New York–based curator Zane Onckule (born 1982, Latvia), curator of the thesis exhibition Balticana that was on view at the Hessel Museum of Art in the spring of 2019, reflects upon geopolitical, cultural, and (visual) identity/ies across the present-day Baltics.
As the only woman artist in the 1920s avant-garde group Devětsil and an important figure in both Czech and French Surrealism, Toyen produced a significant body of work in painting, drawing, printmaking, and collage.
Me vendndodhje në Shkodër, Shqipëri, muzeu Marubi përmban një koleksion fotografik prej më shumë se pesëqindmijë negativësh që shtrihet nga gjysma e dytë e shekullit të nëntëmbëdhjetë e deri në fundin e shekullit njëzet.
Located in Shkodra, Albania, The Marubi museum contains a collection of more than five hundred thousand negatives dating from the second half of the nineteenth century to the end of the twentieth.
En mayo de 2019 la cineasta argentina Lucrecia Martel dio una charla en el MoMA, invitada por el Instituto Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Cisneros. Ya el primer largometraje de Martel, La ciénaga (2001), llamó la atención por la contundencia de sus imágenes, la puesta en tensión con el sonido, la exposición y espacios de quiebre en las relaciones de poder partiendo del núcleo familiar, y una sensorialidad extrema y extrañada. La idea de esta entrevista es dejar una marca escrita de su paso por el MoMA, donde habló sobre un esquema temporal alternativo basado en el sonido.
In May 2019, the Argentine filmmaker Lucrecia Martel was invited by the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Institute to give a lecture at MoMA. Martel’s first feature film, La ciénaga (2001), attracted much attention because of the tension between its powerful imagery and soundscape, its exploration of power relations as rooted in the family, and an extreme and estranged sensorial quality. The idea of this interview is to leave a written trace of her visit to MoMA, where she spoke about an alternative, sound-based understanding of time.
In 1972, Argentine artist Luis Fernando Benedit installed a hydroponic greenhouse environment, containing seventy tomato plants and fifty-six lettuce plants artificially supplied with light and a chemical growth formula, as well as an environment for white mice, “consisting of a maze, food source, material for burrowing, and an enclosed area for sleeping,” at MoMA.
Shot in Rio de Janeiro’s poorest red-light district, and the city’s financial district, Neville D’Almeida’s Mangue-Bangue, presents a portrait of the “normality” of marginalized and criminalized bodies during Brazil’s military dictatorship.
100 miles away from the famous Bauhaus in Weimar, Germany, another center of utopian artistry and intellectualism opened that same year, with one key difference: all of the students at Loheland were women.
This essay is a rare glimpse into the alternative publications of East Germany in the 1980s. Through an overview of the magazines of the period, and a close reading of various images, advertisements, and visual poetry within them, this essay underscores the vibrancy of the underground print scene in the last decade of the GDR.
The Indian artist Sudhir Patwardhan is chiefly a painter in the realist tradition moving between images of the city, inhabitants, and milieu.
In this sardonic text, acclaimed Syrian filmmaker Ossama Mohammed bitingly describes the conditions of filmmaking under the Ba’athist regime in Syria. Under strict control of the National Film Association that was founded in 1963, only one film was produced every year in the country.
