Tyeb Mehta once warned Atul Dodiya against referencing Francis Picabia, who is but one reference on a long and abundant list that includes Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Marcel Duchamp, and surprisingly Kazimir Malevich and Piet Mondrian—although Dodiya has never been an abstract painter. Dodiya also appropriates diverse forms and inspiration from daily life, such as…
In this segment of the theme “Global Conceptualism Reconsidered,” the curators of the exhibition Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin, 1950s–1980s reflect upon their experiences organizing the exhibition. They address in the following interviews the origins of the exhibition’s concept, the challenges faced in defining and presenting the variety of conceptualisms across the exhibition’s many international subsections, and…
The book Striptease by Sonia Švecová (Czech, born 1946) is one of many little-known gems within the Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection Gift at MoMA . Švecová was born in 1946 in the former Czechoslovakia and was a central figure in Aktualní Umeni (also known as Aktual Art or simply Aktual), a small group of artists based in…
Renowned Chilean critic Adriana Valdés visited the Museum in April 2015 to speak to the C-MAP Latin America group about the Chilean art scene and the work of Eugenio Dittborn. During her visit, she generously agreed to record a video interview and share her thoughts and memories of the Chilean art world before and after…
As museums move to put more geographically inclusive displays on view, a tension in emphasis–between cross-geographic correspondences and local particularities–is necessarily at stake. We convened a conversation between art historian, Alexander Alberro; curator, Doryun Chong; and museum director, Edit Sasvári, each with their own regional focus, to discuss the possibility of “the global museum,” what…
Tomislav Gotovac—the influential avant-garde filmmaker, conceptual artist, and anarchist leader of Croatian performance art—occupies an authorial position within the alternative New Art Practice of the late 1960s in the former Yugoslavia. After studying film directing at the Academy of Theater, Film, Radio, and Television in Belgrade, Gotovac made his first experimental films, inaugurating the golden…
In March 2015 MoMA’s C-MAP Asia team took a nine-day research trip to Sharjah and three cities in India. This was C-MAP’s very first field trip focused on India, however not the first time MoMA curators have conducted research in the country. Besides the Sharjah Biennial 12: (The Past, the Present, the Possible), the second Kochi…
Zero Jigen (Zero Dimension), a performance collective active in the 1960s in Tokyo and Nagoya, Japan, has only recently become better known in the international art world through the following exhibitions and content: Tokyo 1955–1970: A New Avant-Garde (The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2012–13) with screenings of the group’s performance documents; Great Crescent: Art and Agitation…
This informal conversation took place in March 2015 in Nalini Malani’s studio in Mumbai during a C-MAP trip to India. Gayatri Sinha and Stuart Comer talked to Malani about her practice, spanning from the 1960s to the 1990s. The discussion focused on Malani’s early lens-based experiments, her interest in psychoanalysis, her activities in the 1980s…
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…
Anna Maria Maiolino (Brazilian, born Italy, 1942) refers to Trajetória I (1976) as a “Book Object,” a term that aptly describes the way it combines aspects of a book with those of a sculpture. Although comprised of eleven folios of black, white, and red papers bound into a black paper cover, it does not include text or…
The C-MAP Latin America research group spent a week in Mexico City in August 2014, visiting the Distrito Federal’s major institutions, flourishing gallery scene, artists’ studios, and architectural sites. The group also celebrated the project Poema Colectivo 2014 and participated in a roundtable at the Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC) with Mexico City–based curators. Throughout the…
