Photography

Toyoko Tokiwa (1928–2019) was born in Yokohama and grew up during the devastating years of war and occupation. Tokiwa’s Dangerous Poisonous Flowers deepens our understanding of the empathetic approach and exemplifies how the photobook served as its platform while also being a more democratic form of photographic expression. Unlike exhibitions, which are confined to specific spaces and audiences, the photobook allowed for broader circulation and accessibility, reaching viewers from diverse backgrounds.

Untitled (Soldiers at Rest) (2003) belongs to a body of work which resulted from Vietnamese American artist Dinh Q. Lê’s long-term archaeological investigation of the visual culture of the American War (known as the Vietnam War in the United States), via a traditional Vietnamese weaving technique. Lê learned the latter from his aunt who, when he was a child in Vietnam, wove grass mats, and he later adapted this traditional craft for his own purposes.

This two-part essay introduces the exhibition Bali, Background for War: The Human Problem of Reoccupation, an exhibition curated by anthropologist and cybernetics pioneer Gregory Bateson at The Museum of Modern Art in 1943. Bali, Background for War was an important exhibition of Southeast Asian modern art history and occupies an exceptional place in the Museum’s institutional history. This second essay traces the wide-ranging infrastructural implications of Bateson’s exhibition from the unrealized Wartime Regional Materials Unit at MoMA to the landscape of foreign capital flows and cultural infrastructure that contributed to the canonization and conceptualization of a Southeast Asian modern art during the Cold War.

A wartime exhibition curated by anthropologist and cybernetics pioneer Gregory Bateson, Bali, Background for War opened at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in late summer 1943 and then traveled to universities and museums across North America. Bali, Background for War was an anthropological exhibition of Balinese modern art and culture conceived as a technology for producing a necessary subjectivity in the American infantry and civilian administrators who would oversee the “reoccupation” of Japanese-captured territories, such as Bali. The exhibition sought to cultivate the ability to recognize cultural patterns so as to foster understanding of “those habits of thought and behavior” characteristic of a particular people.

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…

What happens when we cross over to the other side? In relation to the phenomenon of transshipment – the risky and at times illicit practice of transferring cargo from one ship to another – artist and poet Rindon Johnson ruminates on borders and bodies that remain in flux.

The 2022 C-MAP seminar series, Transversal Orientations Part II, was held on Zoom across four panels on May 25 and 26, 2022. This text by Irmgard Emmelhainz, independent translator, writer and researcher, is the second written response to the seminar.

In her essay Slender Threads, Nancy Dantas revisits the cross-generational dialogue and transnational history evoked by Saigon-born artist Tuan Andrew Nguyen’s The Spectres of Ancestors Becoming, presented at RAW Material Company during the Dakar Biennial of 2022.

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.

Madeline Murphy Turner analyzes recent artworks by the late Jaider Esbell, a pioneering artist, enabler, and advocate of Indigenous perspectives, environmentalism, and land rights.

In this essay, Giulia Paoletti deftly explores the photographic portraits of Senegalese photographer, Mama Casset, where female sitters are not mere objects of a male gaze, but rather present themselves as viewing subjects who dare to look.

In 1970, Johnson Donatus Aihumekeokhai Ojeikere, otherwise known as J.D. ‘Okhai Ojeikere (Nigerian, 1930–2014), made Fro Fro, the point of departure of this short text. Storyteller and lens-based artist Jumoke Sanwo reads this image, produced during Nigeria’s nationalist drive and considers Ojeikere’s subjects and their unapologetic defiance.