The Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) was established in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, in 1961, during the peak of the Cold War, drawing inspiration from the principles of the 1955 Afro-Asian Conference in Bandung, Indonesia. Founded by developing countries opposed to formal alignment with either the United States or the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, NAM advocated for national self-determination and resistance against all forms of colonialism and imperialism. Its united front on social and economic policies proved only the beginning, as it also sought to create a united artistic front, an aim resulting in the opening of the Gallery of Art of the Non-Aligned Countries “Josip Broz Tito” on September 1, 1984, in Titograd (today Podgorica), Yugoslavia. 

Although Yugoslav artists exhibited works at the Alexandria Biennale (Egypt), São Paulo Biennial (Brazil), and New Delhi Triennale (India), and artists from NAM member countries exhibited at the International Biennial of Graphic Arts in Ljubljana (Yugoslavia), the Gallery “Josip Broz Tito” was the only art institution established under NAM auspices¹, a fact crucial to grasping the significance of its collection². 

The archives of the Museum of Contemporary Art of Montenegro³, which was founded through the integration of the Gallery “Josip Broz Tito” and the Republic Cultural Centre after the collapse of Yugoslavia in 1995, reveal a transnational network of cultural diplomacy linking fifty-six non-aligned countries to generate a collection of about eight hundred artworks originating from Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Europe. Though criticized by Yugoslav art historians for collecting “works from faraway exotic places” and “from authoritarian states that support official art,”⁴ the Gallery challenged what its founders viewed as the imperial model that prevailed in many museums in that it acquired its holdings solely through gifts and donations. This essay discusses the transnational model of assembling an art collection by employing NAM networks, countering the imperial model of doing so through colonial violence, looting, or transactional exchange.

Situated in a nineteenth-century castle built by Nicholas I, the last king of Montenegro, and surrounded by a large park complex, the Gallery began collecting, preserving, and exhibiting the art of non-aligned and developing countries in 1984. This effort made Yugoslavia a cultural center, one that attracted artistic productions from North Korea, India, Egypt, Angola, and Cuba, among many other NAM countries (fig. 1).

A European nation situated between the Eastern and Western blocs and in proximity to the African and Asian Mediterranean shores, Yugoslavia proved to be a perfect site for an art space dedicated to the exhibition of the artistic production of NAM countries. Although the rupture with the Soviet Union in 1948 undeniably served as the primary catalyst for a significant transformation in its foreign policy, the Yugoslav Partisans’ resistance against fascism bore symbolic resonance with anti-colonial struggles in the Global South⁶. Not only did the Partisans unite the diverse nationalities within Yugoslavia against local fascist regimes, they also accomplished a remarkable feat in making it the only occupied European nation to liberate itself from Axis occupation⁷. In so doing, they established Yugoslavia’s distinct position beyond the spheres of influence of the United States and the Soviet Union. Operating in a state of “semiperipherality,” Yugoslavia fostered the emergence of distinct perspectives and, notably, “ambivalence . . . regarding . . . Western modernity”⁸ and hostility toward colonial subjectivity. As sociologist Marina Blagojević contends, “Semiperipherality” is “essentially shaped by the effort to catch up with the core, on [the] one hand, and [on the other] to resist the integration into the core, so as not to lose its cultural characteristics,” an ethos that made Yugoslavia a suitable site for the NAM collection.⁹

The Gallery’s model of collecting and exhibiting artworks helped establish its specific identity as an institution that steered clear of cultural colonialism. In an introduction to an undated Gallery exhibition catalogue, Raif Dizdarević, Yugoslav Federal Secretary of Foreign Affairs, remarks how the institution collected art, “preserving national identity despite colonialism, occupation, foreign domination, despite racism, economic exploitation, removal of cultural treasures,” and all other forms of forced exploitation.¹⁰ In the 1970s, a comparable anti-imperialist model united transnational art projects such as the Museo de la Solidaridad Salvador Allende (Museum of Solidarity) in Santiago, Chile, and the International Art Exhibition for Palestine in Beirut, Lebanon.¹¹ These endeavors fostered transnational solidarity movements and strengthened alliances among countries in the Global South, the same vision NAM pursued through the establishment of the Gallery in Yugoslavia.¹²

The works in the Gallery’s collection, with the exception of objects made by artists in residence in Titograd, were processed and administrated by Yugoslav embassies based in NAM countries before being sent to Yugoslavia and exhibited. Indeed, letters exchanged between non-aligned countries, Yugoslav embassies, and Gallery personnel show that the acquisition process followed a structured pattern: countries would submit lists of artworks they wished to donate, and then the Gallery would systematically incorporate them into the collection. Although the acquisition process varied across the fifty-six countries donating works, it chiefly relied upon art institutions, cultural organizations, and appointed artists acting as liaisons between NAM countries and the Gallery. Notably, no records indicate the rejection of any submitted works, a practice that resulted in not only a heterogeneous collection but also eclectic exhibitions. 

In the absence of presentation directives, Gallery curators chose to display acquired objects alongside each other, highlighting the collaborative and transnational dynamics inherent in NAM networks. This inclusive approach to collecting and exhibiting is also reflected in the Gallery’s array of objects, which encompasses various time periods and mediums. For example, a photograph of a display of works in the permanent collection captures its wide-ranging nature and scope (fig. 2): two antique Cypriot vessels, one from about the 14th century and the other from 725–600 BCE, shown together in a glass cabinet; a sequence of Indian modernist paintings by, left to right, Brahm Prakash, Rameshwar Broota (born 1941), and Gurcharan Singh (born 1949) on the walls; and a white marble sculpture by Indian artist Awtar Singh (1929–2002) on the floor. 

The Gallery’s permanent collection ranges from archaeological objects from as far back as the seventh century BCE to contemporary works from across Africa, Asia, Latin America, and Europe. Although the collection includes works in a range of mediums and from different time periods, modern and contemporary artworks dominate its holdings. Between 1988 and 1990, for example, the Gallery organized more than one hundred exhibitions featuring art from different countries, regions, and eras.¹³ While it primarily sought to collect and present works from non-aligned countries, it also organized permanent exhibitions, special exhibitions in Yugoslavia and abroad, lectures and conferences, on-site artistic interventions, and publications promoting the artistic production of NAM countries. By activating the space through a range of public-facing activities, the Gallery swiftly became the hub of NAM’s artistic networks as it drew people from all over the world to Yugoslavia. 

By examining three types of collecting by the Gallery—works created on-site, works produced in other non-aligned countries, and works made off-site with NAM’s mission in mind—this essay will reveal how the Gallery expanded NAM’s transnational solidarity networks and challenged the imperial model of collecting by assembling a collection solely through gifts and donations.

Many artists from NAM countries participated in Gallery residencies, creating art on-site and giving lectures about the art of their respective nations, activities that fostered opportunities to network internationally. A white marble sculpture by Zimbabwean sculptor Bernard Matemera (1946–2002) is an excellent example of a work created by an artist in residence. Porodica (Family, 1987) remains central to the collection as it has been greeting Gallery visitors since its unveiling in 1987 (fig. 3).¹⁴ By 1987, Zimbabwe (which gained independence in 1980, making it one of the last African countries to do so) sought to assert its cultural identity and promote its national narrative on the international stage.¹⁵ Therefore, the Gallery’s invitation to a Zimbabwean artist to undertake a residency and the inclusion of his work in the permanent collection symbolizes more than Zimbabwe’s integration into the global anti-colonial discourse. To be sure, it also reaffirms the Gallery’s dedication to supporting artists and exhibiting art from nations actively engaged in decolonization and self-determination.

The Gallery’s collection also includes two sculptures Matemera made on-site using locally sourced stone. In his works, Matemera explores African folklore, myths, and legends, a pursuit that has made his sculptures of interest beyond Africa.¹⁶ One monumental piece exhibited on the Gallery’s front lawn embodies themes and styles Matemera examined across his oeuvre as he carved African histories and myths into his works (fig. 4). 

The captivating painting by Egyptian artist and activist Inji Efflatoun (1924–1989) is notable as a piece created in a non-aligned country and later gifted to the Gallery. Seljanka i banane (Peasant Woman and Bananas, 1968) depicts a working-class woman seated in a banana tree plantation, themes Efflatoun explored from the mid-1960s onward (fig. 5).¹⁷ Efflatoun, alongside other Egyptian artists represented in the collection, such as Rabab Nemr (born 1939), Hussein El Gebaly (1934–2014), and Zeinab Abdel Hamid (1919–2002), made works “that expressed the characters of the Egyptian people and recorded the urban and rural landscapes of the country,” a theme explored across the Gallery’s Egyptian holdings.¹⁸ This particular collection of works comprises eighty-two objects, a large number of which were made by women. Due to the lack of records regarding the selection process, one wonders whether these objects were given because works by women were deemed minor or if the Egyptian regime was intentionally aiming to highlight the artistic contributions of women through the Gallery’s transnational solidarity networks.

A founding NAM member state, Egypt donated the most works to the collection of any nation, solidifying its continuous support of the project and showcasing the steadfast leadership of its fourth president, Hosni Mubarak, who advocated for deeper South-South cooperation at the 7th Summit Conference of Heads of State or Government of NAM held in 1983 in New Delhi.¹⁹ In the 7th Summit’s final declaration, under the section “Education and Culture,” it is “recommended that the non-aligned countries should actively collaborate in enriching the content and enlarging the scope of the Gallery of Arts of all non-aligned countries, established by the City Assembly of Titograd, Yugoslavia, and invited the coordinating countries to consider concrete measures in this regard.”²⁰ After receiving an official invitation to collaborate in the formation of the Gallery “Josip Broz Tito,” Egypt donated works reminiscent of Efflatoun’s oeuvre, emphasizing the human subject and everyday life, two themes central to NAM, and the collective struggle for equality and peace amid the Cold War.

A work in the collection made off-site by Cypriot artist Hambis Tsangaris (born 1947), founder of the Hambis School of Printmaking, celebrates International Children’s Day and, at the same time, extends NAM’s philosophy of non-alignment, intercommunal peace, and coexistence. Cyprus, a Mediterranean island country and founding member of NAM, played a critical role as a nation that has historically followed a non-aligned foreign policy. For instance, Greek Cypriot authorities saw NAM as a potential source of further international backing for constitutional reforms aimed at mitigating the inter-communal strife between the principal ethnic groups—Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots—an issue central to Tsangaris’s practice.²¹ In Greek and Turkish, the official languages of the Republic of Cyprus, as well as in English, Tsangaris advocates “PEACE IN THE HOMELAND / PEACE IN THE WORLD,” addressing both the intercommunal conflicts between Greek and Turkish Cypriots and the broader geopolitical strains stemming from the Cold War (fig. 6). 

In Prvi jun—Međunardni dan djeteta (June 1—International Children’s Day, 1977), Tsangaris captures the essence of folk culture, myth, and tradition by integrating abstracted representations of nature and figures—such as the sun, sea, human figures, birds, and fish—symbolizing connections that unify the island. Tsangaris’s work not only raises questions about the island’s geopolitical reality of being situated between the east-west axis, it also deepens the complexity of solidarity networks within NAM, which in turn lends further significance to the Gallery as a space capable of collecting “art of the world” through gifts and donations.²²

Many western museums, thanks to acquisition practices now looked upon as unethical, contain highly diverse collections, especially given their colonial legacies. At the same moment the Gallery opened in 1984, many such institutions flaunted their eclecticism, as did MoMA in its 1984–85 exhibition “Primitivism” in 20th Century Art, which brought together objects from many different places and times under the loose heading of “affinity.”²³ While the Gallery also staged collisions between works with distinct histories, it resisted trying to find unity in formal affinities between objects and instead looked to the distinct mode of sociability that was responsible for the objects coming into its hands in the first place: gift-giving—though not by wealthy donors, but rather by national peoples participating in a common project of self-determination. Whatever shortcomings this ideal may possess, it represented a self-conscious counter-practice to that of imperial art institutions. 

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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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Daina Dagnija (1937–2019) is well-known in Latvia, especially after You Paint Just Like a Man! The Art of Daina Dagnija in the Context of Feminism opened in 2021 at the Latvian National Museum of Art in Riga. The exhibition title makes ironic reference to a remark that countless women artists are used to hearing—and that, though often presented as a compliment, in fact confirms the notion of masculine greatness as the decisive yardstick by which to evaluate art. The exhibition explored the diversity of Dagnija’s artistic interests and achievements, introducing a variety of feminist insights, including issues of gender stereotypes and related inequalities, at a time when, according to exhibition curator and art researcher Elita Ansone, “much prejudice and confusion [regarding feminism] remain among the Latvian public.”¹ It is worth noting that this title marked the first time the word feminism had been used by the museum in the title of an exhibition, indicating a possible feminist awakening (or at least a thaw) in Latvia’s art scene.

Regardless of the prejudice and confusion surrounding the notion of feminism—and the distrust and anxiety with regard to it that is typical not only in Latvia but also in other post-socialist countries in Eastern and Central Europe—considering Dagnija’s work from a feminist perspective is rewarding. Indeed, taking into account the artist’s direct interaction with the political ideas and social activism of the so-called second wave of feminism and the women’s emancipation movement in the United States in the late 1960s and ’70s is not only theoretically gratifying but also historically informative. This association reveals a rarely acknowledged dimension of cultural exchange between the Latvian and American art scenes that, until now, has been mostly examined from the point of view of cross-cultural encounters via Latvian exile art circles—for example, the Hell’s Kitchen collective in New York, which Daina Dagnija was part of. Yet, accounting for the feminist sensibility in Dagnija’s works introduces a new dimension to transatlantic feminist genealogies as well as enhances intersectional feminist perspectives in Latvian art that are based in Eastern European cultural and political histories.

Daina Dagnija was born in 1937 in Riga. Four years later, in 1941, her family was affected by the atrocities of the communist regime when her cousins’ parents were deported to Siberia. Dagnija and her family fled the Soviet occupation in 1944, traveling to Gdansk in a cargo ship, and later to Germany, where they spent six years in the camps for displaced persons before moving to Detroit in 1951. In the following years, Dagnija studied art in New York and Los Angeles, and after a trip to Okinawa with her husband, she became immersed in the vibrant artistic and political activism and transformation taking place in the 1960s and ’70s in New York.

Numerous paintings undertaken by Dagnija during this period attest to her proximity to and involvement with the ideas and events associated with the women’s liberation movement (for example, Miss America 1922 and The Orator, both from 1969), and with antiwar and environmental activism (for example, Eartha Kitt from 1968 and Earth Day from 1971). Others reflect her interest in hippie subculture and popular culture (for example, Target Queen from 1980, Hair from 1971/72, and High Wire Performers from 1981). During this time, she developed what would later become her signature style—a form of figurative realism incorporating mainly human figures (often life-size depictions of women) rendered with thick, precise outlines against abstract backgrounds characterized by the application of intense complementary colors and elements associated with Pop and Op art.²Another hallmark of Dagnija’s style emerged early on in what is considered her “American period” (1968–2000), when she began depicting human bodies in green or blue, as if hinting at their nonhuman qualities.

Despite her references to American life, Dagnija emphasized that she experienced the United States as an outsider. Though “doing her own thing” and “preoccupied with . . . existential and survival needs,” she learned to “live on the edge.”³ A hint of this edginess can be sensed in the painting Flea Market (1979), which depicts a woman looking at a pile of colorful blankets for sale in an open-air market. She is wearing a white dress that, as is characteristic of traditional Latvian folk costumes, is accessorized with a waist belt and pin, the latter recalling a sakta, or shirt brooch. In the market, among the many exotic, outdated, and vintage wares, she is perhaps looking for a sense of belonging and identity—or maybe recalling childhood memories and images or objects evoking life in Latvia prior to the Soviet occupation.

Dagnija expressed a much sharper and poignant sense of non-belonging, of being an outsider, in her multiple depictions of refugees. In her memoirs, the artist remembers that “since we had lost everything, I . . . learned not to worry about the material values or ‘security,’ which helped me to survive as an artist in the US.”⁴ Art historian and curator Andra Silapētere observes that the experience of exile was an important point of departure for Dagnija because the artist saw “parallels between her [own] story and those of refugees and marginalised communities in other parts of the world,”⁵ including the Latvian diaspora in the United States. While The Immigrants (1969) echoes her personal experience, Vietnamese Refugees (1976/77) and Afghan Refugees, also known as Where To (1980), address the casualties and loss caused by military conflicts incited by imperial powers in other parts of the world.

In these works, Dagnija emphasized the collective nature of displacement and flight—drawing attention to the fact that it is whole families and communities, not only individuals, who have been forced to flee. Despite their unusual and traditional appearance, the artist’s representations of migrants or culturally marginalized groups are never exoticized, nor do they celebrate “primitiveness.” Instead, her depictions of nomadic subjects⁶ reveal a sense of “tender attunement”—an attitude “characterized by inclusivity, openness, commitment, and sensitivity”⁷ —that enhances their capacity to speak⁸ and acknowledges their right to public mourning of lost homes and lives. Decades before the rights of Indigenous peoples had been officially recognized, Dagnija established an affective affinity for culturally, economically, and socially oppressed native communities. We can see this, for example, in Tribal Portrait (1975), or in works from the artist’s Okinawa period (1961–62), when she empathically explored the everyday life of the island’s inhabitants.

In her memoirs, the artist recalls that in refusing to identify with American consumer culture and fashions, or the US market economy, her thinking was “closer to that of Native Americans.”⁹ Moreover, turning to Indigenous cultures as alternatives to patriarchal consumer capitalism fostered her environmental awareness and nourished her interest in premodern societies, in their rites and beliefs, suggesting that a synthesis of matter and spirit, Indigenous wisdom and practices of art-making, can bring about new ways of being in the world.¹⁰ In particular, Dagnija focused on pantheistic religions, among them, the Goddess movement and its mythical notion of the Earth as a living organism. These perspectives are manifest especially in works from the late 1980s, when, for Dagnija, the female figure began to represent “a quasi-universal mandala, a kind of cosmos”¹¹ in which myths and symbols of Native American, Baltic, Hindu, Greek, and other cultures interact and converge (for example, Woman Power and Lava from 1993, Nymph from 2008, Paris Painting No. 1 from 2009, and Family Tree from 2011).

However, Dagnija’s artistic incentives nonetheless retained a political dimension, one eliciting the trauma of Soviet atrocities. The series Ancestor Lakes (1986–95), for example, not only evokes traditional Latvian folklore, mythology, and cosmogony but also speaks of the forgotten and silenced victims of totalitarian oppression. An even more poignant exposure of the horrors and crimes of the Communist regime is the Martyr series (1989). Among this body of work is a painting of a flipped female figure (reminiscent of an upside-down crucifix) fading into a snowstorm, which the artist dedicated “to the deported, who starved and froze in Siberia.”

The nomadic wanderings of Dagnija’s subjects are also gendered. Dagnija  returned to Latvia in 2001, and after her 2002 exhibition at the Museum of Foreign Art in Riga—now Art Museum Riga Bourse—she remarked that although some visitors had interpreted her works as related to Pop art, she actually had “little in common with the boys of ‘American’ Pop—I was European, an immigrant, a mother, [and] later—a divorced woman artist raising two sons by herself.”¹² She frequently incorporated motifs of motherhood, especially in the 1970s and ’80s. Often disturbing depictions of pain, anxiety, and suffering, these images are characterized by an intense red and Neo-Expressionist aesthetic. Works like Scream (1986), Falling (1986), and The White Line (1987) expose maternal distress and vulnerabilities, and they resonate with a feminist critique of the commonly perceived disposability of female bodies and the appropriation of their reproductive functions for ideological purposes—as well as the double or even triple burden of a woman who is at once a mother, single parent, and artist.          

A more balanced view of mothering is represented in the series Woman and a Cow (1982–85), although the reference to pregnancy and the figure of an infant appear in only four of the fourteen paintings comprising it. According to art critic Aiga Dzalbe, the series might evoke associations with the myth of the Rape of Europa or the biblical story of the Flight into Egypt, or with the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.¹³ Yet it can also be read as a return to the meadow where Dagnija and her sister played as children. If in the painting Summer 1944 (1980) the two girls are disturbed by the military plane, in Woman and a Cow the threatening object is replaced by the cow – a nurturing, comforting, and life-bearing companion, a mother, and perhaps also a midwife. In this sequence of images, the woman and cow develop a post-human intimacy exemplified by their corporeal proximity and peaceful coexistence. The motif of a woman lying in the grass while a cow silently observes her recurs in several paintings and can be interpreted as an expression of the time necessary to overcome the pain of loss and the trauma of non-belonging. The process of gestation and birth and, in the final works in the series, the suckling of an infant, signify revival and a return to life, emphasizing the caring relationships, mutuality, and respectful coexistence evoked by the possibility of homemaking in a homeless world. The promise of a home is enabled by traversing the distinction between human and nonhuman, the self and the other, the caregiver and the cared for, the body and the spirit.

The nomadic subjectivity in Dagnijas’s works is saturated with her multicultural interests and experiences as a refugee, woman, mother, and artist. She has enriched and expanded the feminist ideas of the second wave with Indigenous wisdom and commitment to strive for the sustainable conviviality of species while reviving ancient views of cosmogony. Dagnija’s nomadic insights reflect the historical trauma of replacement and the social vulnerability of marginalized or oppressed communities. Her work addresses the mayhems caused by imperial powers, and it honors their victims while preserving hope for revival, rebirth, and reconstitution of life. The pain of loss combined with the joy of homemaking establishes a unique feminist sensibility in Latvian art—one that while nourished by feminist activism in the United States, remains grounded in Baltic history, culture, and mythology. The nomadic subjects in Dagnija’s work and the promise of finding a home remain important allies in the face of today’s political and social crises of fortifying imperial ambitions and reemerging forms of coloniality. 

The author is grateful to Roland Krumins, Elita Ansone and Dace Ševica for their help with the visual materials. 

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In this text, curator and writer Nina Mdivani revisits the lives and work of Tamar Abakelia (1905–1953) and her student Natela Iankoshvili (1918–2007). She emphasizes how these two Georgian women artists navigated between undertaking state commissions and finding windows of opportunity to oppose the regime and, in the process, creates a genealogy of Georgian artistic practices.

History of Georgian art in the twentieth century reflects two dynamics influenced by the larger history of Soviet occupation.¹ On the one hand, official art followed formalist norms of Socialist Realism by submitting to the fiction of a bright Communist future. On the other, this official directive inspired artists to find unique ways of subverting the artistic dictates established by the regime and defiantly pursuing their individual ideas. The work of women artists Tamar Abakelia (1905–1953) and her student Natela Iankoshvili (1918­–2007) illustrate these concurrent tendencies.

Abakelia, considered one of the most intriguing Georgian artists of the 1930s and ’40s, worked as a sculptor, illustrator, and costume designer for theater and film. She was made an Honored Artist of the Georgian Socialist Republic in 1942 and is remembered as one of the most authentic Soviet masters of her time. Her family background is integral to an understanding of her life and work. Her father, Grigol Abakelia (1880–1938), was a member of the Highest Court Commission of the Georgian Socialist Republic and, accused of being a member of the Polish secret service and of working for the Polish government, was executed during Stalin’s Great Purge.² Her uncle, Ioseb Abakelia (1882–1938), was a notable professor and founder of the Georgian Institute for the Study of Tuberculosis in 1930. Like his brother, Ioseb was executed after he was accused of being a spy and plotting an act of terrorism against the Soviet regime.³

Although Tamar Abakelia’s oeuvre is vast and multifaceted, one project in particular exemplifies her aesthetics while also evoking complex developments in Georgian history.⁴ In 1936–37, she completed five friezes for the Institute of Marxism-Leninism on Rustaveli Avenue, Tbilisi’s central thoroughfare: Batumi Demonstration under the Leadership of Comrade Stalin in 1902, The Meeting of Partisans with the Red Army, Georgian Agriculture, Industry in Georgia, and Happy Life. Leading artist of the day Iakob Nikoladze (1876–1951), who was Abakelia’s teacher and mentor at the Academy of the Arts and himself a student of Auguste Rodin (1840–1917), had been commissioned to design sculptural details for this important building and invited Abakelia to work with him. The Institute was a special project of Lavrentiy Beria (1899–1953), then leader of the Communist Party of Georgia and a close comrade of Josef Stalin. Figures 3 and 4 reproduce archival documentation of two of the friezes. Figure 5 reproduces an archival photo of the Institute in 1941, when it opened. Figure 6 depicts an archival photo of Tamar Abakelia, Beria, and Nikoladze in front of the Institute building at the time it was erected.

As can be seen in figures 3 and 4, Abakelia truthfully adhered to visual formulas associated with Socialist Realism in her depictions of the social progress and triumph of Communism in Georgia. Friezes were widely regarded as marking the revival of the Georgian bas-relief tradition—and were important examples of Georgian monumental-decorative sculpture of the twentieth century. What is visible here is a form of monumentalism that is characteristic of Abakelia’s visual style throughout her career. This return to Renaissance aesthetics is not out of line with the Soviet “promotion” of the physical, emotional, and intellectual well-being of the individual. As postulated in 1934 during the First Congress of Soviet Writers formulated by Andrei Zhdanov (1896–1948) and Maxim Gorky (1868–1936), Socialist Realism represented the single “artistic method” requiring “a true, historically concrete depiction of reality in its revolutionary development . . . [reflecting] the new world, the new person, and a new style.”⁵

Abakelia’s friezes depict chains of soldiers and laboring farmworkers symbolically ready to give up their youth and life force for the glory of the Motherland. One important aspect observable here as well as more evident in other works by the artist is that the women stand by the men in equal positions. Women representing strength and power look stern and capable of action; they are not playing secondary roles, but rather are agents of force and change.

Again and again in a diary that she kept from 1918 to 1940, Abakelia emphasizes: “People and their characters interest me the most. First and foremost, I want to know how they look and what they feel.”⁶

Idealized naturalism, a term coined by Georgian art historian Giorgi Khoshtaria, aptly describes the Soviet art of this time.⁷ In fact, idealized naturalism was a cornerstone of Socialist Realism as it helped to distill the normative and prescriptive ideology of Communism into digestible, optimistic, life-affirming symbols and imagery. One could argue that the ideology of the totalitarian conveyer was not vastly different from that of Ancient Egypt or Greece, both of which were slave-owning societies that produced strong visual imagery to support their ideologic stances. Sociological aesthetics, a term first used by Georg Simmel in 1896, theorizes that aesthetic forms and sociological organization are linked to produce one final, total reality.⁸

Bulgarian philosopher Vladislav Todorov has further elaborated on this point, suggesting that “society is a poetic work, which reproduces metaphors, not capital.”⁹ This fairy tale of a healthy new race was one that Abakelia, as an artist within the system, had no choice but to illustrate. We can only surmise how she felt when members of her own family were persecuted by the creators of this gruesome delusion and the Empire that promoted it, but in order to be able to live and work as an artist, she had to produce works that adhered to the Soviet regime’s strict artistic guidelines.

The history of the Institute of Marxism-Leninism, originally called the Marx-Engels-Lenin-Stalin Institute, reflects the larger context of subsequent Georgian history. Construction of the building took place in 1934–38 and cost fourteen million Soviet rubles. Three years later, in 1941, the architect, Alexei Shchusev (1873–1949), was awarded the Stalin Prize, first degree, for his design. During Khrushchev’s Thaw in the mid-1950s to mid-1960s and the dismantling of Stalin’s cult, the Institute removed Stalin from its name. Its rich library became a public library in 1990 but, soon after, was in disarray. During the civil war in Tbilisi in 1991–92, vandals damaged Abakelia’s friezes.¹⁰

In portraying women as figures of equal strength, Abakelia effectively fought the patriarchy and age-old values in traditional Georgia that insisted upon positioning the male figure at the center of the visual culture produced by Socialist Realism and its male artists.¹¹ She showed women as equal to if not stronger than their male comrades, a stance in contrast to the traditional sentimentalization of women as gentle mothers and caretakers—and a torch her student at the Tbilisi Academy of the Arts, Natela Iankoshvili, would continue to carry.

The landscapes and cultural landmarks of the Kakheti region in eastern Georgia, where Natela Iankoshvili was born and raised, influenced her work throughout her life. Her parents, Archil Iankoshvili and Mariam Zardiashvili, both teachers from Gurjaani, a town in Kakheti, instilled a love of nature and literature in their three daughters. Iankoshvili started drawing and painting as a child and, in 1937, enrolled in the Academy of Arts in Tbilisi, where she studied with renowned Georgian artists David Kakabadze (1889–1952), Tamar Abakelia (1905–1953), and Sergo Kobuladze (1909–1978). After graduation from the Academy, Iankoshvili actively pursued painting, initially accepting the dictates of Socialist Realism, and from 1930 into the 1950s, building up a substantial body of work. She started to travel around the country, painting her favorite locations. Over time, she drastically changed her style, and at one point, burned over two hundred of her earlier, more traditional works.

A solo exhibition of Iankoshvili’s work opened at the Tbilisi State (Blue) Gallery in 1960, and she became the first woman painter to have such a showing in this official space. With its more than 250 starkly different, dynamic, progressive, fresh, and emotionally raw works, the exhibition stirred many voices in the Soviet art community. Contemporary art critics aptly compared Iankoshvili’s paintings to compositions by Alexander Scriabin (1872–1915), Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750), and Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827) in their sophisticated yet poetic structure and approach. As important Georgian-French art critic Gaston Bouatchidzè wrote, “One does find subdued colors and smiling softness, tenderness in her works, but it is above all in these profound, dark depths where the essence of her paintings is rooted.”¹²

Autumn in Kiziki from 1976 (fig. 7) underlines her independence and strength of will, especially when seen in comparison to the docile landscapes of her contemporaries. The expressionist landscape of Kiziki is likewise portrayed with uncommon freedom and exuberance. The silhouettes of trees blend with the black background, connecting the work to that of two Georgian masters: Niko Pirosmani (1862–1918), a self-taught artist and iconic presence in Georgian art history who used a dramatic black background for his still lives and genre scenes, enlivening them with vibrant splashes of color, and Elene Akhvlediani (1901–1975) who, like Iankoshvili, painted landscapes, albeit in much more traditional style, and also used trees as compositional devices.¹³ The connection of Iankoshvili to her Georgian roots rather than to Soviet ones is noteworthy. As one contemporary writer noted, she consciously rose against the notion of the artist as chronicler of “nature’s tireless reconstructor and transformer,” as was expected in landscape painting of the time.¹⁴ The work’s abstract elements and rich lushness of color intensify the uncanny emptiness of the landscape, which is devoid of figures. To be sure, Iankoshvili seems to have eliminated the surrounding Soviet compatriots, instead focusing on a spiritual communion with the Unknown. The fact that Iankoshvili created her works during the Thaw, a time of relative liberalization and de-Stalinization initiated by Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev (1894–1971), made this form of abstraction and her highly individualized method of portraiture not only possible, but also celebrated. In 1976, Iankoshvili became the People’s Artist of Georgia; in 1987, she had an exhibition at the House of Literature in Moscow; in 1996, she received the Georgian Medal of Honor; and in 2000, the Natela Iankoshvili House Museum was founded in Tbilisi, and the artist left all her works to the museum.

Though both Abakelia and Iankoshvili lived and worked in the Soviet period, they were nonetheless able to realize their visions. Neither of them was a dissident in the traditional artistic sense of producing so-called unofficial or underground art, and yet both fought the demands and restrictions of the authoritarian machine. Abakelia was able to produce fundamentally new sculptural representations of women fully equal to their male comrades and to engage in building the country’s artistic future. Iankoshvili continued this line of representation by creating distinct and bold portraits of her contemporaries and then went on to produce even more controversial, abstract, spiritual renderings of the surrounding landscapes. Although neither was a dissident, both held nonconformism as a personal value. Their positions as artists paved the way for underground artists of later decades.

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In this text, Dorota Jagoda Michalska writes about Erna Rosenstein (1913–2004), a Jewish Polish postwar artist. Until now, Rosenstein’s work has been situated among the very few examples of Surrealist work in socialist Poland. Michalska opens up a transnational perspective, inviting us to look at the artist’s oeuvre through the lens of global surrealisms, connecting her articulations of Holocaust trauma with the work of artists who have dealt with slavery, genocide, exile, and colonial dispossession.

Against a black and lustrous background, a silvery landscape painted with elegant and delicate lines emerges. An aural simmering envelops what looks like the gentle slope of a mountain in the far-off distance. Several fractured lightnings irradiate from the mountain’s peak, cutting through the black background. Erna Rosenstein’s enigmatic painting Palace of Lightnings (Pałac błyskawic, 1989) has rarely been the focus of critical reflection, because it slips through the main theoretical categories used to describe the artist’s oeuvre. Current scholarship sees her work as an articulation of Holocaust trauma, situating it within the field of postwar modern art in Eastern Europe.¹ Scholars also underscore that her paintings are among the very few examples of Surrealism in socialist Poland.² However, her complex artistic practice benefits from a more transnational reflection, one that positions her work not only in the context of her Jewish identity and Polish history but also against a broader background of global experiences of Surrealism.

Present readings of Rosenstein’s practice see her work as inexorably linked to her biography. The artist was born in 1913 in Lviv (currently western Ukraine) to an upper-class Jewish family. While her parents acknowledged their ethnic background, they opted for full assimilation into Polish society. Paradoxically, while the artist herself did not consider her ethnic identity paramount, during the Nazi occupation of Eastern Europe, it was exactly her family’s Jewish background that brought tragedy upon them. In their escape from Warsaw in 1942, they were betrayed by a Polish shmaltsovnik (slang for a person who blackmailed Jews during the Nazi occupation), who brutally murdered the artist’s parents.

Miraculously, Rosenstein escaped and managed to survive. Among her most famous works is Screens (Ekrany) from 1951, which has been the central subject of most of the critical writings about Rosenstein. This violently traumatic painting portrays the decapitated figures of the artist’s parents playing ball with their cutoff heads. The work immediately makes us realize just how deeply Rosenstein’s work is rooted in the long history of the difficult cohabitation of Poles and Jews, which reached its tragic zenith during World War II.

While acknowledging the fundamental importance of this historical context, my text proposes a different inroad into Rosenstein’s practice. My aim is to situate her paintings in a broader, international context, one shaped by global histories of coloniality, dispossession, and racial necropolitics. It is for this reason that I want to place Rosenstein’s work within the framework of global histories of the Surrealist avant-garde as outlined in the 2021–22 exhibition Surrealism Beyond Borders, which included Screens.³ While Rosenstein’s work is often categorized as Surrealist within the framework of Polish art history, a comparative perspective opens up new readings of her practice, ones that challenge current narrations on the artist’s works.

Post-Genocidal Ecologies

In 1950, decolonial writer, thinker, and activist Aimé Césaire published the groundbreaking essay “Discourse on Colonialism,”in which he famously claims that there are profound and direct genealogical ties between fascism and the European colonial project. Césaire maintains that European colonies were an experimental ground for Nazism, especially the war and genocide waged upon the Herero and Nama people in Namibia.⁴ Seen in this light, fascism was not merely a tragic exception in European history, but rather quite the opposite; in fact, it was a logical continuation of earlier historical processes and political formations. Nowadays, Césaire’s text is seen as crucial, because it traces fundamental historical parallels between the Holocaust and the experiences of slavery, genocide, exile, and colonial dispossession.⁵

The historical parallels drawn by Césaire shed new light on some of Rosenstein’s paintings. For many years, I have been deeply fascinated by a number of her less well-known works, in particular, those that portray a complex landscape dominated by dark, lush, and impenetrable vegetation. The painting It Is Growing (Rośnie, 1965) presents a florid and vibrant ecological system of hybrid, organic forms undergoing constant transformation.
Another work—the more somber No Man’s Land (Ziemia Niczyja, 1964)—portrays a similar organic landscape; however, instead of brimming with greenery, it confronts us with dark, swirling layers of gray, which sit heavily on the painting’s surface. Both works can be seen as articulations of a post-genocidal landscape marked by fleeting echoes, decaying remains, and spectral presences. Indeed, Rosenstein’s organic ecosystems are expressions of an almost forensic artistic sensibility alert to the smallest and often non-visible traces of the genocide perpetrated by Nazism in Eastern Europe.⁶

As I looked at Rosenstein’s traumatic visions of nature, I was reminded of Jungle (La Jungla, 1943), which waspainted by Cuban artist Wifredo Lam (1902–1982) amid World War II. This painting is, nowadays, considered a fundamental decolonial work reflecting the diasporic identities of the Caribbean.⁷ More specifically, it is an attempt to articulate the postcolonial status of the Caribbean ecosystem marked by colonial violence, extortionists policies, racial fantasies, and slave labor. In 1951, Guyanese writer and decolonial thinker Martin Carter (1927–1997) expressed a similar sentiment in his poem “Listening to the Land”: “I bent down / listening to the land / but all I heard was tongueless whispering . . . as if some buried slave wanted to speak again.”⁸ Lam’s Jungle and Carter’s poem closely resonate with Rosenstein’s paintings of post-genocidal nature, revealing a profound kinship between postcolonial landscapes marked by the histories of slavery and the Polish ecosystem in the aftermath of the Holocaust.

The Alchemy of Gender

Recent years have marked a resurgent interest in underrepresented women artists associated with Surrealism. Of special importance in this context is the rediscovery of women artists outside the Western canon, such as Egyptian painter and feminist activist Inji Efflatoun (1924–1989), Brazilian sculptor Maria Martins (1984–1973), and Czech painter and illustrator Toyen (1902–1980). How can Rosenstein be set against this expanded backdrop of Surrealism? Akin to numerous Polish women artists in the 1960s and 1970s, the Jewish-Polish artist never considered her work in feminist terms; rather, she insisted upon the universal dimension of her practice. However, a reframing of her works within global histories of Surrealism helps us to approach this question from a slightly different perspective.

Throughout her life, Rosenstein maintained a keen interest in alchemy. The language of alchemical practices, founded on such concepts as transformation, distillation, and sublimation, seems particularly well suited for describing the dynamic and ephemeral nature of her paintings. Her works often portray nebulous, vaporized matter that seems just on the verge of either liquifying or evaporating. While researching Rosenstein’s practice, I remember being immediately struck by her painting The Burning of the Witch (Spalenie czarownicy) from 1966. This work confronts viewers with its sprawling, painterly surface of swirling patches of intense color: vibrant reds, fleshy pinks, and deep yellows. The fluidity of shapes seems to echo an ever-changing magmatic surface that, in turn, invokes uneasy images of intense heat and flames. In this piece, Rosenstein directly refers to the widespread phenomena of witch-hunting and public burnings that engulfed early modern Europe (including Eastern Europe) in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. As such, her painting offers a powerful image from the long history of violence toward women and their dispossession by both capitalism and colonialism.

Alchemical practices were also key references for other Surrealists, including British-born Leonora Carrington (1917–2011) and Spanish artist Remedios Varo (1908–1963). In the 1940s, both Carrington and Varo found themselves in exile in Mexico, having fled Europe, which was, at the time, engulfed by Nazism. Soon the two formed a close friendship based on their mutual keen interest in alchemy. Indeed, scholars unanimously underline the proto-feminist dimension of alchemical references in both their work.⁹ This is particularly evident in the case of Carrington, who was also actively engaged in the women’s liberation movement in Mexico. This context allows us to perhaps approach from a slightly different angle the question of gender in Rosenstein’s works. Though the artist claimed not to be interested in feminism, her focus on alchemy reveals an interest in processes of identity formation that eschew fixed categories of normative gender practices and policies. By focusing on alchemical transmutations—conjunctions, separations, sublimations—she forges her own artistic language to give voice to an unfixed subjectivity that slips through the enforced normativity of the discourse. While such an artistic language might seem removed from the more canonical forms of feminism, alchemy may have offered Rosenstein an idiomatic way of articulating her creative position in the postwar Polish art sphere dominated by male artists.

The Night of the Soul

In 1947, a volume of poetry entitled Suryāl (Surreal) was published in Aleppo, Syria. The avant-garde poet Urkhan Muyassar (1911–1965) claimed that the collected poems sought to unearth the “mysterious moments” of human creativity and to liberate them from the imposed tyranny of everyday life and the brutality of logic.¹⁰ The circle of artists active in Aleppo understood Surrealism as an artistic and spiritual project of reaching toward “what lies beyond reality.”¹¹ Such an understanding is deeply indebted to Sufism and older mystic practices. A similar claim was made later, in 1995, by Syrian poet Adūnīs (Ali Ahmad Said / علي أحمد سعيد إسبر, born 1930) in his book of critical essays Sufism & Surrealism. Adūnīs insists that there are fundamental ties between Sufism—as a mystical practice of losing one’s subjectivity and ecstatically approaching God/Nothingness—and writings by Surrealists poets and writers such as Arthur Rimbaud (1854–1891) or André Breton (1896–1966).¹²

These considerations open up a new perspective on several works by Rosenstein that so far have escaped critical attention. Pieces such as Evening (Wieczór, 1974) or Palace of Lightning (Pałac błyskawic, 1989) portray the delicate outlines of fantastic landscapes, frail architectural structures, and isolated human silhouettes cast against a deep and impenetrable black background. At first glance, these works might be seen as expressions of Rosenstein’s traumatic war experience. However, a different reading is possible. These paintings can also be understood as attempts to express what the Spanish mystic and poet St. John of the Cross calls the “dark night of the soul.”¹³ This moment marks a profound spiritual and existential crisis, but ultimately, it also leads to a mystic experience of illumination. This view offers a different perspective on the current psychoanalytical interpretations of Rosenstein’s work, which usually describe it as a sort of traumatic repetition—that is, a horror that recurs in her paintings.¹⁴ A mystical perspective allows us to see the “dark night of the soul” not only as a traumatic moment, but also as the beginning of an inner transformation. It is important to emphasize that—to my knowledge—Rosenstein was not aware of either the Syrian surrealists or Adūnīs’s writings; however, we can still weave together these parallel artistic sensibilities to see how they reflect and dialogue with one other.

By bringing mysticism into contact with Rosenstein’s practice, we might discover a new reading of her painting Clearance (Prześwit, 1968). To understand this work, we must be aware of the historical context of its creation: Rosenstein painted the piece during the anti-Semitic campaign that was waged in Poland in 1968 and resulted in hundreds of thousands of Jews leaving the country. However, other interpretations are also possible. The painting depicts a turbulent landscape with swirling gusts of violent pink. The land is in upheaval, and this restlessness hints at the histories of violence and genocide deeply embedded within the Polish landscape. Rosenstein represents reality as dominated by turbulent, billowing matter that abounds in dramatic transformations, movement, and sudden flashes. At the center of the image, a massive explosion of light is taking place, with sharp beams of light cutting across the whole canvas. The piece captures the moment just before the break of dawn—a mystical experience of vitality and renewal.

(Global) Polish Art Histories

Erna Rosenstein’s work recently has been exhibited in several important international shows, marking a new wave of interest her work.¹⁵ While older scholarship almost exclusively situates her practice within the field of postwar art in Poland, my text takes a different approach in that it considers the global implications of her practice. I believe that Rosenstein’s paintings allow us to see important historical parallels between the works of artists impacted by the Holocaust and those of artists facing the experience of slavery, genocide, exile, and colonial dispossession. Such a perspective is of paramount importance as it makes it possible to consider art practices from Eastern Europe in an expanded field, to see them as deeply shaped by global formations of coloniality and race. This line of thinking allows us to go beyond dominant narratives of national exceptionalism and to instead forge horizontal networks of solidarity and common political consciousness. Rosenstein’s practice—like the fractured lightnings she painted in 1989—point us toward these multiple directions, sudden illuminations, and affinities between what, at first glance, might seem to be very different realities.  

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This text considers the work of Vera Pagava, a Georgian artist who lived in exile in Paris, as an amalgamation of modernist and Georgian art historic references. Following Pagava’s life story from Tbilisi, where she was born, to Germany and later Paris, where she settled with her family in 1923 and lived until her death in 1988, this essay introduces her work in relation to that of various other Georgian artists, simultaneously tracing her path from figuration to abstraction.

Vera Pagava was born in 1907 in Tbilisi, Georgia. In 1919, she and her family left Georgia when her father, Georges Pagava, fell ill. Although the Pagava family intended to return, they soon realized that they would have to wait to do so, for Georgia was going through turbulent times, culminating in the 1924 August Uprising, an unsuccessful insurrection against Soviet rule.¹ In 1923, after living in Germany for several years, Pagava and her family moved to France, where they joined the Georgian émigré community settled in Montrouge. Between 1932 and 1939, Pagava studied fine art at the Académie Ranson in Paris with Roger Bissière (1886–1964) and Nicolas Wacker (1897–1987). She became friends with a group of artists in Paris, most of whom were also émigr­és, including Portuguese painter Maria Helena Vieira da Silva (1908–1992) and Hungarian painter Árpád Szenes (1897–1985).

In order to understand Pagava’s position as an artist, it is important to consider her biography not only within Paris and the larger international context, but also within twentieth-century Georgian history. The political situation in her native country in the 1920s had left her not only an émigré, but also an artist in exile.

Apart from her Georgian community in France, Pagava had a close relationship with her uncle Giorgi Naneishvili, who managed to return to Tbilisi (where in 1937, he was arrested and assassinated by the Soviets). Nonetheless, through him, she met other Georgian artists in Paris, including Ketevan Magalashvili (1894–1973), David Kakabadze (1889–1952), and Lado Gudiashvili (1896–1980), among others. Even though Pagava stayed in France until her death, she and her life companion Vano Enoukidze (1907–1979), who was also an artist and exile, and her family members never chose to become French citizens.


Not being interested in securing French citizenship was something Pagava shared with her friend and gallerist Tamara Tarassachvili who, in 1972, opened Galerie Darial with an exhibition of Pagava’s paintings.² Not only a vibrant place in the context of Paris, Galerie Darial was also the first commercial gallery in the history of Georgian galleries. Its name was derived from the Darial Gorge, a river gorge in the Caucasus on the border between Russia and Georgia. Darial Gorge and the river Tergi located within it were popular subjects among late nineteenth-century Georgian and Russian poets and writers, including Ilia Chavchavadze (1837–1907) and Akaki Tsereteli (1840–1915). Notably, Darial Gorge is immortalized in “Demon” (1839), a masterpiece of European Romantic poetry by Mikhail Lermontov (1814–1841). The Tergi and Darial Gorge would become symbols of resistance, independence, and the dissemination of knowledge in late nineteenth-century Georgian culture.

Apart from its name, the gallery also had a strong Georgian identity in terms of its graphic design. Tarassachvili chose to use the Georgian letter D (დ) as its main visual identity (fig. 1). At the time, given Georgia was hardly recognized as a culture independent from Russia, this seemingly subtle gesture was in fact a bold political statement.

In 1944, long before Darial represented Pagava, gallerist Jeanne Bucher introduced the artist’s work to Parisian audiences in a two-person exhibition with Dora Maar (1907–1997).³ From that point onward, Pagava’s work continued to be exhibited in France as well as throughout Europe and the United States—including in the 33rd Venice Biennale, held in 1966, in a group exhibition curated by Jacques Lassaigne, in which Pagava represented France. In Venice, Pagava’s abstract watercolor series from 1962–63 was showcased in the French Pavilion.

Parallel to Pagava’s artistic development in France, Georgian art history was evolving, shifting from a short-lived modernist period toward Socialist Realism. Especially in the 1930s, artists, poets, and visionaries on the other side of the Iron Curtain were either brutally executed or pushed to adapt to Soviet censorship. Artists in Georgia during this time, such as Niko Pirosmanashvili (Pirosmani, 1862–1918), found inspiration in practices allowed by the regime—for example, in works in the style of nineteenth-century Tbilisian portraiture—considered the first wave of independent Georgian portraiture, and Christian Orthodox wall painting of the Middle Ages.

In Pagava’s earlier works, in particular, one can trace influences of Georgian painting tradition. For example, Les Magnan (1947; fig. 3), which depicts three ladies dressed in black gathered around a table in a dim interior, is reminiscent of Tbilisian Portrait, Portrait of Andronikashvili (fig. 4) as well as early portraits by Ketevan Magalashvili (1894–1973; figs. 5, 6).⁴

The women in the portraits by Magalashvili also wear black, and they too are seated—and look out at the viewer. Their dark clothing contrasts with the lightness of their skin, highlighting their faces and hands. In all four portraits, the subjects’ postures and hand positions resemble one another. Curiously, the hands, in particular, evoke the hands in a much older portrait—an iconic twelfth-century portrait of the female King Tamar (fig. 7). Here, the shape of the king’s hand is noteworthy. Again, the light skin color and delicacy of the fingers are in contrast to the decorative elements of the subject’s clothing, and the rough, dark form of the object she holds. The geometrical figure of a square also occurs in all of the above-mentioned works: in the form of a window (fig. 3), a framed painting (fig. 5), a chairback (fig. 6), and an architectural model (fig. 7). The color black is dominant and serves as a background for much lighter colors—as well as frames the face and hands of those depicted.

In discussing the use of black in Georgian art, one cannot bypass the legacy of Niko Pirosmani (1862–1918), a self-taught artist who applied his paint directly to black oilcloth. Indeed black serves as a backdrop in most of his works. Recognized mostly posthumously, Pirosmani had an immense influence on the generations of artists that followed him, and Vera Pagava was no exception. It is known through her archive of personal belongings that she kept a Pirosmani catalogue in her studio, as well as reproductions from the Pirosmani exhibition held in 1969 at the Musée des arts décoratifs, the Louvre.⁵ Pirosmani’s influence can be felt throughout Pagava’s oeuvre, much of which uses his work as a point of departure. This is especially the case in Pagava’s earlier figurative works, but traces of Pirosmani’s luminous work can also be detected in the balance of heavenly light and darkness in her later abstract paintings.

Pagava’s later works, such as The Flight into Egypt (La Fuite en Egypte, 1944; fig. 8), Théatre Hebertot (1947; fig. 10), and Still Life with Bread, Slices of Melons, Glass (1954; fig. 12) evoke works by Pirosmani in subject matter, as well as in core technical aspects (see, for example, figs. 9, 11, 13). What is salient in both artists’ work is the balance between light and dark, the contrast created between black and yellow tones, and the almost autonomous quality of illumination. In examining the rendering of Georgian bread on the table in Pirosmani’s painting The Feast of Five Noblemen (1906; fig. 13) and of the melons on the table in Pagava’s Still Life with Bread, Slices of Melons, Glass (fig. 12), one sees the source of inspiration for what is a leitmotif in Pagava’s paintings. The recurring image of a half-moon-shaped melon in Pagava’s still lifes calls to mind Pirosmani’s masterful depictions of a supra (Georgian traditional feast)—and his focus on the objects on the table, rather than on the figures surrounding them. The transcendental nature of objects and subjects is yet another interest the two artists shared.

Throughout World War II (1939–45), particularly after the German invasion and occupation of France, Pagava explored biblical themes, addressing the difficult historical moment through religious subject matter. The absence of the figure in this series addressing the war’s brutality is emphasized in the archetypal nature of the narrative suggested by the objects depicted. The stark rendering of these images serves to represent the un-representable, and to evoke the biblical proportions of the tragedy of the times.

By the end of the 1950s, Pagava’s work had grown even more abstract. In this transitional period, the artist undertook a series of architectural landscapes in which she reduced buildings to almost pure geometric form, engaging the viewer in an interplay of lines and color (figs. 16, 17).

While Pagava took many steps in favor of abstraction, her formal decisions and color choices remained entwined with characteristics of her earlier works. Gradually, she completely abandoned figuration in favor of abstraction, settling upon the style she is most known for today. As if illuminated from within, her abstract forms suggest multiple planes on the surface of the canvas, which is devoid of corporeal and mundane qualities. Irregular shapes are fluid, morphing one into the other in harmonious compositions in which rectangular and triangular shapes have no sharp edges, but rather are soft and rounded. As her career progressed, Pagava sought to depict pure abstract forms in perfect equilibrium and harmony. Her later work can be described as spiritual, the product of her “inner world,” as she wrote in 1936 to British painter Roger Hilton (1911–1975),⁶ who was her close friend. On this rare occasion, an otherwise quiet and reserved person shared her ideas about art and the role of an artist: “It’s all right, Roger, you can earn a living and be a painter; you just have to be a human being, all the great painters were, above all, magnificent human beings. Painting reflects us, it is a miraculous mirror in which the outer world glimpses our inner world, talent is the means of communication between us and life, us and men, us and heaven and earth.”

While Pagava’s miraculous mirror reflects the modernist thinking characteristic of Paris in her time, it also reflects inward, into the deeply rooted Georgian influences she carried with her. Vera Pagava’s legacy is one of the rare artistic practices in which Georgian painting tradition is not only transformed into the language of modernism, but also stands as an intersection between the two. It is likewise yet another example of how the diaspora absorbs and profoundly shapes the art scenes of the artists’ new home countries.

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In the festival’s affiliated exhibition of South African art, held at the National Museum and Art Gallery of Botswana, Jantjes showed five works—including a print dedicated to Cabral alongside other images responding to the turmoil of apartheid. For Jantjes, these struggles were not unrelated, despite differing geopolitical conditions. Indeed, his early practice was clearly influenced by the ideas espoused by anti-colonial thinkers and leaders like Cabral—and Frantz Fanon, Eduardo Mondlane, and Kwame Nkrumah—whose writing, in turn, influenced the Black Consciousness movement and other anti-apartheid coalitions in South Africa. Exploring such connections through the artist’s work and writing, the present essay focuses on two screenprints that he created while in exile and presented in Gaborone—Freedom Hunters (1977; fig. 1) and It is our peoples (1974; fig. 2). The impact of Cabral’s theories on culture and revolution is evident in Jantjes’s multifaceted campaign in these years for what he termed “art for liberation’s sake.”⁵

Born in District Six, Cape Town in 1948, Jantjes was one of the only non-white students to attend the Michaelis School of Fine Art at the University of Cape Town, where he studied graphic design in the late 1960s. However, as a student, he was subjected to increased surveillance and threats of punitive action—not just by educational authorities but also by officials of the apartheid state—on account of his outspoken politics. In the last year of his studies, Jantjes began to urgently seek asylum outside of South Africa. Finally, in 1970, he received a DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service) scholarship and secured a spot at the prestigious Hochschule für Bildende Künst in Hamburg.

In Hamburg, Jantjes was mentored by artists such as Richard Hamilton (1922–2011), Joe Tilson (born 1928; fig. 3), and Joseph Beuys (1921–1986). Throughout the 1970s, he produced a prolific oeuvre of screenprints that combine archival and reportage photographs with quotations drawn from political theory, poetry, administrative records, and news articles. In each image, visual and textual passages are arranged as if torn from the pages of books or magazines and placed in dynamic juxtaposition to colorful Pop graphics. While reminiscent of the flatbed compositions common in much postwar art, Jantjes’s work departs from seemingly precedent works by Robert Rauschenberg (1925–2008) as well as Andy Warhol (1925–1987) in its expressly communicative purpose. Indeed, he wanted to make a tangible political impact, to educate viewers on the effects of colonization across the Global South. In his writing of the era, as in his art, Jantjes frequently argued that the times simply demanded that African artists directly engage with their political condition. He claimed in 1976, for instance, that “one cannot speak of form and colour when one’s environment speaks of poverty, hunger, and death.”⁶

These values were first demonstrated in A South African Colouring Book—his earliest, and still most celebrated series of screenprints. Created in 1974–75, the suite consists of eleven images that convey different facets of the history and brutality of apartheid. It was motivated by Jantjes’s astonishment at his German peers’ lack of knowledge about the situation in South Africa. Deploying a motif evoking children’s educational materials, the prints capitalize on multiple associations implied through the use of the term “colour”—a reference to the legislation of racial identity under apartheid, for instance, or to his own designation within this system as “Cape Coloured” (evidenced by the inclusion of his own identification card in one print; fig. 4).

While living abroad, Jantjes had new access to information about anti-colonial and Pan-Africanist movements beyond South Africa. (Any speeches, news, or publications affiliated with such campaigns would have been censored by the apartheid state—although materials were still exchanged covertly among Black activist networks). In 1971, during his first year in Europe, Jantjes visited London, where he attended a public rally for Cabral. The artist was previously unfamiliar with Cabral’s revolutionary activism, and the speech made an enormous impression on him. Jantjes recalled, in particular, Cabral’s comments on the importance of language, and his democratic approach to providing political education to rural communities in Guinea Bissau. Cabral addressed individuals on the level of their own experience, rather than relying on the often-alienating parlance of academic theory. “When we began to mobilise our people,” he explained, “we couldn’t mobilise them for the struggle against imperialism—nor even, in some areas of Guiné, for the struggle against colonialism—because the people didn’t know what the words meant. . . . We had to mobilise our people on the basis of the daily realities of suffering and exploitation.”⁷

Jantjes took to heart the importance of communicating, plainly and simply, the brutal daily realities of colonized people across the world. After Cabral was assassinated by a political rival in 1973, Jantjes produced a print dedicated to his visionary leadership. Entitled It is our peoples, the work’s collagelike composition draws quotations from Revolution in Guinea: Selected Texts, a then-recent English-language publication of Cabral’s writing and speeches. The titular phrase, for instance, which appears in large type against a sky-blue banner, could have been lifted from any number of repeated incantations in a lecture that Cabral delivered in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania: “[Our] fundamental strength is the strength of the people. It is our peoples who support our organisations, it is our peoples who are making sacrifices every day to supply all the needs of our struggle. It is our peoples who will guarantee the future and the certainty of our victory.”⁸

In the print, Jantjes has nestled this text alongside photographs of both daily life and military camps in Guinea. Among these images is a portrait of a PAIGC militant in uniform, screenprinted directly from the pages of Cabral’s publication Our People Are Our Mountains (1972)—in which an English translation of the London speech that Jantjes attended is reproduced.⁹ These fragments surround a larger, solarized double-portrait of Cabral wearing his signature beanie and sunglasses. According to Jantjes, this is a photograph that he himself took of the television screen during a broadcast feature on the Guinean revolution. As such, the work is not simply an homage to Cabral’s leadership, but also a testament to the circulation and intermedial re-translation of material related to African politics—filmic negatives, for instance, that traveled from West Africa to the British press, as well as televised images made static through photographic capture, or the circulation of printed translations of words originally spoken impromptu before a crowded gathering. At the same time, Jantjes’s double-portrait of a recently-assassinated public figure clearly resonates with Warhol’s use of repetition to signal matters of real and symbolic death (or adjacency thereto) in his homages to Marilyn Monroe, Jacqueline Kennedy, and Elvis Presley (figs. 5 and 6), or to the victims of car accidents, penal execution, or riot police in America.¹⁰

In the spring of 1976, this screenprint was among several shown at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London in what was Jantjes’s first major solo exhibition.¹¹ Included works drew content from a range of geopolitical contexts, from resistance efforts waged in Namibia to the American civil rights movement (fig. 7). But again, the artist cites Cabral. In his artist’s exhibition statement, Jantjes asserts that “we have to acknowledge through our creative expression that we are prepared to participate in the kenetic [sic] processes of culture and history,” before going on to quote Cabral, who once claimed: “The colonialists have a habit of telling us that when they arrived in Africa they put us into history. You are well aware that it’s the contrary—when they arrived in Africa they took us out of our own history.”¹²

Jantjes was in London when the shocking news of an event now known as the Soweto uprising was relayed across the world. For several weeks, students in the South-Western Townships near Johannesburg peacefully protested the enforcement of Afrikaans as the mandated language of instruction in South Africa—a law that further disenfranchised the country’s African populations. On June 16, 1976, demonstrators were met by a militarized police force who opened fire on the crowd, killing and wounding countless children. For weeks, the front pages of international newspapers circulated the horrific photograph of the uprising’s first victim: thirteen-year-old Hector Pieterson, carried in the arms of a frightened classmate. Captured by Black South African photojournalist Sam Nzima, the iconic image swiftly became a symbol of apartheid violence. In a matter of months, Jantjes produced several screenprints about the Soweto uprising, including No More (1977; fig. 8), City Late 26 June 1976 (1977), and Freedom Hunters (1977; fig. 1).

The latter is among the most impactful of these works. Featuring a cropped and doubled detail from one of journalist Peter Magubane’s photographs of the event, it depicts students fighting bullets with stones and wielding the lids of trash bins as shields. While conveying, in part, the futility of the students’ defense against police artillery, these photographs also demonstrate their resilience in protesting the discriminatory society into which they were born. Set against a bright red backdrop, with an image of barbed wire bisecting the composition, Freedom Hunters communicates a sense of urgency and pleads with audiences to recognize and protest the violence of apartheid.

Such works resonate with the media-critical Pop practices of Joe Tilson and Richard Hamilton, with whom Jantjes studied, while demonstrating the artist’s own belief in the political responsibility of post- and anti-colonial artists.¹³ As Cabral explained, the fight to reclaim one’s culture, history, and identity was as crucial to liberation struggles as the fight for legal rights. The students of Soweto demonstrated this same desire when they petitioned for an equal education. In fact, these protests were orchestrated by the South African Students’ Movement (SASM), an affiliate of Steve Biko’s Black Consciousness movement—and Biko is well documented as having been impacted by Cabral’s activism.¹⁴ Jantjes’s familiarity and alignment with such political and intellectual networks is evident in the boldly didactic style of his early practice, and in his attention to globalized circulations of political theory. In documenting the South African struggle in connection to other struggles being waged across the continent, Jantjes raised awareness and helped galvanize support for anti-colonial causes worldwide.

It is our peoples and Freedom Hunters were both on view in Gaborone during the 1982 Culture and Resistance Symposium and Festival—a gathering of cultural workers invested in parsing matters of art, education, and activism. The event drew delegates from every region of South Africa, and from exile across the world, to Botswana; leading voices such as Mongane Wally Serote, Hugh Masekela, Nadine Gordimer, David Goldblatt, and Keorapetse Kgositsile were among those who debated the role of culture in the ongoing struggle for liberation. Most participants, like Jantjes, believed strongly that art would remain intertwined with politics as long as the freedom struggle remained urgent. Gordimer declared, for instance, that “if you are a committed artist you are committed to using your talents to service the cause of justice,”¹⁵ while actor Zakes Mofokeng told peers that “trying to avoid politics in art is like trying to dodge raindrops on a rainy day.”¹⁶

While the symposium and festival lasted just a week, the event was accompanied by a two-month-long exhibition of South African art at the National Museum and Art Gallery of Botswana. Entitled Art Toward Social Development, and like the symposium and festival with which it coincided, it was one of the first and most significant occasions in which the work of both exiled and South African–based visual artists was displayed together in a “non-racial” exhibition—which, in the era’s parlance, meant it included work by South Africans classified as “black, coloured, or white” by the apartheid state. The organizers sought to represent the “entire spectrum of South African society” and to reflect a “panorama” of the nation’s creative activity.¹⁷ Significantly for Jantjes, who had not lived in his home country for more than a decade, the exhibition marked his inclusion within an emerging canon of anti-apartheid art, alongside compatriots Ezrom Legae (1938–1999), Lionel Davis (born 1936), David Koloane (1938–2019), Durant Sihlali (1935–2004), David Goldblatt (1930–2018), and Sue Williamson (born 1941), among others.

By the time of his participation in Art Toward Social Development, Jantjes was at the precipice of a major shift in style, artistic focus, and professional milieu. He moved to the United Kingdom in August 1982, and began to paint. His Korabra series, completed in 1986, comprised several large-scale acrylic paintings—texturized with sand embedded in pigment—that ruminate on the history of transatlantic slavery.¹⁸ Jantjes became increasingly interested in ancestral arts of Africa, including West African sculpture, Egyptian monuments, and Khoisan rock paintings (fig. 9). His interest in the latter, for instance, gave rise to a series of prints, paintings, and mixed-media works that overlay esoteric prehistoric imagery with indigo night skies shimmering with constellations and galactic haze. Mixed-media works such as Untitled (double canvas with sculptures) (1988; fig. 10) are remarkably enigmatic; the mystical imagery of stylized masks, natural materials including twigs, and abstracted ceramic ovoid and cubic forms make this piece virtually unrecognizable in relation to Jantjes’s polemical print practice of the 1980s. In an untitled painting from 1989 (fig. 11) , the artist paired the same mask motif—whose sharp, elongated contours are reminiscent of art produced by the Fang peoples of Gabon—with a female figure from Les Demoiselles d’Avignon by Pablo Picasso (1881–1973). Such works aim to uplift the status of African art, which has so often been pushed to the peripheries while European modernists appropriated their forms.

The seeds of these later artistic inquiries are, indeed, detectable in the speech that Jantjes delivered in Gaborone, in which he made the case for centering African art in Western art education. In this presentation, he echoed Cabral’s reminder that the colonists in Africa “took us out of our own history” and honored the Soweto students’ aspirations for an Afrocentric pedagogy: “Visual art education must work to eradicate the interiorization of the western evaluation of our contemporary art. It should instil [sic] in our people a meaningful interest in their culture and art and move them to recognise these as an integral part of the nations [sic] struggle against racist domination.”¹⁹

In his practice both in and out of the studio, Jantjes fought for the decolonization of culture and education, so as to ensure that future generations would have access to African history and identity. Drawing from references to Cabral and Biko, Warhol and Tilson, he grounded this effort in his faith in the power of collectivity and global solidarity.

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Rottenness is a presence, presentification, and manifestation of other-than-human beings (such as fungi, bacteria, larvae, insects…) in an organic body. In the rotting process, their presence is revealed by semantic and semiotic transformations; for example, fresh food – which can symbolize craving, nutrition, and stimulation – turns into the opposite when rotten – disgust, repulsion, and abjection. Rot emerges on a continuum between life and death, occupying two sides of the same coin; and yet, temporality is a possible way to differentiate between them. When rotten, the physical and visible existence of other beings—others living in the present—is activated.

Once an organism begins to rot as a result of the presence of these ‘others’, what becomes visible is an exponential acceleration of time, as matter shifts and emits odors, as decomposition transpires and aesthetics are altered. These changes can also be elevated by the process of decomposition itself—abjection draws attention. When it is lifeless, a body becomes an object; when it is decomposing, an object becomes abject. The properties of the relationship we create between these three bodily stages are produced by the social construction of the End and of Dying. To abject is to debase something: a relation of value is imbricated in processes related to death.

A body that is fresh strives to maintain its stability and durability, just as a rotting body strives to multiply its processes of material transmutation. However, both processes are contained in one another in an infinite loop. At the time of my death, the digestive bacteria in my stomach will extend its action and digest my own flesh; one day, the fly that lays its eggs in the abjection of my decay will also rot; a cluster of leaves, grass, and branches piled in heaps and decomposing for a long time provide ideal conditions for the development of plant growth: Post-Rotten.

When I observe the passage of time as fruit ripens, I witness the moment when freshness is interrupted, I witness the fruit getting past its prime.

When it comes to the temporality of ripening, the word Past extends to Overripening; One relationship between the meanings of “rot” and “inedible,” then, is Past. In a linear understanding of time, is that which is past, a rotten time?

Yet, if we take account of this effect from a chronological perspective, the future is rotten, since within a linear framework, past, present and future, Rottenness is the last stage of the fruit – the future takes place in front of us, as that which is yet to come – underripe, ripe, rot.

Past and future take place in the present of rot.

I seek temporal disruption and anachronism as possibilities for breaking the binarity of Death and Life.

Dife and Leath.

What is decomposing?

What is spoiled?

What is decaying?

What is putrefied?

Underripe, ripe, rot

Past its prime, Forwards, Backwards

Decay, Decline, Arise

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A podridão é a presença, presentificação e manifestação de seres além-de-humanos como fungos, bactérias, larvas, insetos em um corpo orgânico. Essa presença fica evidente pela mudança e transição semântica e semiótica com o podre, por exemplo em um alimento fresco – que pode simbolizar nutrição, desejo e estímulo – em seu oposto, quando podre – simbolizando nojo, repulsa e abjeção. Vida e morte em um contínuo, duas partes integrais de um mesmo, sendo uma das possíveis diferenciações, a temporalidade. Quando podre, ativa-se a existência física e visível de outres seres, outres presentes.

Um vez ativada a podridão de um corpo orgânico, com a presença desses outres, surge a sensação de que a ação do tempo tem uma aceleração exponencial da mudança da matéria com o surgimento de odores, seres decompositores e alterações estéticas. Essas alterações também podem ser enaltecidas por conta do próprio processo de decomposição – a abjeção chama a atenção – um ​corpo​ quando sem vida se transforma em um ​objeto​, um objeto quando em decomposição se transforma em um ​abjeto​. A relação desses três estágios de um mesmo corpo são qualidades que criamos a partir da construção social da morte e do fim. Abjeto é dar um valor baixo, de desprezo a algo – uma relação de baixeza e uma relação social de baixeza está impregnada por processos relacionados à morte.

O estado de frescor de um corpo luta para manter sua estabilidade e durabilidade, da mesma maneira que o estado de podridão também luta para multiplicar seu processo de transmutação da matéria. Porém, ambos processos estão contidos um em outre em um looping infinito – as bactérias em meu estômago que realizam a digestão irão, no momento do meu falecimento, expandir suas ações e digerir minha própria carne; um dia, a mosca que bota seus ovos na abjeta em putrefação também vai apodrecer; um conjunto de folhas, pasto e galhos decompondo e amontoados por muito tempo possibilitam condições ideais para o desenvolvimento de uma planta crescer: ​Pós-Podre​.

Quando observo a passagem do tempo de uma fruta fresca e madura, vejo o momento onde o estado de frescor é interrompido uma vez que a fruta se torna passada.

A palavra ​Passada​ com a temporalidade: O Passado.
Uma relação entre o significado do podre e do inconsumível: O Passado.

O que já passou, no entendimento linear do tempo, é um ​tempo podre​?

Ao mesmo tempo, se olharmos pela perspectiva cronológica e contável, podre é o futuro, uma vez que ainda dentro de um recorte linear – passado, presente e futuro – é o “último” estágio da fruta.

Podre é futuro.

Busco uma confusão temporal e um anacronismo como possibilidade de quebrar a binariedade de Vida e Morte.
Mida e Vorte.

O que está em decomposição?

O que está estragado?

O que está deteriorado?

O que está putrefado?

Passada, Fresco, Podre

Podre, Fresca, Passado

Fresque, Passade, Podre

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According to Rosi Braidotti, transversality (a term originally coined by Félix Guattari, then put at work in his collaborative work with Gilles Deleuze, in A Thousand Plateaux) is an operational concept that helps to understand the subject across multiple axes, recognizing that subjectivity is embedded within other transversal selves bonded by ontological relationality.¹ Indeed, we require a subject position worthy of our times, which means, after Braidotti, that we need to prioritize issues linked to social justice, ethical accountability, and transgenerational solidarity but that we also need to deal with colonialism, racialization, and other forms of injury derived from colonial and human-centered modern life-forms.²

Isabel Sandoval and Sophio Medoidze, presenters at the Rituals and Rapture Panel at the 2022 edition of C-MAP’s annual seminar series in May, outlined a variety of global contemporary forms of transversal subjectivity: Medoidze’s film Let us flow! (ვიდინოთ!) (2022) documents a community in the remote Caucasian Tusheti mountains in Georgia. Inaccessible to most, the region remains a natural sanctuary and one of the most ecologically “virginal” communities in the world. Medoidze’s gaze unravels the complexities inherent to maintaining law, order, and tradition in a premodern community in charge of guarding an ancestral shrine while dealing with the effects of the inevitable need to embrace aspects of modern life, such as mechanization, technology, and commodities. The film is about a community in flux, inhabiting a territory through what binds them, and about the tensions between past and present, between the very ancient ways they conduct their rituals and development. The subjectivities addressed by Medoidze are transhistorical. Then, Isabel Sandoval’s Lingua Franca (2019) tells the story of a Philippine trans immigrant in New York who makes a living looking after an older Russian Jewish woman withering with dementia. Arresting images inspired by Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman depict contemporary New York through the vagaries of the lived precarity of a migrant doing reproductive labor for a living. Sandoval also depicts the strain put on families by an elderly or ill person, how caretaking enters into conflict with individual desires, as well as the split between the migrant’s life here and there—a gap filled by regular phone calls with her mother. The subjectivities laid out in the film are transgender and transgeographical. There was also Diana Tamane, who presented work relating to her grandmother and mother in a transgenerational approach to microhistories. She presented the series of photographs titled Flower Smuggler (2016­–19), which shows beautifully arranged flowers in vases, as well as the documents from the Federal Customs Service of Russia relating to when her grandmother was accused of smuggling two pots of flowers across the border between Latvia and Russia to place on her dead grandfather’s grave. She also presented photographs and a video gathered under the title Mom (2016), which offer a portrait of her mother who, due to economic transformations in post-Soviet Latvia, worked as truck driver, distributing food between Latvia, Spain, and Italy. There are also the Family Portrait (2013– ), which depicts four generations of women, including Tamane, who every year make a picture together, and work generated by findings in her family album. Men are absent from the pictures, and the subjectivities laid out are transgenerational and transterritorial. Finally, Pamila Gupta presented a form of a transimperial, transcultural, and transethnographic subjectivities as laid out in her book Portuguese Decolonization in the Indian Ocean World (2018), which connects India and Southern Africa historically and ethnographically, observing communities that, at the end of Portuguese colonization in Mozambique, did not fit so easily within the labels of colonizer or colonized.³ All of the subjectivities exposed in the seminar are in search of agency, and come from disenfranchised and disempowered contexts: the pre-political Tushetian community in Georgia, a Philippine trans immigrant, working-class women fending on their own in Eastern Europe, and Hindus in postcolonial Mozambique. These microhistories enable a plural and complex vision of history, and of the global present, traversed by class, race, and gender specificities.

The subjects laid out in the seminar are thus situated across a variety of fractures addressing power differences and differential degrees of access to the benefits of citizenry, security, and technological advances, addressing key issues of our times, including global flows of migration, displacement, economic disparity, rising racism and homophobia, xenophobia, warfare, and developmentalism. These subjectivities are anthropocentric and beyond ecosophical assemblages that include nonhuman actors. They are deeply steeped in the cultural world, and traditional in the sense that they are constructed through a humanist paradigm. This humanist subjectivity stems from the principle of the agency of man over a world premised on rationalism. Humanist subjectivation means to throw away the shackles of tradition, religion, and history to enable “man” to take over “his” destiny. This human quest to take charge of history has informed Western political movements, from the French Revolution, to class struggle, to the Zapatista uprising, to discourse around the recognition of rights, giving way to the figures of the “proletariat,” the “subaltern,” or the “non-cis” and the “underdeveloped.”

Humanist subjectivity is furthermore figured as a locus of potential consciousness, and traversed and vexed by colonial and postcolonial identity ambivalence. This form of subjectivation implies a search for a modern authentic being in the face of postcoloniality, positing identity as more than a rational individuating project within the utopian plenitude of romantic community. It involves reclaiming the ground lost in history to colonization, where the self may recognize itself in the form of a collectively emancipated subject recovered from the plundering of its culture and historical memory. In this context, a debate emerges on how to politicize one’s otherness: as subaltern demanding recognition or, for example, through the postmodernist understanding of the operations of power in relation to how the cultural production of minorities, such as feminists and Black people, has been inevitably positioned within modern institutions. This form of humanist postcolonial subjectivity posits a unique individual being, one with a distinctive inner voice and a string of experiences that cannot be repeated. It also implies human agency over our environment and a human drive for emancipation as the ultimate good. In this sense, desire as a revolutionary force, as the desire to self-determine, to become an individual, to shape oneself according to one’s needs and the wish to exist as separate from the community, and to be recognized, are the premises for the individual salvation of everyone. Affect, sensations, desires, memories are indeed at stake in producing transversal subjectivities across temporalities of decolonization and displacement. How do these forms of attachment and sensations of connection create communities? How do they establish interrelational webs or enable us to take root?

We should bear in mind that these transversal subjectivities operate in the field of representation—that is to say, they emerge in a field in which identities come to the fore seeking subjectivation and political self-determination. This is the same field in which violence is originated and managed, and for most of the twentieth century, this field was constructed by development discourse, which had been central to and the most ubiquitous operator within the politics of representation and identity in much of Asia, Africa, and Latin America in the post–World War II period. In this context, the European modernity project was appropriated as a national project in postindependence countries, giving way to the suppression of local cultures in the name of development. As a regimen of representation, development was linked to an economy of production and desire, but also of closure, differentiation, and violence, which came to be the sources of identity. What Jean-François Lyotard argued about the becoming working class of peasants and unemployed, without a doubt, applies to colonized subjectivities, for whom, Lyotard argued, the process of modernization was joyful. He wrote, “[Workers] enjoyed the mad destruction of their organic body which was indeed imposed on them, they enjoyed the decomposition of their personal identity, the identity of the peasant tradition had constructed for them, enjoyed the dissolution of their families and villages. . . .”⁴ The very existence of the Third World has been, in fact, wagered, managed, and negotiated around the politics of representation surrounding modernization and development.

Humanist subjectivity in the postcolonial world, moreover, came with the belief, promise, and desire for development, which became a certainty in the social imaginary. Development posits social life as a technical problem, as a matter of rational decision that requires the management of experts. Development has implied making postcolonial societies fit a preexisting model that embodies the structures and functions of modernity, subjecting populations to an infinite variety of interventions encompassing post (neo)colonial forms of power and systems of control, and selling Third World resources to the most convenient bidder, degrading physical and human ecologies, orienting economies around primitive accumulation or extractivism. Institutional practices and technology and infrastructure are crucial for development, and they have contributed to producing and formalizing social relations, divisions of labor, cultural forms, the production of discourses, and subjectivities.

One of the tenets of postcolonial theory is (to put it briefly) that everything must be locally situated and historically contextualized, and at the core of developmentalist subjectivity is the desire to be recognized. The private certitudes embedded in the desire for recognition and the politicization of a “subaltern,” “decolonial,” “underdeveloped,” and even a “non-cis” subjectivity, stem from the humanist values and morals that found liberal modernity. The problem is that these narratives are now out of sync with the world in which we live. In as far as individual narratives are the lens through which we understand the present, we are failing to see the shape of the societies we inhabit in the face of the ever speeding up of cultural change. These forms of subjectivation also fail to shed light on the contemporary manifestation of the modern relationship between humankind and machines, which is the content and form of subjective arrangements. Machines, which are the reality constructed by capitalism, are not specters of modernity but rather the concrete forms in which life organizes itself, and the world transforms itself and enables the material connections within which subjectivities are produced.

What is more, in  our contemporary world, as collective efforts are monopolized by humanism’s drive for emancipatory freedom, our imaginations are limited, while rational models, stable empirical facts, and data or system prediction no longer offer us reassuring truths. To what extent are our current crises exacerbated by our ideological commitment to the tenets of liberal humanism? Following Franco Berardi, “progress” has given us a world in strife and chaos; the desire to be seen, constitutive of modern subjectivities, has led to extreme polarization and ethnic hatred, giving way to the disintegration of the hegemonic geopolitical order that resulted from five centuries of white colonization and extraction.⁵ We are also realizing that human agency over the planet is a fantasy that no longer holds. A parallel modernity is thus emerging, one that is decentering human perspective, questioning the founding myths of modernity. A notion of the “post-human” in Rosi Braidotti’s sense (not in the Silicon Valley sense) is necessary, to bring back issues of survival, interdependency, relationality—and to conceptualize transversal assemblages encompassing material reality entangled with that which is outside the human, to free language from voice and representation, to approach the radically inhuman.

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