The performances conducted by the late Filipino artist Roberto Villanueva (1947–1995) prompted the effects and the facture of ritual. In 1989, a sprawling circular labyrinth constructed out of eight-foot runo reeds occupied the grounds of the Cultural Center of the Philippines (CCP) in Metro Manila. Inspired by a pattern found in the Cordilleran rice fields of northern Luzon, the labyrinth orchestrated a walk, or dance, toward the center, where one found a circular pit lined with river stones and presided over by totemic figures like the bulul, a carved wooden sculpture representing a guardian spirit. The center was an area resembling a dap-ay, a place for gatherings and rites, traditionally the foundation of Cordilleran learning. Archetypes: Cordillera Labyrinth, like many of Villanueva’s works, combined installation, chanting, magical invocations, and other ritualistic tropes drawn from Indigenous sources.¹ Writer Charlson L. Ong, in a 1989 article for the Daily Globe, articulates a popular impression of Villanueva toward the height of the artist’s prolific practice: “[Villanueva is] most everyone’s idea of a mumbaki—a Cordilleran shaman who invokes ancestral and nature spirits.”²

The events that signaled the opening and dismantling of the maze aspired to states of revelry and trance by way of an eclectic ensemble. Musicians wearing their malong, or tubular garments, played Muslim instruments. Cordilleran elders performed a cañao, a sacrificial ritual. Villanueva’s performative agency assembled a social world through degrees of mimicry and guise. Though not of Indigenous origins, Villanueva wore a bahag (loincloth) and applied white circular patterns on his skin, signaling affinities with Indigeneity through a competently invented self. Certain magical effects were attained through crafty, logistical trickery, while others solicited improbable cosmic interventions. At the closing ceremony, Villanueva performed a borrowed ritual to call rain to the site, expressing the artist-shaman’s ambitions to synchronize spirit and atmosphere. A documentary by Egay Navarro and Rica Concepcion condenses Villanueva’s fascinating duality through its title Showman/Shaman, a duplicitous play between guise and embodiment that parallels what he, in his life, had sought to overcome.  

While the trope of the artist-as-shaman is certainly as alluring as it is ethnographically contentious, it must be seen in light of a sensibility that thrived in the Baguio Arts Guild (BAG), of which Villanueva was a founding member. The Cordilleran region is a mountainous territory inhabited by several ethnolinguistic groups. In the nearby city of Baguio, BAG cultivated a subjectivity that not only sought affinities with the Indigenous but also found, within the halo of that affinity, the aesthetic and moral grounds on which to practice their postcolonial agency. This essay looks at the modern as the discursive milieu that grants the figure of the artist-shaman its historical vitality, which I will also call its anomaly.

In 1992, the Indigenous inclination of BAG was inscribed into a narrative of modernism when three of its members—Villanueva, Tommy Hafalla, and Willy Magtibay—received the Thirteen Artists Awards from the CCP. The Thirteen Artists was first conceived as an exhibitionary project in 1970. Then CCP director Roberto Chabet pinned its lineage to the historical group of Filipino modernists who had turned away from Classical values. The loose metric upon which he based the selection of artists—“recentness, a turning-away from past, familiar modes of art-making”³—expressed the modernist urge for forward traction which oriented succeeding iterations of the awards. The attention given to BAG in 1992, however, suggests other institutional desires. In his notes as CCP director for visual arts, Virgilio Aviado praised the awardees’ use of “old, ancient and traditional methods for modern expression.”⁴ Pointing to pursuits such as “the retribalization of the Filipino” and the search for identity through a recuperation of traditions, this sentiment stresses the national as it draws on the otherness of Indigeneity as a modernist cipher of the authentic.⁵

The term “tradition” is in itself duplicitous, one that assumes diverse uses in countries that share colonial histories. Art historians Geeta Kapur and Leonor Veiga, in tracing fragments of tradition within the largely secularized arenas of Indian and Indonesian art, rethink the notion of tradition as an ancestral practice that has survived modernization. Kapur approaches it as “an ambivalent, often culpable sign,” deployed in post-colonial nation-building, at times conceived and re-functioned for nationalist aims.⁶ Veiga cites British historian Eric Hobsbawm’s argument that the invention of tradition, often prompted by the birth of the modern nation-state, attempts to repair the “social voids caused by secularization.”⁷ Whether enacted on the level of the state or at the grassroots, the process of invention can be essentialist in its appropriations, as it lifts an ideal tradition from a ritual milieu and casts it along the quest for nationhood, identity, and origins.

It is from these discursive frames that I draw the term “invention”—but in conceiving it as a guise, I refer to invention as an activity that is intimate in that it arises out of appearance and bodily enactments. Its pronounced exteriority, commanding recognition through all its elaborate adorning, nonetheless strives for a depth of affinity. Shamanism is traditionally practiced within paradigms of the magical and the religious. The shaman is a medium who brings access to the sacred in communal life. Villanueva echoes this function of mediality and retools it into a poetics. In an undated essay titled “Cosmology in Art: An Experiential Process,” he writes that it “is the unique position of the artist as a go-between of the visual and recognizable world and that of the world that is beyond phenomena that strengthens the artist’s role in the society.”⁸ By rendering sensuous form to “unconscious feelings and thoughts of the social environment,”⁹ the artist-medium, much like the shaman, is seen to perform both a psychic duty and a social one. The artist may not necessarily aspire to summon the sacred but at least to access the subliminal through communal experience.

Early on, Villanueva’s poetics of a world-beyond-phenomena materialized in what several writers had contemporaneously tagged as his surrealist paintings. Taking part in a 1975 exhibition that announced the surrealistic as a common ground, Villanueva relished the ways in which this pictorial modality granted him “a freedom of expression” to mine “dreams, desires, and even fears,” a subliminal repertoire from which he found “a greater sense of realism.”¹⁰ Painting butterflies and arid terrains with winged and “evolutionary beasts,”¹¹ the artist signaled the dreamlike before assuming the register of social allegory, like the painting Aqui descansa el rio defunto, Pasig; año 1985, which divines the degradation of the Pasig River.

In these secular visions, the painter, allied to the prophet or seer, foils a faithful inscription of an external reality; he prefers the clairvoyant register to signal a harboring malaise. The subliminal in Archetypes may refer to the visceral qualities of ritual revelry heightened by drumming and dancing as well as to understandings of the primordial—from Indigeneity to the archetype of a labyrinth. Villanueva notes the archetype’s recurrence “in many ancient cultures—from Ancient Egypt to Neolithic Europe, particularly England, to the American Indians, the Chinese, the Australian Aborigines.”¹² Through the motifs and sociality of ritual, artist and viewer are presumably drawn closer to a primordial consciousness rooted in Indigeneity—an affinity that is nonetheless anomalous as it assumes that psychic license can collapse material difference.

Villanueva was raised in Metro Manila, the urban center of modernization in an archipelago defined by ethnic, linguistic, and cultural diversity. Indigeneity and tradition typically correspond to an imagination of what lies beyond this center, a vision of cultural periphery conceived according to colonial delineations of territory. Ethnolinguistic groups in the Cordilleran highlands, having resisted Spanish colonial efforts, retained significations of otherness during the American occupation as they cast a reverse-image of what was largely seen as a Hispanized and Christianized population in the lowlands. In Philippine modernist painting, this otherness becomes material for an artist’s self-conscious evocations of identity and shared origins, which are at times prone to essentialist portrayals. As Filipino art historian Flaudette May Datuin remarks of modernist Victorio Edades’s depictions of a Cordilleran idyll in Two Igorot Women (1913), “Identity is presented as an eternal and unchanging ‘primitive’ or ‘ethnic’ moment, often associated with the chthonic and submissive female ‘savage.’”¹³

Villanueva’s anomaly rests on a more pronounced representational ambivalence as it is the artist’s body that gestures and personifies, while the otherness of the highlands remains the milieu’s chief source of invention.¹⁴ The fraught territorial divides—wherein periphery and center ideologically align with constructions of tradition and modernity—produce anxieties surrounding the right to represent. Villanueva’s shamanism may thus inspire contrasting attitudes: on the one hand, the celebratory yearning for precolonial identity and then, on the other, the charge of appropriation and self-exoticization. If both these viewpoints spin on tense questions of authenticity, might other readings be possible when we consider what it is about the mediality of the artist-shaman that is fruitfully anomalous?

Villanueva’s biography unwittingly subverts the myth of identity as origin. The anomaly of a body standing in as a medium, proxy, or artifice emphasizes identity’s performativity, one that entails a prolonged process of affinity to stage and to overcome its masquerade. His consciousness of ethnic diversity developed during his childhood visits to Palawan and, eventually, through projects in documentary filmmaking, where he observed and befriended Indigenous groups in several parts of the country. In the late 1970s, dismayed by what anthropologist and BAG member David Baradas has described as a commercialized arts scene that favored homogenizing Western styles, Villanueva moved from Manila to Baguio.¹⁵ This transition brought crushing financial strains; he was then a young father developing an art practice with little commercial or institutional support. What perhaps relieved these precarities was a growing sense of affinity with the thriving cultural and spiritual life he encountered in his visits to the Cordilleras—an affective kinship that differs from systematic ethnography. Scholar Katrin de Guia notes Villanueva’s apprenticeship with an Ifugao mumbaki as well as his visits to healers and mystics in Japan, the United States, and Australia.¹⁶

This affinity with the Indigenous coalesced into a politics of identity through the formation of BAG in 1987. The end of the decade witnessed demands for the state to establish regional autonomy in the Cordilleras. Members of BAG foregrounded cultural identity by inflecting genres of Western origins—film, painting, photography, sculpture, performance—with markers of the local. Materials were sourced from immediate environments and themes carried Indigenous motifs. As an alternative to the secular, commercial, and individualized model of art production in Manila, BAG advanced an ethos of communality: disciplined, spirited organizing—which bred the artist-run international Baguio Art Festival—and a freewheeling camaraderie among travelers, musicians, performers, and artists of all persuasions. The modernist atmosphere of experimentation energized BAG’s postcolonial quest—a quest not just for national origins but also for a real sense of originality, a defining self-consciousness that yielded, for Villanueva, the liberties and the conceit of representation.

In probing the meeting points between tradition and modernity, Geeta Kapur advises us to look “not for hybrid solutions . . . but for a dialectic.”¹⁷ Leonor Veiga then nominates the category of a “third avant-garde” that recognizes the postcolonial agency of artists in using appropriation as a conceptual strategy to capture tradition’s transgressive stance. The “third avant-garde,” in undoing “the taxonomical division between art and ethnography,”¹⁸ fulfills what Kapur has described as a “double-dismantle.”¹⁹ It objects to invented traditions that serve nationalist interests, and it defies the Western monopoly of the avant-garde.²⁰ While much of Veiga’s astute propositions resonate with the conditions of BAG—chiefly, with its ambitions to undo Western aesthetic models and modes of display—Villanueva’s visceral and spiritual performances seem somewhat at odds with the transgressive, radical, and antagonistic edge that defines the vanguardist posture.

The artist-shaman is positioned here as an anomalous figure of postcolonial modernity. What I have been describing as an anomaly is motivated less by the wish to advance than by a long look backward, a nostalgic turning that is naively but also deliberately revivalist in its urges. In working with ritual, however, Villanueva was not only concerned with the symbolic operations that bind it to tradition but also interested in its facture, its design, and its plasticity, recalling the modernist fascination with medium specificity and surface. The artist-shaman thus commits impieties in their revivals, animating the atmosphere of ritual while remaining unfaithful to its ethnographic source.

An anomaly is an instance of irregularity, an improbability, or a moment of anachronism; it derives its effects by virtue of its dislocations. When Villanueva traveled to stage more ritualistic performances in countries like Japan and New York, he seemed more inclined to approach Indigeneity as an activity of invention and guise. It is perhaps the artist-shaman’s more improvised works, like the 1991 project Panhumuko, that reveal another side to his mediality. Largely intuitive, diverging from the elaborate ensembles of Archetypes, Panhumuko foregrounds the shared, symbolic, subliminal space of ritual, which is also a conceptual space to address modernity and its attendant malignancies.

Showman/Shaman documents the performance.²¹ In 1991, the eruption of Mount Pinatubo in central Luzon displaced several Indigenous Aeta communities, forcing them into evacuation camps. Panhumuko, a Sambal word that translates as “surrender,” was prompted by the intention to make an offering that could appease Apo Namalyari, a deity of the Aetas. Around this time, Villanueva had been preparing to travel to New York to serve as an artist-in-residence upon the invitation of the Filipino cultural group Amauan.²² He was conceiving an engagement that could inform his work at the residency. Villanueva, accompanied by documentarians and a linguist, made the trip to Zambales to find Aetas receptive to holding a ritual offering. The plan did not work with one group, but he was welcomed by another, whose elders (whom he described as “shamans of the community”) reacted with enthusiasm.²³

The central element of this project was the ritual atmosphere approximating a collective trance; the making of the installation-offering appeared like a means to achieve this end. Improvisation, play, and eclecticism marked Panhumuko: Cordilleran dances inspired Villanueva’s actions, the Aetas made percussive sounds with bamboo drums and tin cans, and intuitively, the group assembled the installation by an open well by scattering coals, erecting bamboo stems, hanging vegetables, and arranging candles shaped in human form. A semblance of this resulting material form was then constructed as an indoor installation at Lincoln Square Gallery, New York a month after. Villanueva’s impious, eclectic acts seem like an echo of folk religiosity, a cultural response to the colonial imposition of Christian belief. Writing about the human-shaped candles taken from Quiapo Church in Manila, Villanueva relays his fascination with these ritual objects whose “roots are in the animistic traditions of the past” but are now integrated in Christian practices, an integration he regards as “one of the richest points in Filipino culture.”²⁴

Villanueva’s ritual performances may be read as sites of a similar dialectic. Episodes of calamity most sharply manifest an existential rupture, what Villanueva intuits as “man’s alienation from nature,” which brings about environmental havoc.²⁵ The poetics of a world-beyond-phenomena—fulfilled in Panhumuko as a communal experience of psychic release—signal a postcolonial disavowal of modernization’s rational processes. Villanueva favors installations because their assembly calls for communal acts that “quiet the rattles of intellect and allows intuition to reign.”²⁶ For hours in Zambales, drumming, dancing, and chanting ensue as they build the offering. As a performative gesture, Panhumuko attempts to alleviate a collective unease toward modernity’s malignancies, here construed as calamity, loss of community, and ecological disconnect.²⁷

Villanueva held Indigeneity as a modality of being that may yield a cure for modern problems. The artist then assumed the role of a medium to access an eroded subjectivity or to approximate its guise. What he aspired for, it seems, was an exit from modernity, an exit that was never totally fulfilled when modernity created the conditions for his agency and emergence. The anomaly of ritual proceeds from the artist-shaman’s autonomy and invention. Villanueva’s charismatic performances, while sympathetic to Indigeneity, claim a duplicitous worldliness, an independence that appears to keep him unbeholden to one group or spiritual belief. It is through this anomalous position that he performed his dislocations, ruptured categories, and constituted the self as an improbability.

The artist died of leukemia in 1995. The early onset of illness and exhaustion may have manifested in the pain he expressed during the ritual of Panhumuko, which led the Aeta elders to initiate a curing ritual.²⁸ If an anomaly absorbs the time’s contradictions, the modern played out its paradox fully through his body, through to its demise, as though the shaman also absorbed the very malignancy he sought to cure. This emblematic affliction finally makes palpable the contradictory status assumed by the artist and the shaman in modernity, as these figures dwell at the tense point of magicality and marginalization that comes with embodied, material, and terminal pains. To foreground an anomaly is to anticipate such fetishizations, duplicities, and ambivalences. Villanueva’s shamanism was in some ways a show and a representative conceit. It was also a profound affinity, an invention that was, at the same time, his becoming.

The author is grateful to Agnes Arellano, Billy Bonnevie, Rica Concepcion, and Kawayan de Guia for sharing their archives, documentation, and memories.

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

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

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

I offer to myself the world in a phantasmagorical 

Effort of critical transformation

What is it?

It is the outcome of a mysterious delirium

That contracts my fingers

On the multicolored pastels

Which trace the words and the shapes

That burst on the paper like a retarded fusion

Of pachydermic frustrations

Of transcendental relationships

The ramifications degenerate themselves

The stories are no longer listened to

The tales are not anymore tackled

In a warm and re-comforting impetus

We do not listen we look at

We accept with infected eyes

Swollen by the resignation and the demission

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

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

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

Not thinking is to burst out laughing

Like a bomb

Obscured by the night

By the incredible misadventure

Of limited freedom

No matter what the silence 

In the illuminated darkness [. . .]

Who are you Women who submit

To sensual passion

In the shadowy houses

With half-opened windows

Looking into interior courtyards

Women fatal and mysterious 

Powerful in their innocence 

Out of the ordinary

Out of time 

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

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

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Articulations of the relational have been shifting in parallel with the recent turn in global contemporary art toward validating ecological and indigenous practices. This shift invites a consideration of what exactly constitutes the relational among artistic and curatorial efforts within the global contemporary. And among Southeast Asian exemplars, the multimedia practice of artist Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook (born 1957, Thailand) comes to mind as a rich prompt via which to think about the nuances, complications, or possibilities in the relational.

Hinting at such nuances, Roger Nelson and Chanon Kenji Praepipatmongkol’s essay accompanying a recent translation of Araya’s writing proposes the neologism “transunitary” to characterize Araya’s practice: “It is between and across and beyond its many parts and modes. . . . It is a singular practice whose polysemy and sometimes almost dissociative polyvocality circles around ethical, existential concerns.”¹It is striking to note that the thematically diverse range of critical and curatorial discourses on Araya’s practice converge around each of two poles. The first implies that her artistic evocation of the relational hinges on a certain similarity in existential conditions. This does not imply shared suffering through common experiences or circumstances, but rather affective solidarity through proximate conditions of existential marginality—for instance, the similarities between female subjects in patriarchal gender regimes, or those between the lives of powerless, marginalized humans and the lives of animals dependent on human care or vulnerable to human violence. ² Meanwhile, the second discursive tendency dwells on the radical independence, singularity, and intransigence of Araya’s practice, thereby associating the relational with the potential in dissociation, that is, with the artist’s agency in terms of establishing distance from or separating from her immediate artistic and social contexts.³

Here, I would like to think about the question of the relational in contemporary artistic practice from another angle, one more explicitly attentive to encounters or entanglements with difference.⁴ I detour to the artist’s usage of the cinematic tableau as a method of framing, displaying, and addressing difference. In the context of contemporary moving image practices, the tableau has a broader, less traditional meaning than that of restaging an artwork. The cinematic tableau can instead be understood as a compositional form that draws attention to the displaying and viewing of images.

Araya explores the relational potential of the tableau most fully in two video installation series: The Two Planets (2008) and Village and Elsewhere (2011), both of which are composed of short audiovisual vignettes that are usually exhibited as multichannel video and photographic installations. The individual works in each series are almost identical in terms of visual composition. Araya re-situates one or two large-scale, ostentatiously gold-framed reproductions of famous western paintings in outdoor or neighborhood spaces in the rural outskirts of the northern Thai city of Chiang Mai. The video camera frames these reproductions and their visually associative physical surroundings in a straight-on shot. On-screen, the framed reproductions are frontally displayed in the background. In the foreground, small groups of people are visible from the back, and their murmurings, chatter, gossip, speculations, and digressions as they look at the reproductions audible. A reproduction of the work by Vincent van Gogh of a man and woman asleep by a haystack is placed in a lush green field of banana trees and other crops in Van Gogh’s The Midday Sleep and the Thai Villagers (2008; fig. 1); a reproduction of a painting by Edouard Manet of picnickers hangs in a bamboo wood in Manet’s Luncheon on the Grass and the Thai Villagers (2008); and a reproduction of a painting of peasant women by Jean-François Millet is beautifully positioned at the edge of a lake, seemingly suspended above the calm surface of the water in Millet’s The Gleaners and the Thai Farmers (2008). Inside the prayer hall of a neighborhood Buddhist temple, its wooden panels painted burgundy, two enormous and provocative reproductions are placed side by side at one end of the hall; behind them on the wall are brightly colored murals displaying scenes from Theravada tales (Village and Elsewhere: Artemisia Gentileschi’s Judith Beheading Holofernes, Jeff Koons’s Untitled and Thai Villagers, 2011).

In each of these audiovisual vignettes, the duration of the scene displayed approximates the duration of spectatorship by a figural group whose faces we do not see. The visualization of the group signifies “Thai Villagers,” or “Thai Farmers,” transfiguring people who, in everyday life, live in the same suburb as the artist. In each tableau, the group is sitting on the ground, their backs to us, facing the framed reproduction. The shortest of these videos are nearly ten minutes, and the longer ones about twenty-five. Someone comments on a detail that strikes them about the picture in the frame. Another person observes something about this face or that body, this plant, that tool, this hat, or that dish. The group amuses itself, speculating wildly on the backstory in the displayed scene. Sometimes they prod one another to dart up to the framed picture and point out a small detail—or to caress the image of a face, the skin, a body part. With the van Gogh reproduction, the group contemplates the placement of the sickle, the number of wheels on the wooden cart, the total number of oxen legs visible, and the casting of the sunlight on the haystack, all in order to decipher winning lottery numbers. Their conversation flows easily, often straying from the framed reproduction to random neighborhood gossip. Each video is unscripted and staged as a one-take piece using a static shot. The editing is minimal, involving discreet jump cuts to crop out of parts of the conversation without changing the visual composition, giving the impression that the vignettes are displaying spectatorial experiences in real time.

Film theoretical scholarship on the tableau tends to imply a continuation of modernist cinema and museum spectatorship.⁵ This modernist genealogy continues to exert an influence over present-day thinking about contemporary art cinema and the moving image. Here, contemplation remains a persistent marker of the value of spectatorial experience, along with the conception of the apparatus of display that situates the spectator as the solitary beholder of the artwork. Agnes Petho, for instance, observes that the contemporary “tableau-film” ⁶, is, in effect, a continuation of the modernist apparatus for the display of artwork. That is, the artwork is presented for the eyes of the spectator, for contemplation by its beholder. In order for the spectator “to comprehend the picture as a whole,” the work is “displayed in a manner that visibly separates it from the surrounding space,” implying the spectatorial experience is one of intimate, solitary beholding.⁷

Petho differentiates this mode of spectatorship from the more familiar model in which the filmic tableau represents an occasional, exhibitionistic moment of suspension of narrative flow. Her proposition concerning the spectatorial mode of the contemporary tableau-film helps us to grasp the precision with which Araya’s series decenters that model. Rather than reproducing the ideology of the cinematic tableau that is indebted to the genealogy of western modernist art history, the form of display of The Two Planets and Village and Elsewhere instead constellates two incommensurable spectatorial models. The apparatus of contemplative beholding is figured, frontally displayed, and simultaneously entwined with another genealogy of displaying, spectating, and experiencing images, one anchored in improvisatory, social, and participatory interactions.

Village and Elsewhere: Artemisia Gentileschi’s Judith Beheading Holofernes, Jeff Koons’s Untitled and Thai Villagers (fig. 3) is an especially suggestive example in this regard. The framed scene takes place inside rather than outside, in the public space of the prayer hall of a Buddhist temple. In the background of the tableau shot, we see an enormous gold-framed reproduction of an untitled painting by Jeff Koons that is displayed frontally on the left side of the screen. Beside it, toward the right side of the screen, there is a reproduction of a painting by Artemisia Gentileschi, which is encased in a matching gold frame equal in size to the one framing Koons’s work. In the foreground, there are several rows of lively spectator-figures, children and neatly dressed older women—including Araya herself—all of whom are sitting with their backs to the camera on a fandango pink carpet facing the two reproductions. Unlike in most of the other works in the series, a figure stands next to the framed reproductions and faces the camera. He is a Buddhist monk who, for the duration of the video, delivers a humorous, didactic sermon on the third Buddhist precept, the prohibition of sexual misconduct, using the images as visual aids. The response of his audience of unruly children and aunties veers between raucous opining and gleefully digressive and associative interpretations of details in the images to chanting enthusiastic replies by rote. The last group of visible figures in this work are sāmaṇeras, or novice monks, and dogs of different sizes, whose errant wandering off- and on-screen during the unusual sermon disarrays the loose geometric lines of the tableau.

This improvisatory and participatory spectatorship recalls another genealogy of moving-image exhibition: the live narration of films. As with a number of other global majority cinematic cultures throughout the twentieth century, such practices have been the predominant mode of film exhibition and spectatorship in Thailand. Film “versioning” artists toured the country and strayed into borderlands, performing live or as-live vocal improvisations accompanying film projection.⁸ They served as human mediators of film projection performances whose agency in making films come to life, and whose translation of highly mobile, reproducible images into utterances addressed to specific audience congregations, constituted another ground from which to re-pose questions concerning cinema’s ontology and its historical or possible modes of spectatorship. In Araya’s staged tableau, the monk-narrator seems to channel the ancestral figure of the film “versionist.” His improvisatory montaging of a story sequence from Koons to Gentileschi resources his fabulation of a morality tale concerning the spectacular punishment of an adulterous man. The duration of display of this tableau makes perceptible how the monk’s sermon thrives on the sociality and unpredictability of spectatorial energy. To spectate here is to participate in the liveness of improvisation, asserting, exchanging, interjecting, and derailing meaning. Presenting the monk’s versioning and installing traveling, reproducible images inside the temple compound should not be understood in blunt terms as gestures of artistic disruption to the institutional and affective functioning of this place of worship. It is worth recalling that the Buddhist temple ground in Thailand and elsewhere has historically played host to, and certainly continues to host, wide-ranging forms of public celebrations and festivities including itinerant film projection.

In one of her many pieces of writing connecting her visual and textual practice, Araya tells a story of how she came upon the idea to make Village and Elsewhere and The Two Planets:

            เป็นในเช้าตรู่วันหนี่ง ฉันนั่งอยู่ในห้องอาหารกว้างของโรงแรมในเมืองหลวงหนึ่งของยุโรป มีกาแฟร้อนบนโต๊ขณะมองดูหิมะตกขาวบนถนนในเมืองและลานกว้าง ฉันนั่งดูเมืองสลับไปกับอ่านบทความที่อ่านค้างอยู่ว่าด้วยศิลปะอาเซียน ท่อนหนึ่งของบทความพูดถึงการพัฒนาศิลปะของเอเชียจะเป็นไปได้จำต้องได้รับการวิจารณ์ที่แหลมคมจาภายนอก หมายถึงยุโรปและที่อื่นๆ

            ด้วยเหตุที่ชีวิตฉันแวดล้อมไปด้วยสองสิ่งอย่างซึ่งต่างกันคือ ศิลปะซึ่งถูกดูแลดีราวกับจะไม่มีวันตาย กับ อีกอย่างคือเมื่อฉันย้ายออกจากเมืองมาอยู่ในชนบท, ภาพธรรมชาติ การเกิดและตายง่ายๆ ของคนในหมู่บ้าน

                        ฉันวางสองอย่างไว้คู่กัน ศิลปะชิ้นเอกของโลกกับ ชาวนา ชาวสวน สวนทางกับประโยคเคยอ่านข้างต้น

Early one morning, I was seated in a large restaurant inside a hotel, somewhere in a European capital city, with hot coffee on the table. The streets and square outside were covered in pristine white snow. I alternated between watching the world go by and reading an article I had started on ASEAN art. At one point, the author asserts that Asian art can only develop if artists are stimulated by sharp external criticism, meaning from Europe or elsewhere.

I exist in two different environments. One is the world in which artworks are so well looked after they seem immortal. When I moved out of the city, I encountered the other world, a world of nature and of birth and death without fanfare of people in the village.

I placed these two beings together—the world’s renowned artwork, and the farmers—reversing the logic prescribed in the sentence I had read.⁹

Art historian Sayan Daengklom cautions against the reductiveness of reading Araya’s tableaux as a reversing of the Eurocentric mentality expressed in the article she had come across: the provision of an opportunity for the native to talk back and to criticize famous western artworks.¹⁰ Another parallel logic, that of inclusion, likewise meets a dead end when used merely to endorse the socially and symbolically privileged artist for making artworks that apparently endow voice and visibility to the underrepresented. Equally reductive would be to conclude that Araya made these tableaux by manipulating specific groups of people with her symbolic privileges: Araya the artist-academic luring unsuspecting villagers and farmers into her frame in order to expose their ignorance about western modernist art and its spectatorial and museological conventions.

How then to think differently about the relational form of Araya’s tableaux—their constellating, staging, and superimposing of incommensurable modes of display and spectatorship? The logic of display and address in Araya’s series might be thought of as a twist on Jacques Rancière’s proposition concerning the potentiality of art in the aesthetic regime.¹¹ In his argument, the potential efficacy of this regime is premised on dissociating the artwork’s form from its presumed effect. It also implies a conception of community structured in separation and asynchrony. Aesthetic community in this definition concerns the common capacity of every person to experience art in dissimilar and unpredictable ways, and it implies community in absentia, as the speculative future. While differentiating his proposition from western modernist ideas regarding the autonomy of artwork and aesthetic experience, Rancière’s characterization of the potentiality of the aesthetic break still rests on an assumption of the necessary solitude of aesthetic experience. His proposition tends to imply that, at best, artistic works are efforts that, in their very form, explore “the very tension between the apart and the together . . . either by questioning the ways in which the community is tentatively produced or by exploring the potential of community entailed in separation itself.”¹² What if the potentiality of the aesthetic regime—its unpredictability—is less a matter of the separation/solitude of the beholder in their aesthetic experiencing than of the sensorial and perceptual encountering of difference? Here, Édouard Glissant’s proposition regarding the necessity of the poetics of relations in what he calls the “chaos-world” provides a compelling counterpoint. “Chaos-world” is Glissant’s name for the totality of the contemporary world, in which inhabitants live within multiple temporalities and do so within a drastically accelerated time of intercultural contacts and connections. The chaos-world is “the shock, the intertwining, the repulsions, attractions, complicities, oppositions and conflicts between the cultures of peoples.”¹³ Unpredictability is likewise a foundational value in Glissant’s conception of the potential of the aesthetic or the poetic. Yet, unlike Ranciere’s definition of the aesthetic regime, Glissant posits the relational as a situated imagining, opening out from one’s locality and experiencing the extensiveness, immeasurability, openness, and unpredictability of connecting and colliding with others near and far in the totality of the chaos-world. Here, the relational becomes the sensation and the potential of entangling in radically different or incommensurable forms, modes, and beings. With this in mind, I would like to end by drawing attention to how Araya’s tableaux stage encounters with the foreign, and entangle us, the off-screen spectators, in the time-space of the mise en abyme.

The tableau display of the gold-framed reproductions references and aggrandizes museum conventions of hanging and presenting artworks on walls, an exhibition apparatus that lays claim to addressing everyone. Yet the spectators in The Two Planets and Village and Elsewhere exceed the boundary of that universalizing assertion with their actualization of what, following Elaine Castillo, we might call the spectatorship of the unintended.¹⁴ At the same time, their encounters with the reproductions take place in spaces that do not cohere with the museological value of suspending the time and space of daily life. The “Thai Villagers” and “Thai Farmers” in Araya’s tableaux are shown engaging with framed reproductions of art in neighborhood spaces—the local field, temple, and bamboo forest. The spectatorship of the unintended that they enact is a kind of unruly hosting, an extending of hospitality to the foreign, an unpredictable engagement with mobile artifacts from distant lands, cultures, and times.

An iteration of Village and Elsewhere: Artemisia Gentileschi’s Judith Beheading Holofernes, Jeff Koons’s Untitled and Thai Villagers at 100 Tonson Gallery (Bangkok, 13 October 2011 – 31 January 2012) reproduces and re-situates the audiovisual vignette in the format of a single-channel projection of a video within a video. In this example, the projected display shows the sermon video playing on a television screen inside what appears to be a Japanese Buddhist temple and being watched by a small group of monks seated to one side of the television screen. Here, Araya quite explicitly draws attention to the mise-en-abyme structure of the work, highlighting its function as a method of spectatorial entanglement.¹⁵ Each of us, as off-screen spectators, becomes ensnared as the additional figure in the group, the incidental commencer of another space of viewing-participation, situated beyond and “behind” the arrayed bodies of the aunties, children, and dogs on the TV screen, and the monks in Japan whose profiles fill the foreground. In this way, Araya’s installation undoes the separation between the work as an object of viewing, and the spectator as a subject of vision. The mise-en-abyme structure of this and other works in her tableaux creates a preposterous effect of vacillation between the vision of the spectating subject and the spectator as object.

My usage of the notion of the preposterous is inspired by Mieke Bal’s method of theoretic fiction. Bal analyzes the relationship between the work of Caravaggio and that of the contemporary artists who “quote” him, doing so in such a way as to conceptualize the method of “preposterous history” and its accompanying contemporary baroque epistemology.¹⁶ This historiographic method runs counter to art history’s traditional historiographic method, in which the relationship between historical and contemporary works of art is one of the former’s influence over the latter. Bal proposes instead that contemporary artistic works constitute the starting point with which to engage with, understand, or reenvision historical works, and in so doing, to grasp precisely the historical characteristics of those works from the concerns and vantage points of the present. This is the “preposterousness” in question, a dynamic of inquiry constituting a kind of baroque vision characterized by a “vacillation between the subject and object of that vision and which changes the status of both.”¹⁷ Embracing the necessity of reestablishing the terms of relations between entities, acknowledging their singularity while asserting their contemporaneous status, this baroque sense of preposterousness is highly applicable to Araya’s practice. Focusing on Araya’s use of the tableau enables us to better grasp the way the artist makes relational forms. Insofar as her work entangles beings, species, roles, and worlds—the living and the dead, women and dogs, the artworld and the village, the spectator, the participant, and the artist—it might be described, to riff on Nelson and Chanon Kenji’s neologism, as a kind of trans-relational method performing the duration and movement of associating radically different beings and incommensurable worlds. What is so significant about Araya’s practice lies here, in the performing and framing of relations of radically different beings, and of incommensurable and yet contemporaneous entities, in ways that are preposterous, wildly disorientating, and fully lived.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Rootless Generation?

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

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

Queering the Catwalk

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

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

“We feed and grow on poison.”

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

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

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

In the Decade of Darkness

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Builders of Utopia

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

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

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

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

The post <strong>Builders of Utopia: Avant-Garde Fashion and its Queer Undertones in Tbilisi from the 1990s to the Present</strong> appeared first on post.

In this essay, Veronika Molnar writes about the Hungarian Roma artist Omara (1945-2020) whose diverse practice challenged the status quo of Hungary’s contemporary art scene. The essay also highlights the importance of the RomaMoMA project, which offers a transnational approach to presenting and contextualizing the works of Roma artists inside and outside the framework of established art organizations.

I paint the story of my life and my opinion about the world

If you frown: do it after me . . .

But your eye be removed as well—and you be a gypsy . . .

Be deeply humiliated everywhere you go from childhood to this day

Otherwise, I’m not interested in your opinion . . .

—Omara, “If you have taken the time to see Omara’s scribbles,” 2011

It took a simple gesture for Omara (Oláh Mara, 1945–2020) to transcend the category of “naive gypsy painter,” as she liked to call herself, and become an internationally recognized contemporary artist: handing over her glass eye to Hungarian American businessman and philanthropist George Soros at the opening of the First Roma Pavilion at the 52nd Venice Biennial in 2007. Or at least, that is the moment that curator and art historian Tímea Junghaus has deemed pivotal in reframing Omara’s artistic practice, in which “actions, media presence, and performances” became an integral part.¹ During her lifetime, Omara relentlessly worked on carving out space for herself and other Roma artists in contemporary art institutions, which have historically refused to represent the voices of the Roma, even though the Roma are the biggest ethnic minority in Europe. Omara fought for artistic agency through painting, public appearances, and actions both inside and outside of art institutions—from exhibiting her work in a Hungarian prison² to creating the first Roma gallery in 1993 in her apartment.³ Her works were recently presented at Documenta 15 in Kassel, Germany, by RomaMoMA—a transnational, collaborative project of OFF-Biennále Budapest and the European Roma Institute for Arts and Culture (ERIAC).

Born to a Roma family in Monor, Hungary, and raised in humble economic circumstances, Omara married a “peasant”—as she referred to non-Roma Hungarians⁴—and juggled raising their daughter with demanding jobs, including often working as a cleaning lady. She only began making art in 1988, at the age of forty-three, when she was suffering from a migraine: she drew a portrait of Sophia Loren, and by the time it was completed, her pain was gone.⁵ Realizing the healing potential of art-making, Omara began to paint episodes from her life, including her childhood memories and traumas. As a Romani woman and multiple cancer survivor, her firsthand experiences of dispossession, sexism, anti-Gypsyism, police violence, and neglect within the healthcare and education systems became the subjects of many of her paintings. In the beginning, she was humiliated for her artistic endeavors, even by family members, but her career quickly took a turn.

Omara always had an ambiguous relationship with art institutions: from early on, she had good instinct in terms of navigating their power structures but nonetheless played by her own rules, which were often seen as eccentric or even scandalous. In 1991, at the beginning of her career, she brought a painting depicting her eye surgery to the Hungarian National Gallery for evaluation. According to the artist, the director himself encouraged her to continue working.⁶ The following year, an incident at one of her early exhibitions in Szeged, Hungary, inspired a complete shift in her approach to painting and exhibiting work. A self-portrait depicting the artist on all fours, looking for her glass eye in the grass after a relative’s funeral—a real occurrence—was mistakenly titled “Mara Resting,” while a double portrait of Omara and her sister was mislabeled “Lesbians.” When the artist found out what the latter title meant, she was outraged and painted a picture of lesbians as a gift to the curator.⁷ After this episode, she began to inscribe her paintings with text to avoid misinterpretation.⁸

Her inscriptions, which she feverishly scribbled onto the surface of the paintings, often fill all the space around the protagonists in her flat, stylized compositions, sometimes even running over them. One sentence cuts into another, breaking the rules of grammar and linearity, forcing viewers to puzzle over the words and images as they attempt to follow the artist’s tempo and logic. Reconstructing language as a way to reflect her own unique voice, experience, and frustrations is in itself an act of defiance, but many of her exclamations are not only narrative, but also performative: if readers are willing to engage with the text, they might be blessed, cursed, or given instructions—for example, from “May—my—Gypsy—God—bless you!!!!!!!!!!” to “Think whatever you want!” Moreover, these exclamations were often extended into physical space and time. During exhibition openings, television interviews, and video performances,⁹ the artist frequently read them out loud, laughing, emphasizing, and adding further context and comments to her statements.

Woven into personal narratives, Omara’s paintings frequently comment on political events and criticize the systemic discrimination in Hungary against the Roma by the police, politicians, and others. One of her late paintings depicts the artist with two policemen, and the inscription reads: “Oh, but I pity you. You will never know what it is to be a good person—to sleep soundly. I still don’t understand why it—is—not—taught—to—the—police—that—a—70-year-old—Gypsy—woman—can’t—be—labeled—as—homeless?” In the text, Omara further describes how she was on her way to a hotel in Budapest, wearing a turban, to meet with the former Indonesian ambassador when the police stopped her to ask for her ID. In a short interview video, she adds, “If they knew I’m making money off of them, they wouldn’t fucking humiliate me.” In another example, “The peasant can drink in the pub from the social aid?. . .,” Omara calls out the mayor of Monok, whose legislation restricted how its residents could spend their government assistance: “Tell the mayor of Monok that my pension is 28,000 Ft [70 USD], he can tell his mother how to spend her pension but not the gypsy.” In an act of defiance, the artist painted herself and her daughter in the lush garden of her “luxury shack,” where both Omara and her animals are depicted smoking, as anyone receiving assistance was not allowed to buy cigarettes with it.

For more than two decades, Omara’s artistic practice was understood only in the context of her paintings, yet to fully comprehend the artist’s significance, it is crucial to analyze her interventions, media appearances, and public exposures—which might be referred to as performances, although I prefer to use the term “enactments.” Following Andrea Fraser, using this term allows us to “look past the specifically and narrowly defined artistic motives and meanings of what we do, framed by art discourse above all . . . and begin to take into account the full range of motives and meanings of our activities.”¹⁰ Omara never named, recorded, or framed these actions as works of art; indeed, many of them live on in the form of anecdotes and oral histories, or as video documentation by others. When viewed as integral to Omara’s body of work, they position the artist as a pioneer in bringing Roma resistance into the contemporary art institution.

Omara’s most cited and best-remembered enactment is her “I wasn’t invited scene,” in which she repeatedly interrupted art events and openings featuring her work. On these occasions, Omara made theatrical entrances to different institutions, and called out the organizers for failing to invite her to their event—whether or not this was actually the case—as Junghaus has recalled.¹¹ During one such intervention, analyzed in a roundtable by Tímea Junghaus and sociologist Éva Kovács, she interrupted a screening at the Kunsthalle in Budapest, appearing in a white dressing gown and white turban, causing a scene and accusing the organizers of leaving her out. Her interruptions could seem playful or hostile, depending on one’s awareness of her practice, but the timing, location, and outfit she wore were always strategically constructed. As Kovács has pointed out, Omara utilized these actions to carve out institutional spaces where she could stand.¹² Junghaus called them “ritualized productions, which are shaped and repeated under and due to oppression, building on the power of prohibition and taboos, and fleeing the horror of exclusion.”¹³ In her interventions, as well as in her media appearances, Omara enacted stereotypes projected onto her as a means of both provocation and self-protection.

A comparison between Omara’s interventions and the performances of conceptual artist and cultural critic Lorraine O’Grady’s¹⁴ alter ego, Mlle Bourgeoise Noire (Miss Black Middle Class),¹⁵ demonstrates how Romani women artists’ struggles within Central and Eastern European art institutions parallel those of Black women artists in the United States—albeit in a different period and under different sociopolitical circumstances¹⁶—and sheds light on how Omara’s work might find its place in the art historical canon. Mlle Bourgeoise Noire made her debut in 1980 at an opening at Just Above Midtown, a New York avant-garde art space championing Black artists. Wearing an evening gown and cape assembled from 180 pairs of white gloves, she performed a disruptive action in which she whipped herself with cat-o’-nine tails (transformed from the chrysanthemums she handed out) and shouted poems of protest, one of which ended in “BLACK ART MUST TAKE MORE RISKS!!!” in criticism of Black artists she believed were catering to white audiences.¹⁷ She formulated this “guerilla-theater intervention”¹⁸ as a response to the exhibition Afro-American Abstraction, which had opened earlier that year at the Institute for Art and Urban Resources (now MoMA PS1).¹⁹ As Zoé Whitley has pointed out, “With Mlle Bourgeoise Noire, O’Grady could, from a unique perspective, address both systemic exclusions in the art museum and prevailing assumptions of what comprised the so-called Black experience in many culturally specific art spaces.”²⁰

Through utilizing different cultural markers and voicing their demands loud and clear, both Omara and O’Grady disrupted the normative behaviors of art institutions, pointing out their pervasive whiteness, which was present in the 2000s in Hungary just as much as it was in the mid-1970s and 1980s in the United States.²¹ But while O’Grady’s work is finally receiving the attention it deserves,²² Omara’s is not. In fact, her legacy has been more challenging to secure, even though the artist’s estate has become very active in showcasing her work both locally and internationally.²³ While Omara passed away two years ago, a major Hungarian or Eastern European institution has yet to step forward to hold a large-scale retrospective—the Ludwig Museum in Budapest could potentially initiate such an exhibition, as it owns eight paintings from Omara’s renowned blue series.²⁴

In response to the question of how the works and legacies of outstanding Roma artists like Omara could be shepherded, RomaMoMA has offered a potential solution. Modeled after a “nomadic, flexible institutional operation,” RomaMoMA critically approaches questions such as how a “Roma Museum of Contemporary Art” could operate to collect, present, and preserve the works of artists of Roma origin, or how we could “think about the cultural representation of a people, of an ethnic minority, without a nation-state behind it?”²⁵ While RomaMoMA aims to fill a gap in institutional representation of Roma artists, it also challenges the principles and practices of museums built on modernism and aims to contribute to a paradigm shift by “decolonizing the way in which the museum speaks (or does not speak) on behalf of communities whose cultural assets—whether an object, an artefact, or a story—have been stored in warehouses or put on display in exhibition halls for centuries.”²⁶ It is strategic about avoiding monographic presentations of artists²⁷ and follows a nomadic practice with pop-up exhibitions and events. Its latest exhibition, One Day We Shall Celebrate Again, presented at Documenta 15, featured Omara’s paintings and a twenty-six-minute-long video of the artist by János Sugár (Omara, 2010), among work by multiple generations of Roma artists.

While there is growing momentum and interest in exploring the work of Roma artists across Europe, with Documenta 15 being the latest example, it would not have been possible without RomaMoMA having paved the way to present their work in a transnational and collaborative way. Discussing the mission of RomaMoMA on the platform of MoMA begs the questions: In a future reality, will it be possible to close the gap between the two entities? Will brick-and-mortar institutions like MoMA²⁸—which is continuously reinventing its curatorial and acquisition strategies to become more inclusive—amplify the voices of Roma artists so that interventionist alternative projects will no longer be needed?

The second part of this article, “Disrupting the Institution through Language and Enactment: Omara’s Resistance, Part II,” which focuses exclusively on Omara’s enactments, has been published on the RomaMoMA blog by the author.

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In this essay, Māra Traumane guides readers through the diverse, interdisciplinary practice of the Riga-based collective Workshop for the Restoration of Unfelt Feelings (NSRD), which operated from the end of the 1970s until 1989. NSRD was involved in the avant-garde music scene as well as in architecture, and their activities ranged from concerts and the production of record albums to performances, writing, and video art. From consciously exploring the notion of periphery to developing the concept of “Approximate Art,” the group sought to question and escape disciplinary boundaries and divisions.

Over the last three decades, the notion of periphery and conceptualization of center-periphery relations have been actively explored by scholars and curators working on Eastern European histories of art. The terms “periphery” and “margins” have been applied in this context as productive concepts invigorating methods of critical geography and strategies of “provincializing” dominant artistic canons coined at alleged centers.¹ Recent research has proposed a critique of the binary logic and directionality of the center-periphery model, challenging the legitimacy of a “a preconceived notion of centrality”² and inviting reconsideration of cultural phenomena within geographically peripheral milieus as active agents in cultural entanglements.³ Yet even before the notion of periphery became an urgent topic in art historical theorization and discussions, it was both actively and implicitly addressed by artistic practices emerging in Eastern Europe in the 1970s and 1980s that explored geographic peripheries through performance actions and drew attention to processes of perception activated by artistic actions conceived in off-center locations.

Possibly one of the best documented and most researched examples of such an approach is the work of the Moscow–based Collective Actions Group, which beginning in 1976 and continuing for more than a decade, carried out a series of actions in Kievogorskoe Field outside of Moscow. In their extensive discussions of and writings on their outdoor actions, the group introduced a number of original topographic and perceptual terms—including “zone of indistinguishability,” the moment, when performers of an action appear in the field of vision of spectators but are still too distant for details of their activity to be distinguishable, and “demonstrational field,” which describes apprehensible arrangements and settings, as well as the course of an action and its perceptive effects.⁴ Other examples are the collective exploratory walks and happenings undertaken in neglected urban areas in the 1970s by a group of Tallinn architects and artists who drew inspiration from city outskirts and urban sites “forgotten by modernization.”⁵ Likewise, in the 1980s, peripheral environments and ambient, borderline modes of perception were actively explored by the Riga–based artists’ group Workshop for the Restoration of Unfelt Feelings (Nebijušu sajūtu restaurēšanas darbnīca, or NSRD). Members of this transmedia collective brought semi-abandoned sites and other transitional spaces—city outskirts and railway lines—as well as unspectacular daily events, marginal gestures, and multisensory perceptive states into focus in their early writings, and these interests later played a key role in the actions and video-performances undertaken by the group. In the late 1980s, in the last years of their collaboration, NSRD members outlined their aesthetic engagement with peripheral processes and transitory states of perception in their “Manifesto of Approximate Art” and three accompanying essays, all of which were written in 1987.⁶

The Workshop

NSRD, formally founded as a music group in 1982, was an association of friends active in Latvia—then a republic of the Soviet Union—from the end of the 1970s until 1989. Long-term members included architecture theorist Hardijs Lediņš (1955–2004), poet and translator Juris Boiko (1954–2002), architect Imants Žodžiks (born 1955), musician Inguna Černova (born 1962), and architect Aigars Sparāns (1955–1996), but on many occasions, this core group was joined by a wider circle of collaborators.⁷ NSRD member activities extended across a variety of media, including poetry, song lyrics and collaborative writing, new-wave and experimental music recordings, architectural proposals, actions realized outdoors in both nature and urban spaces, and in the second half of the 1980s, multimedia exhibition events, performances, and video-performances. Although the name “Workshop for the Restoration of Unfelt Feelings” initially described the group’s activities in the field of music and, later, in visual art, it is now considered more of an umbrella term covering the entire scope of the collaboration. Collective ways of working, the original aesthetic program developed by the group, and their interest in the creation of time-based aesthetic experiences and pursuit of “a philosophical process,”⁸ invite comparison to other collectives originating in the 1960s and 1970s in Eastern Europe, including the Slovenian group OHO and the Moscow–based Collective Actions Group.

Given the diversity and experimental nature of NSRD’s activities, one might question how it was possible for the artists to carry out their practice in the Soviet Union, where until the mid-1980s, the cultural field was not only subject to rigid ideological control but also opportunities for public artistic expression were mainly given to members of official unions of creative workers, or to those affiliated with amateur clubs. Indeed, some of NSRD’s activities in the first half of the 1980s, for example their outdoor actions, were carried out without an audience—that is, with only members of the collective present. This is why NSRD has sometimes been described as an “unofficial” or even “nonconformist” art phenomenon. However, this characterization is only partially fitting, because even in the early 1980s, within the daunting climate of the Brezhnev era, members of NSRD found opportunities to present their work and aesthetic interests to a wider audience. For example, for recording and distributing their music albums, the artists relied on friendships with other semiofficial music bands and on an expanding network of underground tape-recording culture.⁹ There were also institutional niches that enabled the artists to revise and present their ideas in exhibition spaces in Latvia. Several NSRD members were professionally trained architects and also members of the Architects’ Union of the Latvian Soviet Socialist Republic. Between 1980 and 1985, annual exhibitions of experimental projects by young architects, organized by the Architects’ Union, served as frameworks for the public display of inventive conceptual proposals by NSRD members related to the organization of space and living environments.

The ongoing presence of NSRD in public and semipublic spheres raises questions regarding the distinction between the “first,” or official public sphere, and the “second,” or alternative or unofficial public sphere—categorizations that are sometimes used in descriptions of the cultural environment in the Communist bloc.¹⁰Instead, attention should be drawn to the loopholes, structural gaps, and individual agendas that permeated the cultural field at that time, interrupting the controlling regimes of state institutions and facilitating visibility of independent initiatives such as NSRD.

Peripheries as Sites of Action

“There can’t be such a thing as a center of culture, there can only be a periphery of culture,” NSRD cofounder Juris Boiko pronounced in an interview published in 1988.¹¹ While the group was active, their interest in peripheral spaces and multisensory experience manifested in a variety of genres and media—in literary writings, actions, experimental music recordings, conceptual architectural proposals, and video-performances. In their practice, the notion of “periphery” evolved from its role as a site of physical immersion, contemplation, and performance action to a more productive notion related to the multisensorial contingency of human perception. As Hardijs Lediņš and Boiko outline in the group’s “Manifesto of Approximate Art”: “We identify ourselves with borders. We orientate ourselves in the relationships between the center and the periphery. The processes of identification and orientation lead and guide all our activities.”¹²

Themes of immersive wandering through a desolate, semi-abandoned landscape permeate the absurd novel Zun (the title referencing both “Zen” and the Latvian word for “buzzing”), cowritten by Lediņš and Boiko in 1976–77 and not published until 2005.¹³ In this early text oscillating between poetry and prose, and reflecting the influence of writings by Dada artist Kurt Schwitters (1887–1948) and American poet E. E. Cummings (1894–1962), lonely protagonists traverse a snowy rural landscape, each engaged in solitary action and random, fleeting encounters with other human and nonhuman beings. Programmatic in structure, Zun sketches out the themes of atmospheric wandering in nature and contemplative perceptive states that would characterize the future practice of NSRD.

At the time Lediņš and Boiko were writing Zun, and in the years after, they and other members of NSRD were influenced not only by Dada and the artistic avant-garde but also by the musical avant-garde, most notably the Second Viennese School, new jazz, John Cage (1912–1992), Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928–2007), and minimalist music. The ideas the group discovered in new music informed their own DIY recording sessions as well as their outdoor actions. Retrospectively, Boiko recalled that NSRD’s actions in the early 1980s can be seen as a “transposition” of the impulses they found in avant-garde music into the surrounding environment. Indeed, Cage’s ideas about silence as well as Stockhausen’s improvisational principles and intuitive music echo in the structure of one of the group’s most extensive cycles of actions: Walks to Bolderāja (Gājieni uz Bolderāju, 1980–87). In this particular work, NSRD addressed notions of geographically peripheral zones and changing modes of perception through ritual-like “walks” undertaken at dawn or dusk, once a year, each time in a different month, along the twelve-kilometer-long railway line connecting the outskirts of Riga, where the participating artists lived, with the distant port district of Bolderāja. Along their path, which took them across meadows and fields to the industrial surroundings of Bolderāja, they observed the changing landscape and weather, and the breaking or fading daylight—as well as interacted with objects they found along the way and the soundscape of the railway line—the rumble of passing trains and their own musical interventions. As was characteristic of their practice, the group captured the ambience and experiences of the “walks” in photo and video documentation of the action, and in other mediums, including in lyrics and music recorded on the album Bolderāja’s Style (Bolderājas stils), which they released on their own home-record label Seque in 1982.

The group also drew attention to neglected territories and vernacular suburban structures through conceptual architectural proposals, which members submitted to annual exhibitions at the Architects’ Union of experimental projects by young architects. In these submissions, conceived as creative responses to the general themes of the exhibitions, they presented conceptual interpretations of particular spatial situations—rather than practical architectural solutions. For example, the photo-montage Spatial Action 1m x 1m x 1m (Telpiska akcija 1m x 1m x 1m), which the artists presented in the exhibition Foregrounds of Architecture (1980), is made up of a sequence of photographs of Hardijs Lediņš and Imants Žodžiks excavating a one-meter-square hole in a stretch of land alongside a Soviet concrete wall and the corner of an old wooden building typical of the area. This ironic take can be seen as targeting both formal submission requirements—the standard one-by-one-meter architectural board, and the neglected state of the urban periphery. In 1984, in a submission to the exhibition Nature—Home to Man, the group integrated photographs taken during a Walk to Bolderāja action called A House in Bolderāja (Māja Bolderājā), in which Lediņš engaged with derelict allotment garden sheds and greenhouse structures situated along the railway line. In both proposals, the artists directed attention toward the unspectacular, marginal, vernacular spaces and architectural forms that were given visibility through their own performative gestures.

From Postmodernism to Approximate Art

Postmodernist theory and the aesthetics of new-wave culture played crucial roles in the development of the artistic language of NSRD in the mid-1980s—following the group’s interest in the legacy of the modernist avant-garde. Postmodernism, which the artists first encountered through architecture and design theory, in particular the publications of Charles Jencks (1839–2019) and Alessandro Mendini (1931–2019), proposes an alternative to the prevalent uniform functionalism that some members of NSRD were confronted with as architects working for state-run construction bureaus and thus provided the basis for the group’s critique of standardization in architecture and design. Charles Jencks’s thesis on “double coding” was appropriated as a programmatic statement by Lediņš who, in numerous articles dedicated to architecture and art, writes about “the spirit of the time and atmosphere of place,”¹⁴ meaning the search for a balance between technological and stylistic innovation and the traditional cultural “code” embedded in the specificity of a site. Postmodern use of narrative and semantic forms, abolishment of a distinction between “high” and popular culture, multimediality, irrationality, and emphasis on atmosphere of a particular site and individual expression resonated with the group’s interest in music, design, art, and architecture. At the same time, they drew inspiration from contemporary trends in music—from ambient music and the work of Laurie Anderson (born 1947) and Philip Glass (born 1937) integrating poetic narrative structures into multimedia performance events. In 1985, NSRD recorded what would be considered one of their musical masterpieces—the conceptual sound-play Kuncendorfs and Osendovskis (Kuncendorfs un Osendovskis), a sonic tale in which the narrative plot and compositional structure revolve around the experiences and feelings of its main protagonist, the reclusive forester Jūlijs (July), who is envious of his friend Augusts (August), a mulled-wine merchant traveling to distant countries.

Members of NSRD explored postmodernist ideas in proposals presented in exhibitions of experimental projects of young architects as well as in the artists’ first solo exhibition The Wind in the Willows (Vējš vītolos).¹⁵Held at the House of Architects in 1986, The Wind in the Willows featured staged settings of a living environment synthesizing colorful, asymmetrical, expressive objects (table, dressing screen, tableware) inspired by designs by Memphis Milano and Studio Alchimia and motifs of nature—marsh reeds and wallpaper painted in a pattern of birch trees. Poetic exhibition text invited viewers to disperse the “clouds of rationalism” and “clouds of stereotypes” with the help of diverse kinds of wind—“south-green wind,” “wind of the willows,” and “the wind of your eyelashes.”¹⁶  The display incorporated a recording of NSRD reproducing the howling sounds of wind. A similar aim to introduce qualities of subjective expressivity, individualism, and intimacy, this time as a tool of critique of standardized designs, informed the artists’ first video-action Man in a Living Environment (Cilvēks dzīvojamā vidē), which Lediņš and Žodžiks produced in 1986. Analyzing the architectural shortcomings of prefabricated mass housing in Riga, video footage features a small group of performers traveling through neighborhoods of newly built block-house dwellings, interviewing inhabitants of these suburban districts, and staging delicate performative interventions introducing spontaneity and intimacy into the monotonous, standardized surroundings of the newly constructed city outskirts. In the video, analytical text on modern urban developments, read by Lediņš, is intermixed with the eclectic soundtrack of Latvian choir music, compositions of Laurie Anderson, and music by NSRD.

Following the success of The Wind in the Willows, NSRD members began to position themselves as an art collective, expanding their network of participants in the group’s performances, video-performances, and exhibitions, and revising their theoretical premises. Although still acknowledging expressive means of postmodernism, they became critical of superficial, formal applications of postmodern aesthetics. Instead, the group re-addressed themes present in their early writings, actions, and music albums—motifs that explore transient states of perception and the atmospheric ambience of particular locations. From 1986 onward, newly accessible video technology allowed them to combine the narrative, sonic, and visual elements of a time-based performance action. In a group statement, they explained, “For the Workshop, video is a means of expression necessary to encompass those sensations, for the restoration of which music, the written word, and actions are insufficient.”¹⁷ This aspect of video led the group to use it in the creation of works that put into focus the interrelations of performance actions, often staged in rural, peripheral locations, with universal and cyclical processes in nature. In 1987, they recorded a number of semi-improvised, playful, or ritual-like performance actions unfolding before a backdrop of natural settings: Iceberg’s Longing / Volcano’s Dreams (Aisberga ilgas / Vulkāna sapņi, 1987), Grindstone of the Spring (Pavasara tecīla, 1987), Walk to Bolderāja (Gājiens uz Bolderāju, 1987), and Dr. Eneser’s Binocular Dance Lessons (Doktora Enesera binokulāro deju kursi, 1987).

The group’s video-performances were informed by the newly coined original concept of Approximate Art developed by NSRD in 1987. The idea of “approximation” was seen as in opposition to the alleged precision of technological advancements and the systemic approach to indeterminacy of human experience and accentuated ambient, borderline states of perception. It substantiated the group’s transmedial practice by highlighting the disappearing boundaries between art genres and forms, and arguing for individual, subjective understanding of a polysemic artistic action. As Lediņš explains in one of the texts on Approximate Art: “Since practically all natural phenomena and processes are perceived by the brain as approximate things, it can be argued that approximation is one of man’s most human characteristics. . . . Applying the notion of approximation to art, we arrive at a phenomenon that is very characteristic of today’s world and that the critics find impossible to resolve. The boundaries between different art genres are very blurred, they cannot be defined, just like the boundaries between different cultures. The question often arises—is it art or is it already not art?”¹⁸ Liberalization during the perestroika period, which began in 1985, made it possible for NSRD to access public exhibition and concert venues. The concept of Approximate Art served as a basis for the group’s first exhibition realized in the visual art context—The First Exhibition of Approximate Art,held in the House of Knowledge in Riga in spring 1987. The six-day event featured a designed environment, a multichannel display of video-performances by NSRD and other artists, and daily performances and musical interventions by NSRD as well as by invited musicians and artists.

In the years that followed, the group revised their concept of Approximate Art, as is reflected in the Second Approximate Art Exhibition: Mole in the Hole, which was held in Riga in 1988, and in the display that the group prepared for the exhibition Riga. Lettische Avantgarde (Riga: Latvian Avant-garde), which took place in West Berlin, Bremen, and Kiel in 1988–89. NSRD ceased collaboration in 1989. The oft-cited reasons for the breakup of the group are the sociopolitical and economic changes that affected society during the years of dissolution of the Soviet Union and that led members to seek their own, individual creative paths. Yet it could be argued that NSRD’s encounter with the framework of professional art institutions through their participation in Riga. Lettische Avantgarde also contributed to this process—the time-based, multimedia artistic practice of the collective and the idiosyncratic concept of Approximate Art proved to be difficult to adapt to the institutional, white-cube context—and to international art circulation. Still, since the rediscovery of the full scope of the group’s transmedial, collaborative artistic legacy in the mid-2000s, their work and ideas continue to inspire younger generation of Latvian artists and musicians, who on their own initiative, have engaged in reenactments of the Walks to Bolderāja, reconsidered the storyline of the novel Zun, and continue to reinterpret the performances and architectural proposals of the members of NSRD.  

The author would like to thank the Latvian Centre for Contemporary art for their cooperation during the preparation of this essay.

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What is common and what differs between Georgian artist collectives of the late 1980s and those of today are among the questions explored by curator and researcher Vija Skangale in this text. The collectives Archivarius, 10th Floor, and Marjanishvili Theatre collective, or “Marjanishvilebi,” formed during a time of political transformation to directly address economic scarcity and social instability via collectivity, experimentation, and the search for new forms of expression. Project Fungus, which emerged in 2020 from a burgeoning underground culture scene, addresses discrimination against LGBTQUI+ people in Georgia as well as the homophobia and intolerance endemic to Georgian society using a collective platform to amplify a multitude of creative voices.

In this essay, I explore the idea that artist collectives emerge during times of social crisis followed by social upheaval.¹ Specifically, I discuss underground groups at work in the 1980s in the South Caucasian country of Georgia, including Archivarius, 10th Floor, and Marjanishvili Theatre collective, as well as the Tbilisi-based queer artist collective Project Fungus, which is active today. Although there are vast differences in the social, economic, and political contexts in which the three earlier groups and Fungus formed, parallels can be drawn between them, causing one to wonder whether their emergence is indicative of certain sociopolitical factors and shifts.

Collectivism as a Practice in the 1980s in Georgia and Traumatic Experiences of Political Turmoil

During Perestroika (1985–91), the period marking the end of the Soviet Union, the Georgian art scene saw an increase in underground, nonconformist artist collectives engaged in dialogue about the sociopolitical climate, its rapid changes, and worrisome uncertainties regarding its future. Subsequently, the collapse of the Soviet Union penetrated everyday reality as did the Georgian civil war (1991–93), which resulted in sharp socioeconomic decline and, for many—quite literally—a fight for life. The dire state of the human condition and feelings of hopelessness and existential crises turned Georgia into what one underground Georgian artist deemed a “Theatre of the Absurd.”² Amid the chaos of political divorce, young artists, bohemian musicians, unknown poets, social activists, avant-garde fashion designers, and even ordinary civilians metamorphosed into “actors” in what became, in effect, a grand spectacle.

In 1984, while still a student, artist and writer Karlo Kacharava (1964–1994) formed “Archivarius,” an art collective named for wizardly scholar Archivarius Lindhorst, a fictional character in the German Romantic novella Der goldne Topf (1814; The Golden Pot) by E.T.A. Hoffmann (1776–1822). Highly prolific, Kacharava rallied Georgian artists and thinkers of his generation through his drawings, paintings, essays, poems, and art criticism, and served as a bridge to Western literary and art worlds, whose output had been previously banned in Georgia. He critically engaged society in conversation about the art and political issues of the time, and in questioning the boundaries of art and society.³ “Archivarius” gradually transformed into the “10th Floor” collective when Mamuka Tsetskhladze (born 1962), one of its members, was given an 18-square-meter (194-square-foot) studio on the 10th floor of the State Academy of Art in Tbilisi.⁴ After a short while, the 10th Floor artists moved to the Marjanishvili Theatre, where they became the “Marjanishvilebi.”⁵ Members of Marjanishvilebi were given studio spaces in exchange for creating theater sets. With limited access to art materials, they frequently used performance as a medium of expression, or cheaply available industrial paints, plywood, and other accessible materials.

In December 1992, 10th Floor and Marjanishvilebi member Mamuka Japharidze (born 1962) performed at the Tbilisi History Museum as St. Sebastian. Covered in white chalk and tied with rope to a pillar, the artist presented himself to the public as a sculpture of the Roman saint. Although St. Sebastian is considered the patron saint of homosexuality, Mamuka used the religious figure to reference the chaos of the Georgian civil war. In religious iconography, St. Sebastian is depicted pierced by the arrows of a Roman legionnaire, rendering the viewer—who is in the position of an archer—the unconscious executioner.⁶ By inviting the audience to look at both him and each other, Japharidze addressed the interaction between victim and abuser. After a thirty-minute performance in a semi-derelict space on a freezing cold day, the artist walked to the old Roman Sulphur Baths to wash himself clean. With references to the torturous nature of war, he also played with words and their meaning: in Georgian, romelia translates as “who is” and “Roman.”

The artists of Marjanishvilebi utilized the power of their collective voice to endure the war, and produced exhibitions and performances to combat the societal depression that came with it. The Georgian art scene and cultural activities of the time were comparable to those in the former Yugoslavia, where neo- and post-avant-garde collectives grew out of political instability and crises.⁷ Like conceptual artists in other Central and Eastern European countries, the underground artists in Georgia looked upon art as an idea and form of knowledge, and the role of the artist as that of an interpreter—which is logical given there was neither a public space that welcomed their exhibitions, nor a market for dissemination of their work.⁸

The proliferation of nonconformist collectives in the 1980s was not only a response to the turbulent political situation in the country but also a way to swim against the currents of contemporary Soviet ideology. Following the collapse of the Iron Curtain in 1989–90, and Georgia’s declaration of independence in 1991, Georgian artists continued to organize underground happenings and exhibitions in reaction to the residual political turmoil and amid the ongoing shortages of electricity, food, water, and gas.

More than thirty years after regaining independence, undergoing civil war, and facing the most recent Russian invasion in August 2008, which left approximately 20 percent of Georgian territory under occupation, new counterculture collectives are emerging. This phenomenon raises an important issue in relation to the question I posed earlier about whether the presence of nonconformist collectives is indicative of a certain sociopolitical climate. And if indeed it is, what is at stake now?

LGBTQUI+ Rights and Counterculture Collectivism Today

If underground collectives of the 1980s were markers of politically turbulent times and intended to antagonize the Soviet regime, what is the current state of countercultural collectivism in Georgia in response to? Among the forces behind today’s countercurrent is discrimination against LGBT+ people and denial of their human rights, as well as the homophobia and intolerance endemic to Georgian society. In Soviet times, the Anti-Sodomy Law imposed prison sentences and hard labor for same-sex acts, which were not decriminalized in Georgia until 2000. Homophobia, as a result, is often associated with communism. Despite the fact that Georgia has enacted legislation that directly prohibits discrimination against LGBT people,⁹ LGBTQUI+ and queer people are nonetheless discriminated against in the streets, and frequent targets of hate speech and physical violence.

Project Fungus,¹⁰ which was founded in 2020, unites voices in a way similar to the collectives of the 1980s, but this time in response to the fact that many Georgians view the LGBTQUI+ community as destroyers of Georgian families and societal values, and that the Georgian Orthodox church, which promotes these prejudices, remains a powerful force within the country.¹¹ A key goal of Fungus members is to provide queer and feminist artists in Georgia and the Caucasus with a visual platform and voice that function both locally and within an international network.

According to the group’s manifesto, “The fungus thrives in damp and dark places. It plays a vital role in the ecology of the biosphere. By decomposing any organic matter, it creates rich soil. Like mushrooms, we do not often appear on the surface, but we grow strong underground and cause intoxication.”¹²

In June 2021, Artarea Gallery in Tbilisi hosted Project Fungus’s collectively curated inaugural exhibition BLUE. The term “goluboy,” which in Russian means “blue,” is widely used to refer to homosexuals in the former Soviet countries, but also connotes “sadness” in the English language. The sadness and trauma of the Georgian LGBTQUI+ art community was explored in the eight-hour exhibition, which was attended by more than five hundred people. The show was the culmination of a larger effort involving a research project about trauma within queer communities and a special issue of Indigo magazine focused on May 17, 2013, when during a peaceful demonstration against homophobia, demonstrators were attacked and injured by anti-gay activists and representatives of the Georgian Orthodox church—an event that left many members of the LGBTQUI+ community traumatized.

Text accompanying the exhibition and posted on Instagram reads:“The story of that square is filled with sadness, just like many other stories in our country and our region, where Queer people are stripped [of] their identities, spaces, dates, colors and portrayed as shameful, dangerous, and freaks. Queer people have nothing but loneliness, that follows them everywhere: in love, in struggles, at home, or in the streets.”¹³ These words evoke traumatic memories expressed through artworks exhibited in BLUE.

Among the works shown was David Apakidze’s curtain installation, which he designed in collaboration with poet Ana Itanishvili, whose poems were printed on one of the curtains. This work, together with K.O.I.’s untitled Polaroid portrait series explores the visibility of queer people, who must conceal their sexual identity during the day but can openly express themselves in safe spaces at night. Visibility is extremely important when anti-homophobia rallies and community gatherings are held in Georgia as they often draw attention to the LGBTQUI+ community, which is extremely dangerous for its members.

The exhibition also featured works by Uta Bekaia, including Cosmic Kintos, which refers to entertainers in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Georgia who were considered homosexual and whose existence was widely accepted by society as queer. The artist appears as Kinto, who enchants the viewer with his dance; however, symbols in the artwork convey an even deeper meaning regarding Georgian national identity, queerness, and the darkness often associated with it. A performance by the artist appearing as Kinto was accompanied by three Gobelins made of rich Jacquard fabric with an old Georgian flag woven into them and the words “I see the darkness in your rooms” and “The sun please rise, the sun” printed onto them. It is paradoxical that despite the homophobia ingrained in modern-day Georgian society, Kinto culture and dance are widely accepted and celebrated.

Another Fungus undertaking, the exhibition Anti-Fashion, was held in Kyiv in parallel with Kyiv Art and Fashion Days in October 2021. Featuring a photograph of Akà Prodiàshvili’s Fuck Culture on the exhibition poster,¹⁴  the show offered divergent perspectives on fashion—and its opposite: “Although anti-fashion as a subculture is opposed to fashion, it always becomes part of this culture and nourishes it. Similarly, queer culture, which in its essence often is in sharp conflict with the dominant culture, becomes the main inspiration of fashion and creates new values in it.”¹⁵Throughout human history, clothing has been a means of self-expression, and it holds special symbolic significance for queer Georgians, who are targets of discrimination in Georgia. In a symbolic sense, it signifies belonging to a particular tribe. As the exhibition text reads: “For Queer people, who are one of the main targets of prejudiced culture, clothing takes on the concept and meaning of . . . armor. It also often indicates belonging to a particular community, a group, or a safe space.”¹⁶The garment in Andro Dadiani’s work, for example, is an integral part of his artistic identity. Dadiani, who performs incognito and fights against homophobic environments explains: “I create all of my costumes from trash on the streets, or I find them there. When I approach the bins, I feel as if I am rescuing thousands of tiny, unloved, dirty microorganisms that attract my attention. I take them home and we share information, energies, and transform them into new forms. Masks are my portal to a new metaphysical realm where I can think and breathe freely.”¹⁷

David Apakidze’s work titled Gilded fleece—a Colchian nonbinary character touches upon the theme of the body and explores the artist’s internal conflicts regarding his own identity as Georgian, which is both a part of who he is and a barrier to what he is. In a little golden sculpture, Apakidze’s depicts his own face and dead body (fleece), which does not have a gender assigned to it, and yet is magical and precious because it is soulless and objectified: “Gilded fleece is a queer body in a patriarchal society. A body with magical power. A body with political power. A manipulated body. A body that is a prosperity of the state. A soulless body. A poisonous body. A body not belonging to a soul that inhabits it. A social body, simultaneously unacceptable for society.”¹⁸

Through its shows, Project Fungus focuses on traumatic experiences affecting queer communities in Georgia, using exploration of the human body and clothing as their means of expression. As a collective, they move between established disciplines, blurring the lines between contemporary art and fashion in navigating Georgia’s polarized society. While Fungus may provoke comparisons to underground queer culture in New York or Berlin, they strive to connect themselves with the wider queer network, and to organize their own resistance unit against LGBTQUI+ oppression in Georgia.

The Georgian artist collectives of the 1980s are also said to have emerged and organized themselves loosely but dynamically around their beliefs and resentments.¹⁹ In response to the restrictions imposed by the Soviet system and, subsequently, the traumatic experience of the country’s collapse, the underground Georgian artists who lived through the Georgian civil war and suffered the severe socioeconomic decline that resulted, created collectives such as Archivarius, 10th Floor, and Marjanishvilebi. These artist groups reflected on the turbulent sociopolitical situation and archived their experience of those times through their exhibitions and performances.²⁰ Fungus reacts against the discrimination and lack of rights experienced by the LGBT+ community in Georgia today. Though the Georgian collectives of the 1980s and Fungus had/have different methods and historical, political, and socioeconomic contexts, they share similar positions of resistance to the flaws in the political systems under which—and societies in which—they lived/are living. These examples show the potential of collective action to combine forces, or in other words, form tribes. In contrast to the Soviet ideology of the collective endeavors that promoted unity over individualism, forcing collectivity, the late Soviet collectives and transition-period collectives, as well as today’s collectives, which are united by choice, have kept their individual artistic identities while joining together to cultivate resistance and an artistic response to oppression.

Relative to the transitional years of the 1980s and 1990s in Georgia, which were marked by social upheaval against Soviet ideology combined with political uncertainty, there are more obstacles in the 2020s worth mentioning—including current Georgian government and cultural policies that are provoking social and cultural uprising against the ruling party in Georgia and the cultural institutions that have reinstituted censorship.²¹ The late Soviet-period collectiveness brought with it significant upheaval followed by political change, and so the question arises: Are the activities of Project Fungus and those of other contemporary collectives signs of political turmoil brewing in Georgia?

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In this text focused on how postcolonial and decolonial processes are reflected in contemporary Ukrainian culture, art historian Svitlana Biedarieva examines methods of decolonizing Ukrainian cultural discourse through the lens of works by contemporary Ukrainian artists—specifically those addressing complex aspects of identity conflicts actualized by Russia’s ongoing war of aggression against Ukraine. Each of the artworks analyzed here dismantles the notion of Ukraine’s postcolonial entanglements through discussions of memory, language, and trauma. Further, Biedarieva attempts to establish a new theoretical framework in which to understand Ukraine’s particular position on the world’s geopolitical map, taking into account the fading impact of Russian colonialism on Ukrainian territory.

Decolonial Liberation of Ukraine / Self-Colonization of Russia

Many of the works created by Ukrainian artists during the last eight years reflect on the postcolonial state and traumatic memories of Ukraine’s entanglement with Russia before and throughout the twentieth century.¹ However, since Russian bombs began falling on Ukrainian towns, killing Ukrainian civilians, including children, and destroying thousands of Ukrainian people’s homes, unfolding in a full-scale Russian invasion of the country in February 2022, understanding of this postcolonial entanglement has changed—as has the attitude toward decoloniality in Ukrainian culture.² Art is one of the indicators of such a profound liberation impulse.

To start off, I would like to argue that notions of the postcolonial and decolonial are not interchangeable in terms of the war and history between Ukraine and Russia; rather they reflect two different stages of liberation from entanglement. While the former denotes the situation immediately following the colonial experience and anti-colonial struggle, taking on all the implications of colonialism with the intention of reinterpreting them, the latter speaks about the final process of dismantling the colonial narrative. Decolonial researcher Madina Tlostanova remarks on the chronological and logical discrepancies between the two approaches: “The postcolonial condition is more of an objective given, a geopolitical and geohistorical situation of many people coming from former colonies. The decolonial stance is one step further, as it involves a conscious choice of how to interpret reality and how to act upon it.”³ The atrocities of the anachronistic Russian war of aggression have brought Ukraine to the culmination of its decolonial stage, with the once-dominating narrative of Russian culture “enveloping” Ukrainian culture having fallen apart to the point of no return. Indeed, any further aggressive action on the part of Russia toward Ukraine will only continue to foster what is an inevitable shift.

We observe a very different process in Russia, where ongoing Ukrainian disentanglement provokes Russian obsession not only with Ukraine’s territory, but also with the minds and souls of the Ukrainian people. In this Russian pursuit of the unachievable, the war represents a notorious case of “self-colonization,” in which Russia has emotionally aligned itself with a culture and geographical space to which it has no right.⁴ Ukraine has become a Russian territory of desire, and Russia, in longing to occupy Ukraine, has in effect converted itself into Ukraine’s invisible colony. Currently, it is Russia that persists in simultaneous colonial and anti-colonial stages and has not yet reached the postcolonial condition—a state impossible to achieve without the removal of tyranny and the decentralization of power and institutions. This social and cultural divergence between the two countries is enormous, and though the outcomes for Ukraine are extremely painful, for Russia, they will be fatal unless internal resistance brings the country to a more advanced postcolonial stage. Ukrainian determination toward decoloniality is expressed in recent artworks that reflect on the metamorphosis fostered by the rapid transition from what can be interpreted as a postcolonial state to decoloniality in the last eight years. Further, some works deal with this postcolonial/decolonial dynamic through language.

Dissolving Postcolonial Ambiguity

The work #hero (2014–20) by Anton Lapov is a media installation that gathers data from the Internet to challenge the logic of a digital environment that, after 2014, permitted different political perspectives and, at the same time, gave way to pro-Russian propaganda. Lapov created a generative hypertextual system that constructs a nonselective database formed of portraits of people found under the hashtag “hero” at a particular localized network. These images are further blended into a single, shifting composite portrait, whose features morph as new digital images are added. Lapov intended to show how the overflow of propaganda distorted judgment regarding the outbreak of the Russian war in Ukraine in 2014 as well as led to initial confusion. He also aimed to question whether the “heroic” criteria were any more reliable in times of profound political confrontation and amid a heated information war. This work is an example of the postcolonial “ambivalence” that, as interpreted by critical theorist Homi Bhabha, occurs when the oppressor and the oppressed share similar features, and the dominant culture infects its colonial domain with its own cultural identity.⁵ As the situation following the 2022 full-scale invasion has shown, Russia’s strategy has relied on a similar type of ambivalence—that is, Russia’s hope that Ukrainian society forms a similar kind of nonselective hypertext, and that Russian propaganda leads to Ukrainian support of Russian aggression within Ukrainian territory. The Ukrainian resistance against the invaders, however, confirms that mediatic reality is different from the real status of things. The Ukrainian people’s heartfelt struggle against the Russian war is testament to the fact that postcolonial ambivalence is not characteristic of Ukrainian society, marking not only the end of the debate around ambivalence, but also the birth of a decolonial culture.

Another work that reflects on varying points of view on violence is Blind Spot (2014) by Mykola Ridnyi. In this series of photographs of a building in eastern Ukraine heavily damaged by Russian shelling, a circular “blind spot,” in fact a black ink blot, obscures a significant part of every image. In some works, the extent of the destruction is covered in ink and thus no longer visible, permitting only the surrounding landscape to be seen, while in others, the rubble is visible though seemingly removed from its surrounding context. In a version of the project realized together with Ukrainian poet Serhiy Zhadan on a large banner partially covering a building in Berlin, a small circular view of rubble from a destroyed building in Luhansk appears to float, untethered in a field of black. Ridnyi visually addresses the gradual loss of visibility of violence and voluntary societal blindness to traumatic war events. Zhadan, in his turn, uses words to address the theme of destruction, recalling the bombing of a museum in Donetsk and pointing out that the devastation of buildings and cultural heritage rarely stays in the public memory of those who did not inhabit the place in which it occurred. This work can also be read in a more general way, as a metaphor for the invisibility of evil as a postcolonial condition—or more specifically, for the fact that the peripheral territories in eastern Ukraine were not considered of ultimate importance when war broke out there in 2014. In 2022, however, it has become clear that the avoidance of the topic of the war in the east did not resolve the problem but rather made it deeper. Indeed, the crimes hiding behind blind spots are now in plain sight.

Artist and writer Yevgenia Belorusets’s daily dispatches from wartime Kyiv, which she began posting amid the full-scale invasion in February 2022, present a human view of the horrors in which the city and its surroundings have been immersed since the beginning of the Russian attacks:

In the evening I learned that a friend of mine was evacuated from the small town of Irpin, northwest of Kyiv. On the way, she lost her dog, who was frightened by the explosions and ran off in a panic. She saw with her own eyes how women with children were being targeted as they tried to get on an evacuation bus. Then something heavy crashed to the ground not far from them, a bomb perhaps, and everyone on the bus was knocked over. My friend told me, “I want to survive so I can describe this evacuation in The Hague.” . . . Some were murdered during the evacuation. The estimate so far is six women and children, but the exact number of victims and injured is still being clarified.⁶

This diary excerpt exemplifies observation and reporting in which there are no blind spots, no ambivalence of vision, as Ukraine and the world clearly see the Russian war crimes, including the killings of civilians. The paradigmatic space of the oppressor’s cultural identity has been entirely eliminated among the Ukrainian people, who have witnessed untold violence, destruction, and death unjustly brought upon them by Russia.

Releasing Language

The use of language in the context of the Russian war against Ukraine is discussed in War in Ukraine (2015), a work by Lada Nakonechna. The artist produced a series of typed texts in which she explores how language structures are conditioned by particular political positions and modes of thinking. Small details, such as the order of words or the use of prepositions, can change the meaning of a phrase. In every example, the artist uses three related phrasal structures, where the meaning has been profoundly transformed to reveal how linguistic clichés reflect underlying paradigms—such as “Civil  war on  in Ukraine,” “The armed conflict in the east of Ukraine,” and “Russian-Ukrainian war.” The ways in which these phrases are constructed make clear the points of view from which they are generated: how they distinguish between the subject and object of the aggression, and expose particular ideas either promoted by Russian propaganda or conventionally accepted by the Ukrainian mass media. These phrases are not related to the specific use of the Ukrainian or Russian language; rather the syntax and vocabulary form the intended meaning. Though made in 2015, the work remains relevant in 2022 beyond the Ukrainian media sphere, as Russian propaganda and the Western media alike often describe the war as a “conflict,” in effect belittling its importance and blurring the reality of the actual situation.

The linguistic discrepancy within Ukrainian bilingualism has been challenged by such early post-Soviet works as The Three-Letter Box (1994), an installation and performance by Fast Reaction Group. The artists Sergei Bratkov and Boris Mikhailov created a “Pandora’s box” containing the three letters ї, і, and є, which highlight the difference between the Russian and Ukrainian languages, and use it to make a political statement emphasizing linguistic divergence as a postcolonial process.⁷  As was characteristic in the first two decades of Ukrainian independence, embracing such binary opposition was key to the self-identification process of the Ukrainian political nation at that time. The three Ukrainian letters, clear markers of belonging at a time when the nation-state structure was still unstable and social anxiety about post-socialist cultural resistance was high, were important to Ukrainian identity formation. The work was made in the period of transition, when post-Soviet transformations encouraged the use of Ukrainian language, the return to which was considered an important element of cultural identity—yet leaving existential space for the use of Russian in different Ukrainian regions.  

In his performance Force Me to Speak Ukrainian (2019), Taras Kamennoy referred to The Three-Letter Box as he explored how the imperative of the use of Ukrainian as the official language may or may not be incorporated into the public sphere of Russian-speaking Kharkiv. The project, in the artist’s words, was provoked by one of his Russian relatives, who wondered whether Kamennoy was being forced by the “nationalist” government to speak Ukrainian. To challenge this colonialist view, the artist presented a performance on the streets of Kharkiv, where he approached people, carrying a banner that asked them to “force” him to speak Ukrainian. He then documented the replies, which ranged from surprised to the affirmative—that is, that it would be good for him to switch to Ukrainian as the official state language; however, he failed to obtain the imperative that he sought. This work challenged Russia’s view of Ukraine as a controlling environment, similar to Russia’s authoritarian position. Kamennoy emphasized the freedom of choice and expression upon which Ukrainian solidarity heavily relies. This solidarity, together with pluralism, defined Ukrainian resilience in the protests of the Maidan revolution in 2013, and the subsequent war with Russia in the Donbas—making Ukraine very different from its neighboring country, which has proclaimed itself heir to a colonialist empire.

As these projects show, political conflict may reside in ways of speaking, rather than in the language spoken. And this understanding is an essential principle in the Ukrainian decolonization process. As Ukrainian historian Yaroslav Hrytsak has written: “In a piece on the 2014 fighting around the Donetsk airport, Los Angeles Times correspondent Sergei Loiko noted that inside the airport, Ukrainian military forces used exclusively Russian as their operative language and Ukrainian was nowhere to be heard. What struck him the most was how pure, cultured, and almost literary their Russian was.”⁸  Hrytsak concludes from this incident that the postcolonial condition in Ukraine—if this is indeed the right paradigm to describe the situation—could not be reduced to cultural dominance through language.

Curator Kateryna Botanova proposes that languages and identities have been weaponized and instrumentalized in Ukraine as part of the post-Soviet neo-capitalistic electoral struggle. The efforts of election-related public protests in 2004 and 2013 undermined Russian-led efforts to use language as a marker of identity in Ukraine, emphasizing instead the complexity of the past and the solidarity beyond linguistics as characteristic of a political Ukrainian nation. The ongoing collective struggle against Russia’s violent and dirty war in Ukraine only increases this sense of solidarity. In erasing the possibility of using language in the colonial discourse, language is turned into yet another tool of decolonization. Quoting one of the Ukrainian artists, Botanova proposes that “The Russian language will be our war trophy.”⁹

Disentangling Memory

Turning to the traumatic past, Andrii Dostliev and Lia Dostlieva’s series of collages I still feel sorry when I throw away food—Grandma used to tell me stories about the Holodomor (2018) is a reflection on the 1932–33 famine provoked by the Stalinist repression of Ukrainian peasants. One of the most powerful traumatic moments in twentieth-century Ukrainian history is reinterpreted by the artists as subtle prints of spoiled food on paper. Today, the work painfully resonates with the current situation in Mariupol, where because of the blockade, food is scarce and people are dying not only from shelling but also from starvation.¹⁰This is a new form of genocide unfolding in Ukraine, ninety years after the Stalinist famines, as Russia intends to replay its colonialist intentions in contemporary conditions. In Dostliev and Dostlieva’s work, images generated by food that has been thrown away are juxtaposed with images of anonymous landscapes that evoke permanence. Genocide by starvation does not impact the landscape—unlike genocide caused by Russian bombing in Mariupol. The death, caused by shelling, becomes embedded in it, leaving a permanent trace. As art researcher Kateryna Iakovlenko puts it when she poetically speaks of war destructions and the continuous explosions in the sky over Ukraine: “On February 24, the beauty of the sunrise was stolen from us.”¹¹

In subtle dialogue with the theme of hunger, Zhanna Kadyrova’s new work Palianytsia (2022) reverses the vision of food as a source of life undertaken by Andrii Dostliev and Lia Dostlieva, and, in particular, of bread as a sign of hospitality, turning the latter into a means of resistance. “Palianytsia” describes a type of Ukrainian bread that has reportedly been used to reveal suspected Russian saboteurs, who are unable to pronounce the word correctly. Moreover, due to some differences in Ukrainian and Russian phonetics, it has proven difficult for monolingual Russian speakers to spell the word in its conventional form. In western Ukraine, where Kadyrova was in evacuation, she set a table, replacing the bread with sliced river stones—as unbitable and inedible as Ukrainian phonetics and Ukrainian territory are to the Russians. This project presents the ultimate decolonial gesture of inverting the theme of hunger, turning it against the enemy who came to kill, and thus, in breaking up with historical trauma, reinterpreting food as an instrument of resistance.

Exiting the Decolonial Condition

Works such as those by Ridnyi and Zhadan, Nakonechna and Lapov—which use ambivalence or hybridity of the relative positions of the colonizer and colonized as their moving force—have shifted in their focus from internal to external since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began in February 2022 and Ukrainians fully broke with the Russian cultural sphere. All of the controversies and diversities of positions of which the artists speak have been at once and forever erased by Russia’s ongoing attack. The ambiguity is gone, as is Ukraine’s postcolonial struggle. For Ukraine, this inhumane war, however painful and unbelievably destructive, marks not only the country’s release from postcolonial entanglements, but also its definitive entrance into the decolonial stage. Both the post-socialist and postcolonial conditions gradually evaporated from the territory of Ukraine after 2014, and the selfless yet harsh resistance of the Ukrainian people against the Russian invaders has shown that any other entanglements have also disappeared.

In Ukraine’s particular decolonial case, Russia is no longer present as a political or cultural agent of impact. Among Ukrainians, there is more than a general lack of interest in Russia and its territory; indeed, there is a conscious collective position of distancing to avoid entanglement. We are yet to invent a new framework for interpreting and describing the decolonial state in which we find ourselves, for it goes beyond any existing postcolonial or decolonial paradigm. In Russia’s own simultaneous colonial and anticolonial case, the self-colonization through desire and affection toward Ukraine keeps it in an anachronic time-lapse state, stunts its progress, and is leading to its decay and eventual ruin. Meanwhile, the decolonial process of release in Ukraine carries on at an unprecedented pace—despite the flames of war and loss of heritage.  

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In fall 2021, while working as the Cisneros Institute Research Fellow, I had the privilege of speaking with Macuxi artist Jaider Esbell (1979–2021) over Zoom. Our conversation was brief, but with the assistance of his trusted collaborators Paula Berbert and Daniel Jabra, we organized a much anticipated virtual studio visit that was scheduled to take place on November 3.¹ The day before our planned meeting, Jaider Esbell passed away.

Esbell’s premature departure coincided with a moment of heightened visibility and well-deserved recognition of his practice. When I had the chance to travel to São Paulo just two weeks later, his significant impact on the programs within major art institutions throughout the city—the Bienal de São Paulo, the Pinacoteca de São Paulo, and the Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo (MAM), among others—was immediately tangible, even to an outsider such as myself. In every artistic sphere I encountered, his presence, ideas, and legacy were deeply felt.

Born in Brazil on Indigenous territory known today as Terra Indígena Raposa Serra do Sol, which borders Guyana and Venezuela, Esbell had already participated in a number of Indigenous social movements by the time he moved to the city of Boa Vista at the age of eighteen. In 2011, he began to immerse himself more profoundly in the visual realm when he held an exhibition titled Cabocagem—O homem na paisagem (Cabocagem—man in the landscape), in which he presented fifteen of his own artworks. Two years later, he organized the first edition of Encontro de Todos os Povos (Meeting of All People), establishing himself as an advocate for Indigenous artists and making clear the living presence of their culture and art. Moreover, these efforts promoted a specific Macuxi worldview, which importantly includes Makunaimî, who the Macuxi, Taurepang, and Wapichana peoples consider to be the creator of all natures.² “To be an Indigenous artist, from my perspective,” Esbell explained in a 2019 interview, “is to claim through these four letters—A R T E [art]—everything that it connects us to in terms of possibilities and bridging, indeed, worlds.” He continued, “It is a very special condition that we have been able to attain to be able to make small fissures between worlds so that this communication, which academia has been handling for a very long time, may have more fluidity.”³

Esbell maintained a diverse practice, one that spanned the roles of writer, poet, art educator, curator, and activist. Committed to art as a form of pedagogical activism—or artivism as he called it—he brought together painting, writing, drawing, installation, and performance to elaborate on transversal dialogues with Indigenous cosmologies, environmental concerns, land rights, and critiques of hegemonic culture.⁴ Through his work, he promoted Arte Indígena Contemporânea (Contemporary Indigenous Art),⁵ making explicit the importance of contemporary Indigenous artists—especially women—in order to actively contradict the oppressive and violent Western institutional structures that locate Indigenous art and culture in the past.

Esbell’s prominence in the 34th edition of the Bienal de São Paulo, Faz escuro mas eu canto (Though It’s Dark, Still I Sing), held in 2021, was evident. Among other works, he exhibited  Entidades (Entities, 2021) [Figs. 1–2], a seventeen-meter inflatable sculpture that greeted visitors as they approached the Ciccillo Matarazzo Pavilion, headquarters of the Bienal de São Paulo Foundation since 1957 and a key Bienal venue.⁶ Creating two colorfully marked serpents—creatures the Macuxi understand to be powerful agents of transformation—Esbell intended for the work to confront the nearby statue of Portuguese explorer Pedro Álvares Cabral, credited in Western history with the “discovery” of Brazil in 1500, despite the fact the territory and its people were existing and thriving long before his arrival.⁷ Esbell’s critique of hegemonic discourse further extends through the sculpture’s dialogue with the Pavilion, which was designed by architect Oscar Niemeyer within the context of Brazil’s mid-twentieth-century bid for international recognition through the language of Modernist architecture.⁸ Entidades emerged from a significantly less recognized and yet crucial history of Brazilian art, one frequently erased in favor of Modernist or Western ideals. It and other works presented by Esbell at the Bienal directly engage mythologies and origins outside the narrative of European Christianity.⁹

Highlighting Macuxi worldviews and their ongoing relevance, Esbell painted A guerra dos Kanaimés (War of the Kanaimés, 2019/20) [Figs. 3–6], a series of vibrant yet caliginous paintings that were on view inside the Pavilion.¹⁰ Invoking the Kanaimés, deadly spirits usually associated with violence, the artist references the cosmovision of the Macuxi people in order to ground the fear associated with the Kanaimés in a concrete and contemporary context: Indigenous peoples’ right to life and land in defiance of attempts to exploit their territory. This critical series must be considered in relationship to the numerous resistance movements formed to fight for Indigenous land rights. In 2021, for example, more than 170 distinct peoples from across Brazil went to the nation’s capital to oppose proposed legislation that would both displace them and open their land to deforestation.¹¹ Esbell also brought this activism into the Bienal’s public sphere with the intervention Cortejo de enunciado da Bienal dos Índios (Indigenous Biennial Announcement Procession) [Figs. 7–9], which he performed in collaboration with his partner and fellow artist and activist Daiara Tukano, among other Indigenous activists and artists, including Gustavo Caboco, during the opening in September 2021. As they processed through the Pavilion, they paused at works by Sueli Maxakali, Uýra, and Caboco, as well as their own to stress that five Indigenous artists were represented in the exhibition—the most in the Bienal’s seventy-year history.

Of equal significance is the fact that two recent exhibitions in São Paulo have been dedicated exclusively to Indigenous art: Véxoa: Nós sabemos (Véxoa: We Know), curated by Naine Terena for the Pinacoteca de São Paulo in 2020, and Moquém_Surarî: Arte indígena contemporânea (Moquém_Surarî: Contemporary Indigenous Art), curated by Esbell for the MAM the following year. The former brought together more than twenty Indigenous artists and artist collectives, including Esbell, to confront the challenges Indigenous art faces today. Speaking to the attempted erasure of Indigenous art from Brazilian culture since the beginning of colonization, Terena writes: “The ‘whitening’ of art in Brazil is similar to the whitening of its population, where both alien and foreign references are overestimated to the detriment of indigenous and national ones. The aesthetic concept of art was brought to the country in the luggage of the colonizers. The strength of the internal production of a great diversity of indigenous peoples and their cultural manifestations were not recognized for their artistic qualities or when they were, they were mainly taken as an inspiration or reference for the art of the non-indigenous people.”¹²

Through his artistic, activist, and pedagogical work, Esbell criticized this erasure, or “whitening,” as Terena argues, of art. Carta ao velho mundo (Letter to the Old World, 2019) [Fig. 10], exemplifies Esbell’s concurrent commitment to visual practice and social engagement. Offering a counternarrative to hegemonic history, the large-scale installation features Esbell’s interventions onto pages torn from a four-hundred-page tome dedicated to Western art. By drawing over reproductions of paintings by Diego Velázquez and Caravaggio, among others, or images of the Virgin Mary, Venus, and other hallmarks of a “traditional” art education, Esbell inserted his own commentary, exposing the oppressiveness of this constructed historical narrative. For example, on a reproduction of the painting The Martyrdom of Saint Peter (c. 1620) by Italian Baroque painter Domenichino, Esbell intervened with his signature acrylic marker, drawing small birds into the trees and writing “Há genocídio nas florestas da Amazônia!!” (There is genocide in the Amazon forests!!) [Fig. 11]. On a page dedicated to a seventeenth-century landscape painting by Dutch Golden Age artist Hercules Seghers, Esbell sketched a portrait of Marielle Franco, the queer, Afro-Latina, feminist politician and human rights activist whom the Rio de Janeiro police assassinated in 2018 in a case of government corruption [Fig. 12]. Below her image, Esbell asks, “Marielle?,” evoking the question “Who killed Marielle?,” which was commonly inscribed on posters during the protests that followed her murder. Esbell’s intervention into Western art history with references to Marielle and the destruction of the Amazon aims to expose the ways in which individuals who are not of European descent, from the United States, white, or Christian, are targeted yet excluded from the master narratives of human society. Carta ao velho mundo sheds light on how Eurocentric history—now part of the “Old World” as the title claims—has succeeded at the expense of those deemed to be outside the demographics mentioned above, especially those who challenge such power.

Though Carta ao velho mundo engages with what might be understood as the past, Esbell’s practice was embedded within various temporalities. Along with professor and artist Charles Gabriel, he collaborated with Macuxi children to instill the importance of arts education in future generations and as a method to dismantle hegemonic art historical pedagogies. Amooko Panton—Histórias do vovô Makunaimî (Amooko Pantoni—Stories of Grandpa Makunaimî, 2018) [Fig. 13], which was exhibited on the third floor of the Bienial Pavilion, is composed of thirty-two paintings that Macuxi youth created in collaboration with Esbell through a series of workshops led by Esbell and Gabriel at the José Alamano Indigenous State School in the Maturuca community of the Terra Indígena Raposa Serra do Sol. In these images, the children have depicted stories of the Macuxi people, demonstrating the living roots of their mythology. Esbell’s work as a cultural facilitator, furthermore, is intricately elaborated in Moquém_Surarî: Arte indígena contemporânea, which featured thirty-four Indigenous artists including Daiara Tukano, Rita Sales Huni Kuin, and Elisclésio Makuxi [Fig. 14]. On view at the MAM, adjacent to the Bienal Pavilion, this exhibition seemed to expand on the presentation of the five indigenous artists in Faz escuro mas eu canto, showing the present impact of Indigenous visual practice—as in Rita Sales Huni Kuin’s paintings, which unfold the relationship between ritual action and aesthetic experience through a rich iconography of symbols that intertwine animals, plants, and people.

Although the emphasis on the work of Indigenous artists in biennials and temporary exhibitions has and will be analyzed by some as simply the result of fleeting, Eurocentric institutional interest in “otherness,” I would argue that the permanence of this shift is evidenced by the reimagination of the collection galleries of the Pinacoteca de São Paulo. Reopened in October 2020 to coincide with the inauguration of Véxoa: Nos sabemos, the new installation and corresponding pedagogical information directly address the legacy of colonialism in Brazil as well as grapple with the omissions that characterize hegemonic narratives. Esbell’s Feitiço para salvar a Raposa Serra do Sol (Spell to Save the Raposa Serra do Sol, 2019), is located in one of the new galleries, Terra como matéria (Land as Subject), which questions the Western-imposed understanding of the human-nature relationship as one of anthropocentric domination, in favor of a worldview that prioritizes a reciprocal relationship between humans and nonhumans.¹³ With this presentation, Indigenous artists are making their way into the galleries of well-funded institutions. Still, it is clear that these very institutions are questioning their own histories and the violence their narratives have enacted on large populations of individuals.

At the time I traveled to São Paulo, the art world was still grieving, both privately and publicly, Esbell’s unexpected passing. Denilson Baniwa, Esbell’s close friend and colleague, asked that his own work, which was on view in several venues, be covered for an indefinite period. In response, the Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP), the Pinacoteca, the MAM (in Moquém_Surarî: Arte indígena contemporânea), and other institutions shrouded Baniwa’s artwork in black cloth [Fig. 15]. A gesture to Esbell’s absence, Baniwa’s request also signals the impossible and perhaps even destructive weight that Indigenous artists today carry in fighting for not just representation, but also understanding and respect through increased visibility. In a public letter written on November 3, 2021, Baniwa stated that together, he and Esbell were committed to creating pathways for indigenous expression, but emphasized that with Esbell’s death, he would have to reconsider his own relationship with the West.¹⁴

Exhibitions and biennials come and go, but what is evident is that Jaider Esbell’s profound work will continue to weave its way through and beyond the Brazilian art world. His life and practice demonstrate, however, the immense challenges that still face Indigenous peoples and the art institutions that attempt to present their art. As Esbell’s life project clarifies, buying and collecting Indigenous art is insufficient. There needs to be a deep investment in education, activism, and future generations of Indigenous artists, and a serious institutional reckoning with the immense harm caused by exclusionary collecting and exhibiting practices. In this sense, the work must simultaneously consider multiple temporalities—past, present, and future—to begin creating the small fissures for which Esbell so eloquently advocated.

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