Ram Rahman (photographer, designer, curator and activist) discusses key examples of modernist architecture in post-colonial India. Using photographic documentation and archival materials, he surveys the landscape of architects, designers, photographers, entrepreneurs, and intellectuals working (primarily in New Delhi) between the 1950s and 1990s. This presentation is excerpted from a closed-door session with MoMA’s C-MAP Asia…
Chilean artists from the past three decades discuss their work, influences, and concerns working as Chileans in a post-Pinochet context. MoMA Program Manager Jason Dubs interviews Natalia Babarovic, Francisca Benítez, Felipe Mujica, and Johanna Unzueta about the context of their practices today.
Jorge Schwartz discusses the prominence of the urban in Joaquín Torres-García’s visual and literary works. A major retrospective at MoMA, The Arcadian Modern, reveals a totalizing and structural vision of Joaquín Torres-García’s thinking, mainly through his painting, sculpture, objects, and, of particular interest to me, bibliographic production: his theoretical texts about Constructivism, autobiographical texts, manifestos,…
Artist and critic Luis Camnitzer discusses his personal relationship to the work and legacy of Joaquín Torres-García with special attention to his influential Taller and the recent exhibition at MoMA. I am at a point in my life when I have made complete peace with Joaquín Torres-García. It took a long time. Growing up in…
Luis Pérez-Oramas, the Estrellita Brodsky Curator of Latin American Art at MoMA, talks with artist Natalia Babarovic about the meaning of painting and its ominous and constant ‘returning.’ Barbarovic also commented on the peculiarities of being a painter in Chile, both in contemporary times and during the years of the dictatorship, and spoke about what…
After presenting during a C-MAP Latin America session at MoMA, artist Catalina Parra joined independent critic and curator Julia Herzberg for a conversation about her work. Herzberg, long-time researcher of Parra’s production, conducted an interview that went from politics to education and from Chile to Germany, with occasional stops in New York and Buenos Aires.…
Architect, astrophysicist, scholar, and Valparaiso-aficionado Ann Pendleton-Jullian talks about Chile, Chilean architecture and landscape, and the “ad hoc, ongoing work of art” that is Ciudad Abierta. Pendletton-Jullian, author of Road that Is Not a Road and the Open City, Ritoque, Chile, visited MoMA to talk to the C-MAP Latin America group about her 28+ year…
Since the 1950s, there has been an active production of experimental film, animation, and video art in Asia. Yet, much of this work has not been consistently conserved or shared with the public due to the lack of accessible archives or organized collections dedicated to its preservation and dissemination. The conference “The Archival Impulse: Collecting…
Did 1993 mark a watershed for “contemporary Chinese art” in the then increasingly globalized art world? In this essay Peggy Wang discusses exhibitions of contemporary Chinese art held overseas in the year 1993, notably China Avant-Garde in Berlin, China’s New Art, Post-1989 in Hong Kong, and the Venice Biennale. Analyzing various readings of works by artists such as Wang…
Chen Zhen’s death in 2000 did not stop his art from living on, thanks to the hard work of Xu Min—Chen Zhen’s widow, who continues to organize his solo shows and also to restore his artworks. Xu was trained as an artist in Shanghai, but she has dedicated herself to supporting Chen’s art since the couple…
Tyeb Mehta once warned Atul Dodiya against referencing Francis Picabia, who is but one reference on a long and abundant list that includes Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Marcel Duchamp, and surprisingly Kazimir Malevich and Piet Mondrian—although Dodiya has never been an abstract painter. Dodiya also appropriates diverse forms and inspiration from daily life, such as…
In this segment of the theme “Global Conceptualism Reconsidered,” the curators of the exhibition Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin, 1950s–1980s reflect upon their experiences organizing the exhibition. They address in the following interviews the origins of the exhibition’s concept, the challenges faced in defining and presenting the variety of conceptualisms across the exhibition’s many international subsections, and…
