In the middle of debris and ruin, the Seville Oranges (naranj) were shining from behind dusty leaves. And again it was pickaxes that would come down on the rooftops, and the mud brick and dirt that would fall.

—Ebrahim Golestan, From the Days Gone Narrate

The wind is blowing through the street, the beginning of ruination.

—Forough Farrokhzad, Let Us Believe in the Beginning of the Cold Season

Parviz Kimiavi’s 1973 film The Mongols is a collage of disparate images, sounds, and narrative components that come at the audience like a whirlwind. Produced by National Iranian Radio and Television, The Mongols revolves around various forms of “unearthing,” of old artifacts buried in the soil, of old medieval texts, of fragments of history (writing), of moving images from cinema technology, even its prehistory, and of the “new media” of the time, the television. There are two main characters in the film, a young filmmaker for the national television network (played by Kimiavi himself) and his wife (played by the late Fahimeh Rastkar), who is completing her doctoral research on the Mongol invasion of medieval Persia. As he avidly reads on film history and worries about his assignment to a remote and underdeveloped province, his world is invaded by phantasms of Mongol soldiers from the script of her unfinished dissertation. The “Mongols” of the film (who, as the opening scene reveals, are in fact nonactors recruited from ethnic Turkmens from the northeast of Iran), both spectral and documentary-like, make their first appearance in the present time at an excavation site, a ruin.

The Iranian New Wave, as that large and heterogeneous body of Iranian art films produced before the 1979 revolution came to be known, was besieged by ruins and ruination from the start. Retaining a faith in what Siegfried Kracauer (whose work at MoMA in the 1940s was a forerunner in thinking film history at a museum) saw as the cinema’s ability to redeem physical reality, this essay sets out to explore the cinematic renderings of the ruin and that of the body. ¹ The New Wave still occupies an unsettled space, at once affectionately remembered and orphaned. On the one hand, in Iran, it has finally gained an honored place in film historiography, represented in books and articles published every year in Persian. On the other hand, many of the New Wave’s great films still cannot be shown in Iran, just as the academic film historiography, presumably global now, has yet to give it a chance to find its deserving place within the international canon of art (read modernist) cinema. Almost all of the examples presented here are drawn from MoMA’s upcoming film series Iranian Cinema before the Revolution, 1925–1979, a selection unparalleled in its scope and insight. In time, certain material formations come to the fore in this piece—the ruin, the anguished body, the museum display, the mud-brick wall, the old neighborhood passageway. ²

Persepolis (Fereydoun Rahnema, 1960)

Fereydoun Rahnema’s 1960 essay film Persepolis is constructed as a lyrical portrayal of the most iconic archaeological site in contemporary Iran, the ceremonial capital of the Persian Achaemenid Empire (550–330 BCE). Persepolis is drenched in a sense of historical loss and grief. The destruction of the palace, which the voice-over declares was once a garden, is evoked through the imagery, music, and sound. The scale of ruin is expansive. Not naming the invading army responsible, adding so subtly yet another shade to the film’s overall ambiance of ambiguity, the tragedy of destruction is instilled into all of Iranian history, if not into all history.

The expansion of the temporality of destruction across the ages means opening the door to another form of allegorical arrangement, that of the slow destruction, the decay. Differentiated from abrupt “destruction by man,” the decay (in a built structure) is, for Georg Simmel, significant as it was brought about by the nonconscious, yet creative, forces of nature.³Persepolis dwells on the gradual, still ongoing, destruction brought on by the elements. Nature is still advancing over the ruin, a reality emphasized not only by the voice-over narrative but also by the images of broken stone, stumps of pillars amid grass and flowers, shots of small animals wandering about the place, birds singing, sounds of wind and water.

The sight of antiquity here interrupts the continuity of the present time. Ruined structures, ancient or modern, it should be remembered, evoke other lives and worlds. Again, as Simmel saw it, the genuine ruin (ancient and decayed but not yet rendered unrecognizable in its fundamental formal features) creates “the present form of a past life,” and it does so in the fashion of “an immediately perceived presence.”⁴ But in the place where Simmel looked for “balance,” “unity of form,” “metaphysical calm,” and the reconnections of nature and the spirit in the face of opposition and conflict, cinema is capable of opening radical fissures even as it brings together. And so in Persepolis the ruin of the past, set against a forceful and lively present time, emerges as a ghostly interruption.

The Hills of Marlik (Ebrahim Golestan, 1963)

This year,

last year,

thousands and thousands of years,

With the wind, the smell of pine’s oldness. . .

These words begin Golestan’s 1963 documentary The Hills of Marlik. Repeated again and again, these words mark the film as one concerned with temporality. The images preceding these words are of a pair of hands piecing together the broken parts of what seems to be an ancient artifact. A man sitting by a stream, the camera reveals. When this (re)assemblage is finished, a shot of a stylized clay pitcher placed by the water. “This year, last year, thousands and thousands of years . . .” We see a group of men, the archaeological excavation team of Marlik, with their small picks and brushes, unearthing the remains of a human skeleton. Suddenly, to the cue of a developing atonal music, a wipe cut radically changes the setting. The new scene is opened by a traveling camera moving through a dark space, passing by rows of objects suspended in the air. This twofold engagement with “archaeology” and the “museum display,” this fascination with excavation, with bringing old objects into the present time, shaped in the formative years of the New Wave, was to come back in its later years again and again.

The scenes built around displayed artifacts in The Hills of Marlik establish Golestan’s montage virtuosity beyond the field of word and syntax. The film’s “museum display sequences” principally consist of images of sharply lit excavated objects suspended in the air and filmed in various angles and from changing distances, at times moving and at other times static. They have an ethereal appearance against a background that is immaculately black. These museum sequences are striking in their broad array of editing and lighting arrangements, camera movements, and optical printing methods; the cinematic techniques put on display, most of them drawn from the inventory of cinematic modernism, include jump cuts, traveling shots, close-ups, extreme close-ups, stop-motion cinematography, dissolves, and fades. The “museum pieces” spread and are scattered, with or without justification from the voice-over commentary, into the rural landscape, appearing within or next to images of the villagers standing in front of their mud-brick homes. A result of these unexpected juxtapositions is a collage-like quality. In the face of this high degree of fragmentation, it is the flawless blackness of the background and Golestan’s words that conceive connection and lucidity.

In The Hills of Marlik, the image offered of (Iranian) history is one of loss and rupture. Reminiscent of Persepolis, the excavated skeletons, the ancient objects displayed on museum pedestals, and, above all, the commentary, point to a long process of destruction and decay. “History was lost, the cast became dust, and head that was the bowl of thought is no more.” The calamity, the voice-over continues, perhaps started by terror of an invasion from the outside, by a “tribe,” an “evil idea,” a “deceiving tyrant.” The gravest consequence of this history of disintegration and ruination is the disappearance of “seeing” and its interchangeable properties of “thinking” and “giving birth” (zaeeidan). But, suddenly, in the midst of this thousand-year-long destruction, the possibility of renewal. Golestan’s poetic discourse gives the promise of a life-giving force that can come, across the boundary of time, to this land. “May the ancient roots blossom again! May the god of seed salute the valley! May the eyes see! And seeing becomes life anew.”

The House Is Black (Forough Farrokhzad, 1963)

Forough Farrokhzad’s The House Is Black starts with Ebrahim Golestan’s voice. Golestan’s detached commentary offers a brief introduction to leprosy, stating that what is going to be seen is “an image of an ugliness” and a “vision of a pain.” What follows is an intricate and dense twenty-minute-long film with multiple currents and countercurrents in imagery, sound, and verbal components. We glance the people who inhabit the never-named leper colony going about their daily activities, attending classes and prayer sessions, standing still, undergoing medical treatments. With The House, Farrokhzad introduced the two elements of body and religious motifs into the Iranian New Wave. Farrokhzad reads from the Old Testament: “For I’ve been made in strange and frightening shape. My bones were not hidden from you when I was being created in the hidden, and was being molded in the bowels of the earth.” In The House the body is diseased, photographed, and in ruin. The dominant human body here is a figure of excess, its flesh either constantly in lack or in overflow. This is a body in complete alterity to that healthy productive body of progressive history, an ideal that modern Iran has been fully committed to for a very long time. The human body’s excess here is also a feature of the uncanny. A lot of things in The House cannot be explained with certainty, and to this, the foregrounding of the body element contributes. The diseased human body, then, adds to the film’s photographic realism as well as to its undoing. Like in ancient ruins, the flesh in its very materiality is a register of temporality. Through time the elements leave their marks on our bodies, and so does the process of aging. Scars leave their sign on the skin, and passage of time deepens the lines. But in The House Is Black, the life of the lepers has altered these processes. The age of many of the subjects filmed cannot be easily determined. Although there is an awareness of temporality that comes with the effects of decay, the historical trajectory that the decay has taken remains unclear.

As a lyrical avant-garde work, the body of the filmic text in The House Is Black is also a ruin. It is as though the filmic text itself, like the bodies inhabiting it, is constantly on the verge of overspill and breakage. Passing glimpses of people, body parts (or their absence), trees, water, and animals seem to have been amassed free of narrative considerations and more for rhythmic and affective impact. The sound and Farrokhzad’s voice-over contribute to the rhythm but seldom, if at all, coincide with the diegetic space. In one of the earliest scenes in The House, a man dressed in rags is shown walking back and forth in front of a building, at every few steps, reaching and touching ever so lightly the brick wall of the dilapidated structure. The facade, made of bricks and windows, stretches from one side of the frame to near infinity. Over this intriguing scene, Farrokhzad’s voice slowly reads the names of the days of the week again and again: “Saturday . . . Sunday . . . Monday . . .” and so on. The world of The House Is Black seems to revolve around the cyclical time of the myth and not a progressive one, and that, too, is a messenger of horror.

The Wind of Jinn (Nasser Taghvai, 1969)

The 1969 documentary The Wind of Jinn, by Nasser Taghvai, brings together our two themes, the ruined built structure and the body. The Wind of Jinn’s opening scene is of waves from the sea hitting a harbor town that appears to be emptied of its inhabitants. Mixing with the sound of waves is the sound of wind. The voice-over, this time belonging to Ahmad Shamlou, an icon of modern Persian poetry, gives somewhat of an introduction to the place. “In the broken and ruined port of Lengeh still comes the sound of relentless battle, of waves and the rocks of shores without men.” What follows are shots of decaying buildings, alleyways, and dusty cemeteries. With the images of ruination, the soundtrack picks up a lullaby in a mournful female voice (remarkably reminiscent of Rahnema’s Persepolis). Here, too, as in The Hills of Marlik and Persepolis, the ruin simultaneously points to a past synonymous with life and to the long process of decay that has followed.

The male voice-over’s grieving is also for the “Southern Blacks” and their pains. The Winds, specially the one called the Wind of Jinn, are said to be responsible for the outburst of untold maladies among the remaining populace as well as for the destruction of the port city. Amid the death and decay, though, the locals have found the remedy, a gift deposited within those who (reportedly) have come from the shores of Africa. It is not that the Winds did not exist before the arrival of the Africans, as the commentary intriguingly discloses, but that they had remained “unknown,” “like the power in a diseased body, like the oil under the sea, like consciousness in the head of the uncultured.” The Winds have existed for a long time but they needed the “tradition of the Black” in order to become known, as that tradition was able to recognize the “resemblance” and become the healer. The healing was in mimesis.

From its highly fragmented early scenes of fallen alleyways and objects, The Wind of Jinn moves on to a relatively long possession/exorcism sequence. If so far the film has been finding pleasure in the haunting beauty of open spaces, of stormy seas and deserted shores, with the possession scene we move into the closed space of a crowded room. Slowly some in the group start to move to the center of the room, their bodies convulsing at an increasing rate. Cutaway shots to the ruins outside interrupt the flow of the visual and soundtracks alike. Is there a link between the two? Others in presence stand to shroud the bodies of those in trance, to assist and comfort them, covering them with white sheets. The film ends with a shot of a man wrapped in the middle of the room, as the lullaby we heard earlier returns.    

Arbaeen (Nasser Taghvai, 1970)

The young director of The Wind of Jinn made a number of the most influential documentaries of the New Wave, some of which are among the best representatives of the subgenre of ritual films, a category that centers on bodies more than others. Taghvai’s Arbaeen starts with a slow zoom in on an illuminated object in the middle of a large room, a small replica of a Shia shrine. The music has already started and the image cuts to a small dusty back alley where men are beating on large drums. Arbaeen is going to be the first documentary discussed in this essay that does not have a voice-over commentary. Until this point, the camera is handheld and the whole scene has a rather informal touch. Then, suddenly, as soon as we might think we are seeing an Iranian equivalent of direct cinema, another scene opens that launches the film’s predilection for fragmentation and stylization. An abrupt cut to a black fabric edged with flowers and Qur’anic scripture is followed by a quick succession of shots of stained glass. These backlit glass windows, perfectly symmetrical and two-dimensional, appear to be suspended against the pitch black framing them. This “stained glass segment” in Arbaeen corresponds with what I refer to as the “museum aesthetics” of the New Wave.

Soon after, the scenery changes to a large, brightly lit interior, and the ritual sequence, or what I see as the film’s “body sequence,” begins. In contrast to the streets outside, the interior space is male territory. Its inhabitants form circles around circles, each with one hand holding the next person in line, and with the other, beating his bare chest in a steady beat. In this sequence, by far the longest in the film, the human body not only becomes central thematically, it also bursts onto the screen in its very materiality. With the arrival of this sequence, the film’s rhythm slows down; longer takes take precedence, and the camera’s gaze follows the mourners. Longer duration of the shots and their deep focus allow the viewer to see significantly more. This affirmation of the visual evidence becomes even more intimate as the camera slowly moves closer and closer to the center of the room and among the men engaged in the ritual. Different body types, skin textures, muscle contractions, the shine of sweat, bodily eccentricities, occasional tattoos become visible. As the men beat their bare chests, the redness of the skin where their hands hit comes into view. Moreover, this act of hitting the upper body, simultaneously measured and improvisational, personal and collective, produces another effect, a rhythm. The rhythm generated here, itself in a “dialogue” with the sad lament sang by the singer, sets the tempo for the group’s movement in the pro-filmic world and, in turn, informs the pace of the film. Both the activities of the crew at the moment of filming, as Jean Rouch’s utopian ideas on cine-trance remind us, and the choices made at the editing table are affected by the sounds and movements produced by the bodies of mourners, in a somewhat diffused form of materiality proclaiming and “redeeming” itself. That bodily movements and sounds produced by the “subjects” being filmed have an impact on the documentary/ethnographer filmmakers (sound as well as filming crew) might be by now a part of an old wisdom, an old wish of the participatory cinema and its kin in the ideal of “shared anthropology.” The idea is still alive, though, even if we only take up Rouch’s thesis on “cine-trance” at its minimum reach, and not its maximalist dream of complete dissolve in the native’s ritual.

In Arbaeen, nonetheless, the movement toward more detail and visibility is paralleled by something different: a drive toward fissure and instability. As the ritual continues, as the mourners’ circular movement intensifies, the camera gets closer and closer to its subjects. As expected, this closeness first brings more clarity of sight, which can continue only to a point as, after a while, the now fast-moving hands and torsos start to fall out of focus and become a blurred mass. This arrangement of bodies enmeshed into one another, organized in tight circular lines ringing other circles made of human forms, as though in a whirlwind of flesh, becomes a visual celebration of the possibility of collectivity.

The Brick and the Mirror (Ebrahim Golestan, 1964)

Already well-known as a writer, photographer and documentary filmmaker Ebrahim Golestan made his first fiction feature The Brick and the Mirror in 1964. The film opens with a long take of a busy Tehran street, the only thing visible at night, the city’s lights and cars in sharp black and white. What follows is a long driving sequence. Passing cars, flickering streetlights, rotating neon signs, their hazy reflections. The driver switches between radio stations. As the car travels through the city, it is called over by a female voice: “Taxi!” The driver pulls over and a woman covered in a black chador, played by Forough Farrokhzad, gets into the back seat. The destination turns out to be a faraway neighborhood, desolate, only half-built and half-lit. The car stops on a road next to a mud-brick wall. When the woman exits and disappears into the night, the driver realizes that she has left behind a child. He runs into the thick of the dark and enters what appears to be a ruined building. This desolate structure is inhabited by three ghostly characters: an older woman, a disabled man, and a pregnant woman. The older woman is waiting for her son to come back, the younger woman is languishing in the dream of her husband’s return, and the disabled man, too, is hoping that the older woman’s son, “his friend,” is going to come back one day. At the same time, the first woman seems to believe in something else: “Here is a ruin. Nobody comes here.”

But the ruin in The Brick and the Mirror is a ruin with a difference. Golestan, on different occasions, has used the same term, as in a booklet accompanying the film’s release, while also contesting the designation at other times by insisting that it was an “unfinished home.” This inconsistency is perhaps a continuation of the larger semantic uncertainties of the ruin as an idea, a representation, and as a material formation. The discrepancy we face in the accounts of the building in this most hard-to-pin-down scene in The Brick and the Mirror might not be a bad thing. Between a ruin and an “unfinished home” is, in their existence in the lexicon and beyond, I believe a built-in tension that when further aggravated will bear good results for critical analysis.

An unfinished structure looks to the future. That is to say that it is shadowed by a particular, more flamboyant futurity invested in the site from the moment its material construction begins. An unfinished building is not only different from the ruins of antiquity (like Persepolis in Rahnema’s documentary) but also different from the ruins with chronicles of ruination falling within modern times in one way or another. The unfinished structure, unlike other ruins of modernity, has hardly had its chance under the sun to experience the effects of decay and destruction, natural or otherwise.⁵

Rendering an unfinished building as the ruin, in naming, in conception, contains within it a buried critique of the original project of chronological progress. If the classical ruin in its romantic representation stands as a testimony to the transient nature of history, the unfinished structure as ruin points to the blind eye of the faith in the future. If, as Golestan insists, the building in The Brick and the Mirror’s ruin scene is “a home unfinished,” it is one with all its deformities, in fact stillborn. The stairways cut across darkness, connecting the different floors, the driver with the child in his arms traverses them, only to find out that each layer holds very little except stories of separation. The old woman, her figure and voice progressively disembodied:

Poor souls, they still are hopeful.

But nobody is coming back.

Here was once farmland.

One day they came and sold it all.

The wheat and barley were ready to seed.

But one day they came

with steel. 

The ruin scene in The Brick and the Mirror, standing somewhat apart from the film’s plot and overall style, might be the only passage in the film conjuring a pre-urban past and, in so doing, carries a particular weight. The unfinished structure built on farmland is now standing on the edges of an ever-expanding metropolis. The walls of the city that emerged from the destruction not only divided people from each other but also discursively fractured the temporality of the place. The two distinctive worlds created live simultaneously side by side in their materiality as well as, ethereally, in memory.

In Tehran, too, the country plays hide-and-seek with the city, as Walter Benjamin once observed on Moscow.⁶ The perception that the great metropolis by the Alborz mountain range is divided by a multiplicity of temporal planes finds its most well-known dualistic manifestation in the division between the South and the North. In many regards, this is a split that projects inward the already existing division between the rural and the urban. The “south of the city” stands for the working class, underdevelopment, narrow alleyways (koochehs), buildings in decline, mosques and calls to prayer, men with black open shirts, fallen women, women with chadors, camaraderie, but also poverty, lonely souls, crowds, and crime. South of the City was also the name of a 1958 film by Farrokh Ghaffari, a film that could have been regarded as the Iranian New Wave’s first fiction feature if its negatives had not been destroyed by the authorities.

The Brick and the Mirror ends where it begins, on a busy street with a woman in a black chador calling, “Taxi!” It is getting dark and Hashem is sitting behind the wheel of his car. But right before the final scene, there is another scene. In this scene before the last, the female protagonist enters the orphanage where, earlier in the day, her lover had abandoned the child. Inside she discovers countless little children on different floors. Some in groups on the floor, some in tightly set rows of beds, some smiling, some crying. Most look back at the camera. Many of the kids have an unusual repetitive body movement, back and forth, back and forth. With these images of entrapment and anguish it is as though The Brick and the Mirror opens a door to The House Is Black.

The Cow (Dariush Mehrjui, 1969)

Then, in The Cow I moved a little more daring and fearless. In The Cow I was even able to create metaphysical and surreal ambiences, or the ambience of meaningful silences. —Dariush Mehrjui⁷

The most celebrated film of the Iranian New Wave until not long ago, Dariush Mehrjui’s The Cow has a simple narrative. ⁸ It is a story of a village, unnamed and unlocated, a man living in that village called Mashhadi Hassan, and his cow. One night when he is away, his cow dies. The villagers at first try to hide the bad news from him but to no avail. Mashhadi Hassan metamorphoses into something new, something frightening. In both its narrative and its visuality, The Cow shows a disposition for shedding the “nonessential” to the point that only the formative outlines of the story or image remain. Instead of resulting in simplicity, however, the film’s fascination for austere structures produces a form of stylization.

These austere sets, especially those in the exterior shots of the village, contribute greatly to the film’s particular and hard-to-forget look. ⁹The walls, the houses, and the alleys they create, are made of mud bricks covered with a coating of mud plaster. This adobe material is formed into smooth curvaceous surfaces. The adobe soil is of course a common element used in buildings in Iran (and around the world). It is used as bricks and plaster. Until recently, in rural Iran particularly, unbaked soil mixed with dry hay was the basic building material (called kah-gel). In their earthlike tone and texture, and in their association with the homes of the “down-to-earth people,” these materials of construction stand for authenticity in architecture and in culture. In many of the New Wave films shot in the countryside, mud bricks and mud plaster are inevitably part of the scenery; in that, Mehrjui’s The Cow is an exception only because of the overwhelming degree of this visibility of earth, mud, and dust.

Even before Mehrjui made his classical New Wave film, the adobe earth had entered, discursively and in its very physicality, the world of Iranian visual modernism. Marcos Grigorian (1925–2007) stands as a great example. A graduate of Rome’s Accademia di Belle Arti, Grigorian returned to Iran in 1954 and immediately became influential as an artist, teacher, and gallery owner. He was among the earliest proponents of “traditional” and “naïve” creative practices like the local popular genre known as “coffee house painting,” which often uses themes and motifs from Persian literature and mythology as well as Shia hagiology. The soil, in which dissolved the expressionism of Grigorian’s early years in Italy, became increasingly important in his milieu from the early 1960s onward, the time span that also saw the emergence of the New Wave. This creative use of Iran’s “parched earth and mud” by Grigorian can be seen in such works as Kharg Island (1963), Spiral (1967), and Desert (1972), eventually culminating in a series entitled Earthworks. Made out of adobe soil, at times mixed with dry hay, that other old-fashioned building material, Grigorian’s Earthworks are distinguished by a minimalism that allows the texture of the adobe, cracked and rustic, to come to the fore. At the same time, the compositional sparseness takes in simple rectangular or curved shapes. Rectangles framing other rectangles and circles.

Curvaceous and symmetrical at the same time, the sunbaked walls and rooftops of the “décor” in Mehrjui’s film have a pronounced presence in most of the scenes. The characters of the story, the villagers, are filmed against them, more often in frontal tableau-like shots. The facades of the humble homes crafted out of these adobe walls and roofs are also symmetrical, complicated by curves of windows and arches. Though time after time, through cinematography and lighting, the surfaces of the buildings are framed in such a manner as to separate them from their surroundings, a strategy that creates geometrically minimal graphics. Unlike in Grigorian’s paintings/installations, in Mehrjui’s films the rectangular orifices of windows and doors constantly slip into the narrative as openings into other spaces. Within multiple mediums, whether on celluloid, on the walls of country homes, or on the walls of art galleries, this quotidian building material was entangled with a literary-ethnographic register.

The transmutation that the grieving Mashhadi Hassan undergoes is of the most radical form, affecting him both within and without. It is a source of unimaginable agony for him and the people around him, and it places the film’s narrative on a new, unexpected course. When he is told of his cow’s death, Mashhadi Hassan refuses to accept the calamity and begins to change. He becomes the dead animal. An inventory of bodily excess is put on display, rolling eyes, crying aloud, head hitting against walls, eating cattle feed, howling. Is this a story of a spirit possession or one of a metamorphosis? Part of the strangeness of the film comes exactly from the tension between these two modes of alterity-becoming, from the fact that it is both. Like in possession/trance films, Mashhadi Hassan’s condition finds its primary medium in the body. If mimesis in possession rituals is a performance/dance of empowerment over an alterity (à la Michael Taussig), in The Cow it leads to the horrors of alienation. 

Soon after the release of The Cow, in 1971 Mehrjui made The Postman (Postchi) based on Georg Büchner’s stage play Woyzeck. The story of The Postman takes place in the countryside, unfolding, at least on one level, along a country-city schema. This is a dynamic that is also at play within the two other features directed by Mehrjui before the Revolution, Mr. Simpleton (1970) and The Cycle (1974). In all of these films made after The Cow, a major part of the tragedy, the modern horrors befallen on the characters’ lives, comes not just from the opposition between the country and the city, but, more exactly, from the predestined victory of the latter over the former. The Cycle, based on a script cowritten with Saedi, is yet another celebrated film of the New Wave taking up the tragic theme of the arrival in Tehran. The film begins with images of a young man and an ailing old man against an industrial landscape and ends with the son looking on as his father is buried in a desolate landscape. What takes place in between is the story of their fall, physical and moral, in an urban scene overwhelmed by deceit and corruption.

Film and History in Pieces

Ruins are at the heart of Kimiavi’s cinema, including in The Mongols, the film with which we opened this essay. They are the sites of illegal excavations, where the Mongols, invaders from another time and place, first arrive in the flesh. The landscape, at once breaking into the vision of the filmmaker-turned-protagonist (played by Kimiavi himself, you remember) and into the body of the film, is mainly made of sand dunes minimal in composition and colors, and the scattered, decaying ruins of mud-brick structures. There is also a guillotine, a device more associated with modern France and its terrors than with the Mongol armies of the past, but also the capacity of the cinematic apparatus for cutting and montage. In some shots, the blade of the guillotine is replaced with a TV monitor, as the filmmaker lies down in the place of the condemned.

Kimiavi had engaged before with the imagery of archaeology and museums, the two closely related material formations with the New Wave from its inception, shaping its thematic and aesthetic contours. In 1969 his highly playful and lyrical documentary The Hills of Gheytarieh begins with these words: “We are in touch, with the world of the dead, with those who were lost in history. We renew our historical affinity.” Produced by National Iranian Radio and Television, it is a film that brings together excavation scenes and museum imagery (as did The Hills of Marlik before it). The film depicts an excavation team at work at an archaeological site. Batches of three-thousand-year-old artifacts are unearthed in pieces and then put back together. Meanwhile, in a movement in reverse, the film breaks up the pro-filmic world and then reassembles it. Showing a degree of self-consciousness and autocriticism both toward the medium of cinema and what we now call the heritage/memory industry, The Hills of Gheytarieh takes up an ironic tone in its museum scene, evoking an art auction through its accompanying soundtrack. The critical angle, however, is more apropos to the loss of “authenticity,” indeed, the loss of “life” of the appropriated artifacts.

The last things before the last. In The Mongols, excavating old artifacts includes unearthing old film and media. In many ways a found-footage film, the images are taken out of their contexts and reassembled. We see men dressed in some local attire from the eastern parts of Iran digging holes in the ground in search of ancient artifacts and, suddenly, the Mongols. The film’s treatment of film history moves in parallel to what these men are doing, back in time, as a form of excavation of “primitive” relics. So what comes to the fore, breaking the continuity of the present time, is an onslaught from the cinema’s primal years and the precursors to the apparatus: Eadweard Muybridge’s horses and men; Georges Demenÿ uttering, “Je vous aime!” in 1891; and William Kennedy Dickson’s The Gay Brothers (c. 1896), among others. The ancient relics taken out of the dry earth and the earliest moving images of history emerge, in Raymond Williams’s prediction, as “sources and as fragments against the modern world.”¹⁰The newness of media, like television and cinema before it, are confirmed (in their impact) and thrown into question (in the recurrence of their forms and conditions). Film and media archaeology before its time.

In Memory of Dariush Mehrjui (1939-2023).

This article is published in conjunction with the most comprehensive survey of Iranian pre-revolutionary cinema ever assembled in North America, “Iranian Cinema before the Revolution, 1925-1979,” on view at MoMA in October and November 2023. The series is organized by guest curator Ehsan Khoshbakht, Codirector, Il Cinema Ritrovato, with Joshua Siegel and La Frances Hui, Curators in the Department of Film at MoMA.

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In this text, Dorota Jagoda Michalska writes about Erna Rosenstein (1913–2004), a Jewish Polish postwar artist. Until now, Rosenstein’s work has been situated among the very few examples of Surrealist work in socialist Poland. Michalska opens up a transnational perspective, inviting us to look at the artist’s oeuvre through the lens of global surrealisms, connecting her articulations of Holocaust trauma with the work of artists who have dealt with slavery, genocide, exile, and colonial dispossession.

Against a black and lustrous background, a silvery landscape painted with elegant and delicate lines emerges. An aural simmering envelops what looks like the gentle slope of a mountain in the far-off distance. Several fractured lightnings irradiate from the mountain’s peak, cutting through the black background. Erna Rosenstein’s enigmatic painting Palace of Lightnings (Pałac błyskawic, 1989) has rarely been the focus of critical reflection, because it slips through the main theoretical categories used to describe the artist’s oeuvre. Current scholarship sees her work as an articulation of Holocaust trauma, situating it within the field of postwar modern art in Eastern Europe.¹ Scholars also underscore that her paintings are among the very few examples of Surrealism in socialist Poland.² However, her complex artistic practice benefits from a more transnational reflection, one that positions her work not only in the context of her Jewish identity and Polish history but also against a broader background of global experiences of Surrealism.

Present readings of Rosenstein’s practice see her work as inexorably linked to her biography. The artist was born in 1913 in Lviv (currently western Ukraine) to an upper-class Jewish family. While her parents acknowledged their ethnic background, they opted for full assimilation into Polish society. Paradoxically, while the artist herself did not consider her ethnic identity paramount, during the Nazi occupation of Eastern Europe, it was exactly her family’s Jewish background that brought tragedy upon them. In their escape from Warsaw in 1942, they were betrayed by a Polish shmaltsovnik (slang for a person who blackmailed Jews during the Nazi occupation), who brutally murdered the artist’s parents.

Miraculously, Rosenstein escaped and managed to survive. Among her most famous works is Screens (Ekrany) from 1951, which has been the central subject of most of the critical writings about Rosenstein. This violently traumatic painting portrays the decapitated figures of the artist’s parents playing ball with their cutoff heads. The work immediately makes us realize just how deeply Rosenstein’s work is rooted in the long history of the difficult cohabitation of Poles and Jews, which reached its tragic zenith during World War II.

While acknowledging the fundamental importance of this historical context, my text proposes a different inroad into Rosenstein’s practice. My aim is to situate her paintings in a broader, international context, one shaped by global histories of coloniality, dispossession, and racial necropolitics. It is for this reason that I want to place Rosenstein’s work within the framework of global histories of the Surrealist avant-garde as outlined in the 2021–22 exhibition Surrealism Beyond Borders, which included Screens.³ While Rosenstein’s work is often categorized as Surrealist within the framework of Polish art history, a comparative perspective opens up new readings of her practice, ones that challenge current narrations on the artist’s works.

Post-Genocidal Ecologies

In 1950, decolonial writer, thinker, and activist Aimé Césaire published the groundbreaking essay “Discourse on Colonialism,”in which he famously claims that there are profound and direct genealogical ties between fascism and the European colonial project. Césaire maintains that European colonies were an experimental ground for Nazism, especially the war and genocide waged upon the Herero and Nama people in Namibia.⁴ Seen in this light, fascism was not merely a tragic exception in European history, but rather quite the opposite; in fact, it was a logical continuation of earlier historical processes and political formations. Nowadays, Césaire’s text is seen as crucial, because it traces fundamental historical parallels between the Holocaust and the experiences of slavery, genocide, exile, and colonial dispossession.⁵

The historical parallels drawn by Césaire shed new light on some of Rosenstein’s paintings. For many years, I have been deeply fascinated by a number of her less well-known works, in particular, those that portray a complex landscape dominated by dark, lush, and impenetrable vegetation. The painting It Is Growing (Rośnie, 1965) presents a florid and vibrant ecological system of hybrid, organic forms undergoing constant transformation.
Another work—the more somber No Man’s Land (Ziemia Niczyja, 1964)—portrays a similar organic landscape; however, instead of brimming with greenery, it confronts us with dark, swirling layers of gray, which sit heavily on the painting’s surface. Both works can be seen as articulations of a post-genocidal landscape marked by fleeting echoes, decaying remains, and spectral presences. Indeed, Rosenstein’s organic ecosystems are expressions of an almost forensic artistic sensibility alert to the smallest and often non-visible traces of the genocide perpetrated by Nazism in Eastern Europe.⁶

As I looked at Rosenstein’s traumatic visions of nature, I was reminded of Jungle (La Jungla, 1943), which waspainted by Cuban artist Wifredo Lam (1902–1982) amid World War II. This painting is, nowadays, considered a fundamental decolonial work reflecting the diasporic identities of the Caribbean.⁷ More specifically, it is an attempt to articulate the postcolonial status of the Caribbean ecosystem marked by colonial violence, extortionists policies, racial fantasies, and slave labor. In 1951, Guyanese writer and decolonial thinker Martin Carter (1927–1997) expressed a similar sentiment in his poem “Listening to the Land”: “I bent down / listening to the land / but all I heard was tongueless whispering . . . as if some buried slave wanted to speak again.”⁸ Lam’s Jungle and Carter’s poem closely resonate with Rosenstein’s paintings of post-genocidal nature, revealing a profound kinship between postcolonial landscapes marked by the histories of slavery and the Polish ecosystem in the aftermath of the Holocaust.

The Alchemy of Gender

Recent years have marked a resurgent interest in underrepresented women artists associated with Surrealism. Of special importance in this context is the rediscovery of women artists outside the Western canon, such as Egyptian painter and feminist activist Inji Efflatoun (1924–1989), Brazilian sculptor Maria Martins (1984–1973), and Czech painter and illustrator Toyen (1902–1980). How can Rosenstein be set against this expanded backdrop of Surrealism? Akin to numerous Polish women artists in the 1960s and 1970s, the Jewish-Polish artist never considered her work in feminist terms; rather, she insisted upon the universal dimension of her practice. However, a reframing of her works within global histories of Surrealism helps us to approach this question from a slightly different perspective.

Throughout her life, Rosenstein maintained a keen interest in alchemy. The language of alchemical practices, founded on such concepts as transformation, distillation, and sublimation, seems particularly well suited for describing the dynamic and ephemeral nature of her paintings. Her works often portray nebulous, vaporized matter that seems just on the verge of either liquifying or evaporating. While researching Rosenstein’s practice, I remember being immediately struck by her painting The Burning of the Witch (Spalenie czarownicy) from 1966. This work confronts viewers with its sprawling, painterly surface of swirling patches of intense color: vibrant reds, fleshy pinks, and deep yellows. The fluidity of shapes seems to echo an ever-changing magmatic surface that, in turn, invokes uneasy images of intense heat and flames. In this piece, Rosenstein directly refers to the widespread phenomena of witch-hunting and public burnings that engulfed early modern Europe (including Eastern Europe) in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. As such, her painting offers a powerful image from the long history of violence toward women and their dispossession by both capitalism and colonialism.

Alchemical practices were also key references for other Surrealists, including British-born Leonora Carrington (1917–2011) and Spanish artist Remedios Varo (1908–1963). In the 1940s, both Carrington and Varo found themselves in exile in Mexico, having fled Europe, which was, at the time, engulfed by Nazism. Soon the two formed a close friendship based on their mutual keen interest in alchemy. Indeed, scholars unanimously underline the proto-feminist dimension of alchemical references in both their work.⁹ This is particularly evident in the case of Carrington, who was also actively engaged in the women’s liberation movement in Mexico. This context allows us to perhaps approach from a slightly different angle the question of gender in Rosenstein’s works. Though the artist claimed not to be interested in feminism, her focus on alchemy reveals an interest in processes of identity formation that eschew fixed categories of normative gender practices and policies. By focusing on alchemical transmutations—conjunctions, separations, sublimations—she forges her own artistic language to give voice to an unfixed subjectivity that slips through the enforced normativity of the discourse. While such an artistic language might seem removed from the more canonical forms of feminism, alchemy may have offered Rosenstein an idiomatic way of articulating her creative position in the postwar Polish art sphere dominated by male artists.

The Night of the Soul

In 1947, a volume of poetry entitled Suryāl (Surreal) was published in Aleppo, Syria. The avant-garde poet Urkhan Muyassar (1911–1965) claimed that the collected poems sought to unearth the “mysterious moments” of human creativity and to liberate them from the imposed tyranny of everyday life and the brutality of logic.¹⁰ The circle of artists active in Aleppo understood Surrealism as an artistic and spiritual project of reaching toward “what lies beyond reality.”¹¹ Such an understanding is deeply indebted to Sufism and older mystic practices. A similar claim was made later, in 1995, by Syrian poet Adūnīs (Ali Ahmad Said / علي أحمد سعيد إسبر, born 1930) in his book of critical essays Sufism & Surrealism. Adūnīs insists that there are fundamental ties between Sufism—as a mystical practice of losing one’s subjectivity and ecstatically approaching God/Nothingness—and writings by Surrealists poets and writers such as Arthur Rimbaud (1854–1891) or André Breton (1896–1966).¹²

These considerations open up a new perspective on several works by Rosenstein that so far have escaped critical attention. Pieces such as Evening (Wieczór, 1974) or Palace of Lightning (Pałac błyskawic, 1989) portray the delicate outlines of fantastic landscapes, frail architectural structures, and isolated human silhouettes cast against a deep and impenetrable black background. At first glance, these works might be seen as expressions of Rosenstein’s traumatic war experience. However, a different reading is possible. These paintings can also be understood as attempts to express what the Spanish mystic and poet St. John of the Cross calls the “dark night of the soul.”¹³ This moment marks a profound spiritual and existential crisis, but ultimately, it also leads to a mystic experience of illumination. This view offers a different perspective on the current psychoanalytical interpretations of Rosenstein’s work, which usually describe it as a sort of traumatic repetition—that is, a horror that recurs in her paintings.¹⁴ A mystical perspective allows us to see the “dark night of the soul” not only as a traumatic moment, but also as the beginning of an inner transformation. It is important to emphasize that—to my knowledge—Rosenstein was not aware of either the Syrian surrealists or Adūnīs’s writings; however, we can still weave together these parallel artistic sensibilities to see how they reflect and dialogue with one other.

By bringing mysticism into contact with Rosenstein’s practice, we might discover a new reading of her painting Clearance (Prześwit, 1968). To understand this work, we must be aware of the historical context of its creation: Rosenstein painted the piece during the anti-Semitic campaign that was waged in Poland in 1968 and resulted in hundreds of thousands of Jews leaving the country. However, other interpretations are also possible. The painting depicts a turbulent landscape with swirling gusts of violent pink. The land is in upheaval, and this restlessness hints at the histories of violence and genocide deeply embedded within the Polish landscape. Rosenstein represents reality as dominated by turbulent, billowing matter that abounds in dramatic transformations, movement, and sudden flashes. At the center of the image, a massive explosion of light is taking place, with sharp beams of light cutting across the whole canvas. The piece captures the moment just before the break of dawn—a mystical experience of vitality and renewal.

(Global) Polish Art Histories

Erna Rosenstein’s work recently has been exhibited in several important international shows, marking a new wave of interest her work.¹⁵ While older scholarship almost exclusively situates her practice within the field of postwar art in Poland, my text takes a different approach in that it considers the global implications of her practice. I believe that Rosenstein’s paintings allow us to see important historical parallels between the works of artists impacted by the Holocaust and those of artists facing the experience of slavery, genocide, exile, and colonial dispossession. Such a perspective is of paramount importance as it makes it possible to consider art practices from Eastern Europe in an expanded field, to see them as deeply shaped by global formations of coloniality and race. This line of thinking allows us to go beyond dominant narratives of national exceptionalism and to instead forge horizontal networks of solidarity and common political consciousness. Rosenstein’s practice—like the fractured lightnings she painted in 1989—point us toward these multiple directions, sudden illuminations, and affinities between what, at first glance, might seem to be very different realities.  

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Born in Kampala, Theresa Musoke began her artistic practice in the early 1960s, and to this day, continues to make art with the tenor, range, and mastery of many African modernists of the postwar era. Her work can appear synonymous with postwar African art and has been described by scholars such as Margaret Nagawa³ and George William Kyeyune⁴ as engaging fauna, wildlife, and abstraction. Musoke’s reputation as an artist has rested on the academic training she received in various institutions in Uganda, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Arguably, the dominant theme running through literature on Ugandan and East African art more broadly is the Margaret Trowell School of Industrial and Fine Arts and its aesthetic pedagogy.⁵ It is easy to see Musoke’s excellent draftsmanship, which has been described as her art’s “sweeping brush stroke,”⁶ but when we step away from the academicism of her art, it is clear that her investment in and concept of the wild are more broadly inspired than merely an academic exercise would suggest. Her visual treatment of wildlife, in its illuminating and vociferous activity, recalls the interiority of postwar artists in Uganda, particularly through what I refer to as her imaginative and surreal imagery. While I do not subscribe to a singular definition of surrealism, I claim the imaginative, meditative, poetic, animist, and psychological as descriptive of Musoke’s surrealist art.

In this short paper, I challenge the claim that Musoke began working with nature and the concept of the wild during the mid-1970s in Nairobi, Kenya,⁷ clarifying their presence in her aesthetic trajectory and artistic practice as early as 1963. To give a concise biography, Musoke entered the Makerere Art School in Kampala, Uganda, in 1962.⁸ Makerere University was widely known at the time (and in subsequent years) as the “Harvard of Africa.” Between 1962 and 1965, Musoke made waves at the art school and larger university campus by winning a painting prize, and working on a public mural commission for the old girl’s dormitory at Mary Stuart Hall, which was completed in 1953, and extensions made in 1958 that include a common room.⁹ She went on to earn a diploma from the Royal College of Art in London in 1967. By 1970, Musoke was in the United States pursuing an MFA at the University of Pennsylvania. She returned to Uganda in 1972. Upon her return, she taught at the Makerere Art School for two years before leaving for Kenya, where she taught at Kenyatta University. Musoke permanently returned to Uganda in 1997. Since then, she has maintained a studio-gallery in her home, where she continues to practice painting, drawing, and printmaking.

During World War II (1939–45)

The prevailing dark mood in East African art emerged in the 1940s within the context of World War II. For example, several works made in 1941 by Gregory Maloba (1922–2007), a pioneer modernist in East Africa, clearly reflect the mood of the time.¹⁰ This mood lent itself to folklore. Maloba used the myth of walumbe (death) in his 1941 wood sculpture Death, and similar references to mythology can be traced in the work of many Makerere artists. The emergent Makerere style is evidenced in the work of Maloba and his contemporaries—including Sam James Ntiro (1923–1993), whose 1956 oil painting Men Taking Banana Beer to Bride at Night is in MoMA’s collection—who are considered the first group of Makerere Art School artists. The emergence of the Makerere style was no doubt inspired by the teachings of Margaret Trowell and her pedagogical focus on folkloric myth. However, during and after World War II, artists working in the Makerere style generally chose somber, mournful, or terror-filled myths as sources for their imagery.

Early Years at the Makerere Art School

Theresa Musoke is no exception to the prevailing dark mood expressed in the postwar by artists in East Africa. Her earliest works, such as Anguish (1964; fig. 1) and Cat Ghosts (1962; fig. 2) reflect this somber state of mind. Although Musoke’s work in the 1960s was created in a moment of optimism, and indeed of transition, her much-discussed turn to animal imagery is consistent with the deeply meditative. For instance, her visions of birds and the wild are not “realistic” but rather taken from the imagination. In this sense, her concept of the wild is complex. Such is the case with Guinea Fowls (1963; fig. 3), which was featured in 1963 in Transition magazine. The three birds in this image all face different directions and move across the entire plane of the woodcut. Musoke’s use of space creates the impression that there is no horizon line. Her tendency to break the horizon and create compositions in which much activity takes place but isn’t fixed by a foreground and background, or sight lines, has persisted throughout her career.

In contrast to the dominant discourse on twentieth-century art in Africa, in which artists are measured by their proximity to “modern life,” artists like Musoke have produced a different picture of their experiences. If the urban is absent in Musoke’s art, and further, if her concept of the “wild” tends to be misplaced by Ugandan historians in a lineage of British or American Romanticism and its view of the sublime,¹¹ then her early 1960s Cat Ghosts (fig. 2) suggests that her concept of the wild has an affinity with a certain temperament. “Cat Ghosts” translates as emiyaayu in Luganda, and is used in this context to mean roaming or hostile spirits. Effectively, Musoke’s works confront the postwar anxieties of East Africa as it was coming out from under the clutches of British colonial rule.

The atmosphere at the art school had changed by the time Musoke was admitted as a student, when Maloba and other former students were already teaching there. She encountered a changing department, one that reflected the optimism of Ugandan independence from Britain in 1962. One may ask how the zeitgeist of transition influenced her art, and yet by her second year at the Makerere Art School, she was working with nature. In addition to Guinea Fowls, she produced Cat Ghosts in the style promoted by the art school at that time, that is, the style of artists such as Gregory Maloba, whose innovative aesthetic centered highly emotive subjects such as death and horror. The Makerere Art School, which had been in existence for almost two decades in the early 1960s, emphasized the use of myth, and these artists pushed the aesthetic further by creating aesthetic innovations that foreground the dark atmosphere of the postwar era in East Africa. While Musoke’s Guinea Fowls may not give an accurate depiction of these emotive aesthetics or the somber state of mind of the era, her later surrealist sculpture Anguish (1964; fig. 1), which was featured in 1964 in Transition magazine, does.¹² The sculpture depicts a figure whose body is visibly contorted, its face looking up into the sky and its hands loosely folded together. Its two legs are either rested or kneeling, and the work bears several hollow spaces or voids that cast shadows in sharp light, evoking the traumatic dimensions of the era. Musoke’s turn to nature in 1963 shows her resolution in establishing her own path.

After Makerere

When Musoke was at the Royal College of Art in 1967, she continued her engagement with nature and natural imagery. In The Crested Cranes, a startling beautiful print from 1967 (fig. 4), she depicted the national bird of Uganda. In this lithographic print on paper, her use of color is extravagant. The composition includes a trio of crested cranes, all of which are dancing or flapping their wings. The background is serene, depicting what could be either a clear sky or a calm sea marked by horizontal lines that extend across the plane in a way that appears more forceful. The marshland on which the cranes dance has a more rugged terrain. This work can be contextualized in the history of Ugandan art, which includes oil paintings of crested cranes by Harry Johnson, founder of the Uganda Museum (a Greek temple on Mengo hill), and more recently, works such as a large watercolor drawing of crested cranes by Taga Nuwagaba (born 1968). These works signal to the viewer that Musoke cannot be separated from the social and political history of Uganda, and that as an artist, she understands the visual iconography that has produced Uganda’s history and narrative. If, as art historian Angelo Kakande argues, Musoke did not depict politics in her art,¹³ and as art historian Margaret Nagawa states, she isn’t interested in “social issues,”¹⁴ perhaps this artwork shows us that Musoke embraces the “national” as a paradigm for art-making. Some of the other prints she produced in 1967 also incorporate birds—for example, Feed (1967; fig. 5), which depicts what I view as a reed bunting with thick brown plumage whose mouth is wide open as it reaches out for a circular piece of food. Reed buntings occur year-round in the United Kingdom and would have been a common sight when Musoke studied there.

Indeed, Musoke does not easily fit into neat boxes of social realism that depict feminist art or the incumbent postcolonial regimes. And thus, anyone turning to her art in hopes of finding a clear illustration of either postcolonial or anti-colonial political struggle, or of women’s experience and feminism will be disappointed. I believe that Musoke began to challenge realism fairly early on as a student at the Makerere Art School when, in 1962–63, she enrolled in anatomy classes. In this setting, she favored the peculiar “beautiful ugly”¹⁵ aesthetic of Gregory Maloba and Ignatius Serulyo (1937–2018), and evolved from this position to inject her own personality into her art. This includes her turn to nature as a source. It also includes her opposition to a particular brand of formalist aesthetics under the baton of Scottish artist Cecil Todd (1912–1986), who was dean of the Makerere Art School in the 1960s when Musoke was a student there.

1980s to the Present

Musoke’s art has been included in a range of important exhibitions from the 1980s onward,¹⁶ and questionably positioned within a modernist and primitivist trajectory.¹⁷ Her work of the 1980s incorporates dense imagery suspended in space. In this period, Musoke’s visual language matured to what has become her recognizable style. Her paintings from 1982 to 1986 reveal an almost complete revolt against the notion of a stable horizon line, and in Zebras (1983; fig. 6), she pushed her concept of space even further by depicting the animal figures suspended in midair. Her output from the 2000s onward has been similarly prolific.

In closing, Musoke is an artist who has carried out active intellectual opposition to dominant aesthetic ideologies, such as to the particular human anatomical pedagogies of the Makerere Art School during Todd’s tenure (although she would occasionally return to portraiture in the early 1980s and after).¹⁸ This view might be contested by art historian Kyeyune, who wrote that her rigorous formal training in subjects such as anatomy is a dominant force in her art.¹⁹ Art historian Nagawa has argued that this kind of intellectual opposition could be contextualized within the “artistic, social, and intellectual issues” that have preoccupied Ugandan women artists, who have forged largely independent careers within a patriarchal field.²⁰ Lastly, Musoke’s surreal imagery continues to be sweeping and densely psychological. Her work may parallel twentieth-century post–Independence Uganda in its breadth, and it shows an artist who has innovated her own style and aesthetic sensibility. With this innovation in mind, Musoke’s influence on East African artists, particularly with respect to the surreal landscape, is towering.

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This text considers the work of Vera Pagava, a Georgian artist who lived in exile in Paris, as an amalgamation of modernist and Georgian art historic references. Following Pagava’s life story from Tbilisi, where she was born, to Germany and later Paris, where she settled with her family in 1923 and lived until her death in 1988, this essay introduces her work in relation to that of various other Georgian artists, simultaneously tracing her path from figuration to abstraction.

Vera Pagava was born in 1907 in Tbilisi, Georgia. In 1919, she and her family left Georgia when her father, Georges Pagava, fell ill. Although the Pagava family intended to return, they soon realized that they would have to wait to do so, for Georgia was going through turbulent times, culminating in the 1924 August Uprising, an unsuccessful insurrection against Soviet rule.¹ In 1923, after living in Germany for several years, Pagava and her family moved to France, where they joined the Georgian émigré community settled in Montrouge. Between 1932 and 1939, Pagava studied fine art at the Académie Ranson in Paris with Roger Bissière (1886–1964) and Nicolas Wacker (1897–1987). She became friends with a group of artists in Paris, most of whom were also émigr­és, including Portuguese painter Maria Helena Vieira da Silva (1908–1992) and Hungarian painter Árpád Szenes (1897–1985).

In order to understand Pagava’s position as an artist, it is important to consider her biography not only within Paris and the larger international context, but also within twentieth-century Georgian history. The political situation in her native country in the 1920s had left her not only an émigré, but also an artist in exile.

Apart from her Georgian community in France, Pagava had a close relationship with her uncle Giorgi Naneishvili, who managed to return to Tbilisi (where in 1937, he was arrested and assassinated by the Soviets). Nonetheless, through him, she met other Georgian artists in Paris, including Ketevan Magalashvili (1894–1973), David Kakabadze (1889–1952), and Lado Gudiashvili (1896–1980), among others. Even though Pagava stayed in France until her death, she and her life companion Vano Enoukidze (1907–1979), who was also an artist and exile, and her family members never chose to become French citizens.


Not being interested in securing French citizenship was something Pagava shared with her friend and gallerist Tamara Tarassachvili who, in 1972, opened Galerie Darial with an exhibition of Pagava’s paintings.² Not only a vibrant place in the context of Paris, Galerie Darial was also the first commercial gallery in the history of Georgian galleries. Its name was derived from the Darial Gorge, a river gorge in the Caucasus on the border between Russia and Georgia. Darial Gorge and the river Tergi located within it were popular subjects among late nineteenth-century Georgian and Russian poets and writers, including Ilia Chavchavadze (1837–1907) and Akaki Tsereteli (1840–1915). Notably, Darial Gorge is immortalized in “Demon” (1839), a masterpiece of European Romantic poetry by Mikhail Lermontov (1814–1841). The Tergi and Darial Gorge would become symbols of resistance, independence, and the dissemination of knowledge in late nineteenth-century Georgian culture.

Apart from its name, the gallery also had a strong Georgian identity in terms of its graphic design. Tarassachvili chose to use the Georgian letter D (დ) as its main visual identity (fig. 1). At the time, given Georgia was hardly recognized as a culture independent from Russia, this seemingly subtle gesture was in fact a bold political statement.

In 1944, long before Darial represented Pagava, gallerist Jeanne Bucher introduced the artist’s work to Parisian audiences in a two-person exhibition with Dora Maar (1907–1997).³ From that point onward, Pagava’s work continued to be exhibited in France as well as throughout Europe and the United States—including in the 33rd Venice Biennale, held in 1966, in a group exhibition curated by Jacques Lassaigne, in which Pagava represented France. In Venice, Pagava’s abstract watercolor series from 1962–63 was showcased in the French Pavilion.

Parallel to Pagava’s artistic development in France, Georgian art history was evolving, shifting from a short-lived modernist period toward Socialist Realism. Especially in the 1930s, artists, poets, and visionaries on the other side of the Iron Curtain were either brutally executed or pushed to adapt to Soviet censorship. Artists in Georgia during this time, such as Niko Pirosmanashvili (Pirosmani, 1862–1918), found inspiration in practices allowed by the regime—for example, in works in the style of nineteenth-century Tbilisian portraiture—considered the first wave of independent Georgian portraiture, and Christian Orthodox wall painting of the Middle Ages.

In Pagava’s earlier works, in particular, one can trace influences of Georgian painting tradition. For example, Les Magnan (1947; fig. 3), which depicts three ladies dressed in black gathered around a table in a dim interior, is reminiscent of Tbilisian Portrait, Portrait of Andronikashvili (fig. 4) as well as early portraits by Ketevan Magalashvili (1894–1973; figs. 5, 6).⁴

The women in the portraits by Magalashvili also wear black, and they too are seated—and look out at the viewer. Their dark clothing contrasts with the lightness of their skin, highlighting their faces and hands. In all four portraits, the subjects’ postures and hand positions resemble one another. Curiously, the hands, in particular, evoke the hands in a much older portrait—an iconic twelfth-century portrait of the female King Tamar (fig. 7). Here, the shape of the king’s hand is noteworthy. Again, the light skin color and delicacy of the fingers are in contrast to the decorative elements of the subject’s clothing, and the rough, dark form of the object she holds. The geometrical figure of a square also occurs in all of the above-mentioned works: in the form of a window (fig. 3), a framed painting (fig. 5), a chairback (fig. 6), and an architectural model (fig. 7). The color black is dominant and serves as a background for much lighter colors—as well as frames the face and hands of those depicted.

In discussing the use of black in Georgian art, one cannot bypass the legacy of Niko Pirosmani (1862–1918), a self-taught artist who applied his paint directly to black oilcloth. Indeed black serves as a backdrop in most of his works. Recognized mostly posthumously, Pirosmani had an immense influence on the generations of artists that followed him, and Vera Pagava was no exception. It is known through her archive of personal belongings that she kept a Pirosmani catalogue in her studio, as well as reproductions from the Pirosmani exhibition held in 1969 at the Musée des arts décoratifs, the Louvre.⁵ Pirosmani’s influence can be felt throughout Pagava’s oeuvre, much of which uses his work as a point of departure. This is especially the case in Pagava’s earlier figurative works, but traces of Pirosmani’s luminous work can also be detected in the balance of heavenly light and darkness in her later abstract paintings.

Pagava’s later works, such as The Flight into Egypt (La Fuite en Egypte, 1944; fig. 8), Théatre Hebertot (1947; fig. 10), and Still Life with Bread, Slices of Melons, Glass (1954; fig. 12) evoke works by Pirosmani in subject matter, as well as in core technical aspects (see, for example, figs. 9, 11, 13). What is salient in both artists’ work is the balance between light and dark, the contrast created between black and yellow tones, and the almost autonomous quality of illumination. In examining the rendering of Georgian bread on the table in Pirosmani’s painting The Feast of Five Noblemen (1906; fig. 13) and of the melons on the table in Pagava’s Still Life with Bread, Slices of Melons, Glass (fig. 12), one sees the source of inspiration for what is a leitmotif in Pagava’s paintings. The recurring image of a half-moon-shaped melon in Pagava’s still lifes calls to mind Pirosmani’s masterful depictions of a supra (Georgian traditional feast)—and his focus on the objects on the table, rather than on the figures surrounding them. The transcendental nature of objects and subjects is yet another interest the two artists shared.

Throughout World War II (1939–45), particularly after the German invasion and occupation of France, Pagava explored biblical themes, addressing the difficult historical moment through religious subject matter. The absence of the figure in this series addressing the war’s brutality is emphasized in the archetypal nature of the narrative suggested by the objects depicted. The stark rendering of these images serves to represent the un-representable, and to evoke the biblical proportions of the tragedy of the times.

By the end of the 1950s, Pagava’s work had grown even more abstract. In this transitional period, the artist undertook a series of architectural landscapes in which she reduced buildings to almost pure geometric form, engaging the viewer in an interplay of lines and color (figs. 16, 17).

While Pagava took many steps in favor of abstraction, her formal decisions and color choices remained entwined with characteristics of her earlier works. Gradually, she completely abandoned figuration in favor of abstraction, settling upon the style she is most known for today. As if illuminated from within, her abstract forms suggest multiple planes on the surface of the canvas, which is devoid of corporeal and mundane qualities. Irregular shapes are fluid, morphing one into the other in harmonious compositions in which rectangular and triangular shapes have no sharp edges, but rather are soft and rounded. As her career progressed, Pagava sought to depict pure abstract forms in perfect equilibrium and harmony. Her later work can be described as spiritual, the product of her “inner world,” as she wrote in 1936 to British painter Roger Hilton (1911–1975),⁶ who was her close friend. On this rare occasion, an otherwise quiet and reserved person shared her ideas about art and the role of an artist: “It’s all right, Roger, you can earn a living and be a painter; you just have to be a human being, all the great painters were, above all, magnificent human beings. Painting reflects us, it is a miraculous mirror in which the outer world glimpses our inner world, talent is the means of communication between us and life, us and men, us and heaven and earth.”

While Pagava’s miraculous mirror reflects the modernist thinking characteristic of Paris in her time, it also reflects inward, into the deeply rooted Georgian influences she carried with her. Vera Pagava’s legacy is one of the rare artistic practices in which Georgian painting tradition is not only transformed into the language of modernism, but also stands as an intersection between the two. It is likewise yet another example of how the diaspora absorbs and profoundly shapes the art scenes of the artists’ new home countries.

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In the festival’s affiliated exhibition of South African art, held at the National Museum and Art Gallery of Botswana, Jantjes showed five works—including a print dedicated to Cabral alongside other images responding to the turmoil of apartheid. For Jantjes, these struggles were not unrelated, despite differing geopolitical conditions. Indeed, his early practice was clearly influenced by the ideas espoused by anti-colonial thinkers and leaders like Cabral—and Frantz Fanon, Eduardo Mondlane, and Kwame Nkrumah—whose writing, in turn, influenced the Black Consciousness movement and other anti-apartheid coalitions in South Africa. Exploring such connections through the artist’s work and writing, the present essay focuses on two screenprints that he created while in exile and presented in Gaborone—Freedom Hunters (1977; fig. 1) and It is our peoples (1974; fig. 2). The impact of Cabral’s theories on culture and revolution is evident in Jantjes’s multifaceted campaign in these years for what he termed “art for liberation’s sake.”⁵

Born in District Six, Cape Town in 1948, Jantjes was one of the only non-white students to attend the Michaelis School of Fine Art at the University of Cape Town, where he studied graphic design in the late 1960s. However, as a student, he was subjected to increased surveillance and threats of punitive action—not just by educational authorities but also by officials of the apartheid state—on account of his outspoken politics. In the last year of his studies, Jantjes began to urgently seek asylum outside of South Africa. Finally, in 1970, he received a DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service) scholarship and secured a spot at the prestigious Hochschule für Bildende Künst in Hamburg.

In Hamburg, Jantjes was mentored by artists such as Richard Hamilton (1922–2011), Joe Tilson (born 1928; fig. 3), and Joseph Beuys (1921–1986). Throughout the 1970s, he produced a prolific oeuvre of screenprints that combine archival and reportage photographs with quotations drawn from political theory, poetry, administrative records, and news articles. In each image, visual and textual passages are arranged as if torn from the pages of books or magazines and placed in dynamic juxtaposition to colorful Pop graphics. While reminiscent of the flatbed compositions common in much postwar art, Jantjes’s work departs from seemingly precedent works by Robert Rauschenberg (1925–2008) as well as Andy Warhol (1925–1987) in its expressly communicative purpose. Indeed, he wanted to make a tangible political impact, to educate viewers on the effects of colonization across the Global South. In his writing of the era, as in his art, Jantjes frequently argued that the times simply demanded that African artists directly engage with their political condition. He claimed in 1976, for instance, that “one cannot speak of form and colour when one’s environment speaks of poverty, hunger, and death.”⁶

These values were first demonstrated in A South African Colouring Book—his earliest, and still most celebrated series of screenprints. Created in 1974–75, the suite consists of eleven images that convey different facets of the history and brutality of apartheid. It was motivated by Jantjes’s astonishment at his German peers’ lack of knowledge about the situation in South Africa. Deploying a motif evoking children’s educational materials, the prints capitalize on multiple associations implied through the use of the term “colour”—a reference to the legislation of racial identity under apartheid, for instance, or to his own designation within this system as “Cape Coloured” (evidenced by the inclusion of his own identification card in one print; fig. 4).

While living abroad, Jantjes had new access to information about anti-colonial and Pan-Africanist movements beyond South Africa. (Any speeches, news, or publications affiliated with such campaigns would have been censored by the apartheid state—although materials were still exchanged covertly among Black activist networks). In 1971, during his first year in Europe, Jantjes visited London, where he attended a public rally for Cabral. The artist was previously unfamiliar with Cabral’s revolutionary activism, and the speech made an enormous impression on him. Jantjes recalled, in particular, Cabral’s comments on the importance of language, and his democratic approach to providing political education to rural communities in Guinea Bissau. Cabral addressed individuals on the level of their own experience, rather than relying on the often-alienating parlance of academic theory. “When we began to mobilise our people,” he explained, “we couldn’t mobilise them for the struggle against imperialism—nor even, in some areas of Guiné, for the struggle against colonialism—because the people didn’t know what the words meant. . . . We had to mobilise our people on the basis of the daily realities of suffering and exploitation.”⁷

Jantjes took to heart the importance of communicating, plainly and simply, the brutal daily realities of colonized people across the world. After Cabral was assassinated by a political rival in 1973, Jantjes produced a print dedicated to his visionary leadership. Entitled It is our peoples, the work’s collagelike composition draws quotations from Revolution in Guinea: Selected Texts, a then-recent English-language publication of Cabral’s writing and speeches. The titular phrase, for instance, which appears in large type against a sky-blue banner, could have been lifted from any number of repeated incantations in a lecture that Cabral delivered in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania: “[Our] fundamental strength is the strength of the people. It is our peoples who support our organisations, it is our peoples who are making sacrifices every day to supply all the needs of our struggle. It is our peoples who will guarantee the future and the certainty of our victory.”⁸

In the print, Jantjes has nestled this text alongside photographs of both daily life and military camps in Guinea. Among these images is a portrait of a PAIGC militant in uniform, screenprinted directly from the pages of Cabral’s publication Our People Are Our Mountains (1972)—in which an English translation of the London speech that Jantjes attended is reproduced.⁹ These fragments surround a larger, solarized double-portrait of Cabral wearing his signature beanie and sunglasses. According to Jantjes, this is a photograph that he himself took of the television screen during a broadcast feature on the Guinean revolution. As such, the work is not simply an homage to Cabral’s leadership, but also a testament to the circulation and intermedial re-translation of material related to African politics—filmic negatives, for instance, that traveled from West Africa to the British press, as well as televised images made static through photographic capture, or the circulation of printed translations of words originally spoken impromptu before a crowded gathering. At the same time, Jantjes’s double-portrait of a recently-assassinated public figure clearly resonates with Warhol’s use of repetition to signal matters of real and symbolic death (or adjacency thereto) in his homages to Marilyn Monroe, Jacqueline Kennedy, and Elvis Presley (figs. 5 and 6), or to the victims of car accidents, penal execution, or riot police in America.¹⁰

In the spring of 1976, this screenprint was among several shown at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London in what was Jantjes’s first major solo exhibition.¹¹ Included works drew content from a range of geopolitical contexts, from resistance efforts waged in Namibia to the American civil rights movement (fig. 7). But again, the artist cites Cabral. In his artist’s exhibition statement, Jantjes asserts that “we have to acknowledge through our creative expression that we are prepared to participate in the kenetic [sic] processes of culture and history,” before going on to quote Cabral, who once claimed: “The colonialists have a habit of telling us that when they arrived in Africa they put us into history. You are well aware that it’s the contrary—when they arrived in Africa they took us out of our own history.”¹²

Jantjes was in London when the shocking news of an event now known as the Soweto uprising was relayed across the world. For several weeks, students in the South-Western Townships near Johannesburg peacefully protested the enforcement of Afrikaans as the mandated language of instruction in South Africa—a law that further disenfranchised the country’s African populations. On June 16, 1976, demonstrators were met by a militarized police force who opened fire on the crowd, killing and wounding countless children. For weeks, the front pages of international newspapers circulated the horrific photograph of the uprising’s first victim: thirteen-year-old Hector Pieterson, carried in the arms of a frightened classmate. Captured by Black South African photojournalist Sam Nzima, the iconic image swiftly became a symbol of apartheid violence. In a matter of months, Jantjes produced several screenprints about the Soweto uprising, including No More (1977; fig. 8), City Late 26 June 1976 (1977), and Freedom Hunters (1977; fig. 1).

The latter is among the most impactful of these works. Featuring a cropped and doubled detail from one of journalist Peter Magubane’s photographs of the event, it depicts students fighting bullets with stones and wielding the lids of trash bins as shields. While conveying, in part, the futility of the students’ defense against police artillery, these photographs also demonstrate their resilience in protesting the discriminatory society into which they were born. Set against a bright red backdrop, with an image of barbed wire bisecting the composition, Freedom Hunters communicates a sense of urgency and pleads with audiences to recognize and protest the violence of apartheid.

Such works resonate with the media-critical Pop practices of Joe Tilson and Richard Hamilton, with whom Jantjes studied, while demonstrating the artist’s own belief in the political responsibility of post- and anti-colonial artists.¹³ As Cabral explained, the fight to reclaim one’s culture, history, and identity was as crucial to liberation struggles as the fight for legal rights. The students of Soweto demonstrated this same desire when they petitioned for an equal education. In fact, these protests were orchestrated by the South African Students’ Movement (SASM), an affiliate of Steve Biko’s Black Consciousness movement—and Biko is well documented as having been impacted by Cabral’s activism.¹⁴ Jantjes’s familiarity and alignment with such political and intellectual networks is evident in the boldly didactic style of his early practice, and in his attention to globalized circulations of political theory. In documenting the South African struggle in connection to other struggles being waged across the continent, Jantjes raised awareness and helped galvanize support for anti-colonial causes worldwide.

It is our peoples and Freedom Hunters were both on view in Gaborone during the 1982 Culture and Resistance Symposium and Festival—a gathering of cultural workers invested in parsing matters of art, education, and activism. The event drew delegates from every region of South Africa, and from exile across the world, to Botswana; leading voices such as Mongane Wally Serote, Hugh Masekela, Nadine Gordimer, David Goldblatt, and Keorapetse Kgositsile were among those who debated the role of culture in the ongoing struggle for liberation. Most participants, like Jantjes, believed strongly that art would remain intertwined with politics as long as the freedom struggle remained urgent. Gordimer declared, for instance, that “if you are a committed artist you are committed to using your talents to service the cause of justice,”¹⁵ while actor Zakes Mofokeng told peers that “trying to avoid politics in art is like trying to dodge raindrops on a rainy day.”¹⁶

While the symposium and festival lasted just a week, the event was accompanied by a two-month-long exhibition of South African art at the National Museum and Art Gallery of Botswana. Entitled Art Toward Social Development, and like the symposium and festival with which it coincided, it was one of the first and most significant occasions in which the work of both exiled and South African–based visual artists was displayed together in a “non-racial” exhibition—which, in the era’s parlance, meant it included work by South Africans classified as “black, coloured, or white” by the apartheid state. The organizers sought to represent the “entire spectrum of South African society” and to reflect a “panorama” of the nation’s creative activity.¹⁷ Significantly for Jantjes, who had not lived in his home country for more than a decade, the exhibition marked his inclusion within an emerging canon of anti-apartheid art, alongside compatriots Ezrom Legae (1938–1999), Lionel Davis (born 1936), David Koloane (1938–2019), Durant Sihlali (1935–2004), David Goldblatt (1930–2018), and Sue Williamson (born 1941), among others.

By the time of his participation in Art Toward Social Development, Jantjes was at the precipice of a major shift in style, artistic focus, and professional milieu. He moved to the United Kingdom in August 1982, and began to paint. His Korabra series, completed in 1986, comprised several large-scale acrylic paintings—texturized with sand embedded in pigment—that ruminate on the history of transatlantic slavery.¹⁸ Jantjes became increasingly interested in ancestral arts of Africa, including West African sculpture, Egyptian monuments, and Khoisan rock paintings (fig. 9). His interest in the latter, for instance, gave rise to a series of prints, paintings, and mixed-media works that overlay esoteric prehistoric imagery with indigo night skies shimmering with constellations and galactic haze. Mixed-media works such as Untitled (double canvas with sculptures) (1988; fig. 10) are remarkably enigmatic; the mystical imagery of stylized masks, natural materials including twigs, and abstracted ceramic ovoid and cubic forms make this piece virtually unrecognizable in relation to Jantjes’s polemical print practice of the 1980s. In an untitled painting from 1989 (fig. 11) , the artist paired the same mask motif—whose sharp, elongated contours are reminiscent of art produced by the Fang peoples of Gabon—with a female figure from Les Demoiselles d’Avignon by Pablo Picasso (1881–1973). Such works aim to uplift the status of African art, which has so often been pushed to the peripheries while European modernists appropriated their forms.

The seeds of these later artistic inquiries are, indeed, detectable in the speech that Jantjes delivered in Gaborone, in which he made the case for centering African art in Western art education. In this presentation, he echoed Cabral’s reminder that the colonists in Africa “took us out of our own history” and honored the Soweto students’ aspirations for an Afrocentric pedagogy: “Visual art education must work to eradicate the interiorization of the western evaluation of our contemporary art. It should instil [sic] in our people a meaningful interest in their culture and art and move them to recognise these as an integral part of the nations [sic] struggle against racist domination.”¹⁹

In his practice both in and out of the studio, Jantjes fought for the decolonization of culture and education, so as to ensure that future generations would have access to African history and identity. Drawing from references to Cabral and Biko, Warhol and Tilson, he grounded this effort in his faith in the power of collectivity and global solidarity.

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In this essay, Māra Traumane guides readers through the diverse, interdisciplinary practice of the Riga-based collective Workshop for the Restoration of Unfelt Feelings (NSRD), which operated from the end of the 1970s until 1989. NSRD was involved in the avant-garde music scene as well as in architecture, and their activities ranged from concerts and the production of record albums to performances, writing, and video art. From consciously exploring the notion of periphery to developing the concept of “Approximate Art,” the group sought to question and escape disciplinary boundaries and divisions.

Over the last three decades, the notion of periphery and conceptualization of center-periphery relations have been actively explored by scholars and curators working on Eastern European histories of art. The terms “periphery” and “margins” have been applied in this context as productive concepts invigorating methods of critical geography and strategies of “provincializing” dominant artistic canons coined at alleged centers.¹ Recent research has proposed a critique of the binary logic and directionality of the center-periphery model, challenging the legitimacy of a “a preconceived notion of centrality”² and inviting reconsideration of cultural phenomena within geographically peripheral milieus as active agents in cultural entanglements.³ Yet even before the notion of periphery became an urgent topic in art historical theorization and discussions, it was both actively and implicitly addressed by artistic practices emerging in Eastern Europe in the 1970s and 1980s that explored geographic peripheries through performance actions and drew attention to processes of perception activated by artistic actions conceived in off-center locations.

Possibly one of the best documented and most researched examples of such an approach is the work of the Moscow–based Collective Actions Group, which beginning in 1976 and continuing for more than a decade, carried out a series of actions in Kievogorskoe Field outside of Moscow. In their extensive discussions of and writings on their outdoor actions, the group introduced a number of original topographic and perceptual terms—including “zone of indistinguishability,” the moment, when performers of an action appear in the field of vision of spectators but are still too distant for details of their activity to be distinguishable, and “demonstrational field,” which describes apprehensible arrangements and settings, as well as the course of an action and its perceptive effects.⁴ Other examples are the collective exploratory walks and happenings undertaken in neglected urban areas in the 1970s by a group of Tallinn architects and artists who drew inspiration from city outskirts and urban sites “forgotten by modernization.”⁵ Likewise, in the 1980s, peripheral environments and ambient, borderline modes of perception were actively explored by the Riga–based artists’ group Workshop for the Restoration of Unfelt Feelings (Nebijušu sajūtu restaurēšanas darbnīca, or NSRD). Members of this transmedia collective brought semi-abandoned sites and other transitional spaces—city outskirts and railway lines—as well as unspectacular daily events, marginal gestures, and multisensory perceptive states into focus in their early writings, and these interests later played a key role in the actions and video-performances undertaken by the group. In the late 1980s, in the last years of their collaboration, NSRD members outlined their aesthetic engagement with peripheral processes and transitory states of perception in their “Manifesto of Approximate Art” and three accompanying essays, all of which were written in 1987.⁶

The Workshop

NSRD, formally founded as a music group in 1982, was an association of friends active in Latvia—then a republic of the Soviet Union—from the end of the 1970s until 1989. Long-term members included architecture theorist Hardijs Lediņš (1955–2004), poet and translator Juris Boiko (1954–2002), architect Imants Žodžiks (born 1955), musician Inguna Černova (born 1962), and architect Aigars Sparāns (1955–1996), but on many occasions, this core group was joined by a wider circle of collaborators.⁷ NSRD member activities extended across a variety of media, including poetry, song lyrics and collaborative writing, new-wave and experimental music recordings, architectural proposals, actions realized outdoors in both nature and urban spaces, and in the second half of the 1980s, multimedia exhibition events, performances, and video-performances. Although the name “Workshop for the Restoration of Unfelt Feelings” initially described the group’s activities in the field of music and, later, in visual art, it is now considered more of an umbrella term covering the entire scope of the collaboration. Collective ways of working, the original aesthetic program developed by the group, and their interest in the creation of time-based aesthetic experiences and pursuit of “a philosophical process,”⁸ invite comparison to other collectives originating in the 1960s and 1970s in Eastern Europe, including the Slovenian group OHO and the Moscow–based Collective Actions Group.

Given the diversity and experimental nature of NSRD’s activities, one might question how it was possible for the artists to carry out their practice in the Soviet Union, where until the mid-1980s, the cultural field was not only subject to rigid ideological control but also opportunities for public artistic expression were mainly given to members of official unions of creative workers, or to those affiliated with amateur clubs. Indeed, some of NSRD’s activities in the first half of the 1980s, for example their outdoor actions, were carried out without an audience—that is, with only members of the collective present. This is why NSRD has sometimes been described as an “unofficial” or even “nonconformist” art phenomenon. However, this characterization is only partially fitting, because even in the early 1980s, within the daunting climate of the Brezhnev era, members of NSRD found opportunities to present their work and aesthetic interests to a wider audience. For example, for recording and distributing their music albums, the artists relied on friendships with other semiofficial music bands and on an expanding network of underground tape-recording culture.⁹ There were also institutional niches that enabled the artists to revise and present their ideas in exhibition spaces in Latvia. Several NSRD members were professionally trained architects and also members of the Architects’ Union of the Latvian Soviet Socialist Republic. Between 1980 and 1985, annual exhibitions of experimental projects by young architects, organized by the Architects’ Union, served as frameworks for the public display of inventive conceptual proposals by NSRD members related to the organization of space and living environments.

The ongoing presence of NSRD in public and semipublic spheres raises questions regarding the distinction between the “first,” or official public sphere, and the “second,” or alternative or unofficial public sphere—categorizations that are sometimes used in descriptions of the cultural environment in the Communist bloc.¹⁰Instead, attention should be drawn to the loopholes, structural gaps, and individual agendas that permeated the cultural field at that time, interrupting the controlling regimes of state institutions and facilitating visibility of independent initiatives such as NSRD.

Peripheries as Sites of Action

“There can’t be such a thing as a center of culture, there can only be a periphery of culture,” NSRD cofounder Juris Boiko pronounced in an interview published in 1988.¹¹ While the group was active, their interest in peripheral spaces and multisensory experience manifested in a variety of genres and media—in literary writings, actions, experimental music recordings, conceptual architectural proposals, and video-performances. In their practice, the notion of “periphery” evolved from its role as a site of physical immersion, contemplation, and performance action to a more productive notion related to the multisensorial contingency of human perception. As Hardijs Lediņš and Boiko outline in the group’s “Manifesto of Approximate Art”: “We identify ourselves with borders. We orientate ourselves in the relationships between the center and the periphery. The processes of identification and orientation lead and guide all our activities.”¹²

Themes of immersive wandering through a desolate, semi-abandoned landscape permeate the absurd novel Zun (the title referencing both “Zen” and the Latvian word for “buzzing”), cowritten by Lediņš and Boiko in 1976–77 and not published until 2005.¹³ In this early text oscillating between poetry and prose, and reflecting the influence of writings by Dada artist Kurt Schwitters (1887–1948) and American poet E. E. Cummings (1894–1962), lonely protagonists traverse a snowy rural landscape, each engaged in solitary action and random, fleeting encounters with other human and nonhuman beings. Programmatic in structure, Zun sketches out the themes of atmospheric wandering in nature and contemplative perceptive states that would characterize the future practice of NSRD.

At the time Lediņš and Boiko were writing Zun, and in the years after, they and other members of NSRD were influenced not only by Dada and the artistic avant-garde but also by the musical avant-garde, most notably the Second Viennese School, new jazz, John Cage (1912–1992), Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928–2007), and minimalist music. The ideas the group discovered in new music informed their own DIY recording sessions as well as their outdoor actions. Retrospectively, Boiko recalled that NSRD’s actions in the early 1980s can be seen as a “transposition” of the impulses they found in avant-garde music into the surrounding environment. Indeed, Cage’s ideas about silence as well as Stockhausen’s improvisational principles and intuitive music echo in the structure of one of the group’s most extensive cycles of actions: Walks to Bolderāja (Gājieni uz Bolderāju, 1980–87). In this particular work, NSRD addressed notions of geographically peripheral zones and changing modes of perception through ritual-like “walks” undertaken at dawn or dusk, once a year, each time in a different month, along the twelve-kilometer-long railway line connecting the outskirts of Riga, where the participating artists lived, with the distant port district of Bolderāja. Along their path, which took them across meadows and fields to the industrial surroundings of Bolderāja, they observed the changing landscape and weather, and the breaking or fading daylight—as well as interacted with objects they found along the way and the soundscape of the railway line—the rumble of passing trains and their own musical interventions. As was characteristic of their practice, the group captured the ambience and experiences of the “walks” in photo and video documentation of the action, and in other mediums, including in lyrics and music recorded on the album Bolderāja’s Style (Bolderājas stils), which they released on their own home-record label Seque in 1982.

The group also drew attention to neglected territories and vernacular suburban structures through conceptual architectural proposals, which members submitted to annual exhibitions at the Architects’ Union of experimental projects by young architects. In these submissions, conceived as creative responses to the general themes of the exhibitions, they presented conceptual interpretations of particular spatial situations—rather than practical architectural solutions. For example, the photo-montage Spatial Action 1m x 1m x 1m (Telpiska akcija 1m x 1m x 1m), which the artists presented in the exhibition Foregrounds of Architecture (1980), is made up of a sequence of photographs of Hardijs Lediņš and Imants Žodžiks excavating a one-meter-square hole in a stretch of land alongside a Soviet concrete wall and the corner of an old wooden building typical of the area. This ironic take can be seen as targeting both formal submission requirements—the standard one-by-one-meter architectural board, and the neglected state of the urban periphery. In 1984, in a submission to the exhibition Nature—Home to Man, the group integrated photographs taken during a Walk to Bolderāja action called A House in Bolderāja (Māja Bolderājā), in which Lediņš engaged with derelict allotment garden sheds and greenhouse structures situated along the railway line. In both proposals, the artists directed attention toward the unspectacular, marginal, vernacular spaces and architectural forms that were given visibility through their own performative gestures.

From Postmodernism to Approximate Art

Postmodernist theory and the aesthetics of new-wave culture played crucial roles in the development of the artistic language of NSRD in the mid-1980s—following the group’s interest in the legacy of the modernist avant-garde. Postmodernism, which the artists first encountered through architecture and design theory, in particular the publications of Charles Jencks (1839–2019) and Alessandro Mendini (1931–2019), proposes an alternative to the prevalent uniform functionalism that some members of NSRD were confronted with as architects working for state-run construction bureaus and thus provided the basis for the group’s critique of standardization in architecture and design. Charles Jencks’s thesis on “double coding” was appropriated as a programmatic statement by Lediņš who, in numerous articles dedicated to architecture and art, writes about “the spirit of the time and atmosphere of place,”¹⁴ meaning the search for a balance between technological and stylistic innovation and the traditional cultural “code” embedded in the specificity of a site. Postmodern use of narrative and semantic forms, abolishment of a distinction between “high” and popular culture, multimediality, irrationality, and emphasis on atmosphere of a particular site and individual expression resonated with the group’s interest in music, design, art, and architecture. At the same time, they drew inspiration from contemporary trends in music—from ambient music and the work of Laurie Anderson (born 1947) and Philip Glass (born 1937) integrating poetic narrative structures into multimedia performance events. In 1985, NSRD recorded what would be considered one of their musical masterpieces—the conceptual sound-play Kuncendorfs and Osendovskis (Kuncendorfs un Osendovskis), a sonic tale in which the narrative plot and compositional structure revolve around the experiences and feelings of its main protagonist, the reclusive forester Jūlijs (July), who is envious of his friend Augusts (August), a mulled-wine merchant traveling to distant countries.

Members of NSRD explored postmodernist ideas in proposals presented in exhibitions of experimental projects of young architects as well as in the artists’ first solo exhibition The Wind in the Willows (Vējš vītolos).¹⁵Held at the House of Architects in 1986, The Wind in the Willows featured staged settings of a living environment synthesizing colorful, asymmetrical, expressive objects (table, dressing screen, tableware) inspired by designs by Memphis Milano and Studio Alchimia and motifs of nature—marsh reeds and wallpaper painted in a pattern of birch trees. Poetic exhibition text invited viewers to disperse the “clouds of rationalism” and “clouds of stereotypes” with the help of diverse kinds of wind—“south-green wind,” “wind of the willows,” and “the wind of your eyelashes.”¹⁶  The display incorporated a recording of NSRD reproducing the howling sounds of wind. A similar aim to introduce qualities of subjective expressivity, individualism, and intimacy, this time as a tool of critique of standardized designs, informed the artists’ first video-action Man in a Living Environment (Cilvēks dzīvojamā vidē), which Lediņš and Žodžiks produced in 1986. Analyzing the architectural shortcomings of prefabricated mass housing in Riga, video footage features a small group of performers traveling through neighborhoods of newly built block-house dwellings, interviewing inhabitants of these suburban districts, and staging delicate performative interventions introducing spontaneity and intimacy into the monotonous, standardized surroundings of the newly constructed city outskirts. In the video, analytical text on modern urban developments, read by Lediņš, is intermixed with the eclectic soundtrack of Latvian choir music, compositions of Laurie Anderson, and music by NSRD.

Following the success of The Wind in the Willows, NSRD members began to position themselves as an art collective, expanding their network of participants in the group’s performances, video-performances, and exhibitions, and revising their theoretical premises. Although still acknowledging expressive means of postmodernism, they became critical of superficial, formal applications of postmodern aesthetics. Instead, the group re-addressed themes present in their early writings, actions, and music albums—motifs that explore transient states of perception and the atmospheric ambience of particular locations. From 1986 onward, newly accessible video technology allowed them to combine the narrative, sonic, and visual elements of a time-based performance action. In a group statement, they explained, “For the Workshop, video is a means of expression necessary to encompass those sensations, for the restoration of which music, the written word, and actions are insufficient.”¹⁷ This aspect of video led the group to use it in the creation of works that put into focus the interrelations of performance actions, often staged in rural, peripheral locations, with universal and cyclical processes in nature. In 1987, they recorded a number of semi-improvised, playful, or ritual-like performance actions unfolding before a backdrop of natural settings: Iceberg’s Longing / Volcano’s Dreams (Aisberga ilgas / Vulkāna sapņi, 1987), Grindstone of the Spring (Pavasara tecīla, 1987), Walk to Bolderāja (Gājiens uz Bolderāju, 1987), and Dr. Eneser’s Binocular Dance Lessons (Doktora Enesera binokulāro deju kursi, 1987).

The group’s video-performances were informed by the newly coined original concept of Approximate Art developed by NSRD in 1987. The idea of “approximation” was seen as in opposition to the alleged precision of technological advancements and the systemic approach to indeterminacy of human experience and accentuated ambient, borderline states of perception. It substantiated the group’s transmedial practice by highlighting the disappearing boundaries between art genres and forms, and arguing for individual, subjective understanding of a polysemic artistic action. As Lediņš explains in one of the texts on Approximate Art: “Since practically all natural phenomena and processes are perceived by the brain as approximate things, it can be argued that approximation is one of man’s most human characteristics. . . . Applying the notion of approximation to art, we arrive at a phenomenon that is very characteristic of today’s world and that the critics find impossible to resolve. The boundaries between different art genres are very blurred, they cannot be defined, just like the boundaries between different cultures. The question often arises—is it art or is it already not art?”¹⁸ Liberalization during the perestroika period, which began in 1985, made it possible for NSRD to access public exhibition and concert venues. The concept of Approximate Art served as a basis for the group’s first exhibition realized in the visual art context—The First Exhibition of Approximate Art,held in the House of Knowledge in Riga in spring 1987. The six-day event featured a designed environment, a multichannel display of video-performances by NSRD and other artists, and daily performances and musical interventions by NSRD as well as by invited musicians and artists.

In the years that followed, the group revised their concept of Approximate Art, as is reflected in the Second Approximate Art Exhibition: Mole in the Hole, which was held in Riga in 1988, and in the display that the group prepared for the exhibition Riga. Lettische Avantgarde (Riga: Latvian Avant-garde), which took place in West Berlin, Bremen, and Kiel in 1988–89. NSRD ceased collaboration in 1989. The oft-cited reasons for the breakup of the group are the sociopolitical and economic changes that affected society during the years of dissolution of the Soviet Union and that led members to seek their own, individual creative paths. Yet it could be argued that NSRD’s encounter with the framework of professional art institutions through their participation in Riga. Lettische Avantgarde also contributed to this process—the time-based, multimedia artistic practice of the collective and the idiosyncratic concept of Approximate Art proved to be difficult to adapt to the institutional, white-cube context—and to international art circulation. Still, since the rediscovery of the full scope of the group’s transmedial, collaborative artistic legacy in the mid-2000s, their work and ideas continue to inspire younger generation of Latvian artists and musicians, who on their own initiative, have engaged in reenactments of the Walks to Bolderāja, reconsidered the storyline of the novel Zun, and continue to reinterpret the performances and architectural proposals of the members of NSRD.  

The author would like to thank the Latvian Centre for Contemporary art for their cooperation during the preparation of this essay.

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Zenta Logina (1908–1983) was a Latvian artist at work during the Soviet occupation. Her paintings, reliefs, and sculptural objects developed in a singular manner, as she broke away from the accepted framework of visual arts codified by the regime and crossed into the realm of contemporary art as we define it today. She worked on her own terms, forging new ground through collaboration with her younger sister, Elīze Atāre (1915–1993), whose lifelong support not only sustained Logina but also enabled her to leave behind a cache of several thousand works, a full investigation of which is ongoing.

Descending Underground in Two Steps

Soviet rule was not a homogenous phenomenon.¹ Political and economic markers, among other factors, outlined the territory that shifted with each new party secretary and five-year plan devised in Communist Party plenary sessions. Against this backdrop, Latvian artist Zenta Logina’s private life and artistic practice played out for more than forty years.²

The first distinctive period in Logina’s life as an artist was under the totalitarian regime of Joseph Stalin in the 1940s and early 1950s, with the slight incursion of the Thaw under Nikita Khrushchev in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Zenta Logina was in her late thirties and forties during this time. In different circumstances, she might have been an artist in her prime, mature in her style and established in her career. And, as the examples of some of her peers demonstrate, one could establish oneself quite well in the new order. In Logina’s case, her bleak and mainly formal engagement with the Soviet art establishment signaled her reluctance to be complicit.³ In 1945, she was admitted into the Artists’ Union of the Latvian Soviet Socialist Republic, Section of Painters. One can only imagine what must have gone through her mind when she was commissioned to produce posters declaring “The Red Army gave us a new lease on life!” and “Only the Stalin Constitution gave you the right to vote!” In 1950, her “insufficient artistic activity led to a decline in artistic quality, which is currently inconsistent with the standard required of members of the Artists’ Union.”⁴ Zenta Logina was demoted to a member candidate or, more technically, expelled. Falling out of this circuit meant that her access to certain resources, including materials, commissions, and exhibition opportunities, was cut.

In the 1950s, after leaving the Artists’ Union, Zenta Logina moved in with her younger sister, Elīze Atāre, who had two rooms in what was a communal flat at 6 Blaumaņa Street in Riga. Elīze took on the household chores and, to support herself and her sister, worked as a graphic artist and industrial designer for several enterprises run by the Soviet socialist state. It was perhaps through this connection⁵ that Zenta was granted a job in the textile industry. This opportunity, in turn, allowed her to regain full-fledged membership to the Artists’ Union in 1953—albeit, in the Section of Applied Arts, which required that she work exclusively as a textile artist.⁶ And again, the lingering impression is that Zenta Logina approached this new role quite formally, that she complied with the rules but did not go out of her way to achieve more. Instead, her artistic energy was aimed at the easel waiting for her at home. Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, Zenta Logina never ceased to make art—that is, to paint in the manner she did before the occupation. Her main interest was at first in still life, especially flower compositions, but her canvases from this period show a gradual transition from the naturalistic forms of painterly language to a more generalized and abstract style. “It was as if she set a specific task for herself and then lost interest in the painting as soon as she had achieved it. She just piled up painting after painting, pushing each one aside to free up space for the next one,” is how Pēteris Ērglis, heir to her estate,⁷ remembers Elīze describing Zenta’s process.⁸

The second period in Zenta Logina’s artistic life came with her retirement in 1963 at the age of fifty-five and continued for the next twenty years. As of this point, she had time to pursue her art uninterrupted, and to direct her full attention to whatever subject she desired. Her interest in the genre of still life waned, and her subject matter diversified: in some cases, real-life elements such as a coffee table, a wooden log, or a chopper in the mountains can be discerned in her paintings from this period; in other cases, arrangements of color smudges or sharp lines don’t resemble anything in particular and bear the title “Composition”; and in still other cases, a poetic title reveals the idea behind the content of what is otherwise a rather abstract painting. Because of limited resources and the inaccessibility of needed materials, Logina’s paintings are not always oil on canvas—indeed, she used any available stain on any available surface. Gradually, she began breaking up the flat painted surface, adding different elements to it. By attaching wood, metal shavings, wire, string, and fibers with paint, varnish, glue, and epoxy resin, she created texture and added volume and expressiveness to the work and idea she wanted to embody and convey.

In the 1970s, the boundaries between the various types of art in which Zenta Logina engaged became even fuzzier. Paintings resembling reliefs led to three-dimensional objects and sculptures, and in the most radical cases, matured into full-blown spatial objects or installations. Newly devised shapes manifested the content in unique and sensuous ways. The subject matter of Logina’s output from this time is frequently astronomy, and specifically astrophysics, its concepts, data, and phenomena. For example, works such as Solar Wind, Meteorite, Black Hole, Cygnus Constellation, Alpha Centauri, and Formation of a Planet, among others, are exactly about that. Moreover, her juxtaposition of the macro-level Universe and the micro-level human experience suggests an exploration of more philosophical, cultural, and existential topics. Zenta Logina’s lifelong friend, astronomer Natālija Cimahoviča (1926–2019),⁹ summarized this as follows:

“In Logina’s works, an adequate understanding of the composition of the Universe . . . was combined with an awareness of one’s cosmic self, of the part of man and the Earth in cosmic processes. In the colorful reliefs, galaxies glow and seemingly rotate, cosmic matter swirls, stars are born, and human thought vibrates. . . . Each person creates their own world. Artist Zenta Logina has given us a world of cosmic existence. There the enlightened soul of humanity is in constant dialogue with the darkness of people’s lack of reason, . . . rigidness of the formal logic—with the delicate twines of intuition, it’s a dialogue between the unchained spirit and the rules dictated by the physical form. Artist Logina’s world soars in the infinite space and time, it’s a view of the Earth from Space, the striving of man to rise over the strata of seemingly indispensable activities and unnecessary material things.”¹⁰

Works such as Weeping Planet, Burned-Out Planet, All Flesh Is Grass, Difficulties Shall Be Resolved, The River of Oblivion, The Shield of Justice, We Ourselves, and The Warning, among others, evoke the dark feeling of inevitability; they speak about the scale of human life and its fate in contrast to that of space and time, about the culture and its dependence on, interaction with, and responsibility toward the planet Earth and the Universe. Zenta Logina’s works confront the ecological disasters of the Soviet era as well as offer fertile ground for contemporary ecological discourse.

The Outside World

In the mid-1960s, the USSR underwent several institutional and organizational changes, the effects of which were felt well into the 1970s. In contrast to the fine arts, where “formalism” was targeted and censored for being too individualist and not promoting the ideals of the Soviet socialist ideology, the industrial arts, and by extension the applied arts, enjoyed more freedom of expression—if the goal was to provide Soviet citizens with useful and beautiful household objects, comfortable public spaces, and stimulating work environments. Consequently, the design sphere became an outlet for a variety of alternative artistic modes of expression. In 1963, the year Zenta retired, Elīze enrolled in a decorative arts workshop, where she learned to weave. It is impossible to tell whether she did so to secure an ongoing flow of resources, or as an act of sisterly love and support. However, her desire to show the world the art that she admired is clear—Elīze graduated in 1965 with a tapestry based on one of Zenta’s paintings. At this time, Elīze still worked as a designer. In fact, she was involved with several state-run industrial design enterprises until 1971, when she, too, retired. In the years that followed, in the relative seclusion of their two rooms, the sisters created their own alternative universe. To avoid unnecessary encounters with other inhabitants of their flat, they furnished their personal space with everything they needed to engage in their daily routine. They even brought in a stove to use for not only cooking but also dyeing yarns, which they did by hand. They tucked a loom between furniture, piles of books, stacks of completed artworks, and works still in progress.¹¹

Throughout the 1970s and early 1980s, Elīze Atāre took up weaving based on Zenta Logina’s paintings as well as sketches, which the sisters designed together. They called these collaborative works “wall rugs” as they often were made in a way that deviated from the traditional tapestry-weaving techniques—Elīze used diverse methods, some of her own invention, and came up with a synthesizing, original approach. Over her lifetime, she wove sixty-five such wall rugs, ranging in size from small (approximately 35 1/2 x 27 1/2 inches) to huge (approximately 78 3/4 x 98 1/2 inches). The sisters’ previous affiliation with the applied art industry served as a gateway. Their tapestries were put on display in applied art exhibitions in Soviet Latvia and abroad, and quickly gained recognition. Numerous institutions and organizations bought them for their collections. However, people who saw these wall rugs woven by Elīze Atāre were not always aware of Zenta Logina’s contribution—let alone the artworks upon which they were based.

The first and only solo exhibition of Zenta Logina’s works of the Soviet period was organized by Elīze four years after Zenta’s death in 1987. The era of glasnost (openness) and perestroika (reconstruction) initiated by Mikhail Gorbachev in the second half of the 1980s launched a wave of events previously unimaginable. It included exhibitions of works of artists who, up until then, had never been acknowledged on such a scale. These exhibitions were often memorial, serving as tributes to the heritage of particular individuals rather than records of ongoing artistic efforts; nonetheless, in 1987, the public had a chance to explore the world of Zenta Logina in her own right, when a corner of the veil was lifted off her more abstract body of work.¹²

Paradoxically enough, Zenta Logina’s art could have been interpreted favorably in the context of Soviet Union’s political and cultural program. It resonated well with the scientific aspirations and technocratic flare of the system—evoking space exploration, chemistry and nuclear physics, and cybernetics; it even brings to mind the peace movement and ecological concerns of the 1980s. However, the system had cast her as a treacherous element,¹³ and she had opted not to associate herself with it. Her focus on particular themes was, in fact, a form of dissociation from the Soviet social and political reality, a way of rising above it and finding a common ground in the universal. In the 1990s and 2000s, interest grew in the artists and cultural workers who had been neglected and suffered under Soviet rule. Zenta Logina was one such artist, and thus, an emblem for the correction of historical wrongs. However, the research into her artistic legacy on its own merits has only recently begun, and there is still much to be done. Unfortunately, there are no known sources enabling us to encounter Zenta Logina’s own voice. Her subjectivity is being constructed through the accounts of others, and by the interpretation of her artworks. As of today, her work is an integral part of the Zuzāns Collection, which to date, has acquired the largest holding.¹⁴ There are other institutions and organizations in Latvia, Russia, and the United States¹⁵ that house the sisters’ artworks, or significant bodies of information, and welcome researchers to examine it firsthand in order to further understand her practice.

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In 1970, Johnson Donatus Aihumekeokhai Ojeikere, otherwise known as J.D. ‘Okhai Ojeikere (Nigerian, 1930–2014), made Fro Fro. His earliest dated work in the collection, this image, along with Two in One Piko (1970) and Brush Eko Bridge (1973), were featured in the 2014 MoMA exhibition A World on Its Own: Photographic Practices in the Studio.¹ These three works, all of which are now in MoMA’s collection, are consistent with Ojeikere’s compositional approach of using a diptych format to show his subjects both from behind and in profile.

In Fro Fro, the point of departure of this short text, the female subject’s identity is obscured—according to Ojeikere’s signature style. Like all of the images in his series on hairstyles, it was shot from slightly above, with the emphasis on the subject’s crown, conferring importance on her hairdo. Ojeikere insisted the images are not portraits, but rather “views that reveal the hairdo as object, its form, material and structure.”² His focus is the hairdo’s sculptural qualities, providing the viewer with a sweeping view—much like what a hairdresser in a salon would see. The images appear as visual representations of what Zaza Hlalethwa describes as that “fleeting but prized moment when hair braiders stand behind a client with a mirror to show them the completed look from behind.”³ First they hold the mirror posteriorly, and then move it to either side, giving the client what is, in effect, a panoramic view of the hairstyle.

Shot predominantly with a Hasselblad or Mamiya camera, Ojeikere’s hairstyle series, which he began in 1968 in the city of Lagos and worked on until his passing in 2014, weaves an intricate labyrinth of stories reflecting modern yet nuanced sociocultural expressions of his female subjects—among them, friends, church members, wives of friends, and later on, anyone with a traditional hairstyle who was willing to be photographed.⁴ He was inspired to shift his focus to documenting the cultural life in Nigeria through portraiture during a road trip with his friend Erhabor Emokpae in 1967,⁵ when he turned to immortalizing fading customs such as the traditional hairstyles and elaborate head ties worn by women.

Ojeikere had relocated to Lagos in June 1963 from the city of Ìbàdàn, where in the thick of a hyperculture and nationalist drive instigated by cultural actors in the city shortly after Nigeria’s independence, he had sharpened his photographic skills. Amid the national modernist movement driving for indigenization in the late 1960s and 1970s, his defiant subjects went against the trend of wearing wigs, or straightening and/or perming their hair to European standards, choosing instead to adopt the more traditional styles predominant among women in the “hinterland” as a statement to make space for the local.

Ojeikere described hairstyling as a “collective endeavor, one that reveals the traditional skills of the women in that society, created by one person, worn by another, and photographed by a third person.”⁶ In Fro, Fro (1970), the diptych format enables the viewer to see both the side and back of the sitter’s head and hairdo. Her hair is divided into six “lines,” a style colloquially referred to as òjò npetí (the rain cannot beat the ears), woven in the traditional dídì olówó, an ancient braiding technique that dates back to 500 BCE and can be seen on Ife bronze heads.  

These idealized portraits show the intricately braided hairstyles worn for centuries by women from Ile-Ife—considered by the Yoruba to be the legendary cradle of humankind—and that spread across western Africa. As Titus A. Ogunwale has noted, from the Republic of Benin to Ghana, Mali, Nigeria, and Senegal, the “regional differences in hairstyles are quite strong, sometimes permitting an observer to geographically identify a woman.”⁷ In similar regard, in Igboland, the hair symbolizes the marital status of women, with the Ngala, the traditional bridal hairstyle, signifying the bride’s pride and elegance. In 1968, during the Nigerian civil war, hairdos became a symbol for women confronting the unrealistic expectation that they will marry. A new hairstyle named di gbakwa oku (marriage and husband can go to hell) emerged among the women in the region known as Biafra in what Christie Achebe describes as “direct response to an environment that demanded old ways of doing things, even as circumstances were rapidly changing.”⁸

For centuries in societies across Africa, the practice of hairstyling has held sociocultural import as a marker of age group, social hierarchy, and the individuality and communal leanings of women. Women usually had their hair styled by friends or older relatives, and were sometimes paid to make intricate hairdos for others—in makeshift salons in private bedrooms, on verandas, and in courtyards. Hairstyles were made by women for women as a social activity, revealing the traditional skill sets of women. In Yorubaland, traditional hairstyles are, according to Marilyn Hammersley Houlberg, considered “the liveliest sculptural representation, communicating contemporary life.”⁹ The women sit on the floor, often on traditional eni mats, placing their chins on the knees of the hairdressers, who are seated on apotis, a special stool fashioned for domestic use. As the hairdresser plaits or weaves her subject’s hair in a traditional or sometimes contemporary hairstyle, they discuss personal and social matters.

The hairdresser uses her ojú inú (inner eye), which bestows the ability to divide the hair into sections, without recourse to tools, while exhibiting symmetry and balance to achieve a certain harmony and aesthetics. Beautifying hair is an obeisance to orÍ-inú (inner head), a practice of commemoration preceding spiritual festivals, and the celebration of deities such as Yemoja, Osun, Sango, etc. As Babatunde Lawal explains, “The Yoruba have created a wide range of hairstyles that not only reflects the primacy of the head but also communicates taste, status, occupation, and power, both temporal and spiritual.”¹⁰ Hair is regarded as a marker, differentiating humans from other species, and referred to as edá omo adáríhurun, which translates as “species with a full concentration of hair on their heads,” a term used to denote our species.

It is within this context that Ojeikere’s Fro Fro emerged, the first in what became a series of more than two thousand images chronicling the late photographer’s observation of Nigerian women’s hairstyles, which he described as serving a dualistic purpose of “ethnography and aesthetic” documentation.”¹¹ Fro Fro, Two in One Piko, and Brush Eko Bridge capture fleeting expressions, gestures, and style, documenting the three-way exchange between the hairstylist, her female clients, and Ojeikere, the photographer, for a later audience. These images in MoMA’s collection represent a sliver of how the artist viewed modernity and deployed photography to represent what being modern meant to the women he photographed.¹²

In reproducing the images contained in this text, the Museum obtained the permission of the rights holders, whenever possible. If the Museum could not locate the rights holders, notwithstanding good-faith efforts, it requests that any contact information concerning such rights holders be forwarded so that they may be contacted for future editions.

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