A major publication, Art and Theory of Post-1989 Central and Eastern Europe: A Critical Anthology, presents key voices of this period that have been reevaluating the significance of the socialist legacy.
The sculptures of Congolese artist Bodys Isek Kingelez (1948-2015) offer a vision of a future modernity that is beautiful, harmonious, and functional.
Karl Clauss Dietel conceived a motorcycle in the GDR in 1967. As a result of its flexible design principles, it still runs today.
Karen Grimson comments on the inaccessibility of national archives in Cuba and questions art’s ability to contest censorship and battle the state of “disinformation” that has afflicted Cuban society for decades.
Roxana Marcoci records her impressions of the 10th annual Berlin Biennale and offers a comparative perspective with Manifesta 12 in Palermo.
Lyn Hsieh reflects on education strategies she encountered during the C-MAP Asia group trip to India and Bangladesh in January 2018.
The history of the reconstruction of the Macedonian capital Skopje, after a devastating earthquake in 1963, is at this point firmly associated with the role played by the Japanese architect Kenzo Tange and his Brutalist contributions to the cityscape. But Maja Babić turns her attention to the Ottoman heritage of the city, which she argues was largely disregarded in Skopje’s efforts to assert its “political modernization.”
The names, cultures, and nationalities of African artists who influenced Picasso have historically been omitted from scholarship. Yet Picasso’s interest in African masks is well-known. In this essay, MoMA staff member Kunbi Oni charts the implications— and possibilities—that closer attention to the makers of such masks could shed on modern art.
The publication, Modern Art in the Arab World: Primary Documents (2018), edited by Anneka Lenssen, Sarah Rogers, and Nada Shabout, offers an unprecedented resource for the study of modernism: a compendium of critical art writings by twentieth-century Arab intellectuals and artists. The selection of texts—many of which appear for the first time in English—includes manifestos, essays, transcripts…
“Where do our arts stand with regard to the consciousness that is blossoming in the Arab nation?” This question was posed in 1956 in a questionnaire on “Art and Arab Life” that was circulated to artists in Lebanon, Iraq, Egypt, and Syria in a special issue devoted to the arts of the Arab world of the Beirut-based, pan-Arab journal al-Adab, which was established in 1953 as an outlet for politically engaged thought and cultural analysis.
The following excerpt is from Socialist Architecture: The Reappearing Act, published in Berlin by The Green Box in 2017. A collaboration between the architect Srdjan Jovanovic Weiss and the photographer Armin Linke—supported by the Graham Foundation—the book introduces the concept of an “architecture of Balkanization” and explores textually and visually what that might be in the landscape of the decentralized socialist society of Yugoslavia.
The Kochi-Muziris Biennale has produced three exhibitions since its inception in 2012, with its fourth edition opening in December 2018. This essay sites the biennale within the historical context of the twin port cities of Kochi and Muziris, as well as within the recent burgeoning of the biennial as a international format for viewing “global” art and representing local identities.
