How do artists respond to political oppression, conflict, and censorship? What is the relationship of art to vehicles of social change? How can oppositional and alternative voices be assembled? Brought together here, contemporary crises—whether political, economic, or environmental, and across divergent geographic contexts—offer ways to critically rethink and reassess international trends as well as local urgencies. Enhancing an understanding of the vast landscape of struggle around the globe, while invoking heterogenous discourses, this Theme offers different forms of knowing, frequently beyond, or in direct opposition to, narratives that are in the process of being constructed—or will be in the near future.
This conversation, which took place as a collaboration between the International Program and Research Programs at MoMA, featured presentations by the directors of two important art museums in Kyiv on the crises faced by their institutions since the Russian invasion in February 2022. The National Art and Culture Museum Complex Mystetskyi Arsenal (Art Arsenal) is…
The Fragile Body and the Damaged Subject: A Decade of Crisis and Resistance (1998–2008) If in the early to mid-1990s, performative actions in Armenia were, to a large extent, launched by situational or strategic collectives and groups as interventions—as correctives to institutional operations of the state and the artworld—and motivated by the desire to communicate…
These presentations and panel discussion at MoMA brought together four filmmakers and artists who work in expanded documentary modes, using existing footage, archival research, interviews, and scripted narratives to produce imaginative accounts of transnational struggles, solidarities, and interventions. Using moving images, some of these practitioners interrogate the anti-colonial and anti-imperialist movements of the mid-late 20th…
Performances of Politics in a Nation-State (1991–98) Armenian performative practices and “art actions” in the 1990s were characterized less by grand gestures of plentitude and excess and more by austere, minimal, and often barely visible acts engaging with the triviality…
In May 1988 unofficial artists from across the Soviet republics gathered in Narva, Estonia, for what would be one of the last Soviet art festivals and yet one of the first such events to celebrate experimental performance art.1Throughout this essay, I use the term “unofficial artists” to refer to a generation of artists practicing experimental…
Series Introduction This series of three articles presents a selection of the performative practices in Armenian art in the late-Soviet and post-Soviet periods, practices that would herald the separation of nonofficial artists from the official Soviet cultural discourses and practices, and subsequently, in the 1990s, mark the institutionalization of nonofficial or semiofficial art as “contemporary…
5.0: The Fifth Position air cut into song was first installed in four parts at the seventh Singapore Biennale at the invitation of Nida Ghouse, one of the show’s four co-artistic directors. The artwork is part of an ongoing project that is less a comprehensive collection than a compilation of “gaps.” This fifth entry, composed…
In this text, curator and writer Nina Mdivani revisits the lives and work of Tamar Abakelia (1905–1953) and her student Natela Iankoshvili (1918–2007). She emphasizes how these two Georgian women artists navigated between undertaking state commissions and finding windows of opportunity to oppose the regime and, in the process, creates a genealogy of Georgian artistic…
From August 2022 to June 2023, artists and friends Julie Tolentino and Kang Seung Lee reflected on their decades-long practices in kinship, politics, performance, and queer history.
In relation to the Māravijaya, an occurrence in the Buddha’s life, and Letters from Panduranga, a video work by artist Nguyễn Trinh Thi, art historian Ashley Thompson discusses ideas of land, gender, and colonial history. Thompson’s essay is accompanied by a two-week screening of select clips from Nguyễn’s video work.
On the evening of October 12, 2022, post presents hosted presentations and conversations with artists, scholars, and curators about the artistic responses to the war in Ukraine, looking at the period between the Maidan Revolution, which was followed by Russia’s annexation of Crimea and occupation of Donbas in 2014, and the full-scale Russian invasion launched on February 24, 2022. This conversation is a continuation of the presentations and conversations commenced that evening.
In this essay, Veronika Molnar writes about Hungarian Roma artist Omara, whose diverse practice encompassing painting, intervention, and media appearances challenged the status quo of Hungary’s homogenous contemporary art scene from the early 2000s until the artist’s death in 2020.
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