Among the topics that were discussed were assemblies of the human and other-than-human as collectives, assemblies of materials into collections, and assemblies of spaces and places into shared worlds. The speakers drew from their engagement with exhibitions, films, public programs, and cultural institutions to map how these forms of assemblies realized the poetic potential of coming together through difference. Assemblies in Uncertain Times offered an opportunity to imagine other futures together, complicating established linearities and teleologies.

The 2025 C-MAP Seminar took place on June 11–12, 2025 and was conceived by Diana Iturralde, Cisneros Institute Research Fellow; Beya Othmani, C-MAP Africa Fellow; Carlos Quijon Jr., C-MAP Southeast & East Asia Fellow; and Ananya Sikand, C-MAP Bombay/Mumbai Fellow with support from the International Program: Marta Dansie, Department Coordinator; Jay Levenson, Director; Ksenia Nouril, Assistant Director; and Elena Pérez-Ardá López, C-MAP Program Coordinator. The C-MAP Seminar is organized in collaboration with the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Research Institute for the Study of Art from Latin America at MoMA.

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This edition of post Presents was part of the 2023 C-MAP Seminar: Transversal Orientations III. The 2023 C-MAP Seminar was organized by Nancy Dantas, C-MAP Africa Fellow, Inga Lāce, C-MAP Central and Eastern Europe Fellow, Wong Binghao,
C-MAP Asia Fellow, Julián Sánchez González, Cisneros Institute Research Fellow,
Elena Pérez-Ardá López, C-MAP Coordinator, and Rattanamol Singh Johal, Assistant Director, International Program, with support from Marta Dansie, Department Coordinator, International Program, and Jay Levenson, Director, International Program. It was presented in collaboration with the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Research Institute for the Study of Art from Latin America at MoMA.

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During the event, art historian Svitlana Biedarieva talked about the development and transformation of documentary practices in Ukrainian wartime art, analyzing works by Dana Kavelina, Vlada Ralko, Alevtina Kakhidze, and Yevgenia Belorusets. Researcher Ewa Sułek expanded on her proposal that what happened in the visual arts after 2014 can be named a “postcolonial turn”—a phenomenon based on healing and the acceptance of history and of the past in its hybrid form, without the imposition of imperial or national patterns. Artist Lesia Khomenko discussed her own practice, which is currently focused on ways of looking at the war and the relationship between the digital archives and the materiality of painting. And Nikita Kadan spoke about his own practice, which references the Ukrainian avant-garde and modernism.

This conversation is a continuation of the presentations and conversations commenced that evening.

Inga Lāce: The full-scale war has been going on for more than a year. Could you say where you’re at now, and share a few words about how your surroundings and the cultural landscape have changed.

Ewa Sułek: I am currently in Warsaw, and the city has changed tremendously—Ukrainians have become part of the urban fabric. Works by Ukrainian artists are widely exhibited, and Polish art institutions are making an effort to enable refugee artists to live and work here. When the war started, I was at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, very far from Ukraine and from my own country. While all of my Polish friends were engaged in a massive, beautiful effort to help the millions of Ukrainian refugees arriving in Poland, I felt useless. But my perspective changed once I realized that one of the reasons this war is mainly understood as colonial is that all imperial and colonial powers aim at denying subjectivity to their subjects. This reality has been influencing Ukrainian history and culture for centuries but, once revealed, can become a powerful tool of subversion. So now is exactly the time when art and academic work in Ukrainian studies as separate from Russian ones is important. I have recently completed my PhD on contemporary art centers in Kyiv from the postcolonial and neocolonial perspectives, and I am planning to publish it as a book.

Svitlana Biedarieva: In January 2022, I talked with Ukrainian artists Alevtina Kakhidze, Maria Kulikovska, Piotr Armianovski, and Lia Dostlieva and Andrii Dostliev for October about the wartime experiences of displacement and loss reflected in their art, and we also discussed the then-hypothetical threat of Russia’s attack.¹ Based on their responses, it was apparent that, at that time, such a rapid and violent turn of events seemed completely unlikely. But then the reality proved to be worse than the most pessimistic predictions.

The war-related displacement from 2014 that had affected the cultural landscape of eastern Ukraine and Crimea became the new reality for the rest of the country in February 2022. Violence and destruction in the suburbs of Kyiv reinforced the vulnerability of human life. Many artists and researchers have been forced to continue their work outside Ukraine, but rather paradoxically, this movement provided a new opportunity to globally showcase Ukrainian culture, which until recently, was largely overlooked. 

We saw much more radical forms of antiwar and anti-colonial expression. Artists and curators became more decisive and direct in their discourse, tracing the causes and consequences of the aggression through personal lenses—as direct witnesses to or victims of violence—and they set an important precedent for antiwar resistance through art in Eastern Europe, catalyzing the final dismantling of post-Soviet space together with its postcolonial agenda.

Lesia Khomenko: Immediately following the full-scale invasion, I evacuated my family from Kyiv while my husband joined the Territory Defense Forces. I moved to the United States with my daughter, and we are now based in Miami at an artist residency. Since 2014, a lot of artists from eastern Ukraine and Crimea have moved to Kyiv. There was a very interesting, dynamic exchange in the art community there between those who worked with the issue of war, observing it from outside, and those who had been forced to leave their homes, to run from the war. Now, as of February 24, 2022, there is no such difference.

Before fleeing to the US, I had been deeply involved in developing alternative art education in Ukraine beyond just Kyiv. The institutional landscape was fragile but developing fast. A lot of artists were investing their energy in expanding the context of their practices by curating, teaching, establishing residencies, or opening artist-run spaces. Since February 24, most of these new institutions have been in survival mode or functioning as volunteer hubs.

IL: Svitlana, you have been researching artists’ documentary practices since the beginning of the war in 2014. Could you elaborate on how narratives created by Ukrainian artists have shifted since the full-scale invasion in February 2022?

SB: I wrote in detail about the turn to documentary art in 2014 in the book I recently edited called Contemporary Ukrainian and Baltic Art: Political and Social Perspectives, 1991–2021.² Directly following the Maidan Revolution and Russia’s occupation of eastern Ukraine and Crimea, artists such as Yevgenia Belorusets, Piotr Armianovski, Alevtina Kakhidze, Mykola Ridnyi, Andrii Dostliev and Lia Dostlieva, and Dana Kavelina—among many others—engaged with the effects of war by undertaking documentary practices incorporating photography, text, video, and existing archives and creating new accounts focused on notions of displacement, violence, and trauma.

Researchers Erika Balsom and Hila Peleg point out that this “documentary turn” has emerged globally in response to the postcolonial transformation, when artists turned their gaze away from the centrally produced body of ideas to take up diverse local perspectives, especially through direct, often raw visual language—as has been true in Ukraine.³

Post 2022, there has been another turn in the ways that mediation has moved from social documentation and archival investigation to personal chronicle, in which the different visions of the artist’s diary—in the work of Kakhidze, Vlada Ralko, and Yevgenia Belorusets, for example—have become an emblematic form focused on trauma, the body, identity, and decolonization.

The task of documentary practices now is also to emphatically reflect on the audience’s own traumatic life experiences of destruction and human losses. The question of historical memory has become secondary.

IL: Lesia, you talked about the development of your practice, ending with your recent series Max in the Army (2022). So, I’ll start with that. What was the impulse for making this series, and what does the work open up in relation to digital technologies and images of war?

LK: It’s my first work after the full invasion and my escape from Kyiv. I depict my husband Max Robotov, who is an artist and musician, in the first weeks after he joined the army. I was curious how being a lieutenant had changed him. Early on, he sent me a photo of himself saluting in front of a dark and unclear background. He was in civilian clothes—as were most of the soldiers at the beginning of the war. This image epitomizes my personal experience of the war. The idea of the series is to reflect the merging of civil society and the army.

Since the full invasion, people are no longer allowed to take photos or videos of soldiers or military objects, because sharing them might give the enemy intelligence for an attack. Working on this series of paintings, I have been reflecting on the role and status of the image, which in the context of war has become a potentially lethal weapon. I’m using the photos that I have received from my husband—taken from outside his army unit—as well as footage circulating in the public sphere.

I’m referencing the history of battle painting and, at the same time, thinking about the role of the image and of representation in the context of the cyber war.

IL: Lesia, you and many of your peers got their education in post-Soviet Ukraine. How do you think the local education and museum system has affected your work and imagery and attitude toward painting?

LK: At my alma mater, painting is deeply rooted in the post-Soviet visual tradition, which, for me, is both problematic and productive. The programs in the state art academies in Ukraine are still based in the traditional school of the nineteenth century—corrected just a little during the Soviet period but almost unchanged in the post-Soviet period. By deconstructing the visual language of Soviet figurative painting, I’m rethinking the tools of Soviet propaganda and mythologization by comparing them to recent phenomena in the cyber war. I’m working not only with the idea of narrative but also rethinking the academic approach to producing images and to “realism” by using the method of copying or referencing traditional genres such as landscape, historical painting, or portraiture.

IL: Ewa, you talked about the curatorial strategies employed in Kyiv museums, which are rethinking their own art history, for example, bringing attention to self-taught artist Maria Prymachenko, who was falsely provincialized as the “happy peasant” by Soviet authorities. Can you delve a bit deeper into these curatorial projects and explain the context and intention behind them?

ES: I mentioned three projects in Mystetskyi Arsenal in Kyiv: Kateryna Bilokur. I want to be an artist! (2015) and Mariya Prymachenko. Boundless (2016), both of which were curated by Alisa Lozhkina, and Paraska Plytka-Horytsvit. Overcoming Gravity (2019), which was curated by Kateryna Radchenko. These exhibitions aimed to re-narrate the work and lives of the self-taught Ukrainian women artists who were practicing in Ukrainian provinces during World War II and throughout the Soviet period. Bilokur’s and Prymachenko’s work, although widely recognized, was celebrated mostly for its floral or animal motifs or decorative patterns and thus fell into the category of folk art. In Soviet times, the myth of the Ukrainian village as the source and essence of Ukrainian culture was a state-supported construct that helped in colonizing the country, and so the artists were well supported by the regime.

Bilokur’s and Prymachenko’s work was seen back then as cheerful and optimistic, features that were desired in that they conformed to Stalin’s cultural policy that art should express the joy of the communist system. In fact, the policy of folklorization of Ukraine dates back to the Russian Empire. A similar policy was executed toward the Ukrainian language, which was perceived as a dialect of the main language­—that is, of Russian.

Overcoming Gravity⁠ was devoted to a reinterpretation of Paraska Plytka-Horytsvit’s work. A painter, folklorist, ethnographer, philosopher, and photographer, Plytka-Horytsvit lived and worked in the small village of Kryvorivnia, and she led a solitary life devoted to artistic and ethnographic practices. Her life was also marked by tragedies universal to many at the time—she joined the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, and in the 1940s and ’50s, and spent almost a decade in labor camps and prisons in Germany and Siberia.

IL: Nikita, your projects are dealing with the historical references of avant-garde art and Soviet modernism. Could you elaborate on your strategy for dealing with the past, for unearthing these stories? Why is it important and what is your position with regard to it?

Nikita Kadan: I deal mostly with the ruins of the avant-garde. These ruins are covered with nationalist and neoliberal decorations, which aim to hide too radical universalist and internationalist intentions. I see my task as uncovering or unmasking these avant-garde intentions. “Back to avant-garde” means “back to universalism,” and the latter is no less paradoxical than the former. We have to go back to be able to restart the way to the future.

But local creators of universalist avant-garde work were often imprisoned and executed by the state for being “too Ukrainian.” The state publicly declared internationalist values but, in fact, reestablished a Russia-centric imperial structure for the Soviet republics and their cultural life. “Unearth” is a good word here—really. The remains of Ukrainian avant-garde creators are literally found in death pits in places of mass executions, like Sandarmokh.

The future is to be found in an execution pit—this is the horizon of the new utopia.

IL: There have been attempts across the Central Eastern Europe and Central Asia, especially the former Soviet Union countries to place their histories within the postcolonial debate and decolonial discourse. The recent full-scale invasion of Ukraine has amplified this approach among others with calls for decolonizing Russia. However, even though they share imperial domination with the postcolonial countries, their histories are very different. How, in your opinion, can we use the framework of postcolonialism and decolonization to speak about art in Ukraine?

ES: The story of Russian imperialism in Ukraine goes back much further than the Soviet Union, and a postcolonial perspective can be useful where there are relationships of domination and power that are imposed by imperial structures, like the relationship between Russian and Ukrainian cultures. I also find the concept of “coloniality” proposed by Aníbal Quijano and developed by Walter Mignolo and others helpful. While “colonialism” is a specific historical condition, “coloniality” emerged at the same time (in around 1500), and includes both imperialism and capitalism. It is not as much connected to the prevailing concept of the colony overseas based on geographical distance and racial distinctiveness, but rather to other factors stemming from the rhetoric of modernity, progress, and development. In that sense, the continuous narrative of Ukrainians as “little Russians”—meaning underdeveloped—also finds its place within this discourse. Furthermore, colonization is not only about territory, culture, or economics. There is also the colonization of minds, which likewise stems from the modern “civilizing mission,” and it includes communism.⁴

SB: My most recent research is dedicated to the dichotomy of postcoloniality/decoloniality in contemporary Ukrainian art and culture. I also employ a typology formed by [Madina] Tlostanova, who distinguishes between postcoloniality and decoloniality not only from a paradigmatic point of view, such as the postcolonial theory that was developed by such theorists as Homi Bhabha and Gayatri Spivak and the decolonial theory by Latin American scholars Walter Mignolo and Aníbal Quijano, but also from a chronological perspective. The postcolonial development in Tlostanova’s model immediately follows the anti-colonial resistance and resulting downfall of an empire when a society of a now-independent country reworks its recent colonial experience.⁵ The decolonial process, however, goes one step further in its liberation from any colonialism-related elements, which is exactly what we are witnessing today in wartime Ukraine. I believe, however, that a new theory is needed to describe Ukraine’s complex situation in the post-Soviet space. In my research and the book that is currently under contract with Palgrave Macmillan, I use this theory as a cornerstone for developing a model that would be suitable for the Ukrainian/Russian case.

My position is that art in Ukraine has recorded how Ukrainian society went through a postcolonial stage after 1991 and entered a decolonial stage in February 2022. First, artists are dismantling postcolonial narratives and substituting them with decolonial ones, and second, they are creating new content that conceptually breaks with the imperial legacy of Russia. The current traumatic experience of war serves as the impulse for decolonial transformations—from the anti-colonial calls to cancel Russian culture to the civilized decolonization of institutions of power.

LK: I consider decolonial discourse in Ukraine extremely important. Articulated since 2014, it is in its hottest phase ever. But there is a contradiction among Ukrainian intellectuals: some insist on complete decommunization and on the de-Russification of public space and culture, while others propose rethinking and the reappropriation of certain names and phenomena. I think that the role of artists in this process is very important, because artists build nonlinear narratives and are able to operate within a complex system of paradoxes.

IL: Nikita, in your prompt, you mentioned the changes in the perception of the notion of the avant-garde in post-1991 and post-2014 Ukraine, as well as the (im)possibility of a “national avant-garde.” Could you elaborate on this position?

NK: Early post-Soviet perception was part of Ukraine’s “multi-vector” position in the 1990s and early 2000s, when lots of imperial patterns in culture remained untouched. But the return of the Ukrainian avant-garde to the narrated history was often initiated by people whose position was rather conservative. [Mikhail] Semenko or [Valerian] Polischuk, [Maria] Siniakova or [Anatoly] Petritsky, [Boris] Kosarev or [Vasyl] Yermylov were observed through optics, in which “national” elements in their practices were seen as much better than “cosmopolitan” ones. And this very much differs from the original intentions of most Ukrainian avant-garde and modernist figures. On the other hand, the imperial phenomenon of the “Russian avant-garde” was not really questioned by decolonial thought and was not so problematic for many art professionals and audiences in Ukraine. So narrating avant-garde figures as conjointly Ukrainian, cosmopolitan, and non-Russian was like being between Scylla and Charybdis. 2014 made the “nation-centric” views more popular. At the same time, the field of discussion became broader, and the positions opposing both narrow national-conservative thinking and cultural neocolonialism became more visible.

IL: Could you talk about how your practices as researchers and artists have changed since the full-scale invasion in relation to representing a certain nation state and its art scene. I am thinking of many of our previous conversations, which have been full of ideas of cosmopolitanism, transnational research, and the fact that you are fundamentally international artists and scholars. However, with the war, the pressure to serve national representation seems to be very high. How does it resonate in your art and other activities? How do you negotiate this pressure?

ES: As a non-Ukrainian, I initially found myself doubting my right to comment on art practices in Ukraine now, since it is not possible to fully understand what it means to live and work in a country at war unless one personally experiences it. I have been working with Ukrainian art since 2014, and as a Polish scholar exploring Ukrainian topics, my postcolonial perspective has, at least a couple times, been criticized as a form of Orientalization. An interesting article titled “Explaining the ‘Westsplainers’: Can a Western Scholar Be an Authority on Central and Eastern Europe” was published by Aliaksei Kazharski in July 2022.⁶ It shows that we are maybe even more cautious now about who speaks about what and who is given a voice.

SB: I don’t see speaking about Ukraine or the war as the pressure to serve national representation, but rather as the only means of active protest against the war. Even though, currently, it’s very difficult to make any parallels or comparisons, in 2019, I spoke of the war in Ukraine to Latin American and Canadian audiences as part of the interdisciplinary project At the Front Line. Ukrainian Art, 2013–2019, which took place in Mexico City and Winnipeg. This was the first large-scale research-led project in Latin America focused on the war in Ukraine that addressed the common experiences of conflict, violence, and displacement. When speaking about Euromaidan, for example, we encountered a vivid response from Mexican audiences who remembered or even witnessed the Tlatelolco massacre in 1968; similarly, stories of Russian military violence in eastern Ukraine prompted comparison with the drug cartels’ violent actions in the north of Mexico.

LK: The current attention being given to Ukrainian artists is helping us to better articulate a lot of messages. At the same time, there is very high turbulence in Ukrainian society itself, and a lot of artists are balancing between pure propaganda and critical artistic gestures, between personal stories and general conclusions. These debates, as well as the visibility of artists is very important for postwar Ukraine.

IL: Even though there is this visibility, in the context of the current war, there is a danger that Ukrainian art and artists are reduced to speaking only about the war. How do you deal with that?

LK: I’ve been working with the issue of war for more than ten years. I had been researching World War II and working with the story of my grandfather and Soviet postwar paintings. Now I’m looking at the current war through the perspective of the role of the image and representation—and, of course, I’m thinking about commemoration and the creation of historical narratives. Footage of this war has made me think about how war affects the global civilization in general and what it means to be visible—how security issues and technology are changing our optics. Personally it’s difficult to think about anything else but the war. And, on the other hand, to convey knowledge of the war with nuance is extremely important to resisting the propaganda machine.

NK: Ukrainian artists speak about reality. And reality is impregnated by war. Landscape is a war landscape. Bodies are war bodies. It is a big shift in our sensitivity. Now you even don’t have to show war literally, directly—it is in your work anyhow. I still make work about forgotten and interrupted stories of Ukrainian modernism. About stories of local twentieth-century art history. But these stories are read through the lens of war. There is no other way.

IL: Our discussion takes place in the context of The Museum of Modern Art, thus an important issue for us is to understand how your research and artistic practices impact the art historical narratives and museum practices in relation to art from Ukraine. What is your take on that?

ES: It is important not to engage the norms imposed by the Western point of view, which tends to see Ukraine as “Other” and to exoticize the vaguely defined “East” as a continued form of silencing and trivialization by the dominant discourses. Eastern Europe has been an object of the colonial gaze from both the West and Russia, and a certain image of this place has been imposed. Less interest has been given to art from Ukraine or Poland than to work coming from Russia. Such an attitude strengthens the imperial status quo. Artists and researchers decolonize Ukraine by rewriting the story of the land and region from a Ukrainian as opposed to Russian perspective—discerning its uniqueness, and creating narrations distinct from those imposed in Soviet times and earlier, in the times of the Russian Empire—and, at the same time, recognizing the hybridity that emerged due to decades of existence in the frames of both systems.

SB: I agree with Ewa. For example, many artists, particularly those working in the 1920s–30s avant-garde, who were born or worked in Ukraine, are still labeled “Russian,” which of course is being corrected now with urgency but is still a process often flawed or lacking research. So involving Ukrainian art historians and curators can help a lot.

IL: Is there anything that you feel is missing in the discussion about art in and from Ukraine that you would like to raise here?

SB: Everyone’s talked a lot about the war. I believe that what is missing currently in the international discussion on Ukrainian art is taking into account its heterogeneity, development of the classification of its chronological stages, and critical currents linked to the personal position and style of each artist. Otherwise, in trying to develop a Ukrainian “trademark” in terms of art, we risk overgeneralization. But this art historical systematization needs to be undertaken with a certain historical distance, as it is often impossible to grasp the entire panorama while in the epicenter of war.

_{post presents: Art, Resistance, and New Narratives in Response to the War in Ukraine was co-organized with the Polish Cultural Institute New York and co-sponsored by the James Gallery at CUNY. Promotional support was provided by the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University.}

_{post presents is a series of talks devoted to the cross-geographical consideration of modern and contemporary art. The sessions are an extension of post, MoMA’s online platform devoted to art from a global perspective.}

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The 2022 C-MAP seminar series, Transversal Orientations Part II, was held on Zoom across four panels on May 25 and 26, 2022. Included here are abstracts and recordings of the panels. In order to continue the conversations, written responses from Sarah Lookofsky, current Dean of the Oslo National Academy of the Arts and former Associate Director of the International Program at MoMA, and Irmgard Emmelhainz, independent translator, writer and researcher, will soon to be linked on this page. The seminar series was organized by Nancy Dantas, C-MAP Africa Fellow; Inga Lāce, C-MAP Central and Eastern Europe Fellow; Madeline Murphy Turner, Former Cisneros Institute Research Fellow for Latin America, and Wong Binghao, C-MAP Asia Fellow.

The Contemporary and Modern Art Perspectives (C-MAP) research groups periodically organize seminars, of which Transversal Orientations Part II forms part. These seminars connect the broad research interests of the four groups and enable members to think more deeply about how the Museum might best address a global view of modern and contemporary art.

Transversal Orientations Part II was conceived as a continuation of the conversations and possibilities raised in the 2021 seminar. Building on the ideas generated in this first iteration, which invoked transversalism’s potential for envisioning alliances and surpassing oppositions, this year’s seminar sought to explore and annotate the transversal as a methodology for working between geographical borders and beyond disciplinary and epistemological siloes, while also acknowledging the challenges of such an approach in our fractured, solipsistic present.

Some of the questions raised were: what can we learn by looking and speaking across geographies, histories, and epistemes? What patterns, knowledges, currents, and recognitions emerge when we interweave regional concepts and metaphors? What emancipatory worldviews arise or collapse at these unexpected intersections and gatherings? And, finally, how can we utilize a transversal perspective amid our present-day reality, in which right-wing nationalist leaders have come to power, borders have been fortified, and dialogical exchange often seems to be insufficient or even unattainable?

A term that originates in the field of mathematical geometry, the transversal has been taken up by thinkers to destabilize the ways in which relations are canonically accepted. Transversality “implies a desire in interdisciplinarity for knowledge and practices that are in some senses yet to be made proper.”¹ While aspiring towards the transformative potential of the transversal approach, this year’s seminar came to terms with the lived limitations and violences of categorically closed designations.

Comprised of four panels over two days, each panel featured a distinct pair of speakers  who engaged and acknowledged the limitations of transversalism in the historical present through issues of territory, colonial catastrophe, gender politics, and non-human ontologies.

Participants

Pamila Gupta, Daniel Lie, Sophio Medoidze, Nnenna Okore, Juno Salazar Parreñas, Isabel Sandoval, Diana Tamane, Daiara Tukano

Acknowledgements

The Fellows wish to thank the C-MAP Group Leaders (Ugochukwu-Smooth C. Nzewi, Roxana Marcoci, Inés Katzenstein, Stuart Comer, and Cara Manes) and Jay Levenson, Marta Dansie, Michelle Kuo, Josh Siegel, Howard Deitch, Christopher Brown, Mitchell Leitschuh, and Hayna Garcia for their invaluable input and assistance.

Day 1

Panel 1: In Thick Co-Presence

This panel explores the co-dependence and kinship between humans and other-than-humans. Looking specifically at the co-constitutive relationship between care and harm, this panel relatedly investigates the roles that gender and sexuality play in the creation of shared ecologies. The panel title comes from Donna Haraway’s book, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, which discusses the importance of eschewing the future in favor of present realities and challenges.

Building on legacies of migration and queer studies, Daniel Lie’s work demonstrates how abjection can be a tool of subversion and expansion. Their practice celebrates natural cycles of transformation and the many interdependent exchanges that structure ecosystems. A fundamental aspect of Lie’s practice is their desire to develop works which decenter human agency and subjectivity. Working in collaboration with forces they term “other-than-human beings,” such as bacteria, fungi, plants, animals, minerals, spirits, and ancestors, Lie creates site- and time-specific works that can be experienced through multisensory channels. By giving visibility to materials that morph, decay, and evolve, Lie’s ecosystems highlight the intimate yet expansive coexistences among diverse beings, acknowledging our shared and continuous participation in the processes of living, dying, and decomposing.

Juno Salazar Parreñas is an assistant professor of science and technology studies and feminist, gender, and sexuality studies at Cornell University. She examines human-animal relations, environmental issues, and efforts to institutionalize justice. She is the author of Decolonizing Extinction: The Work of Care in Orangutan Rehabilitation (2018), which received the 2019 Michelle Rosaldo Prize from the Association for Feminist Anthropology and honorable mentions for the 2019 New Millennium Book Award and the 2019 Diana Forsythe Prize, both from the American Anthropological Association, and the 2020 Harry Benda Prize from the Association of Asian Studies.

Panel 2: Cycles and Reclamations

Cycles and Reclamations probes the relationship between art and social engagement pertaining to ecological crises and territory disputes. It asks, how do practitioners draw attention to these challenges by transversing professional and cultural silos? When working with the subjects of land and sea, how do creators engage with politics to call attention to the adversities we endure? Finally, what kinds of creative encounters can be proposed as solutions?

Nnenna Okore is an artist-researcher-teacher who uses artistic practice, pedagogy, and social engagements to address ecological issues. She has been involved in numerous participatory art projects and exhibitions designed to produce dialogue, art making, and an awareness of current environmental issues. Working largely with eco-based materials, Okore uses food-based bioplastic materials to create delicate works of art that engender dialogue about waste reduction and sustainable practices in art making. Okore has a BA from the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, and an MA and MFA from the University of Iowa. She is a recipient of the 2012 Fulbright Scholar Award and Creative Victoria Award from Australia.

Daiara Hori Figueroa Sampaio – Duhigô, known as Daiara Tukano, of the Tukano Indigenous people – Yé’pá Mahsã, Eremiri Húusiro Parameri clan of the Upper Rio Negro in the Brazilian Amazon, was born in São Paulo. She is an artist, activist, educator, and communicator who graduated in visual arts and master in human rights from the University of Brasília. She researches the right to memory and truth of Indigenous peoples. From 2015 to 2021 she was the coordinator of Rádio Yandê, the first indigenous Internet-radio in Brazil. Recently, she won the 2021 PIPA Online Award, organized by the PIPA Institute, the most renowned Brazilian visual arts prize. She studies the culture, history, and traditional spirituality of its people together with their family. She lives in Brasília.

Day 2

Panel 3: (Im)possible Returns

Taking up the call for critical (art) geography to think about the complexity of communities, and an awareness of the issue of scales when we discuss and employ a transversal vision, this panel draws on the transversal as an intense interdisciplinary mode whereby different topologies, for instance, colonial or post-Soviet migration, come into communication, bringing newfound understanding and literacy to the consequences of imperialism.

Pamila Gupta is a professor at WiSER, University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. She holds a PhD in anthropology from Columbia University. Her research and writing interests include Portuguese colonial and Jesuit missionary history in India; diasporas, islands, tourism, heritage, and design in the Indian Ocean; photography, tailoring, and visual cultures in East Africa; and architecture, infrastructure, and affect in South Africa. She is the author of two monographs: The Relic State: St. Francis Xavier and the Politics of Ritual in Portuguese India (2014) and Portuguese Decolonization in the Indian Ocean World: History and Ethnography (2019).

Diana Tamane (b. 1986, Latvia/Estonia). In the artist’s works, family albums, documents, and private correspondence are transformed into catalysts, making it possible to reveal not only touching autobiographical stories but also apt portrayals of society and how a complex political history and presence intertwines with the needs and dreams of ordinary people. Tamane graduated from the Tartu Art College, the LUCA School of Arts, Brussels, and HISK post-academic program, Ghent. In 2020, with APE, she published Flower Smuggler, which has received the Authors Book Award at Les Rencontres d’Arles Book Awards and been shortlisted in the Paris-Photo Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards.

Panel 4: Rituals and Rapture

Joyous, occult, or banal, rituals are a part of our everyday lives and imaginations. This panel explores how rituals – religious, social, daily, or otherwise – are depicted in art and film. In particular, the significance of gender in rituals will be discussed to shore up how supposedly fixed borders (material, bodily, territorial, epistemological) can be crossed.

This panel featured screenings of film and moving image works by Sophio Medoidze and Isabel Sandoval that have not been reproduced here. Watch the pre-recorded conversation between Medoidze, Sandoval, and C-MAP Fellows Inga Lace and Wong Binghao in the video link below.

Sophio Medoidze is an artist, writer, and filmmaker based in London. Her work has been exhibited and screened worldwide, including at the OUTPOST gallery, Ermes Ermes, LUX, CAC Bretigny, Serpentine Cinema (Peckhamplex), Kunstmuseum Luzern, Tate Modern (upcoming), and others. She was a recipient of Tyneside cinema’s Projections commissions and Feature Expanded development and Sub-ti awards for her latest film Let us flow! (ვიდინოთ!). A collection of Medoidze’s short stories, Bastard Sun, will be published in 2022.

Recognized by the Criterion Collection as “one of the most exciting and multitalented filmmakers on the indie scene,” Isabel Sandoval has made three dramatic features, including Señorita, Apparition and the Independent Spirit Award–nominated Lingua Franca. Her films have played at major international festivals like Venice, Locarno, London, and Busan. She is currently in development on her fourth feature, Tropical Gothic, which won a development prize at the 2021 Berlinale. She recently directed the FX limited series Under the Banner of Heaven, based on Jon Krakauer’s nonfiction book, starring Andrew Garfield.

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The Contemporary and Modern Art Perspectives (C-MAP) research groups periodically organize a seminar among all four groups that connects their broad research interests and enables members to think more deeply about how the Museum might best address a global view of modern and contemporary art. Hinged on the transversal as a means to engage with and envision new networks and ways of thinking about modern and contemporary art, the 2021 edition offered an exploration and interrogation of the intertwining of multiple coeval life-worlds through concepts of “extending across.”

Over the course of two weeks, transversalism was offered and considered as a third, enabling term. To transverse is to surpass bipolar socio-historically constructed oppositions such as traditional and modern, male and female, man and nature, local and foreign, theory and practice, etc. Rather than adopting a center-periphery dyad or adhering to “mainstream” canonical standards, changing our perspective of looking at art opens up a way to account for different philosophies and nuances of comparison. This seminar series made reference to the methodology of “minor” transnationalism, to think and relate along other scales of knowability.

In addition, the seminar considered what it means to penetrate, exceed, and undermine geopolitical borders that have been set up to define the places that are safe and unsafe; accessible and inaccessible; to construct an “us” and a “them.” A border, as Gloria Anzaldúa writes, “is a dividing line, a narrow strip along a steep edge. A borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary. It is in a constant state of transition.”

By considering the transversal in its temporal, geographic and/or directional dimensions, as simultaneity, the seminar series elucidated the implications of the adoption of this operative term to art history, the museum, exhibitions, collections, philosophy and/or artistic practice. In doing this, new relational terms, stories, and people can be thought of together again.

Panel 1: Looking Sideways

This panel examined the processes of migration and contra-flows connecting regions while examining their artistic legacies. Looking at particular geographies, artists, and their stories across time, it aimed to challenge mainstream conceptions of the directionality of exchange within modern and contemporary art. How can minor positions weave a fabric of their own links directly, bypassing the centers of power and information? How can these transnational shared stories be acknowledged and told in a context that recognizes their complexity within history and display systems largely guided by national or global presentations?

Introduced by Ugochukwu-Smooth C. Nzewi, Steven and Lisa Tananbaum Curator of Painting and Sculpture, MoMA and moderated by Wong Binghao, C-MAP Asia Fellow, MoMA.

Response by Chairat Polmuk, Lecturer, Department of Thai, Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok. You can read it here.

Panel 2: Acts of Transfer and the Repertoire

This panel was organized around the idea of the transversal as transfer between disciplines, geographies, the performer, audience and participants, and/or the professional and nonprofessional. By looking at and considering the “repertoire” and acts of transfer through, for instance, translation and embodied dialogue, “hidden” processes of transnational contact and local histories, new cartographies, and unseen relations come into evidence.

Introduced by Roxana Marcoci, Senior Curator, Department of Photography, MoMA and moderated by Inga Lāce, C-MAP Central and Eastern Europe Fellow, MoMA.

Response by Laine Kristberga, Assistant Professor and Researcher, Institute of Philisophy and Sociology of the University of Latvia, Riga. You can read it here.

Panel 3: Entangled Terrains

This panel is the outcome of an invitation to Sandra Benites, Black Athena Collective, and Chie Ikeya to reconsider or remap regions. Thinking about people who cross borders and borders that cross people, the session presented perspectives that acknowledge multidirectional histories of migration, colonialism, and the destabilization of current geographical perimeters. Panelists were tasked with reconsidering territorial logic and place vis-a-vis the mobility of individuals; how our relationship with the inhabited terrain might reformulate imposed delimitations. In this session, borderlands and the spaces in-between were examined, and the manifold ways in which art and visual culture entangle terrain.

Introduced by Sean Anderson, Associate Curator, Department of Architecture and Design, MoMA and moderated by Nancy Dantas, C-MAP Africa Fellow, MoMA.

Response by Hlonipha Mokoena, Associate Professor, Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research of the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. You can read it in English here and in Portuguese here.

Panel 4: The Politics of Position

This panel explored the particular conditions of locality and the productive tensions between local and global contexts. How do the languages, values, and histories of art and its attendant sociopolitical conditions differ from place to place? Can they be translated, communicated, and made legible, if at all, on a global scale, and what are the stakes of this transfer? Invited speakers discussed the specificities of their local or regional positions or punctuated a pristine map of universality. These discussions aimed to generate understandings of art and culture that are not uniformly appraised and consumed, as well as a sensitivity and humility when encountering art from unfamiliar contexts.

Introduced by Inés Katzenstein, Director, Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Research Institute for the Study of Art from Latin America, and Curator of Latin American Art, Department of Drawings and Prints, MoMA and moderated by Madeline Murphy Turner, C-MAP Latin America/Cisneros Institute Research Fellow, MoMA; Ph.D. Candidate, The Institute of Fine Arts, New York University.

Response by Riánsares Lozano de la Pola, Researcher and Professor at the Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas, Mexico City. You can read it in English here and in Spanish here.

View the past event page here. 

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Dayanita Singh’s art uses photography to reflect and expand on the ways in which we relate to photographic images. Her recent work, drawn from her extensive photographic oeuvre, is a series of mobile museums that allow her images to be endlessly edited, sequenced, archived and displayed. Stemming from Singh’s interest in the archive, the museums present her photographs as interconnected bodies of work that are replete with both poetic and narrative possibilities.

Sean Anderson is Associate Curator in the Department of Architecture and Design at The Museum of Modern Art. A Fellow of the American Academy in Rome, he has practiced as an architect and taught in Afghanistan, Australia, India, Italy, Morocco, Sri Lanka, and the U.A.E. At MoMA, he has most recently co-organized with Mabel O. Wilson Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America, the first exhibition at MoMA to focus on the work of African American and African Diasporic architects.

This conversation took place virtually on June 29, 2021.

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Meghan Forbes

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