Foreign Language Index (FLI) 2

FOREIGN LANGUAGE INDEX Contents Editor’s Note 1 Languages 5 Chinese Danish German Hungarian Italian Korean Latvian Polish Portuguese Serbo-Croatian Spanish Turkish Indexers 28 Editor’s Note Notes on the Foreign Language Index: The Global Contemporary in 2021 Historians (SCAH). The selected scholarship signals a range of shifts (and some continuities) within the paradigm of global contemporary art as it has been understood for the past decade or so. 2. I write these introductory remarks as we near the second anniversary of the global pandemic (according to the World Health Organization’s dating system). 2021 was, for many, another year of being together and apart; another year with more limited activity related to art—and in some localities, there was even the closure of art museums and, to a lesser extent, galleries. EU Digital COVID (Vaccine) Certificate of the Author, emitted August 4, 2021 1. What does the Foreign Language Index (FLI) index? In order to address this question, I crib a 14-part structure and title that will be familiar to many readers: Rosalind Krauss’s “Notes on the Index” (1977), a “classic” English language text I have found myself engaging with in recent years.1 This is the second issue of the FLI produced by the Society of Contemporary Art 3. Proof of vaccination, mobility, and access to institutions have become increasingly linked. Populations in countries like the United States chose when to be vaccinated; in other nations, vaccines went first to statistically higher risk populations and were distributed by age. I have been residing in Valladolid, Spain; my second vaccination was not scheduled until August. This is nonetheless a relative privilege. In poorer countries with shortages of vaccines, even visiting local art exhibitions has presented risks. 4. Beyond the pandemic’s threat to bodily health are its impact on economic vitality. As Vuk Vuković’s choice of Una Miletić, “Podrška mladima i skidanje elitističkog vela See Rosalind Krauss, “Notes on the Index: Seventies Art in America,” October 3 (Spring 1987): 68-81. 1 1 sa umetnosti” (“Support to young generations and stripping of the elitist veil from the arts”) explores, the economic toll of the pandemic has been especially hard on less-established artists and smaller art institutions. 5. Reopenings of museums have begun and their future seems quite bright. The key role of exhibitions for recounting art histories and thinking through current issues is clear; indeed, 11 of the 40 indexed texts referred to exhibition catalogues, related online platforms, or reviews. Conversely, while access to objects in galleries around the globe has obvious bearing on academic and critical writing, entry into the archival and bilbliographic holdings of art institutions is also necessary for our kind of cultural production. Many archives and libraries continue to be closed or only available for a limited number of hours, a hurdle to new scholarship. 6. International travel across the board has decreased due to COVID-19-related restrictions (as well as a burgeoning awareness of its environmental impact). For the time being, Pamela Lee’s 2003 insight that “citizenship in the art world is measured by the number of frequent-flier miles” no longer holds.2 Given these changes, should we wonder if we are on the cusp of a “postcontemporary” era? At the very least, the Pamela Lee, "Boundary Issues: The Art World Under the Sign of Globalism," Artforum, November 2003: https://www.artforum.com/print/200309/boundar y-issues-the-art-world-under-the-sign-ofglobalism-5683. 3 See “Questionnaire on ‘The Contemporary’*," October 130 (Fall 2009): 3-124. 2 “global” in global contemporary art has undergone a metamorphosis. 7. Responding to the journal October’s “Questionnaire on the Contemporary” in 2009, Richard Meyer outlined a series of questions he puts to his students. 3 He emphasizes a turn away from “traditional” primary sources in one of his lines of inquiry: “Where are the archival and research materials on which you will draw—in the files of a commercial gallery, in a drawer in the artist’s studio, in the works of art themselves, in a series of interviews that you intend to conduct with the artist, in a theoretical paradigm that you plan to apply to the work, or in an ideological critique of the current moment?”4 There are new answers in 2022. Archival digitization initiatives, many begun pre-pandemic, have continued. Moreover, the proliferation of podcasts and widespread use of online video conferencing platforms have meant that a broad array of interviews with artists and public programs, and hence, a significant amount of oral primary source information, are available to scholars all over the world. The old here/there, center/periphery divisions that might have served as hurdles to scholarship have to a great extent liquified for those with a steady internet connection. 5 Indeed, emphasizing the importance of such primary sources, albeit in written form, a number of the selections in this issue of FLI consist of Richard Meyer, See “Questionnaire on ‘The Contemporary’*," October 130 (Fall 2009), 18. 5 This is by no means guaranteed of course. Our indexer for Armenian who works out of Lebanon was unable to contribute this year because internet connections and electricity in general in Beirut have been extremely sporadic over the past two years. 4 2 artist interviews, such as Juan José Santos’s Curaduría de Latinoamérica. 20 entrevistas a quienes cambiaron el arte contemporáneo (Curating of Latin America. Twenty interviews with those who changed contemporary art), volumes I and II. 8. Surely shifts in information delivery and access have impacted—and will continue to impact—the type of scholarship produced and selected for the FLI. Many indexers selected essays created for websites rather than print journals. Daniel Horn’s indexing of Angela Matyssek, “Tempus/Modus. Candida Höfer, Türken in Deutschland 1979”, a 2021 article assessing the translation of Höfer’s work into a digital format in 2011, is a particularly interesting example of how scholars explore temporality and platform shifts. The apparatus through which Höfer’s work is displayed and discussed in the present provides the key to thinking about her body of work’s media transformations in the past. Further indicating the historical and present importance of web platforms for circulating art knowledge is Katalin Cseh-Varga’s selection of Róza Tekla Szilágyi, “Sohasem voltam egy múltba révedő ember“ - Interjú Koronczi Endrével (“I was never a person longing for the past” — Interview with Endre Koronczi), Artmagazin Online, May 25, 2021; the subject of the interview in this internet journal, Koronczi, is the founder of an important online database related to the Hungarian art scene. 9. The question of how to periodize “the contemporary,” alluded to in the aforementioned October survey, continues to yield a range of answers, explicit and implicit, in the scholarship profiled. The plurality of “contemporaries” underscores links between the “where” and “when” of contemporary art. Kathy Mak’s choices suggest that the period commences postWWII. She selects two examples of scholarship focused on this block of time: Sun Ying’s assessment of pro-Chinese propaganda in Hong Kong and Nobuo Takamori’s analysis of Cold War exchanges between Taiwan and South Asia.6 Because of the 2019-2020 Hong Kong protests against increasing Chinese control, this scholarship is also relevant for the present. Ieva Astahovska choices also imply that the mid-20th century marks the contemporary turn with Andra Silapētere, I Remember, Therefore I Am” and “Soviet Latvian Women Artists in Periodicals. Eight Ways of Forgetting” in the I Remember, Therefore I Am. Unwritten Stories: Women Artists’ Archives catalogue. Martina Tanga’s selection of Olga Amendola’s “Alberto Biasi: l’artista ribelle dell’arte cinetica e programmata” locates the dawn of the contemporary in the 1960s. Boyoung Chang’s selection of Carey Park’s North Korean art and the art of national division makes the compelling case that in a Korean periodization, the division along the 38th parallel in 1951 marks the beginning of the current era. She also indexed Performance Art: Its beginning and development in Korea and the West, which begins in the 1960s and Note on the formatting of names: We have opted to maintain the capitalization conventions used by the indexers for their own names and for those they mention in the text. 6 3 explicitly grapples with intersections and difference in the histories of performance at the national and global levels. Magdalena Moskalewicz’s choice of Katarzyna Bojarska, Wilhelm Sasnal’s Transitional Images,” which discusses how the artist’s painting has explored the legacy of the Holocaust, proposes that the end of the Cold War (as well as a reckoning with trauma from before its outbreak) ushers in the current era. 10. The decolonial impulse, so present in recent years in US art history’s “ethical turn,” has proven to be an international phenomenon. Indeed, here at SCAH, we ran our own decolonizing the syllabus edit-athon on December 4, 2020, a few months after the publication of the inaugural issue of FLI. A related concern for revision, repair, and self-reflection has emerged in Denmark too. Elizabeth Löwe Hunter’s examination of “sort” (blackness) brings similar lenses to Danish society and culture (indexed by Eli Ståhl-Nielsen). A reflection on colonialism emerges as well in Leone Contini’s workshop Museo Fantasma (Ghost Museum), a critical analysis of the Museo Coloniale, selected by Martina Tanga. Alice Heeren’s indexing of Marcelo Campos and Maurício Barros de Castro’s Jacaranda: edição especial Arte & Poder (Jacaranda: Special Issue on Art and Power) also points to this important turn in scholarship. In the same vein, Juan Albarrán’s selection of Gabriela A. Piñero, Ruptura y continuidad. Crítica de arte desde América Latina Rupture and Continuity (Art Criticism from Latin America) highlights links between former European colonies in Latin America and its important place in the current construction of the field of hispanophone contemporary art. 11. New theoretical currents related to feminism and the body emerged in scholarship in various linguistic areas: Vuković and Astahovska elected texts focused on feminism: Jana Kukaine, “Viscerālais feminisms kā mākslas interpretācijas metode” (“Visceral Feminism. A Method for Art Interpretation”) and Nataša Nikčević, Erotika u savremenoj crnogorskoj umjetnosti (Erotica in Contemporary Montenegrin Art). A concern for the corporeal aspects of performance in tandem with technology is signaled by Eran Sabaner Kalaora’s choice of Aslı Zengin, “İnsan Ötesi Bedenlerle Hafızanın İmkanları: TeknoCanavarlar ve Bedenler” (“The Potentialities of Memory Through Transhuman Bodies: Techno Monsters and Bodies”). 12. Perhaps it is still too early to ascertain the impact of web conferencing on the future of art content, but I was a little surprised that no one selected any texts addressing new directions in communication about art. Say what you will about “Zoom fatigue,” but the platform (and other similar ones) has revolutionized public programs at art institutions, enabling a far wider public to engage in content that was once only available to those in major metropolitan hubs or college campuses. Indeed, even beyond museums and galleries, SCAH has generated a range of online programs and in my own classroom I undertook remote teaching exchanges with Sara Núñez Izquierdo of the University of Salamanca (Spain). 13. Similarly, Instagram has become an ever more vital source of art information about US-based artists. In fact, in a recent SCAH program on curating biennials, Elia Alba 4 mentioned that the curatorial team for El Museo del Barrio’s La Trienal, Estamos Bien (2020-21) realized that this platform was a valuable resource for research on Latinx art.7 14. Krauss describes the index in art of the seventies as a structure that isolates: “It describes the isolation of something from within the succession of temporality,” she affirms.8 Although only time will tell, with a bit of good fortune, 2022 will see a return to rhythms of life of the last decade and an end to the isolation provoked by the pandemic. John A. Tyson, New York, February 2022 CHINESE Kathy Mak 孫穎，〈戰後中共在香港的宣傳策略研究—— 以「人間畫會」為中心（ 1946–1949 ）〉，《 美術》，2021 年，第 5 期，頁 84–92。 Sun Ying Research Study on the Chinese Communist Party’s Propaganda Strategies in Hong Kong after the Second World War: the ‘Renjian Painting Society’ (1946–1949) Meishu (art) no. 5 (2021): 84–92. This article examines the socio-cultural activities of a postwar, left-wing Chinese art association, called Renjian Painting Society (Renjian huahui), which was established in Hong Kong from 1946 until 1949. In those years, a civil war was fought between the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the Chinese Nationalist Party (aka Kuomintang, hereafter KMT) on the Chinese mainland. According to the author, the CCP relocated a large number of left-wing Chinese artists from the mainland to British colonial Hong Kong in order to retain its power in the face of potential military loss. Meanwhile, the CCP took advantage of Hong Kong’s apolitical environment for propagating leftist ideology and winning support from local people. Utilizing a large number of journalistic reports published in left-wing newspapers in Hong Kong, the author traces how the Renjian Painting Society employed numerous cultural apparatuses—such as exhibitions, books, and magazines—to shape local social discourses and to win the hearts of the people for the Chinese Communist cause. Specifically, the author details how Renjian artists employed caricature and woodcut art in order to portray ordinary people’s everyday social life, as opposed to the more elitist and commercial Elia Alba, “Curating Biennials: The Politics of Mediation, A conversation with Elia Alba, Renata Cervetto, and Lauren Mackler moderated by Paloma Checa-Gismero,” (presentation, Public 7 programming of the Society of Contemporary Art Historians, February 1, 2022). 8 Krauss, 77. 5 way of using Chinese painting and oil painting in prior art exhibitions. The author references many instances of left-wing Chinese-language literature published in Mainland China and Hong Kong; this discourse leads to a somewhat one-sided story that has privileged the perspective of the Chinese Communists. Even so, this article is valuable because it situates Renjian’s art activities in the complex sociocultural ecosystem of colonial Hong Kong in which other local art communities backed by the KMT or the British colonial government also played a key role. came to replace the central authority as the leading agent in promoting international art exchange with the “Global South.” The author continues to examine moments of difficult diplomatic cultural relations between Taiwan and the Global South, since the former lost its seat to China in the United Nations in 1971. Ultimately, this article sheds light on the paradox of Taiwan in its geopolitical position: despite its geographical location in the Northern Hemisphere, it has often been viewed as a political entity “bordering on the South.” 高森信男，〈秘密南方：冷戰初期台灣/東南亞 美術交流〉，《現代美術》，2020 年，第 198 期，頁 15–22。 Nobuo Takamori The Secret South: Art Exchanges Between Taiwan and Southeast Asia in the Early Cold War Period Xiandai meishu (modern art) no. 198 (2020): 15–22. This article is written by the guest curator of an exhibition titled “The Secret South: From Cold War Perspective to Global South in the Museum Collection,” which was held at Taipei Fine Arts Museum in July 2020. Seeking to reconstruct the global position of Taiwanese art, the author investigates how artists from this island have engaged in international art exchanges through its institutional art networks or social organizations in developing countries in Southeast Asia, Africa, and Latin America— “the Global South”—from its colonial period in the 1940s through its neoliberal age in the 2010s. The article utilizes a large number of artworks that have been previously marginalized in Taiwan’s own social discourse to construct this forgotten intercultural art history. Specifically, it discusses the shifting diplomatic strategy of Taiwan’s Chinese Nationalist Party, from its active participation in Southeast Asian largescale art events in the first half of the 1950s to its shifted interest in the São Paulo Biennial and in Latin America later that decade. The 1960s and the 1970s saw a shift in Taiwan’s global art history since unofficial organizations Ishihara Shisan (Japan), Refugees in Tarla, 1943, Gouache on paper, a set of two, 178 × 75.7 cm (each), Taipei Fine Arts Museum Collection 徐裊，〈當代藝術材料探析：「垃圾」在中國 當代藝術中的應用〉，《美術學報》，2021 年 ，第 3 期，頁 95–100。 Xu Niao A Study of Contemporary Art Materials: The Use of “Trash” in Chinese Contemporary Art Meishu xuebao (art journal) no. 3 (2021): 95–100. This article examines the use of “trash” in Chinese contemporary art from the 1990s 6 through the 2010s. Normally, trash is conceived as something disposable since it no longer carries any value or meanings for its owner. Yet, in this essay, the author challenges this misconception by exploring the artistic uses of trash in contemporary China: it has become an agent for manifesting social or historical progress, or changes in a place’s culture, ideology, and people’s way of life. As such, the author probes how different types of materials—for instance, architectural remains or debris, used objects, and pollutants—have been creatively employed or transformed by Chinese art producers in their artistic practices. Commonly considered as “trash” in Chinese society, these materials have demonstrated their capacities to articulate personal, familial, or collective memory, as well as the shifting relations among people within a modernizing and globalizing China. analytical attention to power rather than identity, as well as to the relational, productive aspects of racialization through dominance. As such, some analytical potentials and limitations of Blackness as a structural position within Western Modernity and Eurocentric epistemologies are studied and contextualized. Racial Whiteness and Westernness are emphasized as crucial in constructions of racial difference in Denmark. Whiteness is theorized as a marker of the nation; as an investment; and as a marker of the “West.” Through feminist theoretical perspectives, it is argued that multiple relations of power be analyzed simultaneously, as “racializing assemblages”, to recognize complex racializing hierarchies – and their vocabulary – situated in a specific (Danish) material reality and political context. DANISH Eli Ståhl Elizabeth Löwe Hunter Diasporiske Perspektiver På Racialiseringens Kolonialitet I Danmark Diasporic Perspectives on the Coloniality of Racialisation in Denmark Periskop – Forum for Kunsthistorisk Debat (25):88-111. 2021 https://tidsskrift.dk/periskop/article/view/12 8472/174549 This text examines potential meanings of “sort” (“black” in Danish) as racial categorization in a Danish contemporary context. One such approach is through critical query regarding hegemonic U.S. American, English language notions of race and their relation to constructions of Afro-Danish political communities in Denmark. Grounded in African Diaspora Studies and decolonial thought, the “coloniality of race” is identified and a conceptualization of race is offered with La Vaughn Belle and Jeannette Ehlers, I am Queen Mary, 2018 Andrea Pontoppidan Når Vi Ikke Kan læse Vejret When We Can’t Read the Weather Peripeti 17 (31):83-98. 2020. https://tidsskrift.dk/peripeti/article/view/119 033/166872 This article explores how we can think ‘the weather’ differently to hereby understand the complex relationship between singularity and the collective in a time of pervasive, manmade, climatic changes. It takes as its starting point Astrida Neimanis and Jennifer Hamilton’s term ‘to weather,’ as well as the poetry collections Whereas by Layli Long Soldier, and the weather by Lisa Robertson; investigating 7 through these materials how the weather makes an imprint on our history, language, and stories. GERMAN Daniel Horn Angela Matyssek Tempus/Modus. Candida Höfer, Türken in Deutschland 1979 Tempus/Modus. Candida Höfer, Turks in Germany 1979 21: Inquiries into Art, History, and the Visual. Heft 2, 2021. https://21-inquiries.eu/vorschau/ Candida Höfer, Turks in Germany, 1979, Slide Projection, 80 Pictures on Loop. This article explores Candida Höfer’s photographic slide-show Türken in Deutschland (1979) and its 2011 digital version with the new title Türken in Deutschland 1979. It analyzes temporality, changes in media installation and their effects on the artwork’s meanings. Attention focuses on the historic and medial differences – between the 1970s and the 2010s as well as between analogue and digital projection – that are the results of processes of translation. It is argued that by reworking the piece, Höfer undertakes an actualization as well as a historicization of her work, first realized as a series of slides, then as digital copies. The artistic gesture of changing media and title are mutually dependent on and constitutive of each other. They productively disrupt the coherence of the work and emphasize the time that has passed between the two versions as well as the artwork’s mode of expression. Michael Hübl Protest-Zepter und Militärmanöver Protest Scepter and Military Maneuver Kunstforum International, Bd. 275 June/July 2021, pp. 46-49 https://www.kunstforum.de/band/2021-275utopia-weltentwuerfe-undmoeglichkeitsraeume-in-der-kunst/ The author takes the recently opened exhibition “Dreams of Freedom-German and Russian Romantics” at Moscow’s Tretyakov Gallery as a starting point to question the political potential of collaborative exhibitions in mending fraught relations between Putin’s Russia and the “West.” The exhibition—having been co-organized with the Dresden State Art Collections—serves as a reminder of the prolific exchanges between Czarist Russia and Germany beginning in the 19th century, which continued into the twentieth century until coming to an abrupt standstill caused by Hitler’s invasion in 1941. Despite efforts at cultural diplomacy starting in the 1970s, notably exhibitions such as “Russian Realism 1850-1900” at the State Art Gallery BadenBaden, Russian-German relations have been deteriorating again over the last decade. Transnational cultural events hosted by Russia, including Manifesta 10 in St Petersburg 2014, have been overshadowed by the occupation of Crimea and the Donbas conflict with Ukraine. A documentary-style exposé by the opposition leader Alexei Navalny that details the ostentatious splendor of a sprawling palace complex on the Black Sea allegedly being built for Putin has added further damage while producing a veritable token of anti-Putin protest within Russia and abroad. Hübl identifies this to be a 700-Euro gilded toilet brush, counterfeits of which have been brandished by demonstrators as a caricature of a neo-Czarist scepter. The author concludes that while joint exhibition projects revive historical shared visions and critical reflections to mutually de-estrange German and Russian publics, they have increasingly 8 become inadequate means to thaw RussianGerman relations in light of persisting systemic oppression. Philipp Hindahl Heiß wie Schnee Hot as Snow Der Freitag, Ausgabe 06 2021 https://www.freitag.de/autoren/derfreitag/heiss-wie-schnee HUNGARIAN Katalin Cseh-Varga Iván András Bojár Magyar Géniusz Hungarian Genius Jelenkor Online. Irodalmi és Művészeti Folyóirat, June 4, 2021 http://www.jelenkor.net/visszhang/2097/ma gyar-geniusz Peggy Ahwesh, She Puppet, 2001. Installation view The article discusses A Fire in My Belly, an exhibition of mostly moving image works currently on view at the Julia Stoschek Collection in Berlin until December 2021. The show, titled after a never completed experimental film from 1986/87 by the late American artist, David Wojnarowicz, seeks to establish commonalities between the explicit visualities of mostly US artistic subcultures and contemporary works, as such, suggesting a return of the “culture wars” by raising issues such as the AIDS crisis, cultural conservatism, sexism, and racism. Works by internationally visible artists deal with the mediation of related topics in the social media age: Anne Imhof’s elegiac video work seems to address the lack of individual agency as well as the migration crisis; Arthur Jafa’s cinematic sampling of news and pop culture footage engages with a modern American history of Black struggle and grievance; Bunny Rogers’s video animation deals with the Columbine shooting and its lasting imprint on the national psyche as much as on popular culture. Hindahl concludes that such new battlefields currently enjoy a “boom” in terms of museum and gallery programming. On the occasion of the opening of the exhibition Hungarian Genius (Magyar Géniusz) at the Pécs Gallery, the show’s curator Iván András Bojár published an inaugural address through the Pécs-based literary and art journal Present Time Online. The exhibition celebrated geometric abstract art from the previous hundred years. The 34 artists included in the show were Hungarian. While the content and subject appear to be completely apolitical, especially with regards to how Bojár explained the symbiosis of scientific and artistic innovation in Hungary, the focus on uniqueness as well as “the collective spirit united by Hungarian genius” clearly reflect the national pride currently being promoted by the conservative, nationalist cultural politics in Hungary. 9 In his address, Bojár did not deny the parallels between cultural centers of modern art, such as Paris, Budapest and Pécs, but argued that certain factors have determined the uniqueness of the tradition and innovation of geometric abstract art in Hungary. These factors include the continuity of geometric abstract art over the past hundred years (the earliest work included is by Lajos Kassák from 1922, and the most recent by László Ottó from 2021), and that its contemporary representatives are not simply copying the historic pioneers; they are enriching and refreshing the genre. Despite the continuity of the exhibited works, and although they share a reductive and minimalist form, they do differ from each other in showing the individual characters of their respective creators. Between the two World Wars, countless geometric abstract artists emerged in the heart of Europe within a radius of just 200 km. This, according to the curator, was because of “the presence and shining of the Hungarian mathematic, geometric, constructive and abstracted genius.” To Bojár, Hungarian genius is “world renowned, typically Hungarian, and [its occurrence was favored by] geometric culture, [all three factors] together provided us … Victor Vasarely, and more artists interested in geometric art, it gave us the Rubik’s cube, the first space informatics software, the ArchiCadet, our outstanding (female!) chess players, our innovating engineers and Bauhauslers … and not least, this year, … the Abel prize holder László Lovász.” The curator suggests the origins of geometric abstract art in the region relate to a kind of sublimation: while interwar Hungary seemed to be a place to escape from, or was a place artistic reformers were forced to leave, “Hungarian geniuses,” in Bojár’s word’s, turned their often twisted and dramatic destinies and the wider, turbulent political, social, and cultural experience into a productive force – into analytic and rational art. However, the inaugural address leaves open the question of whether and precisely how contemporary representatives of this genre are absorbing and responding to their own context. Róza Tekla Szilágyi, “Sohasem voltam egy múltba révedő ember“ - Interjú Koronczi Endrével “I was never a person longing for the past” — Interview with Endre Koronczi Artmagazin Online, May 25, 2021. https://www.artmagazin.hu/articles/interju/ sohasem_voltam_egy_multba_revedo_em ber During the global pandemic, Artmagazin Online revisited digitization in the Hungarian art scene and devoted an interview to the ikOn database, which has been one of the most important information and connection platforms for contemporary art for over twenty years. The interview with its founder, Endre Koronczi, looked back on the pre-history of today’s intense and indispensable internet usage. The website started in an era of modem and expensive connections when only a few art institutions had their own homepages – indeed, in 2000, ikOn could be regarded as an early form of professional social media. Koronczi’s initial idea was to introduce a networking platform for institutions to help them to coordinate the organization of art events. In contrast to Facebook, the platform itself is optimized for professional circles, and through the self-regulated uploading of art eventrelated content, offers a systematic organization of data. The ikOn database serves both as an archive and as a register of Hungarian contemporary art events, and therefore has accrued tremendous value. As an artistic research project at Budapest’s Ludwig Museum, BarabásiLAB: Hidden Grains demonstrates, ikOn is a potential resource for creative endeavors. In this project, a research 10 team used data visualization to map current Hungarian art connections. One database the team considered was ikOn. In the interview, Koronczi also addressed how important it is that through his platform, art events of the past 21 years became searchable and retraceable. He draws our attention to the mass disappearance of small galleries and “mini-institutions” in the early 2010s that are documented through the database. Koronczi argues that “paying attention to each other” and “the ability to cooperate” are not strengths of the Hungarian cultural scene. What ikOn can provide us with, though - and this is the vision of its founder - is the simultaneous importance of the present and continuity with the past in light of “authenticity, consciousness, [and] consistency.” „Ma csak veled beszélek“. Koncz András kiállítása (2021. február 24 - 2021. április 10. Viltin Galéria) ‘Today I am only talking to you‘ —Exhibition of András Koncz Új Művészet, March 1, 2021 https://www.ujmuveszet.hu/2021/03/macsak-veled-beszelek/ András Koncz’s most recent show concentrated on a narrow period of his oeuvre: Ten years between 1986 and 1996. The artworks presented in the exhibition mostly contain traces of 1980s “New Painting,” with all its expressiveness, irony, and focus on renewal. This period is of interest because it separates the era of the neo-avant-garde from the era of New Sensibility, which offered advance notice of the democratic turn in socialist Hungary. Koncz’s artworks on display document the emergence of a new avantgarde, which in his case was channeled into dynamic figurative painting that quoted and recontextualized the heroic figures of “clear” painting. The brief exhibition review quotes art theorist László F. Földényi, in whose view Koncz’s paintings from these ten years retell narrative stories. This choice of the artist was conscious, like Koncz’s investigation of classic modernism. The paintings from this period give the impression of one-person-theaters in which the protagonists and actions are projections of the self and its inner struggles. Many of these artworks contain items from mass culture that are neither simply ironized nor exclusively socially critical; instead, these objects and their placement in the frame suggest that the world can still offer some sacredness. Koncz’s pieces seek hope where there is none, with a gaze turned towards the future. András Koncz, Monet is on Duchamp, 1990 After 1989, two cultural trends captured Koncz’s imagination and determined his unique artistic style: French baroque wallpaper patterns, and Danish gymnastics. Viewers of these paintings are not offered any visual implicitness; instead, they are faced with the intellectual challenge of figuring out how the characters in Koncz’s paintings release and free the spaces in which they are trapped. Wallpaper patterns are a bizarre analogy for new democracy with ironic allusions. The final two years included in the show (1995-1996) brought a more synthetic and in-depth art that was inspired by the artist’s stay in Rome. During those two years Koncz combined the motifs of antique ruins, monuments, and that of Walt Disney’s Mickey Mouse. These visual elements placed next to each other created a tension between values of Western (capitalist) culture. The Rome section of the show presents artworks dealing with the inner laws of art. They search for the parallels between sensuality and the artist’s sensitivity. 11 ITALIAN Martina Tanga Leone Contini and Marta Federici The Ghost of Italian Colonialsm Nero Magazine, 13 September, 2021 https://www.neroeditions.com/the-ghostsof-italian-colonialism/ Leone Contini, Museo sepolto, Roma, 201617. This is an interview with Italian artist Leone Contini, spurred by his recent workshop, Museo Fantasma (Ghost Museum), at the Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti, Milan, September 22-24, 2021. The article discusses Contini’s decade-long decolonial project to understand Italian Fascism through the lens of the Museo Coloniale, a Fascist institution in Rome that operated from 1923 to 1971. Upon this institution’s dissolution, the collection was spread among many museums across the country. “It was a ghost collection,” Contini describes, “which both existed and does not yet exist.” With a background in anthropology, Contini’s practice is defined as fieldwork, bringing together personal narratives and multiple perspectives from outside voices to critically examine histories of Colonialism, practices of ethnography, and histories of accountability. Olga Amendola Alberto Biasi: l’artista ribelle dell’arte cinetica e programmata Alberto Biasi: The Rebel Artist of Kinetic Art Artuu, June 16, 2021 https://www.artuu.it/alberto-biasi-lartistaribelle-dellarte-cinetica-e-programmata/ On the occasion of Alberto Biasi’s exhibition, “La Visibilita dell’Invisibile” at the M77 Gallery in Milan curated by Alberto Salvadori, this article discusses Biasi’s sixty-year long experimental career. The article focuses on Biasi’s open-ended, participatory environments in the 1960s and 1970s, in addition to his most well-known contribution to post-war art, Kinetic and Op art, which in Italy was called Arte Programmata. The article deemphasizes Biasi’s collaborative and group work, his founding of Gruppo N, for example, which had overt socialist ideologies, and presents Biasi as an anti-conformist. Overall, the author shows how a pivotal figure in Italian 20th-century art is finally recognized for an autonomous and extraordinary body of work. Marco Petroni Arte contemporanea e intelligenza artificiale si incontrano al MAXXI di Roma Contemporary art and artificial intelligence meet at MAXXI in Rome Domus, May 27, 2021 https://www.domusweb.it/en/art/gallery/202 1/05/26/contemporary-art-and-artificialintelligence-at-maxxi-in-rome.html This is an interview with curator Daniela Cotimbo, organizer of the exhibition “Re: define the boundaries,” the second iteration of the Re: Humanism Art Prize at the MAXXI Museum in Rome. The show brings together the relationships between artificial intelligence, art and design, and our futures. Although this is a common topic in contemporary art exhibitions, the show is unique for its absence of overt technological displays; instead, the artworks on view connect to themes linked to AI, reintegrating humanism into the technological approach. For instance, works such as Numero Cromatico’s Epitaphs for the Human Artist or Carola Bonfilli’s The Flute-Singing, focus on 12 the significant gap between an alien, mechanistic language and the needs for human expression. Irene Fenara, 3000 Tigers, 2020 KOREAN Boyoung Chang performance art from the late 1960s to the 1980s. For instance, “haepeuning(happening)” of the 1960s actively utilized artists’ bodies to respond directly to Korean society under military dictatorship. “Ibenteu(event)” of the 1970s incorporated such elements as language and philosophy to explore a logical process involved in art-making and analyzed the institutional system of art. On the other hand, “haengwi yesul (action art)” of the 1980s was preoccupied with traditional Korean cultural elements and incorporated formats of traditional rituals and feasts. The term peopomeonsu ateu, according to Cho, was utilized frequently only after the 1990s in haengwi misul to reflect direct conversations between Korean and global art. As the book accentuates the avant-garde aspects of performance art, it concludes with the discussion of how Korean performance art of the 1990s and 2000s has continuously expanded the boundaries of art. Soojin Cho Peopomeonsu Ateu: Hangukgwa Seogueseoui Balsaenggwa Jeongae Performance Art: Its beginning and development in Korea and the West Sogang University Press, 2019. This book chronicles the history of performance art in the context of the West and Korea. The author highlights the identity of performance art as an alternative model of contemporary art. Performance art has diverged from the traditional boundaries of art. It has interacted with other genres, media and society; and its development may be opposed to that of Modernism. Thus, the book discusses performance art’s relationship with Neo AvantGarde visual arts, theater, and dance, and how it has commented on sociopolitical issues. While it devotes the most space to discussing how performance art emerged and developed in the West, the book’s final chapter is remarkable for its exploration of the history of performance art in Korea. In the chapter, the author adopts the term “haengwi misul” (translates as “action art”), instead of “peopomeonsu ateu” (“performance art”), to embrace the different stages in Korean Carey Park Bukan Misulgwa Bundan Misul North Korean Art and the Art of National Division Artbooks, 2019. 13 This book is a collection of short essays that discuss artworks produced in North Korea and those by South Korean artists that deal with the national division and North Korea as their main theme. The book is largely divided into two sections: “The Art that Made North Korea” and “The Art Made by the National Division.” From Joseonhwa (a form of traditional painting that developed in North Korea) to commemorative stamps, the first part discusses not only how North Korean art developed as propaganda but also its aesthetic qualities and technical developments over the course of time. On the other hand, the essays in the latter part introduce how contemporary South Korean artists addressed the issues of the trauma of national division, the forgotten Korean War, and the presence of DMZ(Demilitarized Zone) in the Korean peninsula, and integrated their experiences and interactions with the other Korea in their works. The diversity of the works reveal that the continued Korean War and the national division have long been ingrained in Korean lives. The works also span from traditional painting to VR video to reflect the increased interests in North Korea-related issues among younger generations and the political and artistic freedom that avail unrestricted exploration of these issues. The wide scope of the book makes a good starting point for anyone who is interested in North Korean art and contemporary Korean art related to the interKorean relationship for further research. Kim Seong-min, Smelters of the Past, 1970 LATVIAN Ieva Astahovska Jana Kukaine Viscerālais feminisms kā mākslas interpretācijas metode Visceral Feminism. A Method for Art Interpretation Mākslas Vēsture un Teorija (Art History and Theory) 2020 / 24, 63–75. https://www.ceeol.com/search/journaldetail?id=389 The article introduces the notion of visceral feminism and advances its usage as a methodological framework for art interpretation. A visceral perspective addresses urgent political and artistic challenges, as well as histories of traumatic legacies and imperial powers, among them, the peculiarity of the post-Soviet condition. Drawing from feminist political theory, affect theory, new materialism and carnal aesthetics (Papenburg and Zarzycka, 2012), visceral feminism engages corporeality in order to address questions of embodiment and the capacity for a liveable life. In the essay, visceral feminism is understood as a viewpoint that prompts consideration of the issues of bodily matter, its liveliness, intrinsic vitality and fluxes of dynamic life forces. While articulating the body’s ability for agency and resistance, visceral feminism also refers to post-structural findings about how ideology and social norms shape and transform our bodies. From this perspective, the political claim for a liveable life becomes the foundational question for visceral art interpretation: how can art affect bodies viscerally? Rather than examining the immediate psychosomatic reactions to artworks, the aesthetic position of visceral feminism focuses on the performative powers of art to transgress the art world’s institutionalized framework and its common art audience. The capacity of art to perform, to bring into being, or, to borrow a 14 term from J.L. Austin, to “do things,” both affectively and materially, is of crucial importance. These aesthetic qualities reveal the inherent political potential of art to transform not only society, but also to affect bodies on a visceral level. While social changes may take decades and are sometimes hard to grasp, visceral transformations (from tears to laughter, from shame to anger, from pain to solace) are straightforward – they are a crucial part of everyday lived experience. The essay centers on two paintings– Susanna and the Elders by Artemisia Gentileschi (1610) and a work by Latvian artist Rasa Jansone, Self-Portrait. Exercise Machine I (2017). Both artworks are examined from the perspective of visceral feminism to account for the marginalization and bodily oppression of women embedded both in gender-biased art history and today’s culture—and which is especially manifest in patterns of passive victimhood and sexual objectification. While the juxtaposition of a work iconic for feminist art scholarship from the Baroque era (Gentileschi) and a contemporary painting, which draws on post-Soviet legacies and the neoliberal cult of a superwoman (Jansone) may seem farfetched, the encounter between the two artworks is successful: it encourages a transgenerational and transnational feminist genealogy in the arts, based on the visceral experiences of bodies, along with their capacity to act and strive for a liveable life. Both paintings highlight the scope of bodily resistance and thereof put forward a feminist critique of not only the Western art canon, but also the often unliveable and oppressive body politics of today. Andra Silapētere, Adele Bea Cipste and Ieva Melgalve “Atceros, tātad esmu” and “Padomju Latvijas sieviete māksliniece periodikā. Astoņi aizmirstības veidi” Atceros, tātad esmu. Neuzrakstītie stāsti: mākslinieču arhīvi catalogue. I Remember, Therefore I Am” and “Soviet Latvian Women Artists in Periodicals. Eight Ways of Forgetting.” In I Remember, Therefore I Am. Unwritten Stories: Women Artists’ Archives catalogue. Ed. A. Silapētere. Rīga: Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art, 2020. https://lcca.lv/lv/izstades/izstade--atceros-tatad-esmu--neuzrakstitie-stasti-maksliniecu-arhivi-/#izstade This body of texts were written for the exhibition and research project I Remember, Therefore I Am, which brings to the fore different possibilities of interpreting art history through the experiences of women artists in the context of art-, social-, and political-events during the Soviet period. By re-examining events in Latvia and Eastern Europe in the second half of the 20th century, which are marked by the cultivated illusion of “gender equality” during the Soviet era, the exhibition offered opportunities for interpreting the recent past by turning against the established hierarchies in shaping historical narratives. The introductory text, “I Remember, Therefore I Am” by curator Andra Silapētere comments on different artistic practices, facts, and memories, which alongside human and aesthetic values, are revealed in the exhibition. The core of this exhibition included works by artists Rita Einberga (1921–1979), Laima Eglīte (1945), Maija Eliase (1924–1991), Mudīte Gaiševska (1935), Ruta Kreica (1946), Rasa Kalniņa-Grīnberga (1936) and Olga Neimane-Kateņeva (1908–2001). Each of them represented different artistic strategies, which were linked to alternative culture and attempts at diversifying visual language, as well as the range of creative interests within the official art scene. Continuing to explore the core question—Why was there a tendency to marginalize women’s role in society?—Adele Bea Cipste and Ieva Melgalve analyse approximately 5000 articles from Latvian SSR printed media that contained the words “woman artist.” Their essay, “Soviet Latvian Women Artists in Periodicals. Eight Ways of Forgetting” reveals the social, ideological and discursive framings of women artists and delineate some ways of forgetting them as well. Some interpretations were linked to political and economic reasons: women artists who worked in artels (working groups) or 15 factories remained largely anonymous. The language, with the unmarked-male name for “artist,” also tends to efface the work of women artists. The double burden of women artists was pronounced through their relegation to domestic labor in the form of care for the house and children; women artists were also expected to work as teachers and educators instead of full-time artists. In Soviet-era discourse, women artists were presumed to be quiet and shy supporters of male artists or fragile and airy inspiration for artwork. Design, textile and ceramics industries were preferred by women artists not only due to the traditional gender roles they presupposed, but also because this type of work allowed for greater creative expression, often escaping the ideological constraints of fine art. However, after the collapse of the USSR, these artists were “demoted” to the title of “designer” . Additionally, women artists who made ideological art, as well as those who did apolitical work and were marginalized even during Soviet times, were mostly forgotten as the canon of art after independence tends to focus on the (predominantly male) artists who were perceived as actively working against the regime. As the catalogue shows, the delineated ways of forgetting tentatively point to ways of remembering, too. the "writing subject" who exposes the ambivalent relationships between words, objects and their representation in visual forms, proving their poetic relativity. One of the leading motifs in his paintings are childhood memories, considered as psychologically complicated spaces that draw on uncanny, depersonalizing archetypes. Thus, Ēriks Apaļais works with commonly accepted presumptions about role of childhood through the formulas that are close to the famous “I am the Other” by Arthur Rimbaud. While his early works are populated with naive, childish images, his more recent paintings include abstract and minimalist forms. Apaļais’ self-analysis merges with self-discovery and introspection through the ability of words and images to generate new realities, not just reflect them. Similar to the revolutionary modernist and pre-modernist poets, Ēriks Apaļais subjects the pictorial forms, visual representational signs, silhouettes, and shapes to completely different communication principles, contrary to the dominant, traditional canons of figurative painting. Santa Hirša, Patības topogrāfija Topography of the Self Punctum. 19. 05. 2020. https://www.punctummagazine.lv/2020/05/1 9/patibas-topografija/ The article “Topography of the Self” examines the main themes in the works of Ēriks Apaļais, one of the leading figures of Latvian contemporary painting. His works are based on his explorations and recontextualizations of ideas and theories of psychoanalysis, literature, psycholinguistics, and poststructuralism by means of a purely visual language. By deconstructing traditional conventions of image-making and imageviewing, Ēriks Apaļais seeks new types of visual structures that are closer to textual syntax, transforming himself as an author into Installation view of Ēriks Apaļais exhibition Family at the Latvian National Museum of Art. POLISH Magdalena Moskalewicz Katarzyna Bojarska Wilhelm Sasnal’s Transitional Images Miejsce no. 6 (2020), thematic issue: “The History of Art in Poland and the Holocaust.” 16 DOI: https://www.doi.org/10.48285/8kaewzjo3p http://miejsce.asp.waw.pl/english-wilhelmsasnals-transitional-images/ [originally published in English; full text available online] has become? Facing up to these problems, Bojarska connects the work of the painter to the thought of the pediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald W. Winnicott, who invented the category of “transitional images.” If toys play the role of transitional objects because they absorb the child’s accumulated emotions by teaching them to connect with an unknown world, then Sasnal’s artistic work—that which comes into contact with the Holocaust—fulfils an analogous function of providing transitional images, which provoke anxiety and disturb, but ultimately facilitate familiarity with unassimilated history. Monika Weychert, Uchodzenie romskiego ciała The Passing of the Romani Body View: Theories and Practices of Visual Culture, no. 28 (2020) https://www.pismowidok.org/en/archive/28imageries-of-race/passing-of-a-coloredroma-body Originally published in both Polish and English; full text available online Wilhelm Sasnal, Shoah (Translator), 2003. Katarzyna Bojarska considers how the collective memory of the war, the Holocaust and the uniquely Polish attitude of bystanders is communicated in art after 1989. She makes us aware that art can bring “narrative shocks” (Elżbieta Janicka, Tomasz Żukowski) and is capable of diagnosing mechanisms of denial in facing shared responsibility for violence towards Jews. This is exactly how Wilhelm Sasnal’s art works. Katarzyna Bojarska asks key questions in this context: How can shaming a community and the affect of shame lead to the desirable condition of “precarious reflexivity” (Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick), and allow a reworking of the past? And how can one speak from within a community with images, being from there and preserving one’s attachment to that place, but at the same time reject the ideology that the national discourse Antiroma prejudice is among the most persistent and intense kinds of racial hatred in Europe. While criminal or demonic depictions of the Roma were created, their “blackness” was considered abhorrent, described as, for instance, yellowish and dirty, while their hair was always “shaggy” or curling “like vipers.” The “blackness” was believed to be an outcome of an uncivilized lifestyle, dirt, smoke from bonfires, or conscious creation – a picaresque camouflage. Romaphobia or antiziganism have continued to rely on color, visuality and visibility of the body to exclude people on the basis of race. The article discusses the strategy of passing, which enables the Roma to survive in a racist environment, or has been at times the only way to survive, as well as other subversive strategies of performing skin colour observed in the creative output of contemporary visual artists of Roma origin: Delaine Le Bas, Tamara Moyzes, Emilia Rigová and Kálmán Várady as well as creators and performers of Roma Armee and slammer Kristóf Horváth. 17 Justyna Balisz-Schmelz „Obcy we własnym kraju”. Afroniemcy i Afroniemki a pozjednoczeniowe konflikty pamięci w świetle projektu Namibia Today Laury Horelli oraz prac Mwangi Hutter "Stranger in One's Own Country”: AfroGermans and Post-Unification Memory Contests in Laura Horelli’s "Namibia Today" and the Works of Ingrid Mwangi Hutter View: Theories and Practices of Visual Culture, no. 29 (2021) https://www.pismowidok.org/en/archive/20 21/29-images-and-imageries-of-racehistories/foreign-in-own-country Originally published in both Polish and English; full text available online The article offers an analysis of the situation of black German men and women after 1989 in the context of post-unification contests of memory. In contrast to the widespread and relatively consensual policy of remembering the Second World War and the Holocaust, which was aimed at unification of German society after its forty-year division, the works of Laura Horelli and Mwangi Hutter discussed in the article are examples of alternative discourses around the definition of contemporary German identity. They question the dominant and coherent narratives present in numerous post-unification publications and exhibitions, treating the specificity of Germanness and German art, thereby constituting an appeal to broaden the symbolic borders of Germanness. PORTUGUESE Alice Heeren Marcelo Campos and Maurício Barros de Castro (ed.) Jacaranda: edição especial Arte & Poder Jacaranda: Special Issue on Art and Power Art Clube Jacaranda, 2020. https://en.jacarandaarteepoder.com/ Jacaranda is a cross-media platform created to establish connections between Brazilian contemporary art and the international art circuit. Their 2020 special issue Art and Power arises from an invitation made to the Laboratory of Arts and Policies of Alterity at UERJ (State University of Rio de Janeiro) certified by the Brazilian CNPq (National Research Committee) to share the scholarship of academics along with graduate and undergraduate students working in its Art and Afrobrasilidades research line. This special issue of Jacaranda sought to gather essays by scholars and curators engaged in debates over the insertion of afro-Brazilian artists in the art circuit that bring radical approaches to the field, creating a type of “new power” co-opted from the system. It includes essays by Renata Felino, Diane Lima, Raquel Barreto, Marcelo Campos, and Keyna Eleison, as well as interviews with artists Agrade Camíz, Ana Lira, Castiel Vitorino Brasileiro, Coletivo Coletores, Diambe, Mariana Maia, max willá moriais, Raphaek Cruz, Rona, and Yhuri Cruz. Liz da Costa Sandoval, Rogério Rezende, and Luciana Sabóia Fonseca Cruz Brasília contemporânea: ambiguidades e contradições da cidade vistas pelas lentes do cinema Contemporary Brasília: ambiguities and contradictions of the city as seen through cinematic lens Ars, ano 18, n. 39 (2020): 201-223 https://www.revistas.usp.br/ars/article/view /163780 Brasília is recognized for its exceptional modernist architecture and urbanism, as well as for the socioeconomic segregation represented by its satellite cities. Its metropolitan area has more than three million inhabitants, of which 90% live outside the limits of the planned city. This ambiguity is evident in the cinema, since on the one hand, the films produced for the advertisement of Brasilia explored its breadth, monumentality, and plasticity, and on the other hand, those made by the first generation of filmmakers born in the city reveal another Brasilia. This article 18 explores the tensions resulting from this sociospatial segregation materialized in the urban environment and in Brasilia’s representation in cinema. Milagre, and the collective Marepe, to name just a few. Ismael Portela, Untitled, 1997 José Eduardo Belmonte, still from the film Subterrâneos, 2004. Pedro Ernesto Freitas Lima Nordestes, curadoria e identidade: Moacir dos Anjos e o uso estratégico da “nordestinidade” Northeast, Curation and Identity: Moacir dos Anjos and The Strategic Use of “Northeasterness” Modos: Revista de História da Arte, vol. 5, n. 1 (Jan. 2021): 33-52. https://periodicos.sbu.unicamp.br/ojs/inde x.php/mod/article/view/8663904 This article focuses on how works by contemporary artists from the Brazilian Northeast have centered on discussions of identity and been framed by the curatorial work of Moacir dos Anjos. Questioning the benchmarks of “regional,” “local,” and “northeastern”—read as peripheral within contemporary Brazilian art—dos Anjos has proposed new ways of thinking about the works of artists, living or connected to the region. From a post-colonial perspective and dedicated to the discussion of the idea of the "northeastern artist” and “nordestinidade,” dos Anjos has challenged traditional frameworks based on identity-politics in favor of showcasing the manipulation of contemporary art strategies, mass media, and global practices through the engagement with local issues, materials, and aesthetics in the works of artists from the region, including Ismael Portela, Efrain Almeida, José Rufino, Alice Adriano Pedrosa, José Esparza Chong Cuy, Julieta González, Tomás Toledo (org). Habitat: Lina Bo Bardi São Paulo: MASP, 2019 Habitat: Lina Bo Bardi is the publication accompanying the exhibition of the same name, which travelled from the Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP), to the JUMEX in Mexico City, and to MCA Chicago. The catalog discusses the curatorial project, Bo Bardi’s architectural career, and her role as founder of Habitat: Revista das Artes no Brasil, alongside texts by critics and scholars regarding her work and impact in Brazil’s architectural and museum scene. With texts by Antonio Risério, Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley, Esther da Costa Meyer, Guilherme Wisnik, Jane Hall, as well as the curators José Esparza, Chong Cuy, Julieta González, and Tomás Toledo. The catalog also includes translations of texts written by Bo Bardi. The installation of the exhibition recreates Bo Bardi’s radical curatorial thinking with works exhibited in the iconic glass easels designed for the opening exhibitions of MASP of which she was the founder (together with Pietro Bo Bardi), architect, and exhibition designer. The exhibition attempts to show Bo Bardi within her larger socio-cultural habitat beginning with her arrival to Brazil from Italy in 1946, which impacted her notions of curating, architecture, and design: her approach to these fields is 19 enmeshed in both modernism and popular art and culture; she also held deeply critical views of industrialization and the effacement of vernacular production in the country. Paulo Tavares Des-Habitat: Revista das Artes no Brasil Des-Habitat: Journal of the Arts of Brazil São Paulo: N-1 edições, 2021. Paulo Tavares’ Des-Habitat, published by n-1 edições in 2021 uses layout, collage, and reappropriation strategies central to the graphic language of Lina Bo Bardi’s midtwentieth century publication Habitat: Revista das Artes no Brasil to interrogate the juxtaposition of modernist and vernacular vocabulary that was central to the publications’ framing of objects, art and architectural works, photographs, cultures, and texts. Tavares observes how governmental “pacification” discourses of the time that displaced and appropriated native lands in Brazil resulted in the circulation of artifacts and images of indigenous communities among the Brazilian urban elites. Tavares argues that Habitat obscured this colonial context in its framing of these objects and practices. Using the journal’s own graphic language to change the framing of texts, objects and images, Tavares produces an alternative narrative that leads the audience to reflect on the field of cultural production in mid-twentieth century Brazil and especially the mechanisms of erasure that have separated artistic and architectural products from the social costs and means of their production. SERBO-CROATIAN Vuk Vuković Nataša Nikčević Erotika u savremenoj crnogorskoj umjetnosti (29 Maj – 29 Jun 2020) Erotica in Contemporary Montenegrin Art Contemporary Art Centre of Montenegro, Podgorica, Montenegro http://montenegrina.net/fokus/csucgerotika-u-savremenoj-crnogorskojumjetnosti/ In a post-patriarchal society such as Montenegro, remnants of the old system persist, making Erotica in Contemporary Montenegrin Art all the more challenging to its current audience. By featuring 14 artists, Nataša Nikčević, curator of Contemporary Art Center of Montenegro, presents a delicate subject to an audience that persisted through a two-month lockdown caused by the COVID-19 crisis. Many nations, including Montenegro, used this period to reckon with sexist policies that have endured until today – the exhibition takes up the question of the male gaze in order to deconstruct it. Nikčević characterizes the exhibition as a complicated matter: one distinct from pornography, but due to its erotic content the lines between the two spheres are often blurred. For her, the audience must look past sexism, a move she achieves by drawing on French sociologist Jean Baudrillard and Russian-American philosopher Mikhail Epstein, who both distinguish erotica from vulgarity, consequently facilitating a more profound conversation about the works of art. Erotica in Contemporary Montenegrin Art further presents an array of artists including established painters such as Roman Đuranović (b. 1969) and up-and-coming video artists like Jovana Vujanović (b. 1986). Through the intergenerational representation and different art forms of the same topic, Nikčević challenges the status quo of the Montenegrin society that believes it has moved on from the constraints of patriarchy, which, as evident from the exhibition, is not the case. By selecting eight women and six male artists, Nikčević shows how Montenegrin women do not shy away from deconstructing notions set by their predecessors. Erotica in Contemporary Montenegrin Art encapsulates some of the feminist theories Nikčević hopes will stimulate a collective movement towards a genuine postpatriarchal model. Una Miletić Podrška mladima i skidanje elitističkog vela sa umetnosti Support to young generations and stripping of the elitist veil from the arts Danas, 23 April 2021, Belgrade, Serbia 20 https://www.danas.rs/kultura/podrskamladima-i-skidanje-elitistickog-vela-saumetnosti/ Serbia is no exception when it comes to the dire consequences COVID-19 on art scenes across the world. Unsurprisingly, those harmed the most were its up-and-coming artists who heavily depended on continuous exposure, which came to a stop in March 2020. Although the pandemic caused damage, it also radicalized contemporary artists, particularly those of younger generations. Now that art events are coming back, contemporary artists in Serbia are working harder than ever to find alternative pathways to visibility, which, with institutional help, remains possible. No Concept Gallery in Belgrade is an example of an art institution that can help facilitate art historical and business support to young artists of all backgrounds. The gallery's mission is to help up-and-coming artists because Belgrade, the capital of Serbia, has a shortage of spaces where new artists can present their work. The gallery also seeks to dismantle the elitist lens of art institutions by opening its exhibits to "regular people." Although this might seem like customary practice in Western Europe, it is a novelty in the Western Balkans. Considering most influential art institutions in Serbia are publicly funded, gaining recognition within the art establishment is dependent on who you know and less on the quality of the work. No Concept Gallery is trying to foster an environment suitable for the further growth of private galleries that will nurture a new generation of contemporary artists. Dreamcatchers http://www.msu.hr/dogadanja/izlozbahvataci-snova/541.html The history of the Western Balkans is complicated and multifaceted, with remnants of political strife limiting bilateral relations to this day. Nonetheless, the art world remains one of few active channels that has persisted through the political turmoil, and which has allowed contemporary artists to exchange ideas independently and collectively. Organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb, Dreamcatchers represents a combined effort of the museum and Art brut Serbia (ABS), an organization devoted to discovering and integrating “invisible” artists – making it the first project in which both countries collaborated on the subject of naive art. By bringing twenty artists from Serbia and Croatia, the exhibition presents a world where both parties create works outside the realm of Western Balkan problems, with more similarities than differences. In this regard, Dreamcatchers is an example of cultural diplomacy (a policy other European nations exported for generations), but instead of presenting “old masters” to its audience, Dreamcatchers shows how ordinary people from once hostile countries think and create comparable art. The message of unity comes through works as they depict a connection between two nations that faded away due to political difficulties forced on the public. A project such as this one indicates the power art institutions can wield in creating dialogue around sensitive subjects. Dreamcatchers is an example of active collaboration between two nations that once coexisted peacefully, and if contemporary art indicates anything, they will do so again. SPANISH Olga Fernández López and Juan Albarrán Daniela Bilopavlović Bedenik Hvatači Snova (30 Oktobar 2020 – 1 Decembar 2020) 21 Juan José Santos Curaduría de Latinoamérica. 20 entrevistas a quienes cambiaron el arte contemporáneo, vol I y vol. II Curating of Latin America. Twenty interviews with those who changed contemporary art Murcia, Cendeac, 2018 and 2020. Curaduría de Latinoamérica is a research project that brings together forty interviews with Latin American curators. The project is especially necessary because the history of Latin American art has been articulated, to a great extent, through exhibitions that have compensated some of the insufficiencies in academia. Written and published in two stages, the second book is not a sequential continuation of the first, but works as a mirror capturing topics and agents that the first volume could not encompass, such as a wider range of countries, the retrieval of women artists and curators, the new generation of curators, the role of exhibitions in the formation of national or regional identities, along with the diaspora and the recent decolonial impact on museums. Both books have a similar structure: they start with exhibitions that took place in the late 1980s and early 1990s and end with shows that were produced between 2014 and 2017. However, the different choice of exhibitions offers two complementary versions of the same thirty years of curatorial practice, proving that there is not a single history to be told about Latin American curating and, for that matter, about any other canonical history of exhibitions. Additionally, it is interesting to remark how, in the lapse of two years, a new set of questions and strategies have shaken the curatorial field. Juan José Santos makes the perspicacious decision to opt for exhibitions (each with its own brief introduction) rather than curators, which deflates the authorial dimension of curating and allows a deeper look into each project: its context, its institutional conditions, the existing art scene, the expectations, the reactions, and its potential legacy. It is significant to note how some exhibitions refer to their predecessors and how curators learn from each other and build professional and personal networks over the course of many years. In this sense, exhibitions appear as creators of memory. Far from exoticization, the books confirm the importance of transnationality over internationalism and testifies to the crucial role that Central America and the Caribbean have had in the curatorial field of the continent. Finally, the volumes evidence the success of curatorial experiences developed under unstable institutional frameworks, which can be circumvented with biennials, encounters, and projects in public space. (OFL) Lidia Mateo Leivas El reverso de la censura. Cine clandestino durante el tardofranquismo y la Transición The reverse of censorship. Clandestine cinema during late Francoism and the Transition Murcia, Cendeac, 2020. Taking the experience of militant film collectives during late Francoism and the early Transition as its focus, this book offers a cartography of political agents and their documentary practices; it also conceptualizes a genealogy of clandestine images and their agency, intersecting visual culture, affect theory and memory studies. El reverso de la censura. Cine clandestino durante el tardofranquismo y la Transición proposes that clandestine images are the reverse of censorship: they appear at the limits of the politics of visibility, operating at its borderline. However, for the author, the clandestine nature of some images transcend the historical moment in which these films were made. She tracks them down in the period from the Civil War until the 2011 political and social movements in order to rethink Spanish visual memory. Towards that end, Lidia Mateo Leivas interviewed different groups of filmmakers and analyzed their 16 mm. cinematographic practices during the 1970s, documenting realities that Francoism wanted to relegate out of sight. In particular, the author focuses on three issues— people, violence and memory— that were central to battles around representation, resistance and political action. 22 Remedios Zafra Frágiles. Cartas sobre la ansiedad y la esperanza en la nueva cultura Fragiles. Letters on Anxiety and Hope in the New Culture Barcelona, Anagrama, 2021. In an international context where the notion of counter-information was significantly expanded, militant practices involved the filming of the contemporary Spanish social and political struggles, such as strikes, demonstrations, the mobilization of local residents or police repression, which now act as disputed witness-images. But these collective practices also entailed sourcing and editing significant images from the recent past in order to produce other narratives about the Civil War, along with the circulation of the films through alternative, sometimes illegal, channels and spaces. These experiences were recalled in interviews that the author conducted with the film’s viewers, which served to activate their memories. Far from a fetishistic or nostalgic approach, the book opens the question of the afterlife and persistent reemergence of these images throughout the past decades, some of which have retained their political potential, because they have not entirely lost their clandestine status. (OFL) Frágiles. Cartas sobre la ansiedad y la esperanza en la nueva cultura continues the analyses that Remedios Zafra has developed in previous books such as El entusiasmo. Precariedad y trabajo creativo en la era digital [Enthusiasm. Precarity and creative work in the digital era] (2017) or Ojos y capital [Eyes and Capital] (2015), about contemporary working conditions, in particular those of the creative field. Under the mirage of enthusiasm, this milieu is characterized by a vocational selfexploitation that ends in anxiety and harmed bodies and a naturalized precarity that is cause and consequence of trying to create through a network of peers trapped in the same feedback loop of immaterial labor. In this context, creative and cultural workers are forced to operate between their permanent exposure to the Internet, technological hyperproductivity, the guilt of being unable to say no, an everdelayed promise of well-being, and their isolation and exhaustion in front of the screens. The author affirms that whenever technology is present, life becomes life-work. This environment both feeds and conceals an underlying unease and discomfort. Against the background of technological culture intensified by the pandemics, this book comes as a response to a direct interpellation that an actual precarious employee made to the author in which she asked for hope and for answers for a more “livable” life. For that reason, the essay takes the form of a letter. In fact, the book is inspired by conversations, messages and talks with cultural workers that Remedios Zafra conducted after she published El entusiasmo, which she wanted to elaborate as a public reflection in order to elicit recognition based in solidarity. The author explores the similarities between systems of induced subordination and she reclaims feminist experiences of knowledge that connect self-consciousness and awareness of 23 structural problems. She looks for a sense of community and sorority where the oppressionprivacy pair is broken by its making public and its becoming political. For Zafra, our fragile condition demands listening to our bodies, working with our illuminating doubts, slowing down our paces or preserving our intimacy, among other actions that we may take. (OFL) LGBTQ people of the U.K., Germany, Poland and Spain. It was convened as a collective initiative that brings together activists (then named militants), artists and scholars working in art history, film, cultural studies, design and the history of sexuality. Between protest and life, the book underlines the variety of voices and reflections that stand for the multiplicity of experiences that dissenting bodies and sexually diverse subjectivities experienced from Late Francoism to the AIDS crisis. The book is structured in four parts. The first one deals with spaces of socialization, especially places that were not necessarily associated with classical political militancy, but locations and situations, such as those related to culture, leisure or sport that promoted encounters, fun, and enabled everyday resistance to the repressive legal and social framework. The second section focuses on the more recognizable genealogies of political engagement and collectives, but highlights the distinct, and sometimes contradictory ideas and approaches that gave shape to so called “sexual liberation.” The third examines issues from science, law, and related institutions where the body is construed as a battleground. The last one reflects on the role of archives in the building of collective memory, considering them not only a repository of documents, but also a site of struggle. The book offers new perspectives and questions surrounding this particular moment of Spanish history, the Spanish Transition, that was foundational for LGBTQ struggles, but where many stories have not yet been told. (OFL) Alberto Berzosa y Gracia Trujillo Fiestas, memorias y archivos. Política sexual disidente y resistencias cotidianas en España en los años setenta Parties, Memories and Archives. Dissident Sexual Politics and Everyday Resistances in Spain during the 1970s Madrid, Brumaria, 2019. Maite Aldaz Hans Haacke y la crítica de la institución arte Hans Haacke and the Critique of the Art Institution Madrid, Tierradenadie, 2019. This book is the Spanish contribution to Cruising the 70s, a European network research project that looked at the contemporary cultural, social and political understandings of queer history, and the legislative treatment of Although Haacke is the backbone of this survey and the reader will find a comprehensive study of some of his most relevant projects, the book by Maite Aldaz is not just another monograph on the German artist. Hans Haacke and the Critique of the Art 24 Institution analyzes the evolution of institutional critique since the seventies until today, considering Daniel Buren, Marcel Broodthaers, Michael Asher, Louise Lawler, Andrea Fraser, Hito Steyerl, Núria Güell, among other artists. The research is structured through a series of concepts related to institutional critique, museum, publics, business, public space, memory, issues that allow Aldaz to address the limitations, contradictions and possibilities of institutional critique in our cultural field. Sergio Martínez Luna Cultura visual. La pregunta por la imagen Visual Culture. The Question of the Image Vitoria, Sans Soleil, 2019 production of four of these key authors: Luis Camnitzer, Gerardo Mosquera, Mari Carmen Ramírez, and Nelly Richard. Thanks to them, Latin America is no longer considered a southern periphery that derives its models from western centers, but a problematic cultural space that has triggered the construction of new geographies and genealogies for contemporary art. In Piñero’s words: “Their sometimes competing positions are displayed between the affirmation of the existence of Latin America as the ultimate sense for the artworks of the region and the assertion that the best thing that can happen to Latin American art is to stop being so.” (JA) This book constitutes a major contribution to Visual Studies from the Spanish-speaking academic context. Sergio Martínez Luna, an aesthetics scholar teaching at UNED (National Distance Education University, Spain), proposes a theoretical approach to the image in the media landscape of the 21st century. As the author points out in the introduction, his research neither tries to build a “picture theory,” nor to offer definitive answers to the questions that the image raises today. Visual Culture. The Question of the Image is a sequence of brilliant reflections on the transformations that the picture is undergoing. Those mutations are related to an extremely fast technological development that enhances participation, performativity and mobility, and affects the very diverse social lives of the images. (JA) Gabriela A. Piñero Ruptura y continuidad. Crítica de arte desde América Latina Rupture and Continuity. Art Criticism from Latin America Santiago de Chile, Metales Pesados, 2019. In recent decades, Latin America has garnered increasing attention within the contemporary art system. This is due to the growing prestige of its artists, alongside the theoretical innovations of art critics and curators since the 1980s. In Rupture and Continuity. Art Criticism from Latin America, the Argentinean art historian Gabriela Piñero discusses the TURKISH Eran Sabaner Kalaora *Two of the articles selected for this edition of FLI are from Sanat ve Hafıza Konuşmaları, a publication created as part of Hakikat Memory 25 Centre’s project of the same name. Scholars working in interdisciplinary fields were invited to conduct their independent research on a selection of artworks related to state violence and memory in Turkey. Participants were then asked to prepare short presentations around their research. This research culminated in a book project that is available online and in print. (Indexer’s Note) Zengin, Aslı İnsan Ötesi Bedenlerle Hafızanın İmkanları: Tekno-Canavarlar ve Bedenler The Potentialities of Memory Through Transhuman Bodies: Techno Monsters and Bodies Hafıza ve Sanat Konuşmaları 2020 (Istanbul: Hafıza Merkezi, 2021), 117-129. https://hakikatadalethafiza.org/wpcontent/uploads/2021/06/Hafiza-veSanat.pdf. “What do we call a body? What makes a body “body”? Are bodies only related to humans and animals? When the issues we center are concepts such as violence, memory, and testimony, what can we make of bodies that are beyond the human, belonging in forms that transcend the human? What do bodies of government, fascism, genocide, misogyny, and homophobia refer to beyond the human? When I was observing the archives of Memory and Art Project in Turkey, these were the primary questions that directed my research. In this text, I will examine works that encourage me to ask these questions as a social scientist and I will reconsider the body in alternative ways to its human-centric identifications. I will understand the body as something in relation to but not defined by humans and in the framework of montage, subgroup, and assemblage that brings together other existences, objects, and affects. The works that I have chosen for this project go beyond the line of thinking that defines the body in human-centric ways and looks into the body as a posthuman ontology, representation, and construction. Thus, I aim to signify the ways in which multitudes of bodies concerning the memories of violence and testimony in Turkey are constituted.” (Translated Excerpt) Ali Bozan, Bu Bir Toros Değildir, 2009. Tataryan, Nora Şiddetin Temsili ve Yüzleşmenin İmkanı Üzerine Bir Deneme An Essay on The Representation of Violence and the Potentiality of Confrontation Hafıza ve Sanat Konuşmaları 2020 Istanbul: Hafıza Merkezi, 2021, 67-75. https://hakikatadalethafiza.org/wpcontent/uploads/2021/06/Hafiza-veSanat.pdf “How is state violence represented in contemporary artworks from Turkey? Is there a way to artistically represent violence? Does art have the responsibility to represent violence? If it does, can this responsibility be imagined as an area of resistance? When the Hakikat Memory Center invited a group of researchers to interpret an archive/selection related to state violence, these were the first questions posed by myself. Although such classification has the potential to limit ways of thinking around art and aesthetics, it allowed us to analyze a corpus of violence culture in Turkey. In this text, in light of the questions I pose above, I focus on how representation itself can be violent, and how it can reproduce the same language it refuses. In other words, I am interested in how looking at violence and representation from an aesthetic point of view can present us a vocabulary. Within this context, through specific examples, I will research how artworks that are imagined 26 as spaces of confrontation can be associated with concepts such as partnership and responsibility.” (Translated Excerpt) Öztekin, Furkan Gökyüzüne uzanmak: Açık Sütun üzerine bir deneme Reaching for the Sky: An Essay on Open Pillar Argonotlar https://argonotlar.com/gokyuzuneuzanmak-acik-sutun-uzerine-bir-deneme/ This short article, published in the online art journal Argonotlar, presents a queer analysis of Ayşe Erkmen’s public sculpture Açık Sütun (Open Pillar) (1993) by referencing Nicholas de Villiers’ concept of queer opacity. It explains how the sculpture is significant in queer demonstrations, as it acts as a “wish tree” for protestors who hang pride flags and banners around it. The author also likens the work to an “occupied fortress” during protests. The article was published days after thousands of people marched the streets of Beyoğlu against the Turkish governments’ decision to pull out from the Istanbul Convention, a human rights treaty against femicides and violence against women. İstanbul Pride March, Tünel Meydanı, 2014. 27 Indexers Chinese Kathy Mak — The Hong Kong Polytechnic University Portuguese Alice Heeren — Southern Methodist University Danish Eli Ståhl — Goldsmiths, University of London Serbo Croatian Vuk Vuković — University of Pittsburgh German Daniel Horn — Free University Berln Hungarian Katalin Cseh-Varga — Humboldt University Berlin and Academy of Fine Arts Vienna Italian Martina Tanga — Museum of Fine Arts Boston Spanish Olga Fernández López — Autonomous University of Madrid Juan Albarrán — Autonomous University of Madrid Turkish Eran Sabaner Kalaora — Independent Curator Korean Boyoung Chang — Independent Scholar Latvian Ieva Astahovska — Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art (LCCA) Polish Magdalena Moskalewicz — School of the Art Institute of Chicago Editors Editors Jacob Stewart-Halevy — Tufts University John Tyson — University of Massachusetts Boston 28 Issue 2 2022