One Work, Many Voices

Joshua Chambers-Letson extrapolates antinomies from Danh Vo’s Death Sentence, a work on paper in MoMA’s collection, in particular the coexistence of values related to life and death.

Gee Wesley writes about Sandra Mujinga’s Flo (2019). On view in MoMA’s Contemporary Collection Galleries from March 2023, Flo considers darkness and disappearance as a means of remaining illegible to technologies of surveillance and data capture.

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.

The author applies what they call “a Buddhist reading” to Rirkrit Tiravanija’s Untitled (rucksack installation), 1993, analyzing it alongside recent developments in contemporary Thai art and politics.

Collaborating artists Amy Lien and Enzo Camacho take a speculative approach to Alfonso Ossorio’s sculpture, currently on view in Gallery 415, attempting to locate an insurgent potential bubbling underneath the picture’s baroque aesthetic.

By way of Men Taking Banana Beer to Bride by Night (1956), a painting featured in our “One Work, Many Voices” series, which focuses on individual artworks chosen from MoMA’s collection, art historian Gabriella Nugent highlights the role of memory in Ntiro’s practice. She argues that these memories are a product of distance and thus complicate the frameworks of art history.

In 1970, Johnson Donatus Aihumekeokhai Ojeikere, otherwise known as J.D. ‘Okhai Ojeikere (Nigerian, 1930–2014), made Fro Fro, the point of departure of this short text. Storyteller and lens-based artist Jumoke Sanwo reads this image, produced during Nigeria’s nationalist drive and considers Ojeikere’s subjects and their unapologetic defiance.

In 1964, Swiss-born Brazilian artist Mira Schendel (1919–1988) exposed the anatomy of a painting by stripping canvas from a stretcher. For this work, which she created that year while living in São Paulo, Schendel left only a few traces of canvas, which can still be found tangled in the tacks that originally fastened it to the wooden support.

A conversation between the artist Emilija Škarnulytė, Sophie Cavoulacos, and Valentine Umansky on two of Emilija’s upcoming projects: An Evening with Emilija Škarnulytė, streaming online as part of MoMA’s Virtual Cinema series, and a presentation at Tate Modern.

This year’s C-MAP seminar series, Transversal Orientations, comprised four panels that took place on Zoom in June 2021. With this text, Dr. Riánsares Lozano de la Pola provides a reflection on Politics of Position, the fourth and final panel of the seminar series with Jeannine Tang, Jaanus Samma, and Irmgard Emmelhainz.

La serie de seminarios C-MAP de este año, Transversal Orientations, estuvo compuesta por cuatro mesas que tuvieron lugar en Zoom en junio de 2021. Con este texto, Dra. Riánsares Lozano de la Pola responde a las presentaciones y a la conversación posterior que tuvieron lugar en la cuarta y última mesa de la serie de seminarios con Jeannine Tang, Jaanus Samma, e Irmgard Emmelhainz. 

Neste ensaio, Hlonipha Mokoena oferece uma reflexão contundente e um epílogo de propensão evocatória ao terceiro painel Territórios Emaranhados, com a participação de Sandra Benites, Black Athena Collective e Chie Ikeya.