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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“The Angel of Travels”¹⁰

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Artistic photobooks in Japan had originated some years earlier, when photographers and architecture students who had studied at the Bauhaus returned home with modernist ideas. Publications like Sensation of Flight (詩画集 飛行官能 / Hiko Kanno) (1934) and New Compositions of Beauty of Human Anatomy (人体美の新構成 /Jintaibi no Shin Kōsei ) (1932) were part of this avant-garde movement influenced by European photography.³ The Japanese military, recognizing photography’s potential early on, had been using photo publications for propaganda since the late 19th century.

After World War II, the photobook became a key outlet for expression outside the official or institutional art world, especially given the lack of a gallery infrastructure and the overall economic instability. Photobooks were often printed in relatively affordable editions, combining documentary content with a graphic-design sensibility. Notable examples include Hiroshi Hamaya’s Japan’s Back Coast (裏日本 / Ura Nihon) (1957) and Ken Domon’s (ヒロシマ / Hiroshima) (1958), both of which highlight social issues and underrepresented communities.⁴

In this earlier period, from the 1930s to the 1950s, the foundation was laid for the golden age of Japanese photobooks in the 1960s and 1970s, when the photobook became an artistic object in itself—the definitive expression of photography. Kikuji Kawada’s The Map (地図 / Chizu) (1965) epitomizes this shift. During this era, photographers challenged modern photography and documentary traditions, using abstraction and experimental visual language as forms of political and social critique. This trend culminated in the radical break marked by Provoke (1968–1970), a magazine that reshaped the trajectory of Japanese photography.

Despite photography’s growing role in postwar Japan, female photographers remained largely overlooked by art historians and critics. The 1950s saw significant changes in Japanese society, with women entering a wider range of occupations, including photography. However, their role in the context of photography was often limited to that of a studio assistant who primarily handled retouching for a male photographer. Moreover, it was a profession that many women abandoned upon marriage. While Japan’s first photographic school for women had opened in 1902,⁵ it did so 40 years later than its male counterpart, reflecting the broader gender disparities in artistic and professional recognition. Within this male-dominated industry, women struggled to gain legitimacy as independent photographers.

Toyoko Tokiwa (1928–2019) was born in Yokohama and grew up during the devastating years of war and occupation. She developed an early interest in photography, inspired by her elder brother who was also a photographer. After finishing high school, she studied home economics in Tokyo but defied family expectations to marry, choosing instead to pursue a career in photography. She joined the Shirayuri Camera Club (白百合カメラクラブ/ Shirayuri Kamera Kurabu), a social club that evolved into a learning hub where women practitioners honed their skills under the guidance of established male photographers. Tokiwa was interested in capturing the lives of working women, particularly those whose work involved their bodies. Through this focus, she critiqued the gendered division within postwar photography culture and asserted the subjectivity and agency of women photographers.⁶

Her series Working Women (働く女性 / Hataraku Josei) was published in the June 1957 issue of Women’s Review magazine (婦人公論 / Fujin Kōron). Carrie Cushman and Kelly Midori McCormick note that her work’s placement in women’s magazines rather than in photography publications shows that she was disregarded by photography historians of her time.⁷ Working Women was exhibited in Tokyo in 1956 at the Konishiroku Photo Gallery in the district of Ginza. Critics at the time agreed that only a woman could have taken these photographs because a man would not have been able to access the spaces they document. Tokiwa, however, disliked the implication that a woman could only produce exhibition-worthy work when she photographed such subjects.⁸ Shortly thereafter, when she was approached by publisher Mikasa Shobo to produce a photobook titled Dangerous Poisonous Flowers (危険な毒花 / Kikenna Adabana) (1957) based on the Working Women series, she became the first female photographer to publish a photobook in Japan.

While many male photographers of the time focused on postwar devastation, urbanization, and political protests, Tokiwa centered women’s everyday lives and labor. As one of few professional female photographers and someone working with explicitly gendered subject matter, she created a photobook that was not only formally democratic in its accessible format but also socially transgressive. In offering a female-centered narrative within a photographic documentary landscape overwhelmingly shaped by male perspectives, it challenged dominant visual and social hierarchies.

Tokiwa’s photographs align with social realism and emerging subjectivity movements of her time, yet they embody a radical form of empathy as a distinct way of seeing. In her work, empathy becomes a critical factor, and the photobook the platform upon which this vision unfolds most powerfully. Tokiwa’s portraits of sex workers and other working women resist voyeurism and instead foreground relational intimacy. Her lens does not objectify her subjects but rather invites the viewer into their world to bear witness. The sequential format and the physical intimacy between the viewer and the photographs—elements inherent in the photobook form—invite personal engagement, offering a more egalitarian viewing experience than is possible in an austere traditional gallery setting. In this way, Tokiwa subverted the visual conventions shaped by the “male gaze,” a concept introduced by Laura Mulvey in her influential essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975), in which she argues that dominant visual culture tends to position women as passive objects of heterosexual male desire.⁹ This present essay argues that Tokiwa’s photographic disposition fleshed out, for the first time in the history of Japanese photography, a “female gaze,” one that centers empathy, subjectivity, and emotional resonance, and established a new approach to social documentary, one that I theorize as the “empathetic gaze.” The concept of the female gaze emerged as a counterpoint to Laura Mulvey’s framework. As filmmaker Jill Soloway describes it, the female gaze is a sociopolitical, justice-demanding way of art-making. It is a conscious effort to create empathy as a political tool. It changes the way the world feels about women when they move their bodies through the world, fully feeling themselves as the subject.¹⁰

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. Publisher Mikasa Shobo was not primarily known for art or photography publications; indeed, after the war, the majority of its titles focused on popular literature and translations of works by English-language novelists, such as Ernest Hemingway, and catered to a general readership interested in fiction and Western ideas.¹¹ We can assume that Tokiwa’s photobook reached a wide audience based on its publication history. While exact sales numbers are not available, the book was reprinted multiple times in 1957, the year it was published, suggesting significant circulation and sustained demand.¹² The photobook reached at least its eleventh printing that same year, indicating its widespread popularity and impact.

The title “Dangerous Poisonous Flowers” is a traditional euphemism for sex workers.¹³ The cover of the book features a self-portrait of Tokiwa behind the lens, foregrounding her photographic labor and positioning her as another working woman (fig. 1). This image emphasizes her unique perspective, highlighting her identity as a female photographer. The close-up shot makes the image more relatable for women readers, who recognize themselves in the figure pictured. Inside Tokiwa’s lens, a photomontage shows a man and woman holding each other. But on closer inspection, it becomes clear that the man is forcing the woman to accompany him, dragging her in a way that suggests violence. Although Tokiwa disliked the image because it was staged (as she reveals in her interview with Kelly Midori McCormick¹⁴), this image reinforces the theme of the book, addressing the struggles of being a working woman in a male-dominated world.

The book was printed using photogravure, a printing process that enriches the black tones and was often used at the time for magazines like Women’s Review (婦人公論 / Fujin Kōron) (1916–present) and Ladies’ Club (婦人倶楽部 / Fujin Kurabu) (1920–1988). This printing method, along with the arrangement of the images and choice of paper, mimics those publications in material and composition, perhaps catering to a female readership familiar with such formats. The predominantly dark photos heighten the atmospheric quality of the hidden world revealed in the images. The 248-page photobook unfolds like a memoir, with its extensive first-person narrative evoking the personal nature of a diary. This sense of intimacy is reinforced by its compact size (approximately 7 ½ × 5 ¼ inches), which invites physical closeness with the object, while the absence of borders around the photographs draws the reader into their world. Tokiwa’s autobiographical notes throughout the book enhance its journal-like quality, offering personal reflections on her early years, the process of photographing her subjects, and her evolving thoughts on photography and gender. This combination of text and image, a common style in photo publications at the time, creates a narrative experience that blends visual and written storytelling. The structure of the book—interweaving expansive text chapters with photographic sequences, each marking distinct phases in Tokiwa’s journey—further enhances the book’s diaristic character. The use of first-person narration and the short anecdotal captions accompanying some of the images make it feel as though Tokiwa has directly inscribed the pages, deepening the connection between her and the reader.

A substantial number of photographs in the book are focused on sex workers in the red-light district of Yokohama (fig. 2). The photobook also extends beyond this setting, capturing images of nude models engaged in photo sessions, female wrestlers, divers, and street performers, offering a broader perspective on women who earn a living by using their bodies (fig. 3).

In the accompanying text, Tokiwa reflects on the challenges and dangers she faced while working, particularly within the red-light districts. Armed with her camera and dressed in a skirt and a pair of clogs, she wandered through these shadowy and often dangerous areas. It was precisely her appearance as a young woman that enabled her to move unnoticed and to gain the trust of the women she encountered. They welcomed her into their world and offered her glimpses into their private lives, willingly posing before her lens. “They trusted me because I was wearing a skirt. If I wore trousers, I would have been looked at with alarm,” she explained.¹⁵

As we flip through Tokiwa’s photobook, we witness her evolution from detachment to empathy. Initially, she resents her subjects for what she perceives to be their betrayal of nation and dignity, a feeling evident in her early photographs, most of which were taken from a distance. In figure 4, the prostitutes appear as background figures, seemingly barely noticed by the blurry, shadowy figures in the foreground, perhaps alluding to society’s disregard for their existence. Over time, Tokiwa builds connections with her subjects, capturing them with increasing understanding and compassion. As her work progresses, she moves closer, entering their personal spaces and thereby conveying a more firsthand perspective (fig. 5).

When comparing Tokiwa’s images to those of her contemporary male photographers, such as Shomei Tomatsu (1930–2012), a leading figure in postwar social documentary, a noticeable difference emerges. In Tomatsu’s Prostitute, Nagoya (1958), the artist’s famous photograph of a prostitute, his subject appears defensive, her expression suggesting that she is filled with anger at or at least disapproval of the male photographer’s incursion into her private moment. In contrast, Tokiwa captured her subjects in more relaxed, unguarded moments, often during their free time. In her photographs, her subjects meet her gaze, and we sense in this encounter a feeling of approval or trust. In figure 5, Tokiwa has entered the women’s home, where the central figure (on the left), who appears laid-back, is enjoying a drink and a cigarette. She is surrounded by other women, who also seem to be engaging in their usual routines. Tokiwa’s presence feels natural, as if she is part of their world. As McCormick notes, “[Tokiwa] shifts her position from repulsed voyeur to a photographer with a consciousness.”¹⁶ Ultimately, in shedding light on the realities of sex workers’ everyday lives, using photography as a tool for awareness and advocacy, Tokiwa’s work goes beyond documentation. As the photographer comments in her book, “When I first started, I didn’t feel love for them, maybe hatred. However, when I got into their lives, their rooms, and had tea with them, I realized that these dogs were humans after all. . . . I take these pictures to raise awareness of the negative aspects of the prostitution system.”¹⁷

Tokiwa’s ability to gain her subjects’ trust, to position herself as a participant rather than an intruder in their world, enabled her to photograph them in their intimate settings, capturing their true nature and emotions through her lens. This approach constitutes what can be understood as a “female gaze.” Unlike the traditional male perspective, which often imposes power dynamics of control and objectification, Tokiwa’s images center subjectivity and empathy and aim at awareness. Her camera creates space for the women to appear as full, complex individuals rather than symbols of marginalization or desire. This empathetic way of seeing not only challenges the viewer to look at these women differently but also reinforces the role of photography as a tool for sociopolitical change.

Tokiwa experienced the devastation of World War II, including the bombing of her home during the Yokohama Great Air Attack in 1945, which killed her father. After the US military took control of Yokohama’s harbor, she developed a deep resentment toward American soldiers and channeled this anger through photography. As she explains in Dangerous Poison Flowers, “I took my camera and went to the Yokohama port to comfort my feelings of hatred against the American soldiers while pointing my camera at them.”¹⁸.

Tokiwa’s photographs document US soldiers exploiting Japanese sex workers in the red-light districts. This subject matter parallels the work of male photographers like Shomei Tomatsu, Takuma Nakahira (1938–2015), and Daidō Moriyama (born 1938), who likewise captured the impact of the American occupation of Japan. Ross Tunney describes the US military bases in Japan as embodying the “symbolic rape” of Japan, reflecting the fears of “miscegenation” held by many Japanese people.¹⁹ In Tokiwa’s images (figs. 6, 7), this symbolic rape is powerfully evoked, with the Japanese women depicted as both victims and symbols of a coerced and weakened Japan. Tokiwa’s focus, however, is not on the soldiers but rather on the women’s faces and postures. This shift in perspective gives the women agency, transforming them from passive victims into individuals marked by resilience and strength.

In the second photo sequence in the book, we follow Tokiwa as she enters a hospital in which prostitutes are seeking medical treatment. Hiding her camera under a white coat, she pretended to be the doctor’s assistant, which enabled her to capture intimate and disturbing scenes like the moment of injection. As a female photographer, Tokiwa felt a unique connection to these women, seeing and relating to them in a way that male photographers could not. She sought to reveal their lives “under their skin,” to show their vulnerability.²⁰ The women, who in most cases seem unaware of Tokiwa’s presence, appear vulnerable and tired. One image captures a woman who, having just received a penicillin shot, lies on a hospital bed with her face down and a cigarette in hand (fig. 9). Tokiwa has noted on the side of the image, “She looked like she was exhausted from living” and reveals that it was a scene that left a strong impression on her.²¹ Depicting her subjects as patients offers an unconventional portrayal of prostitution while also alluding to the way prostitution is looked upon as a societal illness.

Tokiwa’s ultimate motivation was to shed light on the harsh realities faced by women whose labor involves their bodies. Her goal was to bring attention to their plight and, in doing so, to foster empathy and awareness. At the same time, she aimed to challenge the stigma attached to sex workers, asserting their humanity and dignity in the face of societal judgment. With remarkable honesty, she reflects on their labor and living conditions, weaving together personal anecdotes and the stories of the women she encountered, offering unconventional portraits of women who were typically idealized by male photographers.

Tokiwa’s photobook not only challenged dominant narratives about sex workers and other working women but also made space for marginalized female voices, both those of her subjects and her own as a rare female photographer in a male-dominated field. Dangerous Poisonous Flowers functioned as a feminist manifesto of its time, incorporating powerful language and imagery that not only empowered women but also exposed their gender-based oppression as workers and artists. In these extensive written passages and photo sequences, she reveals the challenges of being a female photographer and the struggles she faced in completing her project.

From the opening sentence of her book, Tokiwa makes a powerful statement about gender biases in photography: “Does being a woman, rather than a man, give you any disadvantage in taking photos?”²² These words not only challenge established stereotypes at the time but also serve as a testament to the sexist discrimination she endured at the beginning of her career. On the contrary, she believed that it was the very nature of women that made them more capable than men in documentary photography. In Dangerous Poisonous Flowers, she declares: “There is a feminine element to photography. Photographers must have a passive stance to get the subject to accept being photographed. . . . Most of my work was made because I am a woman.”²³

Tokiwa’s photographic work evokes that belief, as we see her subjects allowing her to capture them in their most vulnerable and personal circumstances. What makes her approach unique and compelling is her empathetic gaze, which is free of idealization and marked by a sense of belonging. Empathy, in this case, is a transgressive act, as it challenges the dominant documentary tradition characterized by detachment, domination, and objectification. Instead of reinforcing the viewer’s power over the subject, Tokiwa’s gaze fosters proximity and emotional connection. The empathetic gaze is also a female gaze. Both are grounded in care, presence, and a refusal to look from a position of power, allowing the subjects to reveal their own idea of themselves. The term “empathetic gaze” emerges not as a departure from the female gaze, but rather as a way to articulate its specific emotional and political mechanisms, particularly how it invites viewers to feel with, rather than look at, the photographed subjects. In this sense, the “empathetic gaze” is both a way of seeing and engaging with the subject and an artistic practice that challenges dominant representations and redefines the relationship between viewer and subject.

The book concludes with photographs Tokiwa took in a rehabilitation facility in Kanagawa, where young women from the red-light district were sent after the anti-prostitution law was enacted in Japan in 1956. She photographed them during their free time (working at their sewing machines, arranging flowers, eating), believing that these moments reveal their true natures. These images, accompanied by her words, also reveal a deepening compassion for the working women she had followed for several years.

This final sequence, without context, could easily depict a girls’ school. The women are shown during the day, either attending classes or playing sports, with their bright, clear faces exposed to the lens and radiating innocence. They appear relaxed and absorbed in their activities. Tokiwa is no longer hiding from her subjects. She is present in their daily lives, placing them in front of her lens, against the bright sunlight. She has become one of them. In figure 10, the girls are arranging flowers. The flowers take prominence in the foreground, and the girls seem to blend into them, almost appearing as flowers themselves, reinforcing the title of the book. This scene deeply moved Tokiwa, who writes, “The dirt of the past is washed away clean, and the innocent feelings of young girls, placed in a normal environment, are transformed into a flower arrangement. Even withered and lifeless flowers are still flowers.”²⁴

This essay is the outcome of my research trip to Japan in April 2024, which took place in the context of my internship with the International Program of The Museum of Modern Art. I am grateful to curator Yamada Yuri of the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum, who introduced me to Toyoko Tokiwa’s photobook. I also want to thank Carlos Quijon, Jr., C-MAP Southeast & East Asia Fellow at the International Program for his guidance through this process. A copy of this rare publication is available in MoMA’s Library, thanks to the support of the International Program.

The post The Empathetic Gaze: Toyoko Tokiwa’s <em>Dangerous Poisonous Flowers</em> and the Female Photographic Subject in Postwar Japan appeared first on post.

In a series of email conversations with art historian Moira Roth, Dinh Q. Lê (1968–2024) recalled a form of ritual he would perform on each of his trips back to Vietnam. As an act of healing to help his home country recover from the wounds of war, Lê would carry with him some amount of American soil that he would then mix into the water of the Mekong River. In his own words, this action of soil transfusion was a way to “help the wandering souls of all American MIAs lost in the jungle of Vietnam to have some sense of home.”¹ Conjuring both the artist’s trajectory from Southeast Asia to the United States and back again and a process of anamnesis across historical and political events, this anecdote is suggestive of the matrix guiding much of Lê’s work, in which histories of war and violence and the individual lives they often overshadow constitute threads—narrative as well as material—that are open to recombination.

Indeed, the act of bringing an element (soil) from a distant place and mixing it with a local element (water), ultimately—all things considered—results in the transformation of both, a process that can be seen as a translation of the method Lê used to create the series for which he is best known, namely his “photo-weavings.”² Untitled (Soldiers at Rest) (2003) belongs to this body of work, which resulted from 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. As Christopher Miles, an artist, curator, and friend of Lê has noted, the function of weaving was, for Lê, both “an effective method and a powerful metaphor” in addressing the layering of personal, historical, and cultural registers operating in his practice.³ In an attempt both to interrogate the construction of representations of Vietnam and the way his own subjectivity related to them and to explore how “to take back control of those images,” Lê cut chromogenic prints of archival and found imagery into strips that he interlaces into composite pictures.⁴

Untitled (Soldiers at Rest) shows a group of five men who, as the title suggests, are taking a break from their military duties. This moment of pause from the temporality of war is signaled through their bare chests and laid-back demeanors. They smile at the camera; one man in the foreground can be seen holding a cigarette. Elements of warfare are identifiable, mainly in the form of a vehicle that, at the center of the image, one of the soldiers is seated upon. This scene is interlaced with two other characters whose presence produces an impression of spectrality and wards off any attempt to capture the image as a whole—that is, to find an all-encompassing meaning within it. The most easily discernible of them is Cynthia Wood in her iconic role as a Playboy Playmate in Apocalypse Now (1979). Wearing a pale sky-blue cowgirl outfit and white hat, she appears in a number of Lê’s other woven photographs, including in Paramount (2003), Untitled 9 (2004), and From Vietnam to Hollywood (paratroopers) (2005), as part of his endeavor to examine the connection between sexualized imagery and imagery of war and political violence. Wood’s inclusion in Untitled (Soldiers at Rest) seems to aim to problematize certain binaries within the image. Often, black-and-white images are archival or photojournalistic and so Wood is rendered in bright colors—in contrast to the soldiers. Furthermore, the men’s faces are identifiable, while hers is partially blurred through the effects of crosshatching—the mark of Lê’s “own style of weaving.” As the artist has declared, “There are parts where I skip weaving to make a certain part of the image clearer or to hide an area.”⁵ In Apocalypse Now, the arrival of Playmates in the Vietnamese jungle to perform for the soldiers results in the latter’s display of violent virility—led by their drive toward a fantasized full satisfaction that, in fact, exposes the military’s impotence. However, in Lê’s image, this scene is not reduced to the mere spectacle of the female body offered to the male gaze—or even to its critique. The quasi-kinetic dimension of Lê’s photo-weavings, when encountered in real space, invites the viewer to a wander of body and gaze, and to a back-and-forth examination of “hidden” elements and of the work in total. And so, on closer inspection, Untitled (Soldiers at Rest) reveals the silhouette of a man who, emerging from the right-hand edge of the picture, stands face-to-face with Wood, his arm stretched toward her and blending in the picture as he reaches out to her. Within this triangular scenario, it is unclear (at least to the author of the present speculation) which gazing subject is the object of Wood’s lascivious pose. As already mentioned, the soldiers seem to stare at the camera—or the viewer—and the way Lê has crosshatched Wood’s right eye directs her gaze in the same direction. As for the character on the right, Lê has woven a strip of the soldiers in the other image into the area of his eye socket.

Having experienced war and refugeehood, Lê’s questioning of what forms the memories of Vietnam led him to undo their established representations and to “start to insert other narratives,”⁶ a process that, as major commentators of Lê’s work have noted, “can be seen as acts of repair or as a kind of memorial.”⁷ Here, questions arise: do Lê’s gestures of interlacing, interweaving, or suturing constitute a form of critique, and what do these other narratives entail? In this regard, Lê stated in a 2023 interview: “Everything’s kind of merging, so I was trying to break the whole thing apart into pieces or to deconstruct it, to start to talk about how everything is merging between facts, between fiction, between personal memories into this landscape of surreal memories, neither facts nor fiction.”⁸ As this statement on merging levels of realities and the constructed scenario of Untitled (Soldiers at Rest) suggests, the insertion of other narratives produces indeterminacy and undecidability relative to the legibility and visibility of the images he produces. My contention is that this phenomenon relates as much to the material condition of weaving as to its conceptual and psychic dimensions. Although rarely discussed by his commentators, the visual likeness between Lê’s woven photos and the texture of early electronic videos is striking, and it is something the artist himself commented on: “I always think of the weaving in terms of pixels, because weaving is the first binary structure. Maybe not exactly from the start, but certainly over the years I have been working on the project, and particularly after the first body of work in the late 1980s, I was aware of that relationship.”⁹ Thus, it can be inferred that the site that interlaces the personal with the political is precisely the minimal unit of a woven image—the stitch, the point of suture, or the pixel. A suture closes a wound but in so doing, makes it visible; and to borrow from philosopher Maurizio Lazzarato’s writings on the videographic image, similarly, Lê’s “weaving, dissolving, and re-weaving flows . . . is radical constructivism in politics as well as in the . . . image.”¹⁰

In memory of Dinh Q. Lê and to our missed encounters. Thank you to post editors Beya Othmani, Carlos Quijon, Jr., and Elena Pérez-Ardá López for making this encounter of another kind possible.

Untitled (Soldiers at Rest) (2003) is currently on view as part of the presentation titled “War Remembers Me” in Gallery 214.

The post Method and Metaphor: Dinh Q. Lê’s Untitled (Soldiers at Rest) (2003) appeared first on post.

Read the first part of the series here.

Anthropologist Gregory Bateson believed that a systematic understanding of other cultures was important for a peaceful postwar world order. He also believed that the museum, particularly The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), was the ideal institution to undertake this work. In MoMA’s press release for the exhibition Bali, Background for War: The Human Problem of Reoccupation (1943), Bateson notes that “there is one common ground between the scientific world of the anthropologist and the world of art: the idea that in some sense the artist expresses himself. The exhibition is based on that idea which, in time of war, may become as grim as a mathematical equation in ballistics.”¹

Bali, Background for War captured the social science and art networks that were brought together during World War II by the war effort and an institution of modern art. In turn, the exhibition became an important constellation of global history. At MoMA, Bateson’s notion of the museum as a common ground for science, art, and social engineering dovetailed with Bauhaus thought on the shaping of visual culture and perception, leading to a historical confluence of proto-cybernetics, regional thinking, and the New Bauhaus within the modern art museum in the service of military goals and postwar rebuilding. The influence of Bali, Background for War resounded in the postwar years, possibly contributing to the formation and intellectual history of Southeast Asian modern art networks in terms of how the exhibition foreshadows but is also informative in reading the postwar rehabilitation of the US cultural Cold War in Southeast Asia.

During World War II, the Museum executed 38 contracts for various government agencies. Among these contracts and programs, Bateson found work in the Film Library developing cultural intelligence studies of Axis countries through film.² While Bateson was not a film specialist per se, it was his work in Bali and his use of still and motion photography in analyzing cultures that attracted the attention of Iris Barry, first curator of MoMA’s Film Library (now the Department of Film), and led to his employment.³ Prior to joining the Museum, Bateson believed that MoMA had a specific and important role in the war effort, particularly in producing wartime subjectivities through exhibitions. This resonates with how scholar Fred Turner has described the exhibition-form’s compilation of material and the vistas from which viewers could freely discern cultural patterns and navigate the exhibition as a “democratic surround.”⁴ This experience of moving from image to text, of observation, inference, and deduction, could lead the audience to become more psychologically flexible and democratic in nature.⁵ In this regard, Bali, Background for War was an occasion for viewers “to exercise democratic choice.”⁶ This was an exhibitionary logic that provided a counterpoint to Nazi Germany’s instrumentalized modes of communication and power associated with fascist propaganda. Turner notes that Mead and other members of the Committee for National Morale, of which Bateson was secretary (while still at MoMA), envisioned the museum as the proper setting for a new kind of propaganda that could nurture both the individual democratic personality and a collective sense of national purpose.⁷

As an institution, MoMA was committed to these same ideas. In addition, some of the emigrant Bauhaus artists who had made their way to the United States after the closing of the Bauhaus by the Nazis in 1933 were committed to ideas of producing psychological agency through vision. Bauhaus artist Alexander Schawinsky was invited by the Museum (as opposed to Bateson personally) to design Bali, Background for War. Turner has noted that the museum was an important wartime node, one that mobilized Bauhaus methods. Victor D’Amico (founding director of MoMA’s Department of Education), for example, mobilized László Moholy-Nagy’s ideas for treating and resocializing veterans through the Museum’s War Veterans’ Art Center, which opened in 1944.⁸ MoMA likewise employed Bauhaus artist and designer Herbert Bayer’s techniques for extending field of vision by hanging photographs below and above eye level to give viewers of wartime exhibitions a field of visual choices.⁹ Bayer designed MoMA exhibitions Road to Victory, which was curated by photographer Edward Steichen in 1942, and Airways to Peace: An Exhibition of Geography for the Future, which was planned and directed by Monroe Wheeler in 1943.¹⁰

Schawinsky attended the Bauhaus and studied with Moholy-Nagy, Vasily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Walter Gropius, and Oskar Schlemmer. At the invitation of Josef Albers, he taught from 1936 to 1938 at Black Mountain College, where he developed the “Spectodrama,” a multimedia stage design. In response to MoMA’s interest in Bauhaus ideas of how vision might inform subjectivity, on October 28, 1943, Monroe Wheeler, then director of Exhibitions at MoMA as well as the Museum’s first director of Publications, wrote to Schawinsky to solicit a proposal for an exhibition based on the artist’s notion of “perspective,” which Schawinsky explained in terms of the “changes in visual conceptions with the climax of today’s formation of new visual experience in the making.”¹¹

Bateson’s correspondence with Schawinsky in May 1943 indicates a highly collaborative exhibition-making process, wherein Bateson sent detailed notes, expanded the list of artwork to be included, and solicited feedback.¹² However, in July 1943, Bateson wrote to Wheeler and James Thrall Soby, then director of the Museum’s Armed Services Program, to request that Schawinsky be removed from the project. Bateson complained that Schawinsky lacked “respect for the material” and that he was “trimming . . . photographs to fit in with his scheme of rectangles regardless of the internal composition of the pictures.”¹³ Ultimately, Schawinsky was kept on, and in the press release for the exhibition, he is credited as designing the exhibition.¹⁴ Despite their differences, Schawinsky’s Bauhaus training was evident in the exhibition. His design employed Bayer’s extended field of vision techniques—with images placed at different proximities to eye level—and performatively staged modern Balinese art against linear fields in a way that recalled the Spectodrama.¹⁵

These affinities between Schawinsky’s Bauhaus ideas and Bateson’s interest in social engineering subjectivities through vision and aesthetic experience would take on an expanded and international vision through Bali, Background for War and Bateson’s work at MoMA. As part of his job at the Museum, Bateson attended a conference that, held in Chicago in March 1943 by the army’s Military Government Division, brought together faculty from Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, and universities in Wisconsin and Michigan to develop training for the Army Specialized Training Program. Upon returning to New York, he and MoMA Film Library founding director, John Abbott, drafted a proposal to set up a Wartime Regional Materials Unit within MoMA that would be responsible for circulating artworks, cultural objects, graphic materials, photographs, and films to college campuses hosting the army program and eventually to nongovernmental agencies involved in postwar reconstruction. Bali, Background for War was an exhibition that attempted to put these ideas into operation. In his letter to Mortimer Graves, then executive director of the American Council of Learned Societies in Washington, DC, Bateson identifies the exhibition as a basis for setting up a Wartime Regional Materials Unit at MoMA.

Bateson’s papers include notes regarding who would be part of the unit and how it would be constituted through MoMA’s infrastructure. Bateson focused on the diversity of artistic and cultural material at the Museum, including graphic design and film, as well as on its public programs.¹⁶ He considered the Museum an ideal institution to host the unit because it dealt “both with the Arts and with the Sciences.”¹⁷ The notes draw defined lines from Abbot, founding director of the Film Library, to Alfred Barr, founding director of the Museum, and Elodie Courter, who would organize circulating exhibitions, which were seen as fundamental to this unit. The unit was imagined to mobilize the different departments of the Museum, with dotted lines drawing different divisions across the institution into the unit. The inclusion of Barr in Bateson’s notes and Bateson’s supposed attempt at writing a Balinese modern art history point in turn to the transmutation of the currency of modern art history to military value. Bateson’s exhibition expanded the visions of modern art history that Barr had mapped out in his diagrams on the development of abstract art.¹⁸ The anthropologist’s vision for MoMA was that the Museum would be an apparatus that produced intelligence derived from exhibitionary experience and the visual analysis of art. This intelligence during the war represented a convergence of the anthropological and the art historical as these were mobilized toward militaristic ends. Ultimately, however, Bateson’s proposal to develop a Wartime Regional Materials Unit within MoMA was not realized.¹⁹

At first glance, Bali, Background for War was not a particularly successful venture. Yet, it can still be considered an important exhibition of its time and one that is significant in a Southeast Asian modern art history. At the close of the exhibition in 1943, Bateson joined the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), an American wartime intelligence agency. This was an unusual achievement given Bateson was a British national. Created in 1942, the OSS was the first centralized intelligence agency in the United States. It was the institutional predecessor to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).²⁰ David Price, an American anthropologist who has spent his career studying the historical and contemporary military uses of anthropology, has noted in his archival research on Bateson’s wartime work that the OSS was interested in the techniques of visual anthropology.²¹

An OSS memo Bateson authored in November 1944 suggests strategies for maintaining the long-term interests of the United States in South Asia.²² Bateson’s position paper envisions the postwar period as an extension of the prewar colonial system. His memo posits a moderation of the dynamic of “exhibitionism” and “spectatorship” to manage possible rebellion from independence movements—concepts that Bateson had first deployed in explaining child-rearing norms in different cultures. In the memo, Bateson elaborates:

The most significant experiment which has yet been conducted in the adjustment of relations between “superior” and “inferior” peoples is the Russian handling of their Asiatic tribes in Siberia. The findings of this experiment support very strongly the conclusion that it is very important to foster spectatorship among the superiors and exhibitionism among the inferiors. In outline, what the Russians have done is to stimulate the native peoples to undertake a native revival while they themselves admire the resulting dance festivals and other exhibitions of native culture, literature, poetry, music and so on. And the same attitude of spectatorship is then naturally extended to native achievements in production or organization. In contrast to this, where the white man thinks of himself as a model and encourages the native people to watch him in order to find out how things should be done, we find that in the end nativistic cults spring up among the native people. The system gets overweighed until some compensatory machinery is developed and then the revival of native arts, literature, etc., becomes a weapon for use against the white man. . . . If, on the other hand, the dominant people themselves stimulate native revivalism, then the system as a whole is much more stable, and the nativism cannot be used against the dominant people.²³

Bateson suggests that if Indigenous peoples are encouraged to exhibit and celebrate their culture, as opposed to being encouraged to model themselves on Western culture, then “nativism cannot be used against the dominant people.”²⁴ Taken at face value, Bateson’s comments read as patronizing prescriptions for how to manage the postwar decolonizing process. Yet at the same time, an inverse relationship of cultural relations of “occupation” was being brought to the fore. In Bali, Background for War, Bali defined the region that the American soldier was to reoccupy. In this framework, the exhibition established an exhibitionism-spectatorship dynamic in which American soldiers were the spectators celebrating the culture of a region that they were liberating. In theory, American soldiers were placed in an exhibitionism-spectatorship dynamic that prepared them for the more benign reoccupation and postwar worldbuilding that they would have to enact in the Pacific.

Price detailed that when he declassified Bateson’s documents under the Freedom of Information Act in the 1990s, Bateson’s memo from November 1944 was found in the CIA archive and not the OSS archive. This suggests that Bateson’s advice for intelligence gathering was influential beyond World War II and perhaps formative to the CIA. Indeed, in 1951, only four short years after its founding, the CIA outlined a policy on Cold War weapons. The classified report considers culture a “Cold War Front” and advocates for private foundations to patronize and issue commissions to artists “who could create works of art symbolical of the struggle against tyranny in their native lands.”²⁵ The CIA would also infamously fund cultural organizations around the world, including the Congress for Cultural Freedom and the Asia Foundation.²⁶ Both organizations contributed to the advancement of modern art internationally in the postwar years. From 1951, the CIA put into effect a program code-named DTPillar to influence the development of nationbuilding in Asia as a means to limit the growth of communism. Stirred by a public exposé in Ramparts magazine (in circulation from 1962 to 1975), the CIA ceased funding of cultural organizations in 1967.²⁷

Bateson was also strategic in targeting individuals who should see Bali, Background for War. He wrote personal invitations to the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University and to individuals at the OSS.²⁸ Particularly telling is a loose list that includes Cora Du Bois (OSS, 1942–45). Du Bois was chief of research and analysis for the Southeast Asia Command by 1944 and, after World War II, influenced the framing of Southeast Asia through her positions as chief of the Southeast Asia Branch of the US State Department’s Office of Intelligence Research (from 1945 to 1949) and as an academic at Harvard University. The list also includes Charles Fahs (OSS, 1941–45), who became chief of the Research and Analysis Division (Far East) of the OSS in 1942 and director of the Humanities Division of the Rockefeller Foundation in 1950, where he was directly involved in allocating Rockefeller grants and providing critical support to individual artists and intellectuals as well as to museums and art spaces in Southeast Asia.²⁹ In 1947, as if telegraphing Bateson’s comment about regions as a sane orchestration of the world, Du Bois, having returned from her service in the OSS and been asked to speak about cultural anthropology and Southeast Asia, stated at Smith College: “Regions and areas, like fields of academic learning, are artificial boundaries which we erect around our curiosity. They do not represent limits of integrated reality, but defenses built to encompass the frailties of human comprehension.”³⁰ This correlation and the constellated network of Bali, Background for War raises complex questions about US postwar and postimperial worldbuilding and intelligence, as well as about Southeast Asian modern art.

After the war, Bateson would advance his ideas on visual anthropology in other fields. In 1947, he addressed the United Nations, giving a speech titled “Atoms, Nations and Cultures” to argue for the urgency of social engineering based on the cultural analysis derived from visual anthropology.³¹

Twenty-four years after Bali, Background for War opened, in 1967, Bateson published the essay “Style, Grace, and Information in Primitive Art.”³² In this text, he performs an analysis of Balinese art as information coded in style, material, composition, and skill. He emphasizes the profundity of art in terms of its relational quality. Thus, he argues, Balinese paintings, under the influence of traditional and Western art forms, encapsulate the communication process between these societies. Furthermore, the text resonates with Bateson’s interest in addressing differences in international relations, which could also be read as laying out the framework for data to remake the world.³³ In this sense, Bali, Background for War in many ways foreshadowed Bateson’s work on cybernetics in the 1960s and throughout the Cold War.³⁴

The cross-cultural relations based on aesthetic experiences with modern art that defined Bali, Background for War were echoed in MoMA’s contributions to the postwar construction of modern art in Bali. In 1953, the foundation Puri Lukisan was set up to establish a museum of modern Balinese art in Ubud. Tjokorda Gee Agung was its founding chairman while Rudolf Bonnet was its curator. The museum sought support from patrons of Balinese art in Holland, the United States, and England. Monroe Wheeler answered the call. Beyond sending a book on the care of artworks, he supported the development of the museum by soliciting donations from American foundations. The first organization he approached was the Asia Foundation, which would contribute to the building in 1956 of Museum Puri Lukisan, the oldest museum in Bali. Wheeler might not have known at the time that the Asia Foundation received funds from the CIA. Nevertheless, the networked triangulation of capital flows from the CIA as well as the belief in aesthetic experience being able to mold subjectivities is important in the intelligence-making project of modern art in the Cold War.³⁵ In his letter to the Asia Foundation, dated July 10, 1955, Wheeler notes that a financial contribution to the Indonesian government to complete the building of the museum would be an admirable “token of American concern with the fine arts, which is too little understood in Asia,” extending MoMA’s wartime concern for Balinese modern art and Southeast Asia into the postwar period.³⁶

Bali, Background for War, when read against its possible influences on the cultural Cold War in the region and Bateson’s postwar accomplishments, anticipates exhibitions of Southeast Asian modern art as forms of intelligence-making, marrying the regional as a method in structuring the world with “modern art” and as a product of international exchange. Thus, Bali, Background for War offers a vista onto early cybernetic entanglements between Southeast Asia and modern art. It is important to keep in mind that MoMA did not set out to make a regional art exhibition with Bali, Background for War. Neither did the Museum set out to influence the policies of the cultural Cold War in Southeast Asia that Southeast Asian modern artists (like the Balinese modernists) would later navigate in seeking support for their own development through the Asia Foundation and other CIA-funded organizations. As an exhibition that predates Southeast Asia as a field of area studies, Bali, Background for War is an exhibitionary method: it is at once a field of relations, a feedback loop, and an open-ended imaginary produced from comparatively looking at modern art. Bali, Background for War foreshadowed future articulations of the relations that have come to define cybernetics as a field. As this essay argues, the exhibition also expands our understanding of MoMA’s influence as a museum and center for a global history of modern art, a critical part of the construction of a postwar world order.

*This essay has been adapted from and expands on an unpublished chapter from the author’s dissertation titled “Exhibiting Southeast Asia in the Cultural Cold War: Geopolitics of Regional Art Exhibitions (1940s–1980s),” Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, 2023.

**With special thanks to Ana Marie of the Archives, Library, and Research Collections Department and Ottilie Lighte from the Imaging and Visual Resources Department of The Museum of Modern Art.

The post Bali, Background for War (1943), Part II: A Proposal for Wartime Regional Materials Unit at MoMA; A Proposal for the Cultural Cold War appeared first on post.

The whites of eyes and the glint of teeth, the only discernible features in the otherwise dark shape of the Balinese shadow puppet of the witch Rangda in her supernatural form, were probably the first things visitors encountered when they entered the 1943 exhibition Bali, Background for War: The Human Problem of Reoccupation. With its fiery head and tendril fingers, the shadow puppet is a totem for a ferocious “other.” Encapsulating the anxieties that contextualized this exhibition, which coincided with World War II, the shadow puppet embodied the sensibility of the exhibition-form—an elusive sensemaking of a culture oceans away.

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.¹ Unlike MoMA’s other wartime exhibitions of the early 1940s, such as Road to Victory (1942) and Airways to Peace (1943), Bali, Background for War did not visually represent the efforts of the Allied Forces. Instead, it presented Balinese sculpture, paintings, puppets, and idols—Balinese modern art—collected by Bateson and Margaret Mead, his wife and collaborator at the time, as well as a selection of photographs from the more than 25,000 images taken during their joint anthropological expedition to Bali in 1936–39.²

Designed by Bauhaus artist and designer Xanti Schawinsky to be portable, the exhibition’s display system relied on wooden structures composed of thin vertical poles on which artworks and cultural objects were hung or otherwise installed in a variety of ways and at different heights. Balinese cultural objects were installed to facilitate distinct sight lines, which Bateson referred to as “vistas,”³ with the individual pieces appearing to float relative to one another. The exhibition presented works and objects on the same ground, alluding to how the artist and their making of the artwork were the material products of a society in which they lived and worked.

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.⁴ In turn, it represented a weaponization of the then emerging methods of visual anthropology. Bali, Background for War was, in this respect, an exceptional exhibition. Bateson’s only curatorial effort while he was employed at MoMA (from 1942 to 1943), it encapsulated aspects of Bateson and Mead’s most influential work in visual anthropology—at the time, a new subfield of anthropology that would, in part, lead to a break from the racial codification informing exhibitions of Balinese culture in Western museums in the 1930s, wherein biological markers identified race as a defining paradigm of a people’s identity.⁵ Mead and Bateson’s use of film and photography in their fieldwork in Bali has been interpreted by scholars such as Urmila Mohan as a move away from such racialized logic.⁶

After their fieldwork in Bali, Mead and Bateson developed this inquiry into a method that became a “leading social-scientific strategy in World War II” through what Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan has described as “a new alliance of federal and foundation sponsorship with university and industrial partners.”⁷ This included the Committee for National Morale, which the couple joined in 1939, and the Council on Intercultural Relations, which they co-established in 1942 to coordinate research projects among an interdisciplinary group of anthropologists, sociologists, and psychologists interested in analyzing contemporary cultures to benefit the war effort.⁸

Mead and Bateson cowrote Balinese Character: A Photographic Analysis (1942) based on their findings from their fieldwork in Bali. In this book, they lay out their new methodology of visual anthropology.⁹ Photographs capture “behaviors” that are seen as logics or patterns that were registered across a society and found in individual actions or objects. The book explores the social relations that form the basis of larger social patterns. However, this study of Bali by visually surveying the cultural other has been critiqued by scholars such as Geoghegan as indebted to a Dutch colonial policy of turning Bali into a “living museum,” that is, of looking upon it as an idyllic “primitive” society—the assumption being that Balinese culture remained unchanged and thus could be essentialized and understood through visual codes. To be sure, Mead and Bateson’s lack of analysis of the Dutch administration renders their documentation and analysis problematic.¹⁰

Bali, Background for War (1943) was, in essence, the physical manifestation of the method of visual anthropology fleshed out in Balinese Character. Indeed, the exhibition itself became a space in which anthropological methods produced a sense of knowing and relating through the visual encounter with art and cultural artifacts; yet, at the same time, it did not end up being solely an ethnographic representation. In one of Bateson’s many drafts of a press release, he explained that the exhibition would promote “[a] greater realistic understanding of the differences between peoples, of the ways in which each people has developed its own customs and its view of life” and that “if different people are to work together . . . and appreciate each other, some of these special peculiarities must be recognized” and “labelled and pointed out partly so that we may avoid stepping on each other’s toes but also so that each people may have opportunity to make its own special contribution to an organized world.”¹¹ These ideas formed the groundwork for an exhibitionary logic in which the artwork is understood as indexical of a culture and people. Furthermore, it anticipates the belief in postwar art exhibitions as visual arguments for cultural affinities and thus the basis of a shared identity and political consciousness.

Bali, Background for War was the first “regional” exhibition of art from Southeast Asia. In 1943, the imagination of Southeast Asia as a region was a product of World War II. An offshoot of the India Command and formed in response to the Japanese conquest of the region, the South East Asia Command was created by the Allied Forces in August 1943, the same month that Bali, Background for War opened at MoMA.¹² Southeast Asia is referenced in MoMA’s exhibition press release as the “conquered countries” of the Japanese.¹³ The Japanese occupation during World War II had been articulated as the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, an economic, military, and cultural bloc of occupied countries in East and Southeast Asia that supported the Japanese war effort. In wartime propaganda, the Co-Prosperity Sphere was framed as part of a larger historic aim of resisting Western colonization and manipulation. Seeding a regional identity through a cultural program that included the establishment of “modern” arts education, it championed the revitalization of local, traditional, and Asian aesthetics across the region.¹⁴

As a regional exhibition, Bali, Background for War was less a geographic understanding of the region as a proof of concept of Bateson’s theorization of a world order based on regions of cultures. While he does not explicitly point to it, Bateson’s presentation of modern artworks alongside anthropological materials advanced an aesthetic argument about the role of art in navigating cultural differences. It reflected an understanding of the region that was sensitive to the effects of war, one that offered an alternative visual logic to “Asian” aesthetics advanced by Japanese wartime propaganda.

Bateson’s notes about the exhibition indicate “Southeast Asia” alongside other themes such as “Problems of Overseas Administration,” “Problems of National Character,” “Intercultural Relations and Propaganda,” and “Problems of Visual Presentation.”¹⁵ His conceptualization of the region was a framework for organizing and ordering the world—one based on visual identification of “cultural patterns.” In memos regarding the exhibition, he commented that “in the organization and orchestration of the postwar world [,] many different types of technical insight will be required—political, geographic, economic and cultural.”¹⁶ Furthermore, he highlighted that a key failure of the Treaty of Versailles was the lack of regional knowledge and warned that in the postwar epoch, there was a real risk that the cultural aspects of the various regions would “be ignored or imperfectly understood.”¹⁷ Bateson believed that this would lead to conflict. In a letter to Mortimer Graves of the American Council of Learned Societies in Washington, DC, sent in April 1943, four months before the opening of Bali, Background for War, Bateson explained that he and Mead were “trying to arrange in the museum an exhibition of Balinese material (native paintings, carvings, observational films, and observational photographs of native behavior) as an example of what a single culture would look like when worked out in this way.”¹⁸ He concluded by claiming the exhibition was part of a larger framework that was “the next logical step towards a sane orchestration of the world’s regional culture.”¹⁹ If regions were a framework for organizing the world and integral to international relations and building a peaceful world, then the ability to read the cultural patterns found in art and its relationship to a society was crucial.

Bali, Background for War sought to represent “the patterns of thought and behavior” of the Balinese people through “works of art and [Bateson’s] photographs of daily life on the island.”²⁰ Developed with MoMA in mind, the exhibition set out a methodology of viewing that made the exhibition-form a generative site for producing “intelligence.” Intelligence in this regard took multiple forms, including the conversion of anthropological information on Balinese culture into “military intelligence,” wherein the viewer learning to read Balinese culture through the exhibition develops a skill necessary for the successful American “reoccupation” of Bali. The exhibition was firstly a collection of material and anthropological information that in the context of World War II had military value. Secondly, it was mobilized to cultivate skills and subjectivities for military application. In turn, the exhibition as a historical object points to an emergent “cultural” military industrial complex centered on modern art and anthropology.

In this context, the “regional” exhibition was a technology that converted anthropological intelligence into military intelligence, both in terms of apprehending a cultural other but also as a way of organizing the world through cultural regions. How was modern art integral to this convergence? How was the production of a modern subjectivity and exhibitionary logic of Southeast Asia entangled with the writing of modern art at MoMA, and how was it distinct from the colonial aesthetics of the census that scholars have pointed out in discussing Balinese Character?²¹

The artworks that Bateson and Mead presented in Bali, Background for War were procured from three main painting centers in Bali: Ubud, where most foreign artists in Bali had settled from the 1920s onward; Sanur, where some foreign artists lived and most vacationed; and Batuan, which tourists rarely visited. Bateson and Mead seemed to have been most interested in Batuan, where most of the paintings in Bali, Background for War were sourced from.²² By the time Mead and Bateson were in Bali, there was a thriving business of Balinese artists making tourist paintings for a Western audience. As products of transnational exchange, these works of art were quintessentially modern.

Hildred Geertz, in her study of Bateson and Mead’s collection of Balinese paintings and, more generally, of Batuan paintings, describes the paintings produced in Batuan as “bicultural” and “bound up in the meaning systems and aesthetic ideas of several cultures at once.”²³ She notes that only a few of the Batuan painters were directly taught by German artist Walter Spies and Dutch artist Rudolf Bonnet, both of whom lived in Ubud. For the most part, Batuan or Balinese painters at the time encountered Western images in textbooks, in foreign magazines, and in the form of small commercial images distributed within the Dutch colony.

Prior to Bateson and Mead’s arrival in Bali, there were already precedents of exchange and modernism on the island. The year 1928 is marked as the first time Western observers recorded art in Bali as consisting of new forms of representation. These observers went on to cultivate a tourist economy for such images.²⁴ The Pita Maha, an artist society committed to modern art in Bali, was established in 1936 and active until 1940. It became associated with modern art of Bali, with Bonnet, a member of the society, organizing exhibitions of Balinese modernists in Indonesia and in Europe, including exhibitions in 1937 and 1938 in Amsterdam and London²⁵

The modern style that emerged from this period in the 1930s and which defined the artworks that Bateson presented in Bali, Background for War was thus informed by engagement with Western art. As Adrian Vickers has noted, Balinese modern art in the 1930s was seen as exotically primitive and distinctly different from Western modernism. And yet, art dealers such as Dutch gallerist Carel van Lier sold Balinese modern art in Europe alongside European modern art.²⁶

Walter Spies housed Bateson and Mead upon their arrival in Bali in 1936 and provided their first introduction to Balinese paintings, influencing Bateson’s perspective on Balinese modern art.²⁷ For MoMA’s installation of the exhibition, Bateson considered an additional section devoted to Balinese modern art.²⁸ In the anthropologist’s personal papers, there is a memo to Xanti Schawinsky about the wall text alongside instructions regarding which photographs and artworks were to be installed. In addition, Bateson scribbled down several possible configurations for the works. A section called “History of Modern Balinese Art,” for example, was to be arranged in a straight row, suggesting a linear historical narrative. The selection of works would include one or two paintings by Spies and about ten artworks from Bateson and Mead’s collection. The wall text focused on the genealogy of the making of the artwork and described how artists made their works as part of a loose art history of modern Balinese art development, information that was then interspersed with short stories and mythical accounts such as how Spies gave paper and black ink to Balinese artist Sorbet and a whole school was born. The genealogy privileged Spies and his position in Balinese modern art at the expense of other influences, implicitly reflecting Bateson’s own perspective of Balinese art.

Bateson claims in the written guide that accompanied the traveling exhibition that all the artworks were of the artists’ “spontaneous invention,” with the exception of a painting by Ida Bagus Made Togog, who was asked to make pictures of his dreams.²⁹ In this regard, Bateson’s mobilization of artworks might seem to speak to how Balinese artists authentically represented their inner lives and society. This was not necessarily the case, however. In her study of Bateson and Mead’s collection, Geertz found that the two anthropologists deeply influenced the Balinese artists. Throughout their fieldwork, the couple was in contact with Balinese painters who would not only travel to see them but also made art specifically to sell to them.³⁰

While Bateson intended the artworks to be seen as sources of information about the inner lives of the peoples they represented, their makers were aware of the Western anthropological gaze of Bateson and Mead, which informed their process and, in particular, their subject matter. Thus, the Balinese society that Bali, Background for War pictured was one already in dialogue with an international world order and a modern art history.In this sense, Balinese modern art in the exhibition was relational, not just representative of a faraway culture. The photographed Balinese man and more generally the people whose gaze met those visiting the exhibition was thus returning a gaze that was part of a cultural exchange that spanned back to the 1930s and was a critical part of the definition of Balinese modern art. The regional imagination captured in Bali, Background for War was, in turn, an emergent international order framed by an encounter with modern art. This nexus of the anthropological and militaristic sensemaking that took shape as an exhibitionary technology of worldmaking during the Cold War will be unpacked in the second part of this essay.

With special thanks to Ana Marie of the Archives, Library, and Research Collections Department and Ottilie Lighte from the Imaging and Visual Resources Department of The Museum of Modern Art.

The post Bali, Background for War (1943), Part I: A Regional Exhibition of Balinese Modern Art as a Military Technology of Worldmaking appeared first on post.

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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I spent my childhood in the hills or in the sea. I liked to listen to the fog. I ran cross-country, I ran through the woods, the grass, and the meadows; I ran all the time, so much I wore out my knees and now my knees ache at random. When my friends and I got our licenses, we often went to the Marin Headlands. By the time we got to it, the Headlands was a national park; it still is. First though, it was Coast Miwok lands. All of California is unceded. Later, the area was home to Portuguese and Spanish dairy farmers, and marked by all the violence of their arrival. Since the 1900s, it has been a federal military base, which swelled into a monster of an outpost in the 1940s to protect Americans from the perceived threat from the other side of the Pacific. Nobody came. Nevertheless, it was deemed appropriate to intern our own citizens and residents.¹ I remember mulling over this violence when I was still young: Why did that happen like that? It is funny to remember that sense of confusion, despite not knowing or having any of the knowledge then that I do now about the trinity of imperialism, racism, and colonization. Though it was nameless then, I still felt the ambient, unflinching whine of the accumulation of capital, among its cacophonous cohort of atrocities.

There are two ways to get to the Headlands. The way the tourists go, which involves traffic on the weekends and an incredible drop straight to the ocean. Or the way you go when you’ve seen the Golden Gate Bridge before: through a five-minute-long one-way tunnel that spits you out into a valley surrounded by gentle hills, rambling to the sea. Winding through and around and then down a little (if you drive fast, you can make your stomach flip), the beach unveils itself, a lagoon, a parking lot, the cliffs, dark sand; there’s a particular vibrancy and depth to the blue of the Headlands; everything is shrouded with it, the dark swirling, freezing ocean. The sand is so fine and on some days nearly black. The surf in its verticality is so strong, there is kind of a steepness imprinted in the sand, not quite an embankment, a steep slip to the ocean. Meters-high rocks, scale, scale, scale, wind, brush, sage, rumors of a helicopter landing for unknown reasons, and then back in the hills, which were filled with bunkers, deep, crazy caverns, cracking and dripping. I’ve never seen anything darker, filled with people, at least we wagered, kids from other high schools had tall tales buoyed by the traces; lots of jokes are based in fear, writing our names timidly near the entrances, never going much deeper. Rin was here.

Years later, on the street in the rain, Mad told me I was reserved, not quiet. I realized later walking home how I emulated the landscape of my childhood. I think of the darkness of the bunkers and the fog meandering across that big expanse of whatever you call gray when it’s blue, the city across the way and then the bowing horizon, and always a ship going out to the Pacific. Sometimes, I notice things really quickly, and other times, I’m so busy living inside of one thing, I don’t realize the illusion of the other. Like how those ships are so large, the city seemed closer than it was. What was in those containers? It did not matter then, we found the boat a kind of metronome. We’d be sure to see it, smoking somebody’s brother’s California medical marijuana out of an apple on that federal territory before going back to our cars to giggle, or if I was with a lover,² to touch each other until the sun was long gone and the great white lights of the federal police told us from their loud speakers to go home.

In a cafe, as a lark, I suggest to X—a curator who has invited me to do an exhibition in Shanghai—that I would like to cross the Pacific Ocean. I base this lark on the fact that yes, I will always be tied to the Atlantic for the accident of birth.³ However, in practicality, I feel far more tied to the Pacific, having grown up in it, around it, having visited family who had transplanted themselves to Hawai’i, and always, always swimming in it, even now, by chance, marrying a woman from the other side of it. That to cross the Pacific on the various highways of winds that flow across might provide an interesting exercise, one that might not be possible in the future. There were also things that made this act of crossing an American one, more specifically a colonial one. Obvious question: How much has my country irrevocably changed the nations of the Pacific? Besides that there was something about the fact that it matters how you get somewhere, and more in there too that I wasn’t quite sure about all of it; what is the point of this?⁴ It was something, though. In short, I talk myself into a knot and then look up at X. They smile, they think that’s the best idea I’ve presented and that I should indeed cross the Pacific. The Pacific grows in their mind too; it zigzags or maybe bogs up beside us both. So, I will cross. My next preoccupation: how?

Likely the last time I sailed was at age 13 off the coast of Pimu (Catalina Island). In the water I was focused, sharklike. I won my races; I got the gold star in sailing. The only phrase that has really stuck with me after these 20 years is “tacking into the wind,” that to go forward you’d have to do a dance in triangles to arrive at your destination, never being pushed backward, but never straight forward exactly either. This is around the time I think if I had been born a bit later, I would have come out as trans; I didn’t know what to call it then, even with trans adults floating near me in San Francisco. I was too afraid of them. On the water and in it, the changing of my form and its congruous incongruencies with myself were held at a remove. The sheltered bays of Pimu are not the open waters of the Pacific.

I settle on some sort of 40- to 50-foot boat, which I will rent or buy. I learn I’ll need to leave between January and April, and if I don’t stop, it will take me around 30 to 40 days, depending on how things go with the weather. I won’t go alone. I’ll need some companions. I search for them. Likely, we will go in a regatta, with some others who are crossing. This is safest. I begin to compile the tools I’ll need to properly sail. I spend hours on the internet, researching alone and chatting excessively with ChatGPT. I learn that, in addition to my boat and the various rations, I will need the following in both analog and digital forms:

1. A compass
2. GPS
3. Charts and maps
4. SSB radio and VHF radio
5. Weather-forecasting tools
6. GPS-enabled sextant
7. A logbook
8. Automatic identification system (AIS).

Each tool is familiar to me except for the Automatic Identification System (AIS). AIS is used for automatic tracking of large ships and passenger boats. It allows the operator of the vessel to receive and transmit information, such as the ship’s name, position, course, and speed, to other AIS-equipped vessels and shoreside traffic-control centers. Essentially, it transmits who you are to everybody and transmits who everybody says they are to you too. On the water, they say, see and be seen.⁵ Or that’s how it’s meant to be.

I increase my watching of sailing videos on YouTube, I focus on crossing. I watch other people cross in 15-20-30-60-minute bursts, families, solos, couples. I watch their tensions, boredom, the horizons, the fish they catch, their bodies writhing in pain, flipping, the humans grinning holding that transparent line, the flat eye of the fish narrowing in exhaustion,⁶ intermingled as if imbibed with hot sauce into the human, exhausted in the late hours, the sudden squalls, the choppy waves. I watch them stare at their digital charts, their compasses, and their AIS.

Every group I watch eventually struggles with readings on their devices and often on their AIS. Either there are ships that are spoofing—pretending to be larger or smaller than they actually are—or there are ships that have turned off their AIS altogether.

On their voyage to Uruguay, sailing couple Kate and Curtis of the YouTube channel Sailing Sweet Ruca, chronicle their run-in with an illegal fishing vessel.⁷ The episode begins, as most sailing vlogs do, with a teaser of the big event and then jumps right into their day-to-day. They explain how their dog, Roxy, uses the restroom on board the sailboat,⁸ breakfast is made, routes are planned, a day passes, things are fixed, wind is scarce until it isn’t. On the third night of their voyage, during heavy winds—and all the efforts it takes to move through those—the radar alarm⁹ goes off and they discover that there is something very close to them. Kate identifies it as a fishing boat, and it is less than a mile away. The drama of this moment is narrated and explained more than felt in a traditional dramatic sense. Visually, to a non-sailor; the moment feels somehow confusingly mellow. The fishing boat looks far away, just a white light splitting the darkness into horizon and sky. The stress level in Kate’s voice drives home a truism of sailing: distance on the water is very different from distance on land.

“Curtis has been battling him for at least the last half hour,” Kate explains. “He keeps changing direction every time we change direction, making a collision course with us, so finally we had to turn on the motor . . . and just try to get by him.” They try to radio the fishing boat, but there is no response. Kate turns the camera to reveal their view, the main sail, the ropes flexing, sailing in the dark, into nothingness, tool-dependent, tipped to the right, the wind is fast at 20 knots, there is spray coming over the bow, it’s wet.¹⁰ “What the **** is this guy,” Curtis says in calm frustration. He’s spotted another boat on the AIS and asks Kate to go down and take a closer look. It is a 91-foot fishing vessel going 3.5 knots. The boat’s AIS popped on and then off again, suddenly. While it is common enough for boats not to always leave their AIS on, in this circumstance, it is odd; in this weather, at night, usually you’d be in communication via radio with the other vessel, doing what you can to avoid one another. So now there are two boats. One directly behind the other. And suddenly, they’re closer. Still no response on the radio, the spray continues. Frustrated, Kate says, “We all have to respect each other, but I don’t know what this is, it’s just carelessness.” At this point, Kate and Curtis are going upwind using their motor and doing everything they can to avoid this second boat, which reads a mile away from them. It continues, their radar isn’t picking up the second boat’s location, and now Kate and Curtis must depend on their vision alone to figure out how to avoid them. They can see their lights and that’s it; they can’t tell which side of the boat they’re seeing, what direction the boat might be taking. These confusions have forced Kate and Curtis to continue to keep their motor on, going straight into waves that are beating their boat down.

Unbelievably, Curtis spots another vessel. Kate takes a look, “It’s almost like it’s two different AISs for the same vessel.” Curtis agrees, “He’s got a fake-out AIS. These guys are probably all illegal.” Kate gives us a further description: One AIS went off, another went on, they’re in the same position according to the charts. They’re spoofing. “God, it shows him pointing directly at us too, like he wants to hit us.” Kate and Curtis have all their lights on, they want to be visible, they are not trying to hide, they’re just trying to get through. Kate predicts that this will be a sleepless night for her and Curtis; the wind picks up. A week later, Curtis and Kate will find out that the Uruguayan navy caught a Chinese fishing vessel in the same location they had been sailing in.¹¹ Kate notes in her final narration that she and Curtis cannot say for sure if these boats were illegally fishing or not, but given their behavior, it seems quite possible.

The Uruguayan navy put footage of the capture of the fishing vessel on YouTube. The whining of a helicopter provides a heavy soundtrack as the large blue-hulled fishing vessel bobs in the water alongside the navy ship.¹² In another shot, two dinghies surround the fishing vessel. This dance from my view, the computer, seems static, like a painting; the charge is the matter.

Likely, when a boat does not come up on an AIS, that boat’s main job is to transship. I am trans, we must be related. (I’ve told this joke before.)

“Transshipment” is a term used to describe the transferring of cargo from one mode of transportation to another during its transit from point of origin to final destination. For example, this could mean transferring cargo from a ship to a train, or from one ship to another ship. In the Pacific Ocean, transshipment has a long history that isn’t worth relaying here. We can speculate that transshipment likely hit some sort of uptick with the opening of the Panama Canal in 1914.¹³ And that uptick at the Panama Canal then grew exponentially with the growth of the globalizing economy in the 1990s.¹⁴ In its innocent form, transshipment is used to optimize logistics and save on transportation costs. However, as obvious as this is to state, transshipment can also be used to bypass bottlenecks or trade barriers. 

Illegal transshipment can take many forms: smuggling, tax evasion, fraud. Transshipment is resorted to in order to avoid tariffs and quotas. To further avoid inspection, goods are mislabeled, paperwork is falsified, and certain circuitous shipping routes are taken. Transshipment can be used to smuggle goods like drugs and weapons, or live beings like rare wildlife and nolonger-living beings like fish and other dead sea creatures. These activities all live under the title of illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU). IUU fishing vessels will engage in transshipment at sea, where the fish is caught by one vessel and then transferred to another (and sometimes even another) to then be brought to market.

To accomplish the first part of this IUU fishing, a ship will turn off their AIS to conceal their identity and location, or at the very least, confusing or, for lack of a better word, troubling it. This process of concealment is known as “dark shipping,” and it is this practice that Kate and Curtis found themselves caught in the middle of.

In Hakai Magazine’s article “Catch Me If You Can: The Global Pursuit of a Fugitive Ship,” writer Sarah Toy details the complex and intense process of catching the IUU fishing vessel STS-50 in 2018. The capture involved multiple governments and agencies all working together in tandem, often the effort coming down to one email or phone call. Before the vessel was caught, it operated for eight years under different names, with crew members coming and going, some knowing the legality of the ship’s activities, and others just passing through. STS-50, like many other IUU ships, sold its catch to many different middlemen.

As investigators began to close in on STS-50, Toy narrates:

“STS-50 tried to evade tracking by periodically switching off its AIS and using a generic Maritime Mobile Service Identity (MMSI) number, a nine-digit code that is supposed to be unique to each vessel. With the generic identification number, the STS-50 was able to hide under other ships’ transmission signals, says Bergh, “a bit like everybody trying to talk on the same frequency on a radio.” Specialists at Trygg Mat Tracking (TMT), a Norwegian nonprofit that provides vessel tracking analysis to FISH-i Africa, were able to decipher the STS-50’s intermittent satellite signals and detect where the vessel really was. It was like playing a game of cat and mouse in an area larger than the Australian continent.”

STS-50 fled toward Indonesia, a nation whose task force to combat illegal fishing had blown up more than 400 illegal fishing boats since 2014. Since STS-50 only occasionally turned on its AIS, trackers found themselves predicting the ship’s location between each ping, assuming its course. Eventually it pinged in, likely to let the owner of the ship know its location, and the Indonesian navy was able to intercept it. The captain was fined and put in prison, but the owners cannot be prosecuted. “On the high seas, the bad guys have almost always gotten away—a frustrating reality of the seemingly Sisyphean task of policing lawbreakers in such a vast arena.”¹⁵

A vast arena, liquid and thus confusing, it can hold me yet—shipping, illegal fishing—whole ecosystems and beings we’ve never met and probably never will. Paradoxically, once something is nameable, it can be contained. Maybe it’s better to play the homophone and hear that it’s a parallax. The incongruities of trying to make an image when the lens is actually lower than where your eye composes the picture. Transshipment—in its evasion of being known by continuing to go across—sounds familiar. In the case of the shipment, an exploited group of beings taken and going from one state to the next.

What is a definition but an act mired in its traces? We know that transshipment is happening because we see the boats, the boats are caught, the fish are gone, but are we literally seeing the fish brought up onto the decks? Not often. Fragmentation by way of commodification. Confusingly, we have a lot in common—that is me, the act of transshipping, and the very things that are being transshipped. We are reliant on others to exist on multiple levels. We are full of legal and illegal missions and substrates. In IUU transshipment, there is the plundering of the oceans, and in transness, there is a liberation for the person bearing the label.

The self is a troubling political object. Its maintenance is a pawn to be trifled with, exchanged for a different person’s will, whether that is being in the world or what one ingests in order to live. Containment means not just the possibility to be incorporated into capital accumulation but the possibility to be obliterated because of lack of access to things that are basic to one’s survival. My lines of logic have me running toward myself as a commodity. Is that what I share with the shipment? Commodities are to be traded. I won’t be going to Tennessee or Kentucky any time soon. What does the marine life say? Let’s all trade places in this merry-go-round of exploitation.

Vexing statement: Trans is whatever the group needs it to be. In certain instances, nobody needs it to be much of anything; in others, it is the very structure upon which the entire artifice of social interaction is built; and still in others, it is the perfect scapegoat for the uncomfortable god-level truth, change. Trans is the demon, the liberator, the cocoon, the bear, the cave, the ship, the fisherman, the sailor, and me.

There is a phenomenon called “group random dance.” What happens is groups of people get together and play clips of K-pop songs, and if you know the dance, you go to the center and do it. These groups are large, young, queer, trans. Their vibe is good, diverse; there is an air of excitement, encouragement. They are showing off together. These random dances happen all over the world and are very popular. My five-year-old daughter and I watch these random dances while we draw in my studio. In one random dance in Frankfurt, we stop drawing for a long time to witness this group energy. As is custom, each clip is followed by a computerized voice counting down to the next clip, 5, 4, 3, 2 . . . There’s a collective pause as each song comes on; usually there’s a few squeals, a shout, a scream, and then always a mad dash for the center. Places! Then my daughter and I wait for the moment when they all, together, really do perfectly sync up. A lift of a leg, a hip pop, a head shake, a raised hand in a circular motion.

We also watch for a phenomenon we haven’t fully named yet, something like the confusion of the mirror. What happens is that some of the people dancing know the dance from one perspective, and others know the dance from another. So that means they’re doing the same moves, but one is going right while the other goes left. Elbows knock and concentrations are broken.¹⁶ Implied in these public random dances is that they all kind of know what’s going on, not enough to be the “real” thing, but they’ll try all together, kind of knowing the dance is enough; the point is to be dancing, to be giving it a go, to all be trying. Or at least that’s the point I’m seeing from it (we can only read so much of another person’s reasoning through the filter of our own logic). Trying is worth it at least.

Night in our corner of Berlin is quiet, mostly just footsteps and the occasional shout, and still I am unable to sleep. I give in, walk myself to my computer, I begin looking for 40-foot sailboats; there’s one in Providence that could be promising. My ears burn when I am afraid but I kind of like the feeling. I imagine myself reading charts at the shining table on this particular vessel. Poring over the lines, the weather. I bid on the boat; it will be my most expensive artistic endeavor. Anything to cross over. I walk to the window to hear the morning birds. I wait.

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According to Rosi Braidotti, transversality (a term originally coined by Félix Guattari, then put at work in his collaborative work with Gilles Deleuze, in A Thousand Plateaux) is an operational concept that helps to understand the subject across multiple axes, recognizing that subjectivity is embedded within other transversal selves bonded by ontological relationality.¹ Indeed, we require a subject position worthy of our times, which means, after Braidotti, that we need to prioritize issues linked to social justice, ethical accountability, and transgenerational solidarity but that we also need to deal with colonialism, racialization, and other forms of injury derived from colonial and human-centered modern life-forms.²

Isabel Sandoval and Sophio Medoidze, presenters at the Rituals and Rapture Panel at the 2022 edition of C-MAP’s annual seminar series in May, outlined a variety of global contemporary forms of transversal subjectivity: Medoidze’s film Let us flow! (ვიდინოთ!) (2022) documents a community in the remote Caucasian Tusheti mountains in Georgia. Inaccessible to most, the region remains a natural sanctuary and one of the most ecologically “virginal” communities in the world. Medoidze’s gaze unravels the complexities inherent to maintaining law, order, and tradition in a premodern community in charge of guarding an ancestral shrine while dealing with the effects of the inevitable need to embrace aspects of modern life, such as mechanization, technology, and commodities. The film is about a community in flux, inhabiting a territory through what binds them, and about the tensions between past and present, between the very ancient ways they conduct their rituals and development. The subjectivities addressed by Medoidze are transhistorical. Then, Isabel Sandoval’s Lingua Franca (2019) tells the story of a Philippine trans immigrant in New York who makes a living looking after an older Russian Jewish woman withering with dementia. Arresting images inspired by Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman depict contemporary New York through the vagaries of the lived precarity of a migrant doing reproductive labor for a living. Sandoval also depicts the strain put on families by an elderly or ill person, how caretaking enters into conflict with individual desires, as well as the split between the migrant’s life here and there—a gap filled by regular phone calls with her mother. The subjectivities laid out in the film are transgender and transgeographical. There was also Diana Tamane, who presented work relating to her grandmother and mother in a transgenerational approach to microhistories. She presented the series of photographs titled Flower Smuggler (2016­–19), which shows beautifully arranged flowers in vases, as well as the documents from the Federal Customs Service of Russia relating to when her grandmother was accused of smuggling two pots of flowers across the border between Latvia and Russia to place on her dead grandfather’s grave. She also presented photographs and a video gathered under the title Mom (2016), which offer a portrait of her mother who, due to economic transformations in post-Soviet Latvia, worked as truck driver, distributing food between Latvia, Spain, and Italy. There are also the Family Portrait (2013– ), which depicts four generations of women, including Tamane, who every year make a picture together, and work generated by findings in her family album. Men are absent from the pictures, and the subjectivities laid out are transgenerational and transterritorial. Finally, Pamila Gupta presented a form of a transimperial, transcultural, and transethnographic subjectivities as laid out in her book Portuguese Decolonization in the Indian Ocean World (2018), which connects India and Southern Africa historically and ethnographically, observing communities that, at the end of Portuguese colonization in Mozambique, did not fit so easily within the labels of colonizer or colonized.³ All of the subjectivities exposed in the seminar are in search of agency, and come from disenfranchised and disempowered contexts: the pre-political Tushetian community in Georgia, a Philippine trans immigrant, working-class women fending on their own in Eastern Europe, and Hindus in postcolonial Mozambique. These microhistories enable a plural and complex vision of history, and of the global present, traversed by class, race, and gender specificities.

The subjects laid out in the seminar are thus situated across a variety of fractures addressing power differences and differential degrees of access to the benefits of citizenry, security, and technological advances, addressing key issues of our times, including global flows of migration, displacement, economic disparity, rising racism and homophobia, xenophobia, warfare, and developmentalism. These subjectivities are anthropocentric and beyond ecosophical assemblages that include nonhuman actors. They are deeply steeped in the cultural world, and traditional in the sense that they are constructed through a humanist paradigm. This humanist subjectivity stems from the principle of the agency of man over a world premised on rationalism. Humanist subjectivation means to throw away the shackles of tradition, religion, and history to enable “man” to take over “his” destiny. This human quest to take charge of history has informed Western political movements, from the French Revolution, to class struggle, to the Zapatista uprising, to discourse around the recognition of rights, giving way to the figures of the “proletariat,” the “subaltern,” or the “non-cis” and the “underdeveloped.”

Humanist subjectivity is furthermore figured as a locus of potential consciousness, and traversed and vexed by colonial and postcolonial identity ambivalence. This form of subjectivation implies a search for a modern authentic being in the face of postcoloniality, positing identity as more than a rational individuating project within the utopian plenitude of romantic community. It involves reclaiming the ground lost in history to colonization, where the self may recognize itself in the form of a collectively emancipated subject recovered from the plundering of its culture and historical memory. In this context, a debate emerges on how to politicize one’s otherness: as subaltern demanding recognition or, for example, through the postmodernist understanding of the operations of power in relation to how the cultural production of minorities, such as feminists and Black people, has been inevitably positioned within modern institutions. This form of humanist postcolonial subjectivity posits a unique individual being, one with a distinctive inner voice and a string of experiences that cannot be repeated. It also implies human agency over our environment and a human drive for emancipation as the ultimate good. In this sense, desire as a revolutionary force, as the desire to self-determine, to become an individual, to shape oneself according to one’s needs and the wish to exist as separate from the community, and to be recognized, are the premises for the individual salvation of everyone. Affect, sensations, desires, memories are indeed at stake in producing transversal subjectivities across temporalities of decolonization and displacement. How do these forms of attachment and sensations of connection create communities? How do they establish interrelational webs or enable us to take root?

We should bear in mind that these transversal subjectivities operate in the field of representation—that is to say, they emerge in a field in which identities come to the fore seeking subjectivation and political self-determination. This is the same field in which violence is originated and managed, and for most of the twentieth century, this field was constructed by development discourse, which had been central to and the most ubiquitous operator within the politics of representation and identity in much of Asia, Africa, and Latin America in the post–World War II period. In this context, the European modernity project was appropriated as a national project in postindependence countries, giving way to the suppression of local cultures in the name of development. As a regimen of representation, development was linked to an economy of production and desire, but also of closure, differentiation, and violence, which came to be the sources of identity. What Jean-François Lyotard argued about the becoming working class of peasants and unemployed, without a doubt, applies to colonized subjectivities, for whom, Lyotard argued, the process of modernization was joyful. He wrote, “[Workers] enjoyed the mad destruction of their organic body which was indeed imposed on them, they enjoyed the decomposition of their personal identity, the identity of the peasant tradition had constructed for them, enjoyed the dissolution of their families and villages. . . .”⁴ The very existence of the Third World has been, in fact, wagered, managed, and negotiated around the politics of representation surrounding modernization and development.

Humanist subjectivity in the postcolonial world, moreover, came with the belief, promise, and desire for development, which became a certainty in the social imaginary. Development posits social life as a technical problem, as a matter of rational decision that requires the management of experts. Development has implied making postcolonial societies fit a preexisting model that embodies the structures and functions of modernity, subjecting populations to an infinite variety of interventions encompassing post (neo)colonial forms of power and systems of control, and selling Third World resources to the most convenient bidder, degrading physical and human ecologies, orienting economies around primitive accumulation or extractivism. Institutional practices and technology and infrastructure are crucial for development, and they have contributed to producing and formalizing social relations, divisions of labor, cultural forms, the production of discourses, and subjectivities.

One of the tenets of postcolonial theory is (to put it briefly) that everything must be locally situated and historically contextualized, and at the core of developmentalist subjectivity is the desire to be recognized. The private certitudes embedded in the desire for recognition and the politicization of a “subaltern,” “decolonial,” “underdeveloped,” and even a “non-cis” subjectivity, stem from the humanist values and morals that found liberal modernity. The problem is that these narratives are now out of sync with the world in which we live. In as far as individual narratives are the lens through which we understand the present, we are failing to see the shape of the societies we inhabit in the face of the ever speeding up of cultural change. These forms of subjectivation also fail to shed light on the contemporary manifestation of the modern relationship between humankind and machines, which is the content and form of subjective arrangements. Machines, which are the reality constructed by capitalism, are not specters of modernity but rather the concrete forms in which life organizes itself, and the world transforms itself and enables the material connections within which subjectivities are produced.

What is more, in  our contemporary world, as collective efforts are monopolized by humanism’s drive for emancipatory freedom, our imaginations are limited, while rational models, stable empirical facts, and data or system prediction no longer offer us reassuring truths. To what extent are our current crises exacerbated by our ideological commitment to the tenets of liberal humanism? Following Franco Berardi, “progress” has given us a world in strife and chaos; the desire to be seen, constitutive of modern subjectivities, has led to extreme polarization and ethnic hatred, giving way to the disintegration of the hegemonic geopolitical order that resulted from five centuries of white colonization and extraction.⁵ We are also realizing that human agency over the planet is a fantasy that no longer holds. A parallel modernity is thus emerging, one that is decentering human perspective, questioning the founding myths of modernity. A notion of the “post-human” in Rosi Braidotti’s sense (not in the Silicon Valley sense) is necessary, to bring back issues of survival, interdependency, relationality—and to conceptualize transversal assemblages encompassing material reality entangled with that which is outside the human, to free language from voice and representation, to approach the radically inhuman.

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While some of us debate what history is or was, others take it in their own hands. —Michel-Rolph Trouillot¹

Immersed in Saigon-born artist Tuan Andrew Nguyen’s four-channel screen projection The Spectres of Ancestors Becoming (2019), near physical form and presence emerge with the stirring narrative conveyed by the compelling voices of men, women, and children who share a common but little-known transnational history—that of Senegal’s Vietnamese brides and mothers. Nguyen’s narrative-cum-dialogue magisterially transforms Dakar’s RAW Material Company into a dark alcove, a perception field where the fabulations of Senegal’s Vietnamese community reach us from different corners of the room. The cross-generational dialogue is made to brush one’s shoulders and cheeks, raising those fine, emotional hairs that seem to come to life with spectral narratives. This powerful, multi-prismatic, individual yet plural hymn—a Senegalese-Vietnamese “community voice”²—emanates from Nguyen’s longtime local collaborators: Vietnamese women, their African partners, their Métis children, and their once-distant in-laws. Nguyen’s narrative traces the fine crisscross, slender colonial trajectories of peoples displaced, the threads invisibly stretched across the French Imperial map by colonial administrators. Unsettling and displacing cartography, Nguyen attends to stories of south-south solidarity, forbidden love, conflicted departures, slow arrivals, Creole synthesis, and generational resilience.

Tuan Andrew Nguyen’s elegy The Specter of Ancestors Becoming recalls the in/visibilized transnational solidarities and intimacies forged despite colonial surveillance, abuse, violence, and death during France’s nine-year guerrilla war known as the First Indochina War (1946–54). At the root of his project is a group of men known as the tirailleurs sénégalais, or Senegalese riflemen—colonial troops not only of Senegalese origin³—who fought for France in the first half of the twentieth century as part of the colonialist’s last claim for power, and their lost (and found) Vietnamese sweethearts, loves, and wives.⁴ As scholar and historian Sarah Zimmerman has noted, “[The Indochina War] was the first large-scale anti-colonial war where evidence suggests that the tirailleurs sénégalais questioned their role in French colonialism.”⁵

The Tirailleurs

As early as 1946, camps in West Africa and France began preparing West African troops to participate in late colonial “counterinsurgency” operations in the Annam and Tonkin regions of Indochina. The first troops, known as the tirailleurs sénégalais, arrived in Hanoi and Haiphong in 1947, despite their effort and contribution to World War I and II going unrecognized.⁶ To render the service attractive after the two great wars, the French passed laws converting African “volunteers” to conscripts by the end of their first year of service. Intermediaries, known as chefs de cantons and chefs de cercles, produced new ”volunteers,” accumulating favors and monetary bonuses in exchange for their coercion of African youths. As part of their campaign to win men over, the French colonial military funded a range of public spectacles, such as “parachutist demonstrations, photo expositions, speeches by veterans, and film screenings.”⁷ In light of this, many young men considered a career in the army as a means to secure economic and social independence. Part of the promise of an ameliorated life included attending the École des enfants de troupes (which, in reality, did no more than indoctrinate servicemen into military order and teach them basic French) and the École militaire préparatoire africaine, or military school which offered technical training in areas of great interest, such as radio operation, auto mechanics, and French language skills. In addition to this, room, board, and tuition were sponsored by the military. But most tirailleurs serving in the First Indochina War did not attend these schools, and instead trained for a mere five weeks at a military camp in Southern France.⁸ Rather than providing them with important skills for field operations in Indochina—particularly, and key to survival, water operations and swimming—the military placed greater emphasis on French comprehension and literary skills. As such, “volunteers” were ill-prepared for the challenges they faced, and the soggy territory that varied greatly from the dry Sahel and West African Savannah they were used to.⁹ Many deaths went unrecorded, but it is estimated that some 20,700 French nationals, “of all origins,” including the “Metropolitan colonial army” died and that 22,000 were wounded; African troops coming from French “North Africa” and “Black Africa” accounted for 15,200 deaths and 13,900 wounded.¹⁰

Optimizing the fact that the French did not recuperate the bodies of dead soldiers, some tirailleurs crossed the enemy line, joining the Vietminh. Aware of the fact that the “enemy” did not execute their prisoners of war, but instead put them to work, others defected, choosing to bide their time doing hard labor, which was no different from the work they did for the French, until they were freed.

Many—including those who swore allegiance to France—fell in love, transgressing the political divisions and chronological boundaries of war.

We fought as best we could in Indochina but in the end the VietMinh (sic) were too strong for us. They were fighting to be free and we were fighting because we were told to do so by our officers. There is a difference. — Goulli Zo, Tougan, Burkina Faso¹¹

Love across Division

Such is the case of Lan and Waly, the two protagonists in Nguyen’s first episode, written by Anne Marie Niane, one of the artist’s local collaborators, who herself left Vietnam at age five.¹² Niane worked with Nguyen to “rememory”¹³ the dialogue between her forebears, dialogues that, in Justin Phan’s words, “could have taken place, but never did.”¹⁴ Married for six years with three children, the couple, who Nguyen revisits by way of analepsis, find themselves at an anti-colonial crossroads raised by the French whirlwind evacuation upon defeat.¹⁵ In their stiflingly hot, cinematic kitchen, within earshot of their young children, husband and wife debate whether to take up the French exit ticket offered them aboard the Marseille-bound SS Pasteur.¹⁶ They have settled on this eastern edge of mainland Southeast Asia, or so it appears, for the room exudes a warmth and hominess, a care redoubled by Lan’s slow, ritual washing of the family’s dishes. Understandably reluctant and anxious, Lan takes issue with Waly’s ultimatum to abandon Vietnam with her children, or remain alone. She is trepidatious, torn: What position will she hold as a Vietnamese woman and wife in Dakar? What names will her beloved children be called, knowing the treatment already meted out to her by French colonial occupiers?¹⁷ Waly, in turn, cannot fathom betraying the ambiguous but strong bonds tying him to France. Staying would be a betrayal, to which Lan jabs, “So you prefer to betray me?” This is a clash of parental viewpoints and affiliations the couple will revisit and replay, time and again, and a haunting tension Nguyen and his collaborators jointly stage to recall the colonial conundrum that families, forged across colonial and color lines, ultimately encountered.

Orality (the word spoken) and aurality (the word as it [re]sounds) are privileged sites in Nguyen’s oeuvre. Some of us hear ghosts, others of us address them, not—and here I paraphrase Karen Barad—to entertain or reconstruct a narrative of what once was, but “to respond, to be responsible, to take responsibility for that which we inherit (from the past and the future).”¹⁸ On choosing to have the writers of the script read their dialogues on one screen, while actors ventriloquize them to their re-staging on the other, without both screens ever entirely existing in full view of a somewhat dis/oriented audience in the center of the room, negotiating their angle of vision in this changing horizontal field, Nguyen cultivates the “force of the conjunction,”¹⁹ a variable space-time juxtaposition, playing with lip sync that allows the spectral (and unsaid) to slip through and take hold.

It is necessary to speak of the ghost, indeed to the ghost and with it. —Jacques Derrida²⁰

History—the stories we tell—is made of omissions and silences, and is never replete, never black, white, or as clear-cut or conclusive as the patriarchal victors of war will have us believe. Not exclusively contained in the “ordered narrative of books,” or hushed archival corridors, history as novelist Alex Halberstadt reminds us, is an “affliction that spread[s] from parent to child, sister to brother, husband to wife.”²¹ As displaced peoples and their born and unborn children can attest, history lives through us without our consent or even our knowledge.

Observed from the margins, Nguyen compels viewers to consider memory, and how life in revolution took place beyond official, state-dug trenches and mute archival records. As a matter of fact, despite French opposition to relationships between originaires, Senegalese (and French) troops cohabited with the Vietnamese, building ties of trade, anti-colonial solidarity, intimacy, and love. Senegalese men lived married lives in Indochina. Some lost contact with their partners and children when transferred to another combat zone; others lived side by side in military family housing throughout the conflict; many extended their tours of duty in order to file and receive paperwork validating their marriages to local women.²² The end of the war separated and ruined families. In some cases, Indochinese families pressured their daughters to remain in Indochina while their partners claimed paternal rights to their children; in others, children accompanied their fathers to West Africa, definitively losing contact with their mothers. In certain stances, Indochinese women delivered their children to French social programs.

Included in the Dakarese iteration of the installation²³ are constellations of local family albums—tender and intimate betokening snapshots of time, tradition, and togetherness—marriage, the growth of families and communities, communion as sharing of food.²⁴ Retrieved from intimate troves and entrusted to Nguyen, RAW, and its visitors, these testimonies call on our capacity to hold and truly care for the memories of resilience and resistance embedded in the colonial betwixt.

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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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