One Work, Many Voices

MoMA’s curators, selected staff, and specialist invitees each pick individual works in MoMA’s collection and discuss the particularities of the chosen piece and its relationship to other works housed within the Museum. Several of the works included here entered MoMA’s holdings as a result of Contemporary and Modern Art Perspectives (C-MAP), a research initiative begun at the Museum in 2009, which has focused on tracing artistic legacies in Africa, Asia, Central and Eastern Europe, and Latin America. However, MoMA’s inclusion of works from these regions predates this endeavor, which is something also evinced here. C-MAP’s efforts both to promote a deeper understanding of works already in MoMA’s collection and to instigate a broader perspective on how other geographical histories might relate to MoMA’s context, reflect a history of modern and contemporary art premised on international travel, networks, and connections. 

Encompassing historical as well as contemporary objects in a diversity of mediums, this Theme in effect serves to mimic the structure of a museum’s collection: Artworks created in disparate locales and in different moments in time find themselves in chance adjacency and juxtaposition, prompting reflection on similarities and differences, and deeper investigations of the contexts within which each work of art was produced. This body of objects does not tell one particular story; instead it enables multiple stories to be told, including the inclusion of formerly underrepresented voices, and offers a site for contemplating the difficulties and possibilities of writing a globally-comprehensive history of art.

A Queer Media Archaeology of the Future: Ming Wong’s Quest for a Cantonese Space Opera Film

A tapestry of interplays between mythology and technology is on display in Ming Wong’s Windows on the World (Part 2), a 24-channel soundtracked video installation from 2014 composed of flat-screen monitors arranged on three levels of long tabletops stacked like freestanding shelves. This work’s corpus of moving images and accompanying on-screen notes are gleaned from the sprawling archives of Cantonese opera film, East Asian science fiction, and TV news about the role of the People’s Republic of China in what has become of the Space Race.

Method and Metaphor: Dinh Q. Lê’s Untitled (Soldiers at Rest) (2003)

Untitled (Soldiers at Rest) (2003) belongs to a body of work which resulted from Vietnamese American artist Dinh Q. Lê’s long-term archaeological investigation of the visual culture of the American War (known as the Vietnam War in the United States), via a traditional Vietnamese weaving technique. Lê learned the latter from his aunt who, when he was a child in Vietnam, wove grass mats, and he later adapted this traditional craft for his own purposes.

Safi Faye: Selbé et tant d’autres

Artist and author Nene Aissatou Diallo revisits Safi Faye’s 1982 portrayal of Selbé, a thirty-nine-year-old mother of eight from Fad’jal as she and her compatriots go about their daily routines, carried by song. This feature reflects on the visual portrayal of Selbé, and Faye’s use of the camera in a documentary produced as part of the series As Women See It.