In 1970, Johnson Donatus Aihumekeokhai Ojeikere, otherwise known as J.D. ‘Okhai Ojeikere (Nigerian, 1930–2014), made Fro Fro, the point of departure of this short text. Storyteller and lens-based artist Jumoke Sanwo reads this image, produced during Nigeria’s nationalist drive and considers Ojeikere’s subjects and their unapologetic defiance.
Art historian Simon Soon analyzes the texts and images in Syed Sheikh Syed Ahmad al-Hadi’s two-volume novel Hikayat Faridah Hanom (The Story of Faridah Hanom), published in Penang in 1925 and 1926, which notably repurposed photographic images from magazines.
As the entrepreneurial co-founder of the Société Zin, a modernist design company, Safia Farhat (Tunisian, 1924–2004), contributed to the visual aesthetics of civic space during the formative period of Tunisian socialism and state feminism. Jessica Gerschultz introduces Farhat’s key role in sustaining a mural tradition for Tunisian modernists.
C-MAP Africa fellow, Nancy Dantas, reads Mozambican modernist Bertina Lopes’s anticolonial trajectory and long-distance nationalism in ‘Tribute to Amílcar Cabral’ (1973).
This year’s C-MAP seminar series, Transversal Orientations, comprised four panels that took place on Zoom in June 2021. This essay reflects on Looking Sideways, the first panel in the seminar series featuring Sorawit Songsataya, Corina L. Apostol, and Ruth Simbao.
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.
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.
Therapeutically, and deeply attuned to context, Jaya Jacobo intimates spirits of transfemininity through the temporalities of the Philippines. Without spoon-feeding tangibility or timeline, Jacobo unsensationally invokes perseverance in its purest form.
Through a close reading of Kowkülen (Liquid Being) (2020), a video piece by artist Sebastián Calfuqueo, the author delves into the work’s intricate engagement of Mapuche cosmopolitics, proposing a critical approach to the neoliberal violence of water commodification in Chile vis-à-vis nonbinary modes of inhabiting the world.
This essay brings together Baltic artists Anu Põder and Virgilijus Šonta, considering their mutual interest in human corporeality and non-heteronormative visuality to explore how their artwork reflects a disregard of official concerns of the late Soviet era, and sheds light on the blind spots of the homogenizing use of Western theoretical frameworks.
In 2007, at age twenty-seven, having already spent several years directing and editing audiovisual programs for broadcast, Rosine Mbakam left her native Cameroon to attend film school in Belgium. Here, Mbakam reflects on her experience in a conversation with Sophie Cavoulacos, Assistant Curator in the Department of Film at The Museum of Modern Art.
Refusing to fit into the mainstream art of her time, Gazbia Sirry replaced formal modernist training with local Egyptian art conventions to critically address women’s rights, patriarchy, social justice, and Western imperialism.
