How do you historicize the events of the dehistoricized? From its inception in 1948, the apartheid regime implemented a system of institutionalized racial segregation against the nonwhite citizens of South Africa. In recent years, a counter narrative has emerged of a group of artists and activists who viewed “culture as a weapon of struggle” against the oppressive policies of the apartheid regime.
In this interview, recorded a few months before Davidovich’s passing, curator Ana Janevski talks with the Argentine-American artist about his career, his early days in New York City and Cleveland, and his work Tape Wall Project (1970/1988), recently acquired by MoMA. This is the second of two parts. Read the first part of the interview…
En sus películas, la cineasta paraguaya Paz Encina combina ficción y material de archivo, imágenes condensadas y un inusual foco en el sonido, para abordar temas que atraviesan la historia de su país, como la Guerra del Chaco (1932–35), la larga dictadura de Alfredo Stroessner (1954-89), la deforestación masiva, y el desplazamiento de comunidades indígenas.
Paraguayan filmmaker Paz Encina (born 1971) combines fiction and archival material, precise imagery, and an unusual focus on sound to address issues that mark the history of her country—like the Chaco War (1932–35), the long dictatorship of Alfredo Stroessner (1954–89), massive deforestation, and the displacement of indigenous communities.
Collectivity, economics, gender, and spirituality converge in this meticulous reading of Philippine modern artist Anita Magsaysay-Ho’s painting, In the Marketplace. Skirting the ease of performative, atomized, or biographical takes on the subjects at hand, the writer primes instead a broader proposal for latency.
This essay revisits the starting points of the project Communicating Difficult Pasts, which was initiated in 2018 while searching for new ways to artistically and curatorially explore the twentieth-century history of the Baltic region and its ongoing impact.
Ming Wong wanders between worlds. From Chinese painting and philosophy to theatre, film, Non-Aligned histories, and the radical politics of queerness, Wong’s artistic worldview comprises a prescient pastiche of cultural possibilities.
As art historian Anissa Rahadiningtyas argues, Arahmaiani’s long-term, performative, and community-based work Proyek Bendera (Flag Project) foregrounds a socio-political trinity of feminism, environmentalism, and Islam that cultivates a reparative and egalitarian space of potential.
Published to coincide with Fotoclubismo: Brazilian Modernist Photography, 1946–1964 at MoMA, art historian Adele Nelson analyzes the Sala de Fotografia, a last-minute, “in-between” and hitherto unexamined exhibition organized by Foto-Cine Clube Bandeirante for the second edition of the São Paulo Bienal.
What is historicized, how is it recorded, and who determines and controls these seemingly unyielding criteria? Invoking multiple media apparatuses and deriving its title from a rumor, Akram Zaatari’s Letter to a Refusing Pilot (2013) undercuts the hegemonic and umbilical ties of media and history.
Showing up in food, cosmetics, fuel, and medicine—and, by consequence, in much of the air we breathe—corn is a ubiquitous presence in our lives. Inspired by the first episode of MoMA’s Broken Nature Podcast, this text investigates how one single crop travels through our contemporary food system.
Taking as her point of departure the kiondo, and the acknowledgment of the multiple forms technology can take, this essay focuses on Wangechi Mutu’s generative re-imagination and re-inscription of the foundational figure of Eve.
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