In her painting Aku Hamil (I’m Pregnant, 1962), Kartika (born 1934) presents her own body turning slightly away, even as her gaze meets ours. The interior around her—chairs, a hanging lamp, a smaller portrait—recedes unevenly, as if space itself is unsettled. Objects gather in her hand and scatter at her feet. The palette presses rather than opens: yellows, greens, ochers that feel closer to density than light. What is held here is not immediately shareable. The painting does not clarify itself; it withholds, or perhaps more precisely, it concentrates.

And yet, in the photograph, this interiority does not remain closed. It is approached collectively—through pointing, through conversation, through the act of showing something to another. What might otherwise remain singular becomes partially held in common. Not fully understood, not resolved, but shared enough to sustain an encounter. If conviviality names the practice of living with difference, then this moment suggests that such practice does not depend on transparency. It can also be built around what resists easy articulation—around forms of sensing that are unevenly distributed, guided, negotiated. One points, another follows. Attention is shared, but not equally. The work participates in this asymmetry, shaping how relation unfolds.

A different rhythm appears in the second image, where Title not yet known (2005) by Siti Roelijati (1930–2023), Bakau-bakau (Mangrove, 1973) by Sriyani (1930–2006), and Gerobag (Cart, 1969) by Kustiyah (1935–2012)—are gathered along the wall. Here, attention does not settle as tightly. It moves—across surfaces, between figures, from one painting to another, and back again. Viewers do not fix themselves in front of a single work; they circulate, pause, resume. The encounter becomes less about entering one interior and more about navigating a field. In Roelijati’s compositions, lines rarely rest. Figures, animals, and objects seem to emerge through movement rather than outline. The eye follows but never quite arrives. Looking becomes a matter of attunement—of staying with rhythms that do not resolve into a single focal point. Sriyani’s works, by contrast, often hold a quieter density. Forms gather slowly; darkness is not absence but a kind of presence that reveals itself over time. One does not grasp the image at once. It requires returning, adjusting, allowing the work to unfold at its own pace. Kustiyah’s paintings move still differently. Her brush seems to glide, carrying a lightness that does not negate depth but instead approaches it without weight. Flowers, objects, self-portraits—these do not insist on symbolic reading. They offer themselves as things to be lived with, to be encountered in their immediacy.

Taken together, these works do not present a unified style or direction. What they share is less formal than relational: a way of holding the world that allows proximity without collapse, distance without detachment. They invite forms of looking that are sustained, negotiated, and often shared. It is perhaps here that the words of Oei Sian Yok return, not as a statement to be confirmed, but as something that begins to resonate differently: “The birth of nationalist awareness at the beginning of this century also awakened Indonesia’s humanist consciousness. This, then, became their right to freedom as sentient beings.”¹⁷

Read from within these situations—of looking, of pointing, of staying with works and with one another—this “right” does not appear as a declaration secured once and for all. It emerges, rather, in the act itself: in the ability to attend, to respond, to remain with what is not immediately resolved. Freedom, here, is not located outside the encounter but practiced within it. In one instance, it takes the form of a concentrated interiority—a figure who holds something not fully shareable, yet not entirely closed. In another, it disperses across a field of works, where attention moves between images and bodies, never settling for long. In both, what is at stake is not only what is seen, but also how seeing becomes possible, and with whom.

Marianne Katoppo’s writing offers another way to approach this. For Katoppo, freedom is rooted in compassion—not as sentiment, but as a capacity: the ability to be touched and to touch in return. Such a capacity does not eliminate distance; it works through it.¹⁸ It allows proximity without possession, relation without the need to resolve differences. Perhaps this is what these works—and the situations that gather around them—make available. Not a unified account of modernity, nor a stable image of the human, but a set of practices: of sensing, of attending, of being with others, human and otherwise, in ways that remain open, partial, and ongoing.

If histories are multiple, and convivialities are lived rather than declared, then art practices might be understood less as objects to be interpreted than as conditions for such encounters to take place. Not answers, but occasions. Not resolutions, but ways of staying.

The post Histories, Convivialities, and Art Practices in Modern Indonesia appeared first on post.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * * 

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

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

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

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

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

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

The post Artistic Art Histories of the Curatorial (in Southeast Asia) appeared first on post.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The post Triangle Network in Zimbabwe: An Oral History with Berry Bickle appeared first on post.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The post From Ornament to Theory: Reimagining the “School of the Sign” as a Grammar of Liberation appeared first on post.

On February 1, 1974, the Senegalese newspaper Le Soleil published a shocking headline: “Younousse’s Slashed Painting: A Simple Matter of Scissors.” According to the article, Senegalese artist Younousse Seye (b. 1940) discovered that her painting Mame Coumba Bang (n.d.) had been vandalized as she guided Ethiopian visitors around the second Salon des artistes sénégalais at the Musée dynamique de Dakar, Senegal’s national collection. This event had high stakes: Pieces from the salon would be selected to tour internationally as part of the landmark traveling exhibition Arts sénégalais d’aujourd’hui opening in the Grand Palais in Paris. One might imagine, then, the shock, panic, and disappointment Seye must have felt upon seeing the strips of fiber that she had embedded into her painting sliced off and scattered across the floor. 

Apart from three newspaper articles describing the incident, no visual record of the work survives. Nevertheless, reconstructing the imaginative depth of Seye’s Mame Coumba Bang through descriptions of its defacement opens a window into contested struggles within Senegal’s postindependence art world. Specifically, a closer reading of this scandal reveals not only the gendered and racialized structures of the cultural landscape Seye was navigating, but also her insistence on challenging them.

Before displaying her work in the Musée dynamique, Younousse Seye had emerged quickly on the Senegalese arts scene. Born in Saint-Louis in colonial Senegal in 1940, she came of age amid African independence movements, and her career evolved in tandem with this long moment of decolonization. Working across oil, wood, iron, marble, poetry, and cinema, the self-taught Seye expressed Pan-Africanist and feminist sympathies, grounding her oeuvre in woman-centered African aesthetic practices, techniques, and themes. While local artists of her generation share her Pan-African ideals, Seye’s assertive feminism distinguishes her work, periodically generating tensions with her male peers.¹

By the time Mame Coumba Bang was exhibited at the 1974 Salon des artistes sénégalais, Seye was more than a decade into her practice. Her creative sensibilities first developed when she was a child, while she assisted her mother in dyeing batik, working outdoors and observing nature’s color palette.² She began painting in her spare time in the mid-1950s while pursuing secretarial work. The First World Festival of Negro Arts (FESMAN), held in Dakar in April 1966, marked a pivotal moment in Seye’s career. Eager to participate, she volunteered as a hostess and, through her encounters with Black artists and intellectuals from across the world, found the inspiration that led her to fully commit to an artistic path. Within three years of her participation in FESMAN, she shot to fame as both a painter and an actress, starring in Ousmane Sembène’s Mandabi (1968), which won the Special Jury Prize at the 1968 Venice Film Festival. By placing her work in the film’s background, Seye drew further international attention to her developing visual arts career. 

During this period, Seye became renowned for her distinctive use of cowrie shells. Once used as currency in Africa, cowries convey symbolic spiritual and material power. Across the continent, cowries are also associated with fertility, women’s adornment, and feminine power. Seye was among the earliest artists to employ them as a material, threading them onto canvas or embedding them into marble or iron, and she believed that “the language of the spirits is passed down through the secret of cowries.”³ Through her signature use of the shell, Seye merged African spirituality, feminine symbolism, and continental themes of power and ritual in her work, creating a unique expression of Pan-African feminism. Her engagement with Pan-African themes quickly earned her the attention and patronage of President Léopold Sédar Senghor, who helped to propel her career from the early 1970s onward.⁴

Despite her success, Seye stood apart from other professionally exhibiting Senegalese artists in that she did not rise through the ranks of the Dakar School: a network of artists in the postindependence nation who received government patronage in the form of funding, training at national institutions, and participation in state-sponsored salons and exhibitions. It is notable that she never sought this label. Indeed, when Senghor offered her a teaching position at the national art school, she declined it.⁵ In this sense, Seye maintained a critical distance from the state’s cultural apparatus while, at the same time, benefiting from its international reach. 

This was not without its costs. Senghor, too, maintained an ambivalent position toward Seye: Though he extended his patronage, he also voiced reservations about her aesthetic choices. Upon seeing Seye’s solo exhibition at the Théâtre national Sorano Theatre in Dakar in 1977, for example, he derided her characteristic use of organic materials like cowries and vegetable fibers. Senghor disassociated Seye’s use of female-gendered materials—subject to decay over time—from the “eternal” qualities of high art. He elaborated, “This is what gives European artists their practical superiority. We must try to renew the African art of painting for eternity.”⁶

By the mid-1970s, many artists, critics, and intellectuals were expressing their disillusionment with Senghorian cultural policy, decrying its alleged neocolonial cultural visions and institutional structures.⁷ Critics felt their viewpoints affirmed when, in 1974, the minister of culture Alioune Sene appointed 26-year-old Frenchman Georges Hornn as curator of the Musée dynamique.⁸ Hornn had no curatorial experience; his artistic credentials included amateur photography and a film commissioned by the Senegalese government.⁹ He was appointed after arriving in Senegal as a coopérant militaire—a French civil service position that was itself a colonial legacy—two months prior.¹⁰ The defacement of Seye’s Mame Coumba Bang in 1974 under Hornn’s watch just weeks into his tenure crystallized this widening divide between the state and cultural actors, and at the same time, it underscored Seye’s outsider status within the arts establishment. 

The vandalism of Mame Coumba Bang became public knowledge when, following the incident, the dramatist and critic Abdou Anta Kâ, who was Seye’s close friend, published a forceful editorial in Le Soleil. Kâ cast the slashing not as an isolated act, but rather as the result of institutional negligence under white museum leadership hostile to what he called “independent Senegalese painters.” He pointedly cited the Ethiopian delegates who first discovered the damage, noting their disbelief that works could be left unprotected in a state museum equipped with guards and a curator. According to Kâ, Hornn dismissed the incident altogether, claiming it was not “his business” to intervene.¹¹

For Kâ, this indifference exemplified broader tensions within Senghor’s cultural establishment. He framed the attack as symptomatic of a neocolonial cultural policy in which white juries determined which African works merited international circulation. These critics, Kâ argued, claimed authority by evaluating artists according to whether they aligned with their own schools or theories of a “Black African aesthetic,” a posture he likened to that of the cercle commanders of the colonial era.¹² In this reading, Seye’s work was vulnerable not merely because of individual malice, but also because its value was decided through Eurocentric criteria embedded in the attitudes of the museum’s leadership.

State officials swiftly rejected this interpretation. In an interview published days later, Hornn denied responsibility, accusing Kâ and Seye of exploiting the vandalism as a “Trojan horse” for personal grievances. He dismissed the episode as a publicity stunt “underpinned by false anger.”¹³ Alioune Sène went further still, condemning Kâ’s critique as exceeding “the measure of tolerable bad taste.” He trivialized the damage by reducing Seye’s use of yoss—a vegetal fiber traditionally used by Senegalese women for braiding—to a matter of “snipped tresses” and echoed Hornn’s claim that the controversy sought to undermine the jury’s discernment.¹⁴ Both men ultimately defended the authority of the museum and the legitimacy of the white jury as best qualified to represent Senegal on the international stage.

Notably absent from this exchange is Seye’s own voice. In later interviews, she recalled the perpetrator with restraint, describing him simply as someone who resented others’ success, and remarked bluntly of Hornn: “He didn’t like Younousse Seye” (fig. 4).¹⁵ Although Senghor later offered Seye compensation for the damaged painting, she refused it.¹⁶ For her, the incident was never about publicity or restitution, but rather the museum’s failure to protect African artists from the lingering structures of colonial power. Responsibility, she maintained, lay both with the individual who carried out the act and with the institution that enabled it.¹⁷

We still don’t know what Mame Coumba Bang looked like. After the Musée dynamique’s closure in 1988, much of the national collection was scattered, including this artwork.¹⁸ According to accounts in Le Soleil, however, the painting Mame Coumba Bang, which depicted the titular deity, was part of a six-painting series representing protector spirits from each region of Senegal.¹⁹ Mame Coumba Bang, the river goddess of Seye’s hometown, carries importance as a protector of the Saint-Louis branch of the Sénégal River. Other paintings in the series were likely named for different titular spirits. Across Wolof, Lébou, and other cultures, female water deities are revered for their ability to shelter residents from misfortune, ailments, and infertility. Wolof people adore Mame Coumba Bang, and ritual offerings to her remain common.²⁰ Seye’s invocation of Mame Coumba Bang personified the goddess as a nourisher and protector of the country—just as the river nourishes the land and its people.

By depicting a pantheon of female deities, Seye continued her practice of routing local symbolism through feminine iconography. For example, in L’Afrique Nourricière (c. 1970), Seye depicted three women producing milk from their pierced breasts. For Seye, the painting reflects the essential role of women as sustainers. When asked about the painting, she asserted that womankind “is the guardian of our traditions, mother, wife, educator. She is everything and everything revolves around her.”²¹ Likewise, Light Bearer (1971) depicts a female figure carrying a torch, which can be interpreted as symbolizing women’s roles in transmitting cultural traditions (fig. 3).²² Mame Coumba Bang thus fits squarely within Seye’s broader oeuvre. 

Mame Coumba Bang’s symbolism deepens with its materiality. According to the report in Le Soleil, Seye had woven the cowries onto a tuft of yoss.²³ Seye likely used yoss in the painting to celebrate its prominence in Senegalese feminine worlds, where it was historically employed by Senegalese women in the making of wigs, braids, and elaborate hairstyles, before the advent of synthetic fibers.²⁴ The fiber’s derivation from the land additionally highlights Seye’s attachment to nature. The gathering of yoss and cowries encapsulates themes essential to Seye’s work: her proud rootedness in Senegal, her reverence for the natural world, and an emphasis on womanhood. 

The choices of material, subject, and symbolism magnified the gendered stakes of the vandalism at the Salon: someone cut a tuft of yoss from the painting, causing it to shed fiber and cowries. Though the culprit was never publicly named, Seye claims he was a colleague who later confessed privately that he had defaced her painting out of jealousy.²⁵ Symbolically, this perpetrator cut away the trademark African and feminine dimensions of Seye’s work. Materially, too, the act jeopardized the chance that the jury would select Mame Coumba Bang to tour internationally with Art sénégalais d’aujourd’hui. Ultimately, despite the controversy and swarming accusations, the jury chose two of Seye’s pieces, Femme aux cauris (n.d.) and La danse des cauris, to tour with the exhibition in 1974 (fig. 2). Seye was the only woman in the show, which traveled internationally until 1980.

Mame Coumba Bang survives today only in fragments—in hostile press clippings and the artist’s own recollections. Its destruction exposes the fault lines in Senegal’s postindependence art world, where state patronage, neocolonial cultural agents, and gendered hierarchies coexisted with genuine ambitions for emancipation. Seye’s differential treatment as a self-taught woman—as a woman artist who forged a singular artistic path during this moment of decolonization—became visible precisely when her work required care, protection, and institutional recognition. That the painting itself is now lost only sharpens its significance. What was cut away in 1974 was not simply a tuft of yoss, but also the possibility that feminine, spiritual, and materially grounded artistic practices could be fully safeguarded within national cultural institutions. Reading Mame Coumba Bang through its defacement thus clarifies the terms under which artists like Seye were asked to create and the costs of doing so on their own terms.

The authors gratefully acknowledge the insightful editorial guidance of Merve Fejzula.

The post A Painting in Pieces: The Defacing of Younousse Seye’s Mame Coumba Bang appeared first on post.

In times of danger, we learn to seek sanctuary—a place of safety and security when the world we know is under attack. Once we have regained our strength, perspective, and a better vantage point for reclaiming what was lost, we must consider when to leave the protective space that has sheltered us from harm. During the 20th century, art museums served as venues for Haitian Vodou–based works. In The Spirits and the Law: Vodou and Power in Haiti, historian and anthropologist Kate Ramsey explores how the Haitian government targeted Vodou practitioners, illustrating how Haitian Vodou artists were deemed enemies of the state in practice.¹ However, after the US Occupation (1915–34), the Haitian government used Haitian Vodou art in its pursuit of cultural patrimony. In 2003, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, then president of Haiti, recognized Vodou as one of the country’s official religions.² Even though Vodou artworks are seen in museums and galleries worldwide, the stigma of danger and mystery associated with the practice of Vodou and the art related to it has not diminished.

 In the fall of 2024, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, hosted Spirit & Strength: Modern Art from Haiti. Curated by Kanitra Fletcher, this exhibition showcased the museum’s first acquisitions of Haitian modern and contemporary art. Featuring 21 paintings gifted by Kay and Roderick Heller and by Beverly and John Fox Sullivan, it offered a diverse range of subject matter encompassing daily life, religious traditions, popular customs, rituals, portraiture, and historical paintings.³ The artist Edouard Duval-Carrié (American, born Haiti, 1954), whose work is included in the collection, delivered the keynote address, titled “Reframing Haitian Art: An Artist’s Point of View,” at the opening reception. He discussed the significant contributions made by Haitian artists to contemporary art. However, he did not fully speak to how Vodou practitioners, whose artworks once adorned the walls of peristils (Vodou temples), have been rebranded and presented only as artistic contributors to the Haitian narrative on display in museums. In this article, I will illustrate the importance of Vodou themes to Haitian cultural expression and examine how, in times of peril, museums in Haiti and the United States may have inadvertently contributed to the ongoing silencing of Vodou.

In the 1940s, US and European art markets as well as museums began pursuing Haitian art, unknowingly creating a “sanctuary” space for Haitian Vodou art, which possesses plural narratives of the sacred and the contemporary.⁴ The ongoing relationship that developed between Vodou artists and foreign cultural institutions also provided a hedge of protection from the persecution that devotees were suffering at the hands of the Haitian government. However, their contributions to contextualizing Vodou visual art has yet to be integrated: The sacred narrative of Vodou is preserved within museum collections but remains silenced in its presentation. In this article, I will unpack the spiritual components of Haitian art and culture.

Vodou is a traditional Afro-Haitian religion blending elements of West African Vodou and Roman Catholicism. From the 16th to 19th century, in the context of the transatlantic slave trade, Spanish and French colonizers transported captured Africans to the New World. Upon arrival, these captives were forced to either become baptized and follow the Roman Catholic faith or face persecution.⁵ During this period, the western side of the island of Saint-Domingue—currently known as Haiti—was governed by the Code Noir, or “Black Code,” a set of laws that regulated the lives of both enslaved and free people of color in the French colonial empire.⁶ To adapt to these demands, enslaved Africans found parallels between Catholic saints and their own African deities.⁷ Thus, a syncretic religion arose among the descendants of various African nations, including the Dahomean, Kongo, and Yoruba.

During the Haitian Revolution, caves and tunnels served as a network of underground passages connecting enslaved communities across plantations as well as places where Vodou rituals occurred without colonial persecution.⁸ Vodouisants often hid sacred items within busts of Catholic sculptures. Meanwhile, representations associated with the two religions became visually indistinguishable.⁹ However, the 1805 Haitian Constitution recognized freedom of worship, and as the new Republic formed, the postrevolutionary government maintained Vodou as the popular belief system.¹⁰ By the 1900s, the partnership between the Catholic Church and the Haitian government influenced members of the new Haitian ruling class, who adopted their former colonial captors’ view of Vodou as a “spiritualized militancy” that challenged the government’s legitimacy and redefined aesthetic tendencies.¹¹

During the US Occupation, Vodou temples and artifacts were destroyed and confiscated by US soldiers while, at the same time, the Haitian government routinely harassed and arrested Vodou practitioners.¹² In 1928, Jean Price-Mars, a medical doctor and anthropologist, wrote the manifesto Ansi parla l’oncle (So Spoke the Uncle), in which he refutes the occupation and supports Haitian cultural nationalism against foreign interests. His speeches and writing inspired Haitian Indigènisme, a movement that embraced the ideology that the promotion of Haiti’s folklore and African heritage was key to its cultural identity and defense against US Occupation.¹³ This proclamation inspired young leftist Haitian scholars to publish La Revue indigène, a literary journal featuring articles, poems, and interviews that sought to offer a perspective on Haitian life and culture that was authentic and integral to Haitian identity.¹⁴. Haitian scholars sought to expose colonial devices, to encourage recognition of Haiti as an emerging nation, and to disassociate themselves from the traumatic memories of the previous century.

 Indigènist writers such as Philippe Thoby-Marcelin and Émile Roumer urged Haitian artists to create innovative works exploring Surrealism and Expressionism while moving away from European notions of art and beauty. They encouraged artists to focus on Haitian realities such as the local landscape, rural life, and the local flora and fauna.¹⁵ The Indigènist writers did not view Vodou as a means of achieving the recognition of modernity they sought. Having come from affluent families, many had had the opportunity to study in Europe and, therefore, had come to view Vodou as a nostalgic backdrop to their poems and essays. Meanwhile, their audience, composed of the metropolitan bourgeoisie, viewed Vodou as a rural, backward practice maintained by peasants.¹⁶ Within the framework of these movements, there was no space for Haitian Vodou artists to share their subject matter and its layered meanings. Nor was there anywhere for them to reflect on how to navigate their identity in terms of the sacred and the secular.    

The Catholic Church and the Haitian government led various anti-Vodou campaigns that resulted in the deaths of many practitioners. In the 1940s, the Roman Catholic Church and the Élie Lescot regime launched an “anti-superstition” campaign that contributed to the secularization of Haitian art. They destroyed the peristils that artists had decorated and maintained as part of their spiritual practice.¹⁷ During this tragic period, the Centre d’Art, a government-sponsored nonprofit cultural institution in Port-au-Prince, was established in 1944. Led by the American artist DeWitt Peters (1902–1966), the Centre aimed to promote Haiti’s artistic intellectuals by showcasing that their values were in alignment with the Indigènist movement. Peters, a conscientious objector sent to Haiti to teach English during World War II, was intrigued by the level of Haitian art being produced but not promoted.¹⁸ According to the Centre d’Art archives, Peters sought new talent by exploring rural communities.¹⁹ As Vodou-based artists witnessed the destruction of their works in sacred native spaces, and with lives and communities threatened, art museums outside of Haiti began to provide space and agency for Haitian art. The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), for instance, became the first mainstream art institution to acknowledge the importance of the Indigènist painting movement in Haiti by acquiring Le combat des coqs (Cock Fight) by René Vincent (Haitian, 1911–?) in 1940.²⁰

An artist associated with the Centre d’Art whose work brought attention to Haitian art forms was the carpenter and blacksmith Murat Brierre (Haitian, 1938–1988). Brierre was introduced to the Centre by fellow Vodou practitioner and artist Rigaud Benoit (Haitian, 1911–1986), who initially came to the Centre as DeWitt Peter’s chauffeur.²¹ Brierre learned to create metal sculptures from George Liautaud (Haitian, 1899–1991), the father of Haitian metalwork. Brierre’s sculptures were hand-forged from oil drums discarded from container ships that refueled in Haiti.²² He developed a highly experimental style, often focusing on multifaceted and interconnected figures. One of his notable sculptures, Metamorphosis, illustrates the transformation of a woman into a bird (fig. 1). The top of this long metal sculpture features a woman’s head, while the base represents the body of a bird in mid-flight. The torso of the sculpture combines elements of both life forms, portraying them as one. While at first glance the work does not appear to be representing spirituality, it in fact depicts “mounting,” a Voudou concept referring to the possession of a devotee by a spirit, or lwa, during a Vodou ceremony. The lwa is believed to take control of the body—rendering it a vessel for movements, voice, and words that are understood to be those of the spirit. “Mounting” symbolizes the Vodou belief that humanity is physically and spiritually connected to all things. Brierre and other Vodouisants, such as Wilson Bigaud (Haitian, 1931–2010) and Hector Hyppolite (Haitian, 1894–1948), found creative sanctuary in their association with the Centre, which enabled them to express their Vodou identities through their artwork.

Unlike the Centre d’Art, Saint-Soleil was a spiritually based rural arts community that focused on tourism to promote Haitian art while attempting to create a “safe space” for the Vodouisant. Established in 1973 by Jean-Claude “Tiga” Garoute (Haitian, 1935–2006) and Maud Robart (Haitian, born 1946), the movement is based on the practice of “rotation artistique”—a technique in which students move freely between art mediums and are encouraged to favor intuition, academicism, and spirit possession in their method of operation.²³ The Haitian principle of kombit (collective creation of works) was central to the many artists and Vodouisants who joined the movement. This groundbreaking experiment empowered mountain-dwelling peasants with no prior exposure to art to explore spirituality and creativity, garnering them international attention.

As in other cultural organizations, artists from Saint-Soleil utilized galleries and museums to raise awareness of Haitian art, amplifying the material culture of Vodou. Levoy Exil (Haitian, born 1944) was a prominent artist of the Saint-Soleil movement. In his painting Female Twins (fig. 2), two nearly identical women face the viewer. They are lwa—specifically Marassas, or the divine twins. Their bodies resemble vines and snakeskin and are not confined by a traditional physical form—indeed, they are flexible rather than rigid.

However, by the late 1980s, the Duvalier dictatorship had come to an end, and due to political unrest, foreign travel to Haiti became difficult.²⁴ This caused interest in the Haitian art market to decline, and Saint-Soleil could no longer sustain its artists, leading global enthusiasm for Haitian art to wane.

Two renowned artists whose works have been barely discussed in the context of Voudou representation are Pierre Augustin (Haitian, 1945–2014) and Préfète Duffaut (Haitian, 1923–2012). In his 1979 painting Vodou Ceremony (fig. 3), Augustin portrayed a gathering in which a mambo (Vodou priestess) leads her initiates in a ceremony. The practice of ancestral worship, a foundation of many African and Indigenous religions, teaches that the African path to freedom lies in the connection one has to their ancestors and the lwas. This belief system originates from the West African Dahomey, Yoruba, and Ifa religions.²⁵ Palm leaves represent the initiate’s connection to the land and the stewardship of nature, key Vodou tenets. The group is performing a ritual to call on the lwa Ezili, a feminine spirit who personifies facets of womanhood.

In this painting, the mambo stands in the center. Dressed in white, she holds an ason (sacred rattle) in her right hand and a candle in her left. She is surrounded by female initiates who are also dressed in white, a color that indicates an initiation. The mambo stands in front of a vevè of Ezili, a symbolic representation of the lwa drawn with chalk or cornmeal that serves as a temporary portal through which the deity travels from the spiritual plane to the physical one to participate in the ceremony. Although Ezili has become visually parallel to her Catholic counterpart, the Virgin Mary, Augustin has avoided the adaptation of integrating Vodou beliefs within a Catholic framework, thereby resisting postcolonial influences.

A prominent figure in Haitian painting, Duffaut was born in 1923, when Haiti was under US Occupation. In 1944, he met the painter Rigaud Benoit, who was scouting artists for the Centre d’Art. According to Robert Brictson, although all accounts indicate that Duffaut was a practicing Catholic, his paintings of imaginary cityscapes feature strong Vodou representation.²⁶ In Vodou City (fig. 4), for example, a bustling beach community surrounded by mountains, with ribbons of paths and roads weaving throughout, allows for a reimagining of identity and community in a modern context. In the center of the painting, a mountain stands alone, possibly representing the poto-mitan (center pole) that symbolizes the sacred presence of Bondye (God) in Vodou ceremonies. The recurrent representation of an immense number of people—one of Duffaut’s visual signatures—reflects themes of inclusion and the connectivity of Vodou. Duffaut’s work implicitly explores spirituality, history, and mythology, while simultaneously embodying a broader narrative that envisions a future cultural legacy.

Overall, the interplay between sanctuary and silence in the context of Haitian Vodou art is a poignant reminder that cultural expression can be simultaneously protected and marginalized. Scholar Kyrah Malika Daniels cautions that Western thought does not understand the plural and public role of the Vodou practitioner: In defining the “plural and public spirit pantheon,” she explains that “Vodou devotees do not exist as individual selves, but rather as a multitude of souls.”²⁷ Though museums serve as sanctuaries for sacred objects, providing spaces for appreciation and recognition, they risk oversimplifying or overlooking the complexities of Vodou artists’ contributions—as well as those of other religions.

As we celebrate the resurgence of Haitian culture in contemporary discourse, we must continue to confront the enduring challenges—to ensure that the voices of Vodou practitioners are not only amplified but also understood and to dispel the stigma associated with Haitian Vodou. In curating themes around Haitian Vodou, museums must engage directly with practitioners, to invite them to contribute to the exhibition being presented and even, possibly, to serve as docents. It is essential to acknowledge the rich tapestry of history, artistry, and spirituality that Haitian Vodou embodies, securing a proper account in museums and within the broader context of global art and culture. Museums can ensure that the sacred aspects of Vodou are preserved and adequately represented alongside the contemporary aspects of Haitian art by documenting and contextualizing the design and purpose of individual objects in sacred spaces. Today, museums such as the Waterloo Center for the Arts and the Figge Art Museum in Iowa and the Milwaukee Art Museum focus on incorporating the Vodou narrative that was culturally omitted over time. Collaborating with experts in this religious practice and its cultural expression, they offer more in-depth perspectives through curatorial initiatives that focus on diverse themes and the surrounding world of Haitian art, particularly Haitian Vodou. It is my hope that more institutions will follow suit and consider how curators and other professionals can amplify the cultural promotion of sacred art.

The post The Silence of Sanctuary: How the Museum Served as a Safe Space for Haitian Vodou Art appeared first on post.

Karlo Kacharava (1964–1994), a prominent Georgian artist, writer, art critic, and poet, has been referred to as “the voice of his generation”¹ and a “supernova.”² In my contribution to the book Karlo Kacharava: Sentimental Traveller, published in 2023 on the occasion of Kacharava’s solo exhibition in Ghent at S.M.A.K., I discuss the intertwining of his “oceanic” body of work, both visual and written, with his short but extraordinary life.³ However, in the present essay, I have chosen to focus on his Erased Portraits of Politicians (c. 1988), which are lesser known yet nonetheless important and provocative. In the nine graphic works that make up this seminal series, Kacharava repurposed existing photographs of Soviet politicians printed on high-quality photographic paper that, in their rebirth, not only acquire new meaning but also function allegorically in decolonial discourse.

Even though Kacharava, commonly known as simply “Karlo,”⁴ was a monumental figure in Georgia in the late 20th century, founding collectives in the 1980s that played significant roles in the broader Caucasus, he has only recently garnered international recognition and institutional interest. While his works are now being “discovered” and explored by transnational scholars, curators, and researchers, they have been a powerful presence, albeit unseen or perhaps effaced or otherwise hidden, for much longer. Erased Portraits of Politicians represent a prodigious example of Karlo’s storytelling—juxtaposing symbolism with endless possibilities for knowledge contribution and imagination to draw parallels with the past that connect it to the present and future. In repurposing existing photographs of Soviet politicians, the artist has presented a perfect metaphor for the double-sided nature of history. The result is a showcase of captivating drawings and graphic works posthumously exhibited in 2023–24 in the artist’s first institutional show in Europe, where they were displayed so that viewers could see both the front and back sides of each image (figs. 1, 2).⁵ The curatorial decision to present the works in this way accentuates their multilayered meaning, an essential aspect of the series (figs.3-8).

In contemporary discourse, the reuse or recycling of materials is considered a sustainable and environmentally friendly practice. However, in Georgia in the early 1990s, it was a necessity due to the scarcity of art supplies. Karlo was not unusual in his decision to repurpose existing materials—in this case, photographs of politicians—but how he chose to do so is nonetheless interesting. Rather than simply covering up the photographs in black to create a fresh background for his new images, the artist employed a thick brush dipped in black ink to smudge them. This technique left behind ghostly silhouettes, suggesting the presence of the individuals in the original photographs while effectively obscuring their identities. On the blank reverse sides of the photographs, he then created new drawings. Through the deliberate act of “erasing” the original portraits, and simultaneously intertwining them with his own imagery, he established a complex dialogue surrounding themes of identity, representation, and the ephemeral nature of political power. These two-sided works serve not only to critique the prominence of political figures but also to challenge viewers to consider the implications of narrative erasure. In doing so, the artist invites a reflection on those voices that can become marginalized or invisible within contemporary discourse.

“One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light but by making the darkness conscious.”
—Carl Jung⁶

In a manner akin to the erasure of specific political identity enacted in Karlo’s series, Georgia’s national identity has been systematically suppressed for more than a century, resulting in enduring postcolonial trauma.⁷ Indeed, more than thirty years since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the people of Georgia still carry the pain of suppression. Could we potentially analyze our colonial history through the framework of Jungian theory of light and shadow? Carl Jung proposed that the latter symbolizes the unacknowledged or repressed aspects of the self. According to Jung, these elements, though often considered unacceptable or oppressed, can potentially be “resolved” or “repaired” by bringing them to the forefront of consciousness.⁸ This dynamic suggests that the content of the shadow is not fixed. Can this framework give us a deeper understanding of identity and collective subconscious memory? How can we construct a decolonized and enlightened future by acknowledging and confronting the “dark shadows” of our history, and what measures can we take to prevent their recurrence? In what ways can recognizing the historical actions of colonialism and their enduring consequences assist us in transcending our nation’s distressing legacy? While these questions are hard to answer—and perhaps serve more as a simple invitation for thought than a groundbreaking means of resolving postcolonial trauma—we could mirror Karlo’s unconventional approach in our own discussion of political and/or philosophical matters.

I want to write so my texts don’t sound political or philosophical in general, but I’d rather simplify political and philosophical matters, and things like that, to the point of poetry.
—Karlo Kacharava⁹

The transformative process of translating “political or philosophical matters” into poetic expression lies at the core of Karlo’s artistic practice—whether visual or written. Just as it is crucial to consider his poetry and other writings as integral components of his visual art, we must take his visual art into account when examining his work as a writer. Karlo commenced composing poems at a tender age, and his poetry reveals the evolution of his thought processes over the course of his lifetime. For example, “The Angel of Travels” (1987), translated below, is vividly cinematic, conveying Karlo’s emotions and capturing his anxieties at a particular moment in time. It not only reflects his fondness for German Expressionism and Neo-Expressionism, but also serves as a window into his multiverse, where his bold images blur with condensed text, evoking a wide range of emotions and their universality. Given that Karlo wrote this poem around the same time he created his series Erased Portraits of Politicians, it feels both natural and essential to highlight it here.

“The Angel of Travels”¹⁰

It’s hot out. You are lying in a train.
You think about many things at once—
this road, the landscape, and the houses
are a reflection of your thoughts:
what you can neither call accidental nor accept,
and what is divine, because it is auspicious,
and wistful, too, since it has passed.
Moons light heavy bridges.
This river begins your native land
and you fall asleep.
In a dream, you see:
People gather in a hall, take their seats.
They’re showing a Bergman picture.
A white labyrinth appears on the black screen.
Unexpectedly, the film is packed with action.
Actors step out of the screen into real life
and then go back into the movie.
Snow, a soliloquy, a clock,
another soliloquy.
Unhappy trepidation over
what will happen to somebody close.
The telephone, the clock again.
A train in a train.
On the lower part of the compartment ceiling
are the words: “Open-Closed.”
Lights in the moving corridor.
Flying ghostly companions
outside the window.
The hall was like some kind of weirdo movie studio.
They don’t know anything in this pavilion, either.
A sleepwalker’s piano.
Then
the father washes the feet of the son,
as if baptizing him.
O, the spinning of stars reflected in the river
And the sad angel of travels,
His brow clear, gazing down
Upon the passengers’ troubled slumber.

Just as in his poetry, which is loaded with visual references, Karlo’s paintings and drawings, and specifically his Erased Portraits of Politicians, bear deeper, hidden meanings and cryptic symbolism, some of which require local knowledge. The back side of each portrait has been, in effect, turned into a front side, a few of which depict nude women or nude couples in erotic poses. Although the political figures in the photographs have been rendered unidentifiable, to those familiar with Soviet history, they likely call to mind political propaganda and other instruments of imperial power designed to shape public narratives and manipulate perceptions. In stark contrast, Karlo’s own figures are bold, provocative, and collectively stand free from the confines of prejudice, propaganda, and censorship. These mixed-media works bridge German Expressionism and Neo-Expressionism while also encompassing the dark history of 20th-century Georgia.¹¹

In his solo exhibition at S.M.A.K., Karlo’s nine drawings were presented in double-sided frames, showcasing his boldness and free-spiritedness while simultaneously evoking the political suppression that preceded them. This visual dexterity begs the question of whether the “erased” local histories in the broader transnational context might be presented and embedded in a similar way. The concept of visionary experience, as described by Carl Jung, highlights that the aesthetics of German Expressionism are fundamentally rooted in the collective unconscious.¹² In contrast to psychological art, which seeks to articulate the collective conscious, German Expressionism achieves two key goals: It “compensates the culture for its biases” by illuminating what is often “ignored or repressed,” and it may also “predict something of the future direction of a culture.”¹³ What if we conceptualize the smudged blackness in Erased Portraits of Politicians through a Jungian psychological framework, interpreting it as a manifestation of darkness or unconscious trauma, a representation of Georgia’s colonized past within the context of decolonization?

By acknowledging it and incorporating it into our contemporary narrative, in a way that is similar to the exhibition’s presentation of the series, we avoid merely obscuring this darkness; instead, we render it a visible, intrinsic aspect of the artwork. Engaging with this historical reality presents significant challenges and may elicit deep feelings of injustice, particularly within the current Georgian sociopolitical landscape. Nevertheless, grappling with these uncomfortable truths is essential to fostering genuine progress, to decentralizing narratives, and to facilitating collective healing and freedom from the trauma of the colonial past.

A man who continually erases the footprints that attest to his presence somewhere has a need to erase some of the footprints of his cohabitants, as well, so that they are not mistaken for his own by still others who are asleep or who have not opened the door, or who will never write you a letter.
Nobody, nobody, nothing.
— Karlo Kacharava¹⁴

Karlo engaged with themes of constrained or erased freedom and identity within his Erased Portraits of Politicians and across his other works—including in Fahrstuhl Morella (1987), which hangs in the hallway of his home in Saburtalo, a neighborhood in Tbilisi (fig. 9). This abstract piece depicts two interwoven forms evoking elevators suspended by “ropes” in a field of seemingly unlimited light green. Executed on cardboard that has been folded in half, it can be interpreted as representing different realities coexisting within the same space—life in the Soviet Union and life outside of it—or even life and death. Moreover, it reflects the sociopolitical context in which the ability to travel beyond the borders of the Soviet Union remained, until the state’s collapse in 1991, an unattainable luxury for many. On a philosophical level, Fahrstuhl Morella probes the concept of eternal freedom, articulated as the capacity to navigate spaces devoid of borders or physical constraints. Notably, this piece, created contemporaneously with Erased Portraits of Politicians, is most likely influenced by Edgar Allan Poe’s short Gothic horror story “Morella,” first published in 1835, which explores themes of identity, death, and the uncanny resurrection of the dead. The exploration of freedom—both in metaphysical and geographical dimensions—is a pervasive motif throughout Karlo’s work.

Karlo persistently challenged the polarization inherent in the binary constructs of “us” versus “them,” which are frequently articulated through the lens of “West” versus “East” or “West” versus “Other.” His approach exemplifies a profound application of decolonial thought. Indeed, Karlo situated these categories within a horizontal, nonhierarchical framework, thereby emphasizing the intricate interconnectedness of identities within a transnational landscape. Furthermore, Karlo’s advocacy for a decentralized narrative for Georgia in the early 1990s predates the current discourse on decolonization in Georgian art history, highlighting the foresight of his perspective.¹⁵ In Jung’s analytical psychology, one recognizes that light and shadow are not mutually exclusive; rather, they coexist, often with shadow being significantly oppressed or suppressed. Acknowledging the darkness of the traumatic colonial history and incorporating it (rather than avoiding or suppressing it) may help to overcome the traumatic post-Soviet histories.

In conclusion, the journey of overcoming the postcolonial Soviet past and its accompanying trauma in Georgia is an arduous and protracted one. Engaging in discussions that illuminate these often-overlooked aspects of history and incorporating them into our daily consciousness is vital for collective healing. This necessity is particularly salient in the current political climate within Georgia, where historical narratives are frequently contested and reshaped. The recent uncovering of Erased Portraits of Politicians exemplifies this dynamic. These artworks, long obscured from view and largely unrecognized by the international art community, provide an invaluable opportunity to reflect on the mechanisms of memory, identity, and representation. By presenting both sides of the erased faces of political figures, this series acts not only as a visual statement but also as a powerful metaphor for the complexities of decoloniality. It underscores the imperative to confront the historical silencing of certain narratives and to actively reconstruct a more inclusive understanding of our past. This approach is essential for fostering a more equitable and just society, as it encourages ongoing dialogue about the layers of history that inform our present and future.

The post Erased Histories: Karlo Kacharava’s Lights and Shadows appeared first on post.

Taking these representations of the Virgin inscribed in the patriarchal imaginary as a point of departure, it is possible to trace visualities in modern Latin American art that confront the myth of this voiceless, bodiless, holy woman. Among these, the works of artists Norah Borges (Argentine, 1901–1998), María Izquierdo (Mexican, 1902–1955), and Miriam Inez da Silva (Brazilian, 1939–1996) stand out for their construction of alternative visual narratives that not only act as provocations to the canonical imperatives of Marian representation, but also propose a fundamentally different, female approach to the divine. Depending on the image, their approaches vary from personal, affectionate, and sensitive to lively and popularly oriented to corporeal, tactile, and even sexual. By means of what Giorgio Agamben has called “profanation,” all three artists aimed to return the sacred to common and communal use in a way that is neither ironic nor blasphemous—to express religious belief and its creative potential by delineating another form of understanding of religion in modernity. At the same time, they opened a space for aesthetic and ethical experimentation that follows the modernist canon and yet offers original perspectives on the connections between art, politics, and gender.⁴ As the following comparative analysis will show, religious language—against all odds—enabled innovative affective, popular, and corporeal configurations that challenged the ruling sexist and patriarchal order in Latin American social and religious realms as well as in Latin American artistic realms.

Norah Borges’s Quotidian Mysticism

Though she began as a poet, Norah Borges studied wood engraving in 1914 in Europe, where along with her brother, the writer Jorge Luis Borges, she was active in the Spanish Ultraist avant-garde. When she returned to Buenos Aires in the mid-1920s, she brought this experience with her, becoming an active participant in the group of young innovators who came together in the pages of the avant-garde journals Prisma, Proa, and Martín Fierro.⁵ By the end of the 1920s, however, she was married to the Spanish critic Guillermo de Torre, and her interest had shifted away from radical expressionism to the tranquility of more ordered form—to an art aligned with the post–World War I conservative cultural French movement known as the “return to order,” or rappel à l’ordre, which overlapped with her connections to the emerging Catholic intelligentsia attempting to forge ties with modern artists and writers.⁶ Thus, her name appears among those exhibiting in the gallery of the Buenos Aires Courses in Catholic Culture at the same time as she was contributing drawings and woodcuts to contemporary journals of cultural Catholicism such as Criterio and Número.⁷ The drawings Niña vestida de primera comunión [Girl Dressed for Her First Communion] (fig. 1) and Aviñon, both published in Número, when taken together, show that Borges’s religious interest cannot be thought of as outside the classical aesthetic of the return to order and its classical emphasis on balance, harmony, and precision.⁸

If, within the history of art, the return to order marked a shift among artists and writers to classicism in a European sense, Borges brought her own uniqueness to this affiliation. To be sure, as Patricia Artundo has suggested, she enjoyed the freedom that came with not fully belonging to postwar European culture.⁹ This is clear in “Un cuadro sinóptico de la pintura” (A synoptic chart of painting), an unsigned text credited to Borges and published in Martín Fierro in March 1927. In this writing, the watchwords “order,” “proportion,” “sharply defined contours,” and “definite forms” coexist with an expressed need for colors that “give joy to the eyes,” such as pink and lemon, pink and Veronese green, and salmon-pink, together with the “mystic color” equivalent to the “color that things will also have in heaven.”¹⁰ Borges’s choice of a pastel palette that avoids strong chromatic contrast, along with her interest in circuses, toys, children, and cart decoration, led male critics of the time to condescendingly and paternalistically emphasize its spontaneous, childlike, and hence feminine aspect, while ignoring the formal aspects of her work and its expression of harmony and proportionality.¹¹

As Griselda Pollock explains, although femininity is “an oppressive condition” for female cultural producers, analyses of their output should explore both its limitations and the ways in which women have negotiated and transformed them.¹² In Borges’s case, her exploration of affect was as much a consequence of the “good” feminine attributes that a woman of her social class was expected to cultivate as it was the possibility inherent in nonvisual, more haptic forms of perception. A wager, therefore, on the expression of a sensorial experience of the world as a form of resistance that, when distributed in oppressive pictorial spaces, encourages community among some bodies (women, young people, and children, in particular). In this way, while her formal compositional style deviated from the aesthetic of order by combining geometry with feeling, her religious-themed works, by recurrently investigating the daily, affective aspect of faith, deviated from the virile, aggressive primacy of Catholic discourse in those years. Borges innovatively put forward a pastel-colored, joyful, and amicable spirituality that brought the religious figures she represented closer to those viewing them.¹³ In turn, she granted materiality to the representation of the sacred, making the body itself and the contact between bodies recurrent themes.

In The Annunciation (1945; fig. 2), a traditional subject in the history of Western art, Borges presents the encounter between the archangel Gabriel and the Virgin Mary within a modern, formal configuration simultaneously framed within a familial, affective space.¹⁴ Brought together in an intimate setting but in golden tones denoting the sacred, the scene presumes a certain hierarchy between the characters, since Mary is seated and looking upward at the archangel hovering just above her, thereby granting greater importance to the spiritual being and his tidings. However, unlike other artists before her, Borges depicted this meeting without resorting to symbols or other elements usually associated with it. In fact, Gabriel is wingless and dressed no differently than a mortal. His clothes share a certain contemporaneity and style with those worn by the Virgin Mary, who is dressed in green (as opposed to the traditional blue and red), sports a modern hairstyle, and lacks a veil—just like countless modern young women in the first half of the 20th century. In this way, Borges returned a founding myth in the history of Western civilization to daily life, bringing it closer to her audience, who must pay attention to the title to understand that what is happening is not a simple chat between friends—and perhaps and perhaps not even between women friends at that. In fact, gender ambiguity is a characteristic of this work and others by the artist. The scholar Roberta Ann Quance has highlighted the presence of a “female androgyny” in Borges’s paintings through the artist’s depiction of slightly effeminate beings set in pink worlds, as in her images of lovers, newlyweds, and angels.¹⁵ Without calling herself a feminist or pretending to reflect on gender, Borges destabilized sex/gender limits and granted a leading role to affectivity, a quality marginalized by the sexist structure of modern society and that would acquire political relevance decades later.¹⁶

In many of Borges’s images, through a language of love devoid of romantic cliché, the bodies of her subjects touch or caress each other—including in The Annunciation, where the position of the arms could be understood as a precursor to an embrace. Confronting the relationship between emotionalism, weakness, and female inferiority, Borges reaffirmed the female, in contrast to other women of the avant-garde (like Maruja Mallo or Frida Kahlo) who, as Quance suggests, assimilated male styles and activities in order to “pal around” with male artists.¹⁷ For example, in Borges’s painting Holy Week (fig. 3), the Biblical characters are identifiable by the symbols they carry rather than by their features, which do not differ greatly from one another. Veronica, Joseph of Arimathea, and Nicodemus all have oval faces, gentle demeanors, big black eyes, and pastel-colored cassocks, and they are composed in an iconic arrangement. However, the staging of the scene and characters is closer to that of modern daily life than to a historicization and sacralization of Catholicism.

In Norah Borges’s pastel-colored universe, the private, mystic, intimate, and affective coexist with a rational harmony guided by a spiritual imprint. In this sense, religiosity is an aesthetic form and motif that brings the supernatural closer to the everyday, contributing strikingly to undo hierarchical binarisms (sacred/profane, reason/heart, modern/primitive, and feminine/masculine, among others), pillars of a modern Western narrative from which women (artists) found themselves excluded.

Divine Mestizaje: María Izquierdo’s Altars

María Cenobia Izquierdo was born in San Juan de los Lagos, Jalisco, a pilgrimage site thronged by the miracle-seeking faithful. She moved to Mexico City with her husband and children in the 1920s. In 1928, she entered the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes, where, in 1929, Diego Rivera was appointed director. Art historian Nancy Deffebach recounts that Rivera praised Izquierdo’s paintings in a student exhibition without knowing who had painted them and was surprised to find out that they had been done by a woman. As a result of this recognition, Izquierdo was invited to show her work in November 1929 in La nueva Galería del Arte Moderno, her first solo exhibition, but then had to abandon her studies when she fell victim to the jealousy and aggression of her classmates.¹⁸ By then separated from her husband, she was sharing a studio and had become romantically linked with the painter Rufino Tamayo; both were connected to the Contemporáneos, a group of young avant-gardists who opposed nationalist discourse and defended the internationalization of Mexican art and literature.¹⁹ Not coincidentally, in the 1930s, Octavio Paz, among other writers, reproduced some of Izquierdo’s paintings in the journal Taller in homage to this “heterodox” whose art, he recalled fifty years later, “was far removed from the muralists’ ideological painting.”²⁰

Along the same lines, the Mexican writer Elena Poniatowska has suggested that Izquierdo was more Mexican than Frida Kahlo because she was not “folkloric but essential.”²¹ Depicting soup tureens, mermaids, peasants, dollhouses, self-portraits, and tablecloths, in her words, she painted “a still life with huachinango [red snapper].”²² Along these elements, the women in Izquierdo’s paintings (for example, the nudes or ballerinas, tightrope walkers, trapeze artists, and trainers of the circus universe) have active roles. Notably, as Jean Franco suggests, they stand in contrast to the representations of women by the famed Mexican muralists, who usually relegated their female subjects to a passive, secondary role.²³

Izquierdo’s series of altars to the Virgen de Dolores (Virgin of Sorrows), which she worked on at the end of her life, from 1943 to 1948, channeled her interest in 19th-century popular and religious art by means of female representations that have physical characteristics like her own. As Poniatowska notes, these Virgins have Izquierdo’s face as well as the curve of her lips, which evokes harshness and controlled internal rage—perhaps the result of having to create within an artistic field dominated by male muralists.²⁴ Izquierdo’s self-representation may also be connected to her own childhood memories, to the religious universe of Jalisco, to popular beliefs, and to mestizaje as a representation of Mexican national identity.

The Altar of Sorrows emerged as a tradition among Franciscan friars in Mexico in the 16th century, when it was installed only in temples; but upon growing in popularity, it was set up in squares, gardens, and within homes on the Friday of the sixth week of Lent, known as “Viernes de Dolores” (Friday of Sorrows). Although its purpose was to recall the Virgin Mary’s suffering over the Passion and Crucifixion of Christ, over time, it assumed festival characteristics, including an association with music and dance, that gave it a popular appeal. Among the objects common to traditional celebrations were paper tablecloths, white-and-purple curtains and garlands conveying purity and mourning; shiny ornaments and jars and glasses of flavored water representing the tears of the Virgin; fruits, such as oranges, symbolizing grief and bitterness; flags as symbols of hope and triumph through the Resurrection; and sprouted seeds as a metaphor for the life cycle but also associated with agriculture, flowers, and candles. For her part, the Virgin was dressed in mourning, sometimes with a heart pierced by daggers, and she had tears in her eyes and on her cheeks.²⁵

Izquierdo respected the traditional altar elements, which she incorporated in her paintings, and yet she included more personal, popular objects, such as decorated ceramic incense burners, among them. But perhaps the most distinctive characteristic is that, in contrast to the sorrowful Virgins of New Spain, Izquierdo’s Virgins are neither white nor alone. Moreover, they are not depicted in a sacred, timeless setting, but rather in a modern space that seems local, secular, and quotidian by comparison.²⁶ By painting an altar installation in a more contemporary way, Izquierdo evoked the domestic intimacy of a religious practice. In her Altar de Dolores (fig. 4), the transparency of the curtains indicates a religiosity that continues into daily life, suggesting a connection with the “beyond” that may be found in the “nearby” of Mexican popular culture. These transparent fabrics do not separate the two realms—rather, they integrate the sacred into everyday life in an intimate way, making clear that it belongs to a reality socially inscribed in the working class, as suggested by the austere frame of the painting and the image itself. According to some scholars, this painting is based on a series of inexpensive reproductions of an Italian Baroque painting that circulated widely in Mexico at the time.²⁷

Unlike Norah Borges, Izquierdo did not present herself as a believer—or even as someone interested in Catholic thought. Her altars instead responded to a popular religiosity practiced outside of the Church, one that, as anthropologist Renée de la Torre has indicated, was neither institutional nor individual, but rather social-communal. Moreover, as de la Torre points out, this popular religiosity unfolded between colonial syncretism and postcolonial hybridism. Within this context, it is not strange that Izquierdo’s Virgin has moved away from colonial, white-centered representation and is, instead, a sacred mestiza with Indigenous characteristics. This shift can be seen in Altar de Dolores and in Ofrenda del Viernes de Dolores (1943), in the Virgin’s dark skin, black eyes, and heavy features.²⁸In turn, the political gesture is explicit: As Deffebach has indicated, the images of the altar are an affirmation of popular customs that emphasizes gender, since in a time when a large part of the Mexican school, associated with the government, affirmed the nation’s virility, Izquierdo insisted that the national patrimony was also profoundly connected to Mexican women.²⁹ Izquierdo never tired of depicting Mexican women—whether sacred or profane—in her paintings and, at the same time, asserted in her own life the daring of a woman artist who transgressed the feminine codes of her age.

Miriam Inez da Silva’s Pop Sacrality

In line with conventional readings of the work of women artists, Miriam Inez da Silva’s paintings, like those of Norah Borges and María Izquierdo, have been characterized as “primitive,” “naïve,” “ingenuous,” and/or “folkloric” because they are associated with the simplicity, purity, and traditions of the state of Goiás in central Brazil. However, as curator Bernardo Mosqueira has noted, da Silva’s work is nonetheless also characterized by impurity, complexity, intention, slyness, and transgression.³⁰ In aesthetic terms, the seeming contradictions may be explained by the convergence of artists who inspired her: the Concretist Ivan Serpa, who was her teacher at the Museo de Arte Moderno (MAM) in Río de Janeiro, where she lived from the 1970s onward, and the votive painters whose works hang on the walls of the Hall of Miracles in the Igreja Matriz in Trindade, where da Silva was born and raised.³¹ There are several versions of the origin story of this small city located in the interior of Goiás. According to one, it was established in the mid-19th century by garimpeiros (miners) Constantino Rosa and Ana Xavier, a married couple who, while working there, found a medallion depicting the Holy Trinity crowning the Virgin Mary; another holds that Rosa made the medallion to justify building a chapel on his property. Whatever the case, the object attracted both the faithful and pilgrims, who prayed and gave thanks for the miracles associated with it, and it inspired the construction of a church that to this day houses one of the finest collections of Latin American votive art.³²

Steeped in this popular culture of devotion, da Silva changed its sign. She did not give thanks for miracles that occurred in the past but rather recast them in modern-day renditions on canvas. From this perspective, I analyze da Silva’s Marian representation Nossa Senhora dos Anjos (Our Lady of the Angels; fig. 5), in which the Virgin and Child are surrounded by angels playing musical instruments. In this festive scene set in a bright field of white, there is something surprising: Da Silva has depicted Mary as a modern young woman wearing red lipstick, blue eye shadow, and blush on her cheeks (as are the angels and the Baby Jesus). In turn, while in traditional images of the Virgin, she is fully robed from head to toe, da Silva’s Mary wears a dress that accentuates her slim waist and provocatively reveals her cleavage. Furthermore, with its shimmering blue fabric, puff sleeves, and sweetheart neckline, this garment corresponds to the fashion of the 1980s—as do her high heels. Nor is da Silva’s Virgin veiled; though her hair is down, it is partially pulled back in a contemporary style that distances her from traditional Marian representations. Finally, the Brazilian artist carried out a subtle inversion by clothing her central subject in a blue dress and red cloak—instead of the opposite as is traditional in the visual history of Catholicism. In this way, by transgressing and profaning the codes of Marian representation, the Virgin recovers her feminine condition, evoking the sensuality and body lost in the Christian myth of the conception, without ceasing to be a devotional symbol.

Da Silva’s Virgin makes sense within the artist’s imaginative universe, in which religious figures coexist with figures from popular culture and other forms of belief or worlds—for example, the tarot or extraterrestrials—in joyful, celebratory scenes. In this regard, da Silva’s Mary is inscribed within the chronicle of female characters—from traditional (like brides) to literary (such as Jorge Amado’s female protagonists) or legendary (like in pop culture, the Brazilian singer and songwriter Rita Lee)—that offers a more liberated version of female subjectivity, establishing what curator Kiki Mazzucchelli calls a “microsubversion of the dominant morality of the provincial middle class that rejects the manifestation of women’s sexual desire.”³³ Additionally, the artist has called into question the ideals of maternity; indeed, in da Silva’s paintings, the Virgin often appears exhausted, letting the angels help her to care for the Baby Jesus.³⁴

Da Silva’s “milagros,” or miracles, therefore, serve to dismantle the dichotomies separating the sacred and the profane, sin and holiness, purity and impurity, fantasy and reality, and of course, popular or mass culture and high culture. Regarding the latter, Mazzucchelli proposes considering da Silva’s work within the context of a Pop art all its own, that is, as a form of Pop that is “neither the Pop of postwar US consumer society, nor the politicized manifestations of Pop art that emerged in the Rio–São Paulo axis during the 1960s, but rather the ‘Pop’ of the visual culture of a largely rural country.”³⁵ In adopting this language, da Silva carried out diversions, inversions, and exaggerations that approach a camp sensibility. Through this aesthetic of irony, artifice, and exaggeration, she shaped her political commitment—as in her Seven Deadly Sins series. For example, in Calumny (fig. 6), a woman being slandered for expressing her sexuality and desire resembles the Virgin depicted in Nossa Senhora dos Anjos (see fig. 5) in not only her features and makeup but also in the neckline of her dress, while in Wrath (fig. 7), a femicide is taking place. Without moralizing or conservatism, da Silva placed religiosity at the service of a critique of gender bias and a denunciation of the forms of patriarchy in Brazilian society.

In his text on exvotos, the philosopher and art historian Georges Didi-Huberman declares that votive images seem not to exist for the art historian, since they generate unease and place the aesthetic model of history as a continuous narrative chain and a family romance of “influences” in crisis.³⁶ In a way, Miriam Inez da Silva’s interest in religious materiality has also placed her at the margins of the grand narratives of modern Latin American art—even though she knew how to combine the lessons of the avant-garde with manifestations of popular culture, rupturing the conventions of religious art, impugning the social customs and rules of the sexist behavior of her time, and creating innovations in the Brazilian artistic field, which thankfully has, in recent years, given her work greater visibility.

* * * *

In our contemporary era, room has been made for the sacred aspect of modernity, which has not died out amid secularization. But in addition, and more importantly, modern art has concerned itself with the intersections of religion, politics, and gender, allowing for emancipatory narratives and gestures outside the institutionality of the divine and thereby coming closer to daily realities. I propose that the work of Norah Borges, María Izquierdo, and Miriam Inez da Silva constitutes a vital contribution to this reflection, since all three, in different ways, used religious material as a means of artistic experimentation and a disputable narrative that they appropriated to imagine feminist ways of inhabiting the world—even when their personal positions did not coincide with this ideology. On the other hand, if one attends to the “activism of their works,” as Andrea Giunta proposes, the representations of the Virgin and the Biblical universe encountered in their paintings crack open the secular, rational agenda of modern art that, as art historian Erika Doss states, was defined by art historians and critics as “anti-religion” and “anti-religious.”³⁷ At the same time, they make it possible to call into question the patriarchal system that supports gender discrimination in both religious discourse and the field of art.

Translated from Spanish by Christopher Winks.

Spanish

“María es el mito de una mujer sin vagina”, sentencia Marcella Althaus-Reid en La teología indecente. Perversiones teológicas en el sexo, el género y la política.³⁸Con un tono polémico, pero no por eso menos certero, la teóloga queer afirma que la adoración de la Virgen en América Latina en el siglo XX no provocó una sensación de empoderamiento para las mujeres, ya que siempre requirió que se negara su cuerpo a través del misterio de su virginidad.³⁹También que se negara su voz, puesto que en sus múltiples apariciones en América Latina, y a diferencia de Europa, ella no hablaba, sino que aparecía ante sus elegidos y elegidas como una mujer de tez clara, envuelta por tela de alta factura y adornada con metales y piedras preciosas. Así, sin voz, pero con un poderoso discurso visual, su imagen cumplió dos roles que, en apariencia, resultaban contradictorios. Por un lado, fue un elemento central del dominio militar y espiritual desde la conquista hasta las recientes dictaduras militares latinoamericanas (patrocinio que se sintetizó en el apodo que asumió a partir del siglo XIX: la “Virgen Generala”).⁴⁰Por el otro, se la representó como madre y esposa ejemplar consolidando dentro del catolicismo un modelo de feminidad obediente, sin agencia ni deseo que, lejos de intervenir en el espacio público, debía recluirse en la “seguridad” del hogar ejerciendo tareas domésticas y maternales. Entre ambos extremos, la imagen de una Virgen María autoritaria se utilizaba en contra del Otro diferente o en contra de la igualdad de sus compañeras de género. La devoción mariana, de este modo, al sostener los valores de pureza, de heterosexualidad (y asexualidad), de eurocentrismo y de la maternidad como destino manifiesto, reprodujo y contribuyó a las desigualdades de clase, género y raza sobre las que se erigieron las sociedades moderno-coloniales y cristianas en Latinoamérica.

Tomando en cuenta estas representaciones de la Virgen inscriptas en un imaginario patriarcal como punto de partida, es posible rastrear otras visualidades en el arte moderno latinoamericano del siglo XX que enfrentaron el mito de una mujer sacra sin cuerpo ni voz. Entre otras, se destacan las obras de las artistas Norah Borges (Argentina, 1901-1998), María Izquierdo (México, 1902-1955) y Miriam Inez da Silva (Brasil, 1939-1996) al componer otras narrativas visuales, o contranarrativas, que no solo provocan los imperativos canónicos de representación mariana, sino que, fundamentalmente, imponen un modo alternativo y femenino de acercamiento a lo divino. Dependiendo del caso, sus aproximaciones se vuelven cercanas, afectuosas y sensibles; vivaces y populares; o corpóreas, táctiles e incluso sexuales. Sin ironía ni blasfemia pero siguiendo un impulso profanador que devuelve lo sagrado al uso común y comunitario, estas tres artistas se interesaron por la creencia religiosa y su potencialidad creativa que delinea otra forma de entender la religión en la modernidad y, al mismo tiempo, abre un espacio de experimentación estética y ética que si bien siguen el canon modernista, proponen miradas originales sobre el vínculo entre arte, política y género.⁴¹Como mostrará el análisis comparativo propuesto, el lenguaje religioso –contra todo pronóstico– habilita novedosas configuraciones afectivas, populares y corporales, que desafían el orden sexista y patriarcal vigente tanto en el campo social y religioso como en el campo artístico latinoamericano.

El misticismo cotidiano de Norah Borges

Primero poeta, luego artista, Norah Borges estudió grabado en Europa, en 1914 con el artista belga Frans Masereel, convirtiéndose –junto con su hermano Jorge Luis– en una participante activa de la vanguardia española ultraísta. Al regresar a Buenos Aires en los años veinte, esta experiencia vanguardista la acompañó y fue una participante activa del grupo de jóvenes renovadores que confluyeron en las páginas de las revistas Prisma, Proa y Martin Fierro.⁴²No obstante, a fines de esa misma década, ya casada con el crítico español Guillermo de Torre, Borges comenzó a interesarse por un arte alineado a la tendencia parisina conocida como el retorno al orden, que abogaba por la tranquilidad de las formas y contrastaba con las expresiones radicales del expresionismo; y esto coincide con su acercamiento a una incipiente intelectualidad católica que intentaba trazar lazos con escritores y artistas modernos.⁴³Por eso, su nombre aparece entre quienes exhibieron por esos años en la sala de los Cursos de Cultura Católica de Buenos Aires, al mismo tiempo que enviaba contribuciones visuales –dibujos y xilografías– a las revistas modernas del catolicismo cultural, Criterio y Número.⁴⁴En esta última publicación, aparecen “Niña vestida de primera comunión” y “Aviñón” (fig. 1), dos dibujos que, vistos en conjunto, muestran que el interés religioso de Borges no puede pensarse por fuera de la estética del retorno al orden y su vuelta a los valores clásicos, metafísicos y armónicos.⁴⁵

Si, dentro de la historiografía del arte, el retorno al orden permitió a artistas y escritores volver su mirada al pasado premoderno, a la figuración y a la búsqueda de los valores clásicos, Borges le aportó su singularidad ya que, como sugiere Patricia Artundo, su filiación contaba con la libertad de no pertenecer estrictamente a la cultura europea de posguerra.⁴⁶Esto es evidente en “Un cuadro sinóptico de la pintura”, texto publicado en la revista Martín Fierro (marzo de 1927) sin firma pero adjudicado a Borges. En este texto, los lemas de orden, proporción, contornos nítidos y formas definidas conviven con la necesidad de colores que, según la artista, “den alegría a los ojos”, como el rosa y limón, el rosa y verde veronés y el rosa salmón, junto con el llamado “color místico” que equivaldría al “color que las cosas tendrán también en el cielo”.⁴⁷Esta tendencia al pastel, que evita los contrastes cromáticos violentos, junto con su interés por los circos, los juguetes, los niños y los decoradores de carros, hicieron que los críticos varones, contemporáneos a su obra, enfatizaran el aspecto espontáneo e infantil y, por tanto femenino, de un modo condescendiente y un tanto paternalista, dejando de lado el aspecto constructivo de sus obras, guiado por las premisas de armonía y proporcionalidad.⁴⁸

Aunque la feminidad sea “una condición opresiva” para las productoras culturales, explica Griselda Pollock, los análisis de las obras deberían no solo explorar los límites sino también las maneras en que las mujeres negociaron y transformaron esa condición.⁴⁹En el caso de Borges, el trabajo con el afecto en sus obras es tanto consecuencia de los “buenos” atributos femeninos que debería cultivar una mujer de su clase social como posibilidad de una percepción, ya no visual, sino háptica. Una apuesta, de este modo, por la sensorialidad como experiencia de mundo y como forma de resistencia para algunos cuerpos (mujeres, jóvenes y niños, especialmente), los cuales, distribuidos en espacios pictóricos opresivos, forman comunidad a partir del contacto entre ellos. De esta manera, mientras que su modo de composición formal ofreció un desvío en la estética del orden al conjugar sin conflicto geometría con sentimiento, sus trabajos de impronta religiosa también se desviaron de la primacía viril y agresiva que tomó el discurso católico en esos años, al investigar recurrentemente el costado cotidiano y afectivo de la fe. De forma novedosa, Borges propone una espiritualidad apastelada, alegre y amistosa que acerque los personajes religiosos a quienes ven sus lienzos.⁵⁰A su vez, le otorga materialidad a la representación de lo sacro haciendo del cuerpo, y del contacto entre los cuerpos, un motivo recurrente.

En su escena de La anunciación (1945) (fig.3), tópico recurrente en la historia del arte occidental, Borges presenta el encuentro entre el arcángel Gabriel y la Virgen María dentro de una configuración formal moderna que, al mismo tiempo, está enmarcada dentro de un espacio familiar y afectivo.⁵¹Reunidos en un espacio íntimo, pero con tonos dorados que denotan sacralidad, la escena supone cierta jerarquía entre los personajes, ya que María está sentada y mira hacia arriba otorgándole mayor importancia al arcángel y su noticia. Sin embargo, a diferencia de otras composiciones, Borges representa esta escena sin necesidad de recurrir a símbolos o elementos que remitan a ese episodio bíblico; el arcángel Gabriel ni siquiera tiene alas ni viste de manera distinta a un mortal. De hecho, su vestimenta comparte cierta contemporaneidad con la de la Virgen María, que no solo no está representada con los tradicionales colores azul y rojo, sino que porta un peinado moderno y no utiliza velo, tal como lo haría una joven en la primera mitad del siglo XX. De esta manera, Borges vuelve cotidiano un mito fundante de la historia de la civilización occidental, acercándolo a los espectadores, quienes deben prestar atención al título para entender que no se trata simplemente de una charla entre amigos, ¿o amigas? La ambigüedad genérica es un rasgo presente en esta y otras de sus obras. La investigadora Roberta Quance ha señalado la presencia de una “androginia femenina” en sus pinturas a través de seres vagamente afeminados insertos dentro de un mundo rosa, como sucede con los amantes o los novios, o con sus ángeles.⁵²Sin proclamarse feminista y sin pretender hacer una reflexión de género, Borges desestabiliza los límites sexo-genéricos y, en sintonía, otorga protagonismo a la afectividad, esa cualidad marginalizada por la estructura sexista de la sociedad moderna que cobrará relevancia política décadas más tarde.⁵³

A través de una gramática del amor que no le teme al cliché romántico, los cuerpos representados se tocan o acarician en muchas de sus imágenes –incluso en el caso de La anunciación, la disposición de los brazos podría entenderse como el signo de un potencial abrazo. Enfrentando la relación entre emocionalidad, debilidad e inferioridad femenina, Borges reafirmó lo femenino en sus cuadros, en contraste con otras mujeres de la vanguardia que, como sugiere Quance, se asimilaban a los modos y actividades masculinas para “hombrearse” con los demás artistas (como Maruja Mallo o Frida Kahlo).⁵⁴Por ejemplo, en su obra titulada Holy Week (Semana Santa) (fig.4), una pintura en la que los personajes bíblicos se vuelven identificables por los símbolos que cargan, sus rasgos no se diferencian mucho entre sí. La Verónica, José de Arimatea y Nicodemo poseen rostros ovales, facciones suaves, ojos negros y grandes, sotanas de colores pasteles y una misma disposición icónica. Sin embargo, la representación de la escena y los personajes está más cercana de un contexto moderno-cotidiano, que a la historización y sacralización del catolicismo.

El universo apastelado de lo privado, lo místico, lo íntimo y afectivo de Borges convivió con la armonía racional de sus composiciones también guiada por una impronta espiritual. Lo religioso, en este sentido, es forma y motivo estético que acercan lo sobrenatural a las prácticas cotidianas, contribuyendo llamativamente a desbaratar los binarismos jerárquicos (sacro/profano, razón/corazón, moderno/primitivo, femenino/masculino, entre otros), pilares de un relato moderno occidental en el que las (artistas) mujeres se vieron excluidas.

Mestizar lo divino: los altares de María Izquierdo

María Cenobia Izquierdo nació en San Juan de los Lagos, Jalisco, un lugar de peregrinaje que se llenaba de devotos en busca de milagros. Se mudó a la Ciudad de México en la década de los veinte, con su marido e hijos. Ingresó a la Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes en 1928, donde tiempo después Diego Rivera fue nombrado director. Cuenta la historiadora de arte Nancy Deffebach, que Rivera elogió los cuadros de Izquierdo en una exposición de estudiantes sin saber que ella los había pintado y que se sorprendió al enterarse de que era una mujer. Como consecuencia de este reconocimiento, pudo organizar su primera exposición individual en la Galería de Arte Moderno en noviembre de 1929, pero debió abandonar sus estudios ya que fue víctima de los celos y agresiones de sus compañeros que no entendían por qué ella era considerada la única estudiante con talento.⁵⁵Separada, compartió atelier y estableció un vínculo amoroso con Rufino Tamayo; ambos se relacionaron con los jóvenes de vanguardia conocidos como los Contemporáneos, quienes se oponían al discurso nacionalista y defendían la internacionalización del arte y la literatura mexicanos.⁵⁶No por casualidad Octavio Paz, entre otros escritores, reprodujeron, en la década del treinta, algunas imágenes de Izquierdo en la revista Taller como una forma de homenaje a esa pintora “heterodoxa”, cuyo arte, recuerda Paz cincuenta años más tarde, “estaba muy lejos de la pintura ideológica de los muralistas”.⁵⁷

Siguiendo la misma línea, la autora mexicana Elena Poniatowska sugiere que Izquierdo resultaba más mexicana que Frida Kahlo porque no era “folklórica sino esencial”, ya que pintaba naturalezas muertas, soperas, sirenas, campesinos, casas infantiles, manteles, autorretratos, en sus palabras, “una naturaleza viva con huachinango.”⁵⁸Junto con estos elementos, los personajes femeninos que tienen una presencia recurrente en sus cuadros (como bailarinas, equilibristas, trapecistas y domadoras del universo circense o desnudos femeninos) tienen roles activos y, como sugiere Jean Franco, contrastaban con las representaciones femeninas de los afamados muralistas mexicanos que usualmente otorgaban a la figura femenina un papel secundario y pasivo.⁵⁹

   Su serie de altares para la Virgen de Dolores en la que trabajó desde 1943 hasta 1948 –casi al final de su vida– canaliza su interés por el arte popular y religioso del siglo XIX a través de representaciones femeninas que toman características físicas de la propia artista. Según apunta Poniatowska, estas vírgenes portan el rostro de Izquierdo y la curvatura de sus labios, expresando una dureza y una rabia interior contenida, posiblemente un producto de crear en un campo artístico dominado por los varones del muralismo.⁶⁰También su autofiguración puede relacionarse con la vuelta a la infancia, al universo religioso de Jalisco, a las creencias populares y al mestizaje como representación de la identidad nacional mexicana.

Surgido como tradición en México en el siglo XVI con los frailes franciscanos, el Altar de Dolores pasa de colocarse solamente en templos a hacerlo en plazas, jardines y dentro de los hogares el sexto viernes de cuaresma, conocido como el “Viernes de Dolores”. Si bien su función era recordar el sufrimiento de la Virgen María por la pasión y muerte de su hijo Jesucristo, con el paso del tiempo comienza a tomar características festivas que lo popularizan y lo acompañan de música y bailes. Se utilizaban manteles de papel, cortinas y guirnaldas en blanco y morado que traían las ideas de pureza y luto; adornos brillantes, jarras y vasos de agua de diferentes sabores que representaban las lágrimas de la Virgen; frutas, como la naranja que remitía a la amargura y el dolor; banderas como símbolos de esperanza y triunfo por la Resurrección; y semillas germinadas como metáfora del ciclo de la vida, pero también en asociación con la agricultura, flores y velas. Por su parte, la Virgen viste de luto, a veces con un corazón clavado con dagas, siempre con lágrimas en sus ojos y mejillas.⁶¹

Izquierdo respeta los elementos tradicionales de los altares, los cuales aparecen en sus pinturas, e incluye dentro de estos también objetos de artesanía popular como apuesta personal –por ejemplo, sahumadores de cerámica decorados. Pero quizá el rasgo más distintivo es que, a diferencia de las vírgenes dolorosas novohispánicas, las vírgenes de Izquierdo no son blancas ni están solas. Tampoco están en un ambiente ni sacro ni atemporal, sino en uno cercano, secular y cotidiano.⁶²Al recrear la instalación de un altar a través de la pintura siguiendo cánones modernos, Izquierdo opta por concentrarse en la intimidad doméstica de esa práctica religiosa. En su altar de Dolores, la transparencia de las cortinas marca una religiosidad que continúa en la vida cotidiana, permitiendo una conexión con el “más allá” que, en realidad, se encuentra en un “más acá” de la cultura popular mexicana. Las telas transparentes no separan, sino que integran lo sagrado a la vida íntima, de modo que es evidente que corresponde a una realidad inscrita socialmente en la clase trabajadora sugerido por el marco austero del cuadro de la Virgen y la misma imagen que, según algunos estudiosos, está basada en la reproducción de una pintura barroca italiana que circuló masivamente en ediciones baratas en México.⁶³

A diferencia de Norah Borges, Izquierdo no se presenta como creyente ni está interesada en el pensamiento católico. Sus altares responden a una religiosidad popular que se practica por fuera de la Iglesia y que, por tanto, como ha señalado la antropóloga Renée de la Torre, no es ni institucional ni individual, sino social-comunitaria. Asimismo, de la Torre puntualiza que esta religiosidad popular se desenvuelve entre los sincretismos coloniales y los hibridismos poscoloniales, y no es extraño entonces que la Virgen que pinta Izquierdo se aleje de la representación colonial y blancocéntrica, proponiendo una imagen sacra-mestiza que recupera rasgos indígenas, como se ve en Altar de Dolores y también en Ofrenda del Viernes de Dolores (1943), a través de la piel morena, los ojos negros y las facciones gruesas.⁶⁴A su vez, el gesto político es explícito: como ha señalado Defferach, las imágenes de los altares son una afirmación de las costumbres populares que hace hincapié en el género, ya que en una época en la que gran parte de la escuela mexicana, asociada con el gobierno, afirmaba la virilidad de la nación, Izquierdo insistía en que el patrimonio nacional también estaba profundamente vinculado a las mujeres mexicanas.⁶⁵Profanas o sacras, no se cansó de representarlas en sus cuadros, asumiendo al mismo tiempo en su propia vida la osadía de una artista mujer que transgrede los códigos femeninos de su época.

La sacralidad pop de Miriam Inez da Silva

Siguiendo las convenciones de lectura impuestas a las artistas, la obra de Miriam Inez da Silva, al igual que la de Norah Borges y María Izquierdo, fue categorizada como “primitiva”, “naif” e “ingenua” y/o “popular”, porque apelaba a la simplicidad, la pureza y la tradición del interior del estado brasileño de Goiás, en el centro del país. Sin embargo, según el curador Bernardo Mosqueira, hay impureza, complejidad, intención, malicia y transgresión en su trabajo.⁶⁶En términos estéticos, las contradicciones que crea su proyecto artístico en el sistema de categorización del arte podría explicarse por la convergencia de dos artistas que la inspiraron, según ella misma afirma: por un lado, el concretista Ivan Serpa, que fue su profesor en el Museo de Arte Moderno (MAM) de Río de Janeiro, ciudad en la que vive desde los años sesenta; por el otro, los artistas votivos, cuyas obras colgaban en las paredes de la Sala de los Milagros de la Iglesia Matriz en la ciudad de Trindade, donde nació y creció.⁶⁷Hay varias versiones sobre el origen de esta pequeña ciudad del interior de Goiás. Una cuenta que fue fundada a mediados del siglo XIX por una pareja de garimpeiros (mineros), Constantino Rosa y Ana Xavier, quienes encontraron una medalla de la Santísima Trinidad coronando a la Virgen María; otra versión sostiene que fue Rosa quien fabricó la pieza para justificar su deseo de construir una capilla en su propiedad. En cualquiera de los dos casos, la medalla atrajo devotos y romerías, que rezaban y agradecían los milagros, y también condujo a la construcción de una iglesia que, aún hoy, alberga una de las mayores colecciones de arte votivo latinoamericano.⁶⁸

Impregnada de esta devoción popular, da Silva le cambia el signo: no agradece a milagros ya sucedidos, sino que los crea en su tela para que sucedan efectivamente en la realidad. Desde esta óptica se podría analizar la singular representación mariana que da Silva realiza de Nuestra Señora de los Ángeles (fig. 6). Recortándose dentro de un fondo claro limitado por una moldura propia, se ve, como es de esperar, a la Virgen rodeada de ángeles. Estos la festejan, le cantan y tocan música con diferentes instrumentos. Pero dentro de esa escena festiva, algo llama la atención: da Silva representa a la Virgen como una mujer joven maquillada con labial rojo, sombra azul en sus ojos y rubor en sus mejillas (al igual que los ángeles y el niño Jesús). A su vez, si tradicionalmente las vírgenes suelen ser representadas completamente cubiertas, del cuello a los pies, la virgen de da Silva porta un vestido azul que marca la figura de su cuerpo y un escote que muestra provocativamente el borde superior de sus pechos. Además, ese vestido corresponde a la moda de los años ochenta, de tela azul tornasolado, las mangas abullonadas, el escote corazón y los tacones altos. La virgen de da Silva no porta velo; su cabello está semirrecogido, simulando asimismo una tendencia contemporánea, y alejándose de la convencionalidad de la representación mariana. Finalmente, la artista brasileña realiza una sutil inversión al pintarla con vestido azul y manto rojo, en lugar de mantener la iconografía utilizada en la historia visual del catolicismo. De esta manera, al transgredir y profanar los códigos de representación mariana, la virgen recupera su condición femenina, representadas por el cuerpo y la sensualidad, perdidos en el mito cristiano de la concepción sin por ello dejar de ser un símbolo de devoción.

Sin dudas, la virgen cobra sentido dentro del universo imaginario de da Silva en el que los personajes religiosos conviven con los de la cultura popular y con otras formas de creencia –como el tarot o los extraterrestres–, siempre dispuestos en escenas festivas, celebratorias y gozosas. En este sentido, esta imagen mariana se inscribe en una serie de personajes femeninos, tradicionales –como las novias– y populares –como las protagonistas de las novela de Jorge Amado– o masivas –como Rita Lee–, que ofrece una versión más liberada de la subjetividad femenina, estableciendo una “microsubversión del moralismo vigente en la clase media provinciana que repudia la manifestación del deseo sexual en la mujer.”⁶⁹Incluso también se pone en disputa la propia idea de maternidad, ya que muchas veces la virgen se muestra exhausta, dejando que los ángeles ayuden en la tarea de cuidar al niño Jesús.⁷⁰

Los “milagros” que pinta Miriam da Silva, entonces, apuestan por desarmar las dicotomías que separan lo sagrado de lo profano, el pecado de la santidad, la pureza de la impureza, la fantasía de lo real, y, por supuesto, lo popular y masivo de la alta cultura. Sobre esto último, la curadora Kiki Mazzucchelli propone pensar la obra de da Silva dentro del diseño de un arte “pop” singular, y lo distingue de otras corrientes al aclarar: “no el pop de la sociedad de consumo estadounidense de posguerra, ni tampoco las manifestaciones politizadas del arte pop que surgieron en el eje Río-San Pablo en la década de 1960, sino el ‘pop’ de la cultura visual de un país en su mayoría rural.” Adoptando este lenguaje, la artista brasileña realiza desvíos, inversiones y exageraciones que la acercarán a la sensibilidad camp.⁷¹A través de esta estética de la ironía, el artificio y la exageración, da Silva moldea su compromiso político, como se pone en evidencia en su serie de los pecados capitales. Mientras que, por ejemplo, en la imagen sobre la calumnia (fig.6), un personaje femenino es víctima de la difamación por su pose sexual de mujer deseante y sexual –que se asemeja a la figura de la virgen en sus rasgos, maquillaje y escote –; en la imagen sobre la ira (fig.7) se presenta directamente un caso de femicidio. Sin moralismo ni conservadurismo, la religiosidad se pone al servicio de la crítica de género y la denuncia de las formas del patriarcado en la sociedad brasileña.

En su texto sobre los exvotos, el historiador del arte y filósofo Georges Didi-Huberman afirma que las imágenes votivas parecen no existir ya que generan malestar y una puesta en crisis del modelo estético que piensa la historia como una cadena narrativa continua y una novela familiar de “influencias”.⁷²De alguna manera, este interés de Miriam Inez da Silva por la materialidad religiosa también la colocó al margen de los grandes relatos de la historia del arte moderno latinoamericano, aun cuando supo combinar las enseñanzas del arte de vanguardia con las manifestaciones de la cultura popular generando rupturas a las convenciones del arte religioso, impugnaciones a las costumbres sociales y reglas de conducta sexista de su época e innovaciones en el campo artístico brasileño que, gratamente, en los últimos años ha dado mayor visibilidad a su trabajo.

* * * *

Nuestra contemporaneidad ha sabido darle un lugar al costado sagrado de lo moderno, que no se extinguió pese a las teorías fatalistas de la secularización. Pero, además, y más importante, el arte moderno se ha interesado por el cruce entre religiosidades, política y género, permitiendo narrativas y gestos emancipadores por fuera de la institucionalidad de lo divino, y acercándose así a las realidades de la cotidianidad. Propongo entonces que la obra de Norah Borges, María Izquierdo y Miriam Inez da Silva constituye un aporte imprescindible a esa reflexión, ya que las tres, de diferentes maneras, eligieron el material religioso como una vía de experimentación artística y como un relato que podía ponerse en disputa, del cual se apropiaron para imaginar modos feministas de habitar el mundo, más allá de que sus posicionamientos personales no coincidieran con ese ideario. Si se atiende, en cambio, al “activismo de sus obras”, como propone Andrea Giunta, las representaciones de la virgen y del universo bíblico que se encuentran en sus cuadros agrietan la agenda secular y racional del arte moderno que, como sostiene la historiadora de arte Erika Doss, fue definido por críticos e historiadores del arte como “antirreligión” y “antirreligioso”.⁷³ Y, al mismo tiempo, hacen posible la puesta en cuestión del sistema patriarcal que sostiene la discriminación de género tanto en el discurso religioso como en el campo de las artes.

The post Female Approaches to the Divine: The Marian Representations of Norah Borges, María Izquierdo, and Miriam Inez da Silva / Acercamientos femeninos a lo divino. Las representaciones marianas de Norah Borges, María Izquierdo y Miriam Inez da Silva appeared first on post.

The annual Asilah Cultural Moussem, an international festival held in northern Morocco, was cofounded in 1978 by Mohamed Benaïssa and Mohamed Melehi in collaboration with Toni Maraini and Al Muhit Cultural Association. It served as a significant postcolonial cultural platform, involving activists from the Casablanca Art School and artists from Africa, the Arab world, Asia, Europe, and the Americas. The festival featured outdoor exhibitions, murals, visual art workshops, theater, music, and social and cultural programs aimed at rehabilitating the neglected city of Asilah and integrating art into social progress and daily life. The Asilah Cultural Moussem is still ongoing to this day.

Morad Montazami: Toni, to start the conversation, can you tell us how the idea of creating a festival of murals in Asilah—literally on the city’s walls (fig. 1)—came to you and Mohamed Melehi?

Toni Maraini: Firstly, I would like to mention that Mohamed Benaïssa was with us from the outset. Melehi and Benaïssa were born in Asilah, and our mutual friendship had blossomed many years before under various circumstances. Back when we were teaching at the Casablanca Art School in the 1960s, Melehi and I frequently traveled to Asilah, where we met Benaïssa. At that time, Asilah’s old medina was in poor condition; walls were deteriorating, many houses were abandoned, and the streets were quite dirty. When we got together with Benaïssa, we often discussed how we could contribute to the community’s cultural and economic development. Our goal was to enhance Asilah’s living standards, and for this, we thought about creating a festival. However, instead of calling it a “festival,” we decided to call it a “moussem,” the term traditionally used in Morocco for local festivities organized by the community. Thus, the Asilah Moussem needed to be community-driven from the outset. This is how the concept of a moussem emerged. Fortunately, there were elections during this time, and both Benaïssa and Melehi had campaigned for local office. Their active involvement in various community projects sparked enthusiasm among the residents,  and they were voted in: Benaïssa was elected mayor, which was a significant milestone for Asilah’s political landscape, and Melehi was elected member of the municipality and took on a prominent cultural role, creating a group called Al Muhit Cultural Association. This cultural association represented a fresh start, marking a new chapter in the city’s history. Concurrently, the Ministry of Culture provided funding to restore the city’s walls and its long-neglected houses. This was when the vision of visible walls took form.

MM: This photo conveys a sense of how artists organized and assigned the walls for painting. 

TM: Take a look at the state of the walls in this image (fig. 2). The house you see in the background was abandoned. Fortunately, we had numerous friends who were artists. We forged these connections through our involvement in the Casablanca Art School and through various other activities,¹ including organizing a series of public outdoor exhibitions—Présence Plastique—on the streets of Marrakech and Casablanca.² These artists participated with great dedication. In figure 2, we see them walking around the medina, deliberating on which area to tackle.

Artists were organized into six groups, with each one focusing on a specific location. The walls would initially be painted white, and then each artist would create a composition with the assistance of local young people. Everyone collaborated regardless of gender and age. Take, for example, this mural by Mohammed Chabâa (fig. 3; see also fig. 1). In the photograph, you can see Chabâa himself, but there is also someone assisting him. The wall was painted white, and the streets have been cleaned.

MM: Toni, you pointed out your experience with collaborative methodologies, dating back to the renowned Présence Plastique outdoor exhibition series held in Marrakech and Casablanca in 1969. Therefore, by the time of the Asilah moussem, roughly a decade later, you all had had experience with public space exhibitions. Could you elaborate on the specificity of the Asilah Cultural Moussem and the unique interactions that it fostered between artists and the local community?

TM: First of all, it differed in that in Jemaa el-Fna Square, paintings were hung on the walls of a large, unique public space. Here in Asilah, murals were created on the walls in various corners and city streets. The enthusiasm of the people was enormous, as they would pitch in to help with the painting.

MM: Did local people spontaneously join the mural collaboration, or had you planned for these murals to involve the local community?

TM: As muralists, we naturally considered the principles of street art. It needs to be in public spaces, contributing to urban development, and involving people’s participation. This is why, when working with Benaïssa on the concept of the Moussem, Melehi and I proposed a special art and culture project with three components: workshops, exhibitions, and street art.

MM: And can you tell us about the role of the local inhabitants, especially women? When we examine some of the photographs taken by you and Melehi, we can see many women collaborating on the murals.

TM: Yes, many female students had gathered to create their walls, and older women would come around to look, offering suggestions and help (fig. 4). That was indeed socially important. It sparked interest and friendship and, moreover, it reflected the female community’s desire to turn to more modern habits and experiences, changing from what Asilah was and engaging for better local conditions.

MM: Yes, as you say, apparently the local inhabitants understood the project, and there was some sort of synergy between the project, the city’s state, and how local people responded with enthusiasm and positivity to the Moussem, which brings me to my next question: Was Asilah already a tourist destination in 1978, or did it become one after the creation of the Moussem?

TM: Before the 1970s elections, Asilah was in such poor condition that it only drew a transient crowd—people who would briefly visit and then leave. The restaurants were shut down, and there was nothing to offer visitors. However, after 1978, Asilah’s economic situation improved significantly as shops started to open. Artisans, both men and women, would now sell their products, like rugs and ceramics. The weekly market became a gathering place for people from the countryside to sell their goods—vegetables, tomatoes, and many other products from nearby farms and fields. It was always crowded and very animated. The streets were cleaned, and many shops and houses reopened. Two traditional restaurants (one owned by a woman) opened as well. All of this attracted tourists, who came to see the murals. A museum was also established in the ancient Portuguese Al-Kasbah Tower, where some exhibitions were organized. These significant changes encouraged thoughtful tourism—tourism that pauses, observes, and values. Eventually, as people’s income improved, local families found it easier to send their children to school.

MM: Let’s discuss the workshops that featured so many key artists, especially in such a cosmopolitan environment. Can you tell us how these workshops were organized? I know, for instance, that the printmaking workshop was very significant.

TM: There was a painting workshop that welcomed artists of different nationalities and offered lessons to the youth from the city, but the printmaking workshop (fig. 5) was particularly significant, thanks to three outstanding artists, Mohammad Omar Khalil, Krishna Reddy and Robert Blackburn, who were experts in the field and supervised the workshop activities for several years. They coordinated all aspects, secured all the printing machines, etc. The printmaking workshop was the first of its kind in Morocco. Several artists, such as Farid Belkahia and Malika Agueznay (fig. 6), came to learn how to print their own works on paper, and over the years, they engaged in teaching these techniques to local students.

MM: How and when did you and Melehi connect with Mohammad Omar Khalil, Krishna Reddy and Robert Blackburn?

TM: We became acquainted with them during our stay in New York from 1962 to 1964. Melehi had been awarded a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship, and I had been given a scholarship to Smith College. While in New York, visiting exhibitions and participating in cultural meetings, we became good friends with several artists.

MM: So you actually knew these artists for almost 18 years before inviting them to Asilah. That’s impressive!

TM: In those years, we traveled to New York several times, and met them again, and we became friends. The Moussem was a good occasion to invite them to Morocco. Given our collaborations on projects associated with the Casablanca Art School and international exhibitions or meetings, we also traveled to Baghdad, Lebanon, Tunis, Algiers, France, and Spain, and met many other artists. It was a fascinating cosmopolitan time that fostered numerous international, cultural, and artistic connections. Unlike today, there was a positive atmosphere, one characterized by a strong desire to collaborate in every direction—north, south, east, and west.

MM: It’s evident that our current fascination with the 1960s and 1970s, along with the broader postcolonial networks and solidarities, indicates we are facing challenges today. This suggests that our solidarities and networks clearly have limitations, and we need to draw our inspiration from that era.

TM: Exactly. There were no borders at that moment.

MM: Could you remind us if international artists were invited to the first edition, or if the 1978 edition primarily featured Moroccan artists—with international artists being invited starting from the second edition?

TM: Since our initial concept was to conduct local activities with an international approach, fostering connections between the north and south, east and west, and of course, Africa, the first edition was absolutely international (fig. 7) . . .

MM: For example, if I recall correctly, the first time you met Etel Adnan was around the time of the First Biennale of Arab Art in Baghdad in 1974. Four years later, she came to Asilah. I mean, there was a very strong dialogue and an artistic friendship between you and Adnan, as you even translated some of her poems into Italian.

TM: Yes, over the years, I translated and published three of her books and several poems in Italy. I also wrote for the catalogues of a couple of her exhibitions. As you say, I met Etel Adnan in 1974 at the Baghdad biennale, which I attended with Melehi and Belkahia. Since she told us she wanted to visit Morocco, we invited her in 1978; she visited Asilah, traveled around, had an exhibition in Rabat, and then in 1979, came again to participate in the Moussem painting workshop.

MM: There were printmaking workshops, painting workshops, and ceramics workshops, right? Who were the main participants practicing in these workshops? Were they mostly young Moroccan artists from Asilah? Obviously, many incredible artists came together, like Etel Adnan, Mona Saudi, and Malika Agueznay—all the ones we mentioned. But who were the workshop practitioners? Were they young people from Asilah or even youth from other Moroccan cities coming to Asilah in the summer?

TM: The workshops were open to everyone. Some of the artists invited would be responsible for organizing workshops and teaching programs. Artists from many countries would work at the workshops, as did young people from Asilah, including some who came from Tangiers or Rabat. Workshops were a great place for artistic convergences, not only for painting, sculpture, and ceramics but also for learning printmaking, as it was, at that time, the only place to learn it in Morocco (fig. 8).

MM: So this was a poster exhibition (fig. 9), right? Can you tell us if there was a direct relationship between the printmaking workshop and such displays? Were the works on display there mainly by artists who took part in the workshops, or were there other printmakers?

TM: This poster exhibition was held with works made for the occasion by the artists participating to the painting and printmaking workshops. The wide exhibition space was once an abandoned factory that had been restored. It became a very important municipal gallery called “Al-Qasaba,” where many exhibitions have been held over the years.

MM: Were you the curator of this exhibition?

TM: The art exhibitions were curated collaboratively! Certainly, Melehi and I would participate in their conception, yet much of the work was made possible thanks to the collaboration with the new local association called “Al Muhit,” created by Melehi and Benaïssa with the enthusiastic participation of other friends and people from Asilah, Tangier, and Rabat.

It is important to remember that during the Moussem there were not only the workshops and exhibitions, but also many other different projects—conferences, music and theater rehearsals, film screenings, and all the while street art activities. Every day, women and men worked hard and collectively to make all this happen. This is what the Moussem was intended to convey: a collaborative effort that showcased the dynamic enthusiasm of the community.

MM: OK, I get it. So there was never really one person, for example, responsible for the poster exhibitions; it was always a collective effort.

TM: As a newly elected member of the city council, Melehi was responsible for cultural activities. He would work from morning to evening on everything related to the arts, and I would help—but, as I said, without the participation of work groups and the great collective force, it would have been impossible to realize these cultural, artistic, and social projects concretely.

MM: It’s quite clear that you and Melehi were significant driving forces, albeit within a collective framework. Additionally, you both stood out as key figures in fostering connectivity, effectively bringing together artists from diverse backgrounds and countries in Asilah.

In the children’s workshop, you played a crucial role. I know you always tell me not to exaggerate your contributions, but in this case, it was definitely you who raised the idea of creating workshops for children. I’m aware that your experience with children and art pedagogy goes back further, as you had already been involved in art therapy, even in schools in Casablanca in the early 1970s. Can you share how the concept of children’s workshops and art pedagogy became so meaningful for you, and how you later implemented it in Asilah?

TM: When I was teaching at the Casablanca Art School, I also wanted to do something for younger audiences and the public schools. In 1976, I was asked by the headmistress of the Ibn Abbad school—a public school in a neglected neighborhood in Casablanca—to organize a free art workshop there. It turned out to be a great experience not only for me but also for the students, who joined with enthusiasm and, in many cases, did much better in their studies and their behavior as a result. That prompted me to study art therapy. In fact, every art historian knows that art serves as a form of therapy. I had a good friend, the psychiatrist Abdallah Ziou Ziou, who encouraged me and with whom I often exchanged ideas. Then, I had the opportunity in 1980 to open an art therapy workshop at the Children’s Hospital Ibn Rochd in Casablanca for two years. That was a great responsibility but also a fantastic experience.

MM: Did you implement the children’s workshop beginning with the first edition of the Moussem?

TM: Yes, since the very beginning . . . and I didn’t want the artists to join and teach . . . there was nothing to teach. The children would teach the artists (fig. 10)!

MM: The workshop’s approach was that we shouldn’t try to teach them anything; rather, they can teach us something.

TM: Certainly! They have valuable lessons to teach us and share. The issue was that at their school, students were asked to copy images, and instead of letting them express themselves, the children would have their drawings severely judged and corrected. During the first week, the first month, and the very first years of the Moussem, the doors of my workshop—which was organized in an open space between the street and the garden of the Raissouni Palace—were wide open, welcoming children and teenagers, boys and girls, from the streets and the neighborhoods around. They came, some from very poor backgrounds, others not. They came in, stayed, and played. Initially, there were approximately 20 children, and within two years, the number grew to around 200, possibly even 250 (fig. 11).

MM: Many of these children seem to have attended the workshop consistently over the years. Some of them you followed over the years; it wasn’t a one-time meeting. I believe you worked with several of them for many years, which implies that you saw some of them grow up, correct?

TM: Yes, many attended the workshop for many years; they literally grew up in it! And I kept in touch with them. Many have become excellent artists and some, art teachers. They still write to me, which is the most important thing. If somehow over the years, my name was forgotten by the Moussem’s organizers, young people who attended my workshops did not forget me …

MM: I’m curious to hear your thoughts on the independence of the Asilah Cultural Moussem compared to other more formal postcolonial festivals, which seemed more state-organized. For instance, the First World Festival of Black Arts in Dakar in 1966 was state-organized and highly political, as was the Baghdad biennale of 1974. Similarly, the Pan-African Cultural Festival in Algiers in 1969 had a distinctly centralized organization, despite its international character. Given that the Asilah Moussem was organized on a citywide scale rather than as a state-run event, was it more independent or less political from an official standpoint?

TM: We attended the Bagdad biennale of 1974 with Melehi—as the artists related to the Casablanca Art School representing Morocco. We attended the Pan-African Cultural Festival in Algiers in 1969 as well. All these events were fantastic artistically, but they indeed felt overtly political and official. Consequently, there were independent artist groups engaged in protest, like the Aouchem artist collective in Algeria and others. Asilah was different because it was organized locally by the municipality and the Al Muhit Cultural Association, and it involved local people primarily—this is why it was important to call it a moussem and not a festival.

MM: It’s quite interesting that it was just as international as in Algiers. It matched the internationalism of those earlier festivals, but the organization operated on a different scale. And, as you mentioned, it felt more local and grounded in some way, perhaps. So I believe it’s a very intriguing point regarding the originality of the Asilah Moussem within the broader context of postcolonial platforms, festivals, and transnational solidarities.

This conversation took place at a meeting of the Contemporary and Modern Art Perspectives (C-MAP) Africa group at MoMA in September 2024. The 2024 C-MAP Africa research program was conceived and organized by Beya Othmani (C-MAP Africa Fellow) and Ugochukwu-Smooth Nzewi (Steven and Lisa Tananbaum Curator, Department of Painting and Sculpture, and leader of the C-MAP Africa Group). Read more about C-MAP here

The post The Asilah Cultural Moussem: Tricontinental Meeting Points, Toni Maraini in conversation with Morad Montazami appeared first on post.