Ram Rahman (photographer, designer, curator and activist) discusses key examples of modernist architecture in post-colonial India. Using photographic documentation and archival materials, he surveys the landscape of architects, designers, photographers, entrepreneurs, and intellectuals working (primarily in New Delhi) between the 1950s and 1990s. This presentation is excerpted from a closed-door session with MoMA’s C-MAP Asia…
Art historian Daniel Quiles focuses on examples from the Transmissions exhibition to show how Argentine conceptualists of the late 60s converted information from one medium to another. This phenomenon shifted to the transmission of social and political information, causing artistic practices to leave national borders and connect beyond the region. One of the earliest Argentine…
Since around 1977 when Gilbert and Lila Silverman began to develop their Fluxus Collection, Jon Hendricks has played a central role in fostering the formation of that renowned collection that bears their names.
We live in a world of unedited images. Pictures are present in our most private chambers and on the most public social-media platforms. Photography is without question the lingua franca of our time, even if the nature and ubiquity of photographs have been marked by a turn toward digital means of capturing and storing images.…
In the shadow of the Brazilian military dictatorship, Regina Silveira pursued an elusive art, by necessity and by design. Absence and isolation, illusion and distortion were not only promising artistic strategies, but also richly meaningful metaphors in an era of severe political repression. Trained as a painter and printmaker in her native Porto Alegre, Silveira…
In 1959, the year he founded Gorgona with his friends and colleagues, Josip Vaništa staged a solo exhibition in Zagreb of his drawings from the 1950s. A black-and-white photograph commemorates the occasion; it shows three framed works on the wall, studied by three female visitors. The drawing on the left suggests the moody, delicate, somewhat…
post asked the artist and critic Luis Camnitzer, one of the project directors of Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin, 1950s–1980s, to respond to some basic questions about the exhibition. In this interview he talks about how the show evolved. He also addresses how the organizers dealt with critical issues such as the differences between “Conceptual…
John Cage and David Tudor visited Japan in October 1962 at the invitation of the Sogetsu Art Center (SAC). Over the course of the month they gave seven concerts in Tokyo, Kyoto, Osaka, and Sapporo, causing a sensation that would become known as “the John Cage shock.”
Armin Linke (Italian, born 1966) is a traveler in search of strange, yet familiar frontiers; his photographs spring from a peripatetic practice that has taken him from the slopes of the massive infrastructural transformations rent by the Three Gorges Dam in China, to the technologically crafted snow-globe winters of Ski Dubai’s interiors. Each photograph forms…
In this interview, the artist Anna Bella Geiger explores the development of her production from early neo-figuration and her “visceral” works, to more experimental tendencies from the late 1960s onward. She talks about photographs taken on the subway during her time in New York City, works that engage unusual mediums such as bread bags and…
Since completing her studies in printmaking in Budapest in the late 1950s, Dora Maurer has emerged as one of Eastern Europe’s most rigorously experimental artists of the past fifty years. Her work has alternated fluidly between process-based printmaking experiments and mark-making procedures that favor indeterminable outcomes, on the one hand, and, on the other, formal…
Mexican artist Felipe Ehrenberg ruminates on the life journeys of his archive, weaving a tale that takes in personal, cultural, socioeconomic, and institutional dimensions of building—and letting go of—an artist’s file, and considering whether an archive can itself be a work of art. To most people, a file is merely a collection of objects, mostly…
