The texts below are entries taken from the 1933 guest book from the first solo exhibition of the work of Zulfa al-Sa‘di (1905–1988), a young Palestinian female artist, held in the Palestine Pavilion at the First National Arab Fair, organized in Jerusalem under the auspices of the Supreme Muslim Council.
Thoroughly committed to novelty, invention, and atomic and space-age practices, the Crystalist group proposed completely new directions for art in Sudan in the 1970s. Their manifesto published in a Khartoum newspaper within the artistic context of the time introduces the Crystalist themes of transparency and dualism.
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 of roundtable discussions, diary entries, letters, and the guest-book comments including those featured here.
The interview with Zarina considers the artist’s life and work as a bridge between New Delhi and New York.
MoMA’s C-MAP research program developed an extended focus on historical alliances such as Bandung, the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), pan-Africanism, pan-Arabism, and other south-south, east-east, and Third World nexuses. This conversation addresses such pasts, and their reverberations in the present, as they appear in Mohaiemen’s media-based practice.
Artists can be activists but can art be activism? C-MAP presents a forum at the Museum of Modern Art with Coco Fusco, Oleksiy Radynski, and Ram Rahman—artists who have all engaged with activist practices—who discuss relations between art and politics in Cuba, Ukraine, and India.
The Rauschenberg Overseas Cultural Initiative was a large-scale international traveling exhibition that doubled as a cultural exchange program.
The Rauschenberg Overseas Cultural Initiative was a large-scale international traveling exhibition that doubled as a cultural exchange program.
When the Brussels Expo presented the exhibition Fifty Years of Modern Art in 1958, it unintentionally pioneered a more broadly global view of modern art, although not without some friction.
As part of an ongoing collaboration between the Jaipur Literature Festival and MoMA, this post Presents discussion “Patriot Games: Contextualizing Nationalism” explores nationalism around the world, with panelists Urvashi Butalia, Bouchra Khalili, Bruce Robbins, Eyal Weizman, and moderator Marie Brenner.
Shi Lu’s 1955 trip to India to oversee the design of the Chinese Pavilion at the Indian Industries Fair and his 1956 trip to Egypt for the Afro-Asian Art Conference offer a lens for understanding the PRC’s outreach and artistic diplomacy in the Cold War era.
As the Guggenheim prepared to open its exhibition Art and China after 1989: Theater of the World on October 6, 2017, post collaborated with the Guggenheim’s Checklist blog to reflect on works by Yang Fudong and Zhang Peili, two important contemporary artists from China.
