Contemporary Crisis and Dissent

Achille Mbembe reflects on the global present and observes a recurring demand for durability in a planet in need of political and aesthetic repair.

In this conversation the two discuss Pilar’s artistic formation; her use of family lore and fabulation in her interventions into the silences of the state archive; and her interests in science and digital technology.

Is the globe of globalization the same as the globe of global warming?

The panel examines historical cases of the migration of images and knowledge across cultures and temporalities.

The move to diversify art historical narratives is often accompanied by a search for commonalities. Instead addressing a need to acknowledge radical difference and untranslatability, each presenter in this panel approached the question of the incommensurable, interrogating tensions between a global approach and site-specific study.

The discussion raises contemporary questions of restitution of cultural property taken during periods of colonial expansion.

In the keynote lecture, Zdenka Badovinac introduces her concept of the “sustainable museum,” and explores possible translocal approaches to exhibition practice from the so-called periphery, nevertheless situated within the neoliberal global network of art museums and biennials.

A key contradiction of globalization is its facilitation of the movement of goods while the movement of people is increasingly restricted. Furthering this tendency, biometric technologies have expanded the traditional notion of the border, regulating the circulation of gendered, racialized, and classed bodies.

How to raise awareness of the most recent refugee crisis in the Mediterranean in a way that does not spectacularize human suffering? Beginning with Bouchra Khalili’sThe Mapping Journey Project, this essay addresses how the present crisis has manifested as image and has made its way, across a variety of methodological and ethical approaches, into works of…

Addressing the history and impact of violence in Colombia, Juan Manuel Echavarría’s work does not represent violence as an abstraction but rather registers a tangible reality with a name and a face.

In this sardonic text, acclaimed Syrian filmmaker Ossama Mohammed bitingly describes the conditions of filmmaking under the Ba’athist regime in Syria. Under strict control of the National Film Association that was founded in 1963, only one film was produced every year in the country.

Artists can be activists but can art be activism? C-MAP presents a forum at the Museum of Modern Art with Coco Fusco, Oleksiy Radynski, and Ram Rahman—artists who have all engaged with activist practices—who discuss relations between art and politics in Cuba, Ukraine, and India.