Untitled - ARTL@S

Transcription

Untitled - ARTL@S

T
he decentered internationalism espoused by the
Havana, Dakar, and Gwangju biennials invites art
historians to depart from an exclusively North
Atlantic focus. Such a shift in purview
seriously considers cities and regions that have
been marginalized by previous academic emphases,
more so than by their historical circulations of art and culture with
the rest of the world. Historicizing and measuring the circulation of
art on the former margins is now a decisive task if we want to
evidence, nuance, or contest the “provincialization” of Europe and
North America in recent art history. Artl@s’ upcoming conference
aims to gather an international and transdisciplinary group of
researchers to collectively investigate the formation and
impediments of what we call “South-South” axes from
decolonization to the present day.
L’
internationalisme décentré affiché par les biennales
de la Havane, de Dakar ou de Gwangju, invite à ne
plus se contenter d’une conception nord-atlantique
de l'histoire de l'art, et à considérer sérieusement
des villes et régions qui ont été marginalisées peutêtre plus encore de nos sujets de recherche que des circulations
artistiques effectives. L’historicisation et la mesure des circulations
artistiques dans les marges sont aujourd’hui des tâches décisives
pour démontrer, nuancer ou contester la “provincialisation” de
l’Occident dans l’histoire récente de l’art. C’est l’objet de la
prochaine conférence Artl@s, qui cherche à réunir des chercheurs
de tous horizons géographiques et disciplinaires afin de réfléchir
ensemble à l’hypothèse de circulations artistiques “Sud-Sud” depuis
la décolonisation jusqu’à aujourd’hui.
2
Scientific Committee
T.J. Demos, Professor, History of Art and Visual Culture,
University of California, Santa Cruz, USA
Anthony Gardner, Associate Professor of Contemporary Art
History and Theory, University of Oxford, UK
Andrea Giunta, Professor of Art History, Universidad de Buenos
Aires, Argentina, and The University of Texas at Austin, USA
Dominique Malaquais, Senior researcher at the Centre d’Études
des Mondes Africains, CNRS, Paris
Zahia Rahmani, Director of the Art et Mondialisation program,
Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art, Paris
Sven Spieker, Professor of Germanic, Slavic and Semitic Studies,
University of California, Santa Barbara, USA
Organizing Committee
Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel, Associate Professor of Modern Art, École
normale supérieure, Paris, Director of Artl@s
Olivier Marcel, 2014-2015 Artl@s Postdoc, ENS/IHMC
Daniel Quiles, Assistant Professor, The School of the Art Institute
of Chicago, USA, 2013-2014 Artl@s Postdoc
Catherine Dossin, Associate Professor of Art History, Purdue
University, USA, Vice Director of Artl@s
3
C
ONFERENCE PROGRAM
WEDNESDAY, JUNE 17
9:30 - 10:00
Tea & Coffee
10:00 - 10:15
Introduction
10:15 – 12:30 PANEL 1 - Historicity of a Decentered Art History:
Formation and Impediments of South-South Circulations
Chair: Sven Spieker
Dwight Carey: Global Architecture in the Indian Ocean: The Built
Environments of Nineteenth-Century Mauritius
Nicolas Nercam: Un aperçu des échanges artistiques sino-indiens
de la première moitié du XXe siècle: transfert, identité,
politique. Le cas de Calcutta et du Bengale
11:15 - 11:30
Pause
Josefina de la Maza, Juan Ricardo Rey, Carolina Vanegas, Catalina
Valdés: Art Collectors in Network and Identity Narratives:
Contributions to a Cartography of the Genre of Types and
Costumes in South America
Victoria L. Rovine: Style Migrations: Tracing South-South Networks
through African Dress Practices
12:30 - 14:00
Lunch at the restaurant of the ENS
14:00 – 16:30 PANEL 2 - Cities, Routes, Regions: Placing SouthSouth Circulations
Chair: Dominique Malaquais
Yin Ker: From Santiniketan to Yangon & Beyond: Considerations on
an Ashram’s Vision for a Contextualised Narrative of Modern
Burmese & Southeast Asian Art
Maria de Fátima Morethy Couto: Entre Paris et Londres: contacts et
rencontres des artistes sud-américains en Europe (1950-1970)
15:00 - 15:30
Pause
4
Maeline Le Lay: Les circulations artistiques entre la RD Congo, le
Rwanda et le Burundi: de l’Empire colonial belge à l’Afrique des
Grands Lacs
Fanny Gillet: De l’Union nationale des artistes plasticiens algériens
à l’Union arabe des arts plastiques: pour une analyse des
échanges artistiques à l’échelle panarabe (1970-1979)
16:30 - 16:45
Pause
16:45 - 18:30
ROUNDTABLE: Past Disquiet Narratives and
Ghosts from The International Art Exhibition for
Palestine, 1978
- Kristine Khouri, Rasha Salti, Nasser Soumi, Claude
Lazar
Chair: Catherine Dossin
18:30 - 19:00
Reception, École normale supérieure
THURSDAY, JUNE 18
9:00 - 09:45
KEYNOTE ADDRESS: ANTHONY GARDNER
South as Method: Fetish, Farce or Force?
9:45 - 10:00
Tea & Coffee
10:00 – 12:30 PANEL 3 - Biennales of the South: expectations
and influence Chair: Anthony Gardner
Nuria Querol: The Delhi Biennale: Paradoxical Conditions in SouthSouth Axes of Global Art and Politics
Nora Greani: L’art contemporain à l’épreuve de l’authenticité
bantoue, L’exemple de la Biennale d’Art Bantu Contemporain
11:00 - 11:30
Pause
Thomas Fillitz: The Biennial of Dakar, Global Art, and the
Circulation of African Artists
Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel, Olivier Marcel: Bringing Artlas South
12:30 - 14:00
14:00 – 16:30 PANEL 4 - Southern connections and nonconnections
5
Chair: Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel
Annabelle Boissier: Les institutions artistiques asiatiques des
décennies 1970 à 2000
Emmanuelle Spiesse: Acteurs de l’art du Nigeria ; artistes visuels et
marchés de l’art (début des années 2000)
15:00 - 15:30
Pause
Camila Bechelany, Camila Maroja: From the South and Back Again.
Constructing Latin American Art at the Biennale de Paris
(1977) and at the Bienal Latino Americana de São Paulo (1978)
Chanon Praepipatmongkol: Modern Islamic Art Beyond the Middle
East
16:30 - 16:45
Pause
16:45 - 17:45
KEYNOTE ADDRESS: ANDREA GIUNTA
Simultaneous abstractions: Nasreen Mohamedi and the
constellation of Latin American Art
18:00 - 19:00
FRIDAY, JUNE 19
9:30 - 10:00
Tea & Coffee
9:30 – 12:00 PANEL 5 - Trauma, memory and visibility in/of the
South
Chair: Zahia Rahmani
Benjamin O. Murphy: Synchronicity, Historicity, and Juan Downey's
Ethnographic Present
Devika Singh: India and South-South Formations: Responses to the
Bangladesh War of 1971
10:30 - 11:00
Pause
Katja Gentric: Memórias, Íntimas, Marcas: Angola - Cuba - South
Africa
Bindu Bhadana: Index of the Disappeared: Navigating the Archive
12:00 - 13:15
6
13:15 - 14:30
FILM PROJECTION
Fesman 2010, du Nord au Sud de l'Est à l'Ouest
Christine Douxami, Philippe Degaille
14:30 – 17:00 PANEL 6 - A southern turn in art?
Chair: Andrea Giunta
Kevin Murray: South Ways - art undercurrents across the latitude
Andrew Weiner: Chorus, Screen, Pistol: Regional Socialism Against
the Global Contemporary
15:30 - 16:00
Pause
Cristiana Tejo: Curare: is it possible to de-colonize curatorial
practices?
Daniel Quiles in conversation with Mabel Tapia and Annabela
Tournon of the Red Conceptualismos del Sur
17:00 - 17:15
Pause
17:15 - 18:45
CLOSING DEBATE:
Is the South a place, a mobile condition of domination
and invisibilization, a global commodity, a
geopolitical ideology, or an academic chimera?
Chair: Sven Spieker
19:00 - 20:00
7
P
ANELS, AND ABSTRACTS
- PANEL 1 –Historicity of a decentered art history: formation
and impediments of South-South circulations.
12
Dwight Carey: Global Architecture in the Indian Ocean: The Built
Environments of Nineteenth-Century Mauritius
12
Nicolas Nercam: An overview on the Sino-Indian artistic
exchanges during the first half of the 20th century: transfer,
identity, and politics. The situation of Calcutta and Bengal.
13
Josefina de la Maza, Juan Ricardo Rey, Carolina Vanegas, Catalina
Valdés: Art Collectors in Network and Identity Narratives:
Contributions to a Cartography of the Genre of Types and
Costumes in South America
14
Victoria L. Rovine: “Style Migrations: Tracing South-South
Networks through African Dress Practices”
16
- PANEL 2 – Cities, routes, regions: placing South-South
circulations.
18
Yin Ker: From Santiniketan to Yangon & Beyond: Considerations
on an Ashram’s Vision for a Contextualised Narrative of Modern
Burmese & Southeast Asian Art
18
Maria de Fátima Morethy Couto: Entre Paris et Londres: contacts
et rencontres des artistes sud-américains en Europe (1950-1970) 19
Maeline Le Lay: Les circulations artistiques entre la RD Congo, le
Rwanda et le Burundi: de l’Empire colonial belge à l’Afrique des
Grands Lacs
21
Fanny Gillet: De l’Union nationale des artistes plasticiens
algériens à l’Union arabe des arts plastiques: pour une analyse des
échanges artistiques à l’échelle panarabe (1970-1979)
23
ROUNDTABLE - - Past Disquiet Narratives and Ghosts from The
International Art Exhibition for Palestine, 1978
25
8
KEYNOTE ADDRESS: Anthony Gardner - South as Method: Fetish,
Farce or Force?
27
- PANEL 3 – Biennales of the South: expectations and
influence.
28
Nuria Querol: The Delhi Biennale: Paradoxical Conditions in
South-South Axes of Global Art and Politics
28
29
31
31
-PANEL 4 – Southern connections and non-connections.
33
33
Emmanuelle Spiesse: Acteurs de l’art du Nigeria ; artistes visuels et
marchés de l’art (début des années 2000)
34
Camila Bechelany and Camila Maroja: From the South and Back
Again. Constructing Latin American Art at the Biennale de Paris
(1977) and at the Bienal Latino Americana de São Paulo (1978) 35
Chanon Praepipatmongkol: Modern Islamic Art Beyond the
Middle East
37
Keynote Address: Andrea Giunta
39
Simultaneous abstractions: Nasreen Mohamedi and the
constellation of Latin American Art
39
- PANEL 5 - Trauma, memory and visibility in/of the South. 40
Benjamin O. Murphy Synchronicity, Historicity, and Juan
Downey's Ethnographic Present
40
9
Devika Singh: India and South-South Formations: Responses to
the Bangladesh War of 1971
42
Katja Gentric: Memórias, Íntimas, Marcas: Angola - Cuba - South
Africa
43
Bindu Bhadana: Index of the Disappeared: Navigating the Archive
45
FILM PROJECTION :
l'Ouest
Fesman 2010, du Nord au Sud de l'Est à
46
- PANEL 6 - A southern turn in art?
47
Kevin Murray: South Ways - art undercurrents across the latitude
47
Andrew Weiner: Chorus, Screen, Pistol: Regional Socialism
Against the Global Contemporary
48
practices?
50
Discussion: Daniel Quiles in conversation with Mabel Tapia and
Annabela Tournon of the Red Conceptualismos del Sur
51
-Closing Debate – Is the South a place, a mobile condition of
domination and invisibilization, a global commodity, a
geopolitical ideology, or an academic chimera?
52
10
11
- PANEL 1 –
Historicity of a decentered art history:
formation and impediments of South-South
circulations.
Chair: Sven Spieker
Sven Spieker, Art Margins, University of California, Santa
Barbara
Dwight Carey: Global Architecture in the Indian Ocean: The
Built Environments of Nineteenth-Century Mauritius
Dwight Carey, Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Art History,
UCLA
In 1810, the French government on the Indian Ocean island of
Mauritius sold 406 enslaved masons and carpenters to the British
military. These builders became a part of English forces through an
Act of Capitulation, which ensured the British takeover of the
island. Of this group of slaves, 153 were born in Mauritius. Likewise,
193 came from Mozambique, fifty-five hailed from Madagascar, two
hailed from India, two came from West Africa, and one was from
Malaysia. This multicultural group shaped the architectural history
of Mauritius despite European control. Since the Act of
Capitulation required French landowners to vacate the colony, this
population of slaves was the only group left with the skills to erect
dwellings in the local, subtropical climate. Although the buildings
this group constructed served multiple purposes, they all adhered
to the same conglomerate style. Such structures were two-story
wood or stone complexes with symmetrical European floor plans
and diverse non-European components, particularly, detached
kitchens, absent interior hallways, and frontal or wrap-around
porches. These buildings conformed to a typology known as creole
architecture.
12
This paper contends that the enslaved masons and carpenters sold
to the British at the beginning of the nineteenth century were
principal agents in the architectural development of modern
Mauritius. As the island transitioned from French to British rule,
these individuals produced structural forms that demonstrated the
resilience of non-European culture under European colonialism.
Previous scholars, most important, Jay Edwards and Philippe
Oszuscik, have claimed that creole architecture emerged because of
the blending of West African and European building traditions in
the colonial Americas. My paper contends that the case of
nineteenth-century Mauritius challenges this notion. I argue that
the colony incubated creole built environments that combined
elements—from Madagascar, East Africa, India, West Africa,
Southeast Asia, and Europe—in a manner that was irrespective of
the American world. In doing so, I refute suppositions that
Mauritius, specifically, and the Indian Ocean, in general, were
peripheral entities within systems of cultural exchange.
Furthermore, I reframe both this island and the corresponding
region as sites where actors from diverse non-European societies
conceived one of the first building traditions to reflect the global,
transcultural character of nineteenth-century slavery. In this way, I
provide a point of departure for rethinking the centrality of
Mauritius for the history of architectural mixture in the global
south. Thus, this paper engages the marginalized peoples and
places that shaped a style, which came to define cultural contact in
the modern colonial era.
Nicolas Nercam: An overview on the Sino-Indian artistic
th
exchanges during the first half of the 20 century: transfer,
identity, and politics. The situation of Calcutta and Bengal.
Nicolas Nercam, Maître de Conférence à l'université Montaigne
Bordeaux, UFR Humanités, département des arts plastiques.
Membre de l’équipe de recherche ARTES (EA CLARE)
This paper analyses some aspects of the Chinese-Indian exchanges
in the artistic domain and studies their impact on the cultural
productions of the two major « artistic homes » of the first half of
13
the 20th century in Bengal: the metropolis of Calcutta and the
ashram of Shantiniketan.
Till the 30’s the interpretation by the Indian cultural circles of the
artistic contributions from Japan as well as from China, was closely
connected with Okakura’s homogenous conception of Asian
cultures. Asia was conceived as a uniform cultural ensemble,
representing a kind of radical reaction (anti-thesis) against the
Western modeling modernity that the European colonial Empires
brought in Asia. In front of this authoritarian implantation, without
any local rooting, which challenged the traditional practices in the
name of modernity, the essence of the Asian art had to be mystical,
rooted in ancestral traditions and on its way to the “pre-colonial
Golden age”.
From the 30’s, the cultural circles of Calcutta involved in their new
aesthetic search to represent the social reality (poverty,
malnutrition, political subjection, economical underdevelopment)
and in solidarity with the emancipation movement all around the
world, were influenced by Chinese artistic contribution. It was in
Calcutta that this new aesthetic took place; the ashram of
Shantiniketan remaining in an atemporal conception of the
Chinese culture.
Josefina de la Maza, Juan Ricardo Rey, Carolina Vanegas,
Catalina Valdés: Art Collectors in Network and Identity
Narratives: Contributions to a Cartography of the Genre of
Types and Costumes in South America
Josefina de la Maza, PhD in Art History and Art Criticism, Stony
Brook University (NY). Assistant professor in art history
(nineteenth-century Latin American and Chilean Art) at
Universidad Alberto Hurtado (Santiago, Chile),
Juan Ricardo Rey, PhD candidate under direction of Gabriela
Siracusano at the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina
Carolina Vanegas, PhD Candidate in Art History in joint program
at CRAL-EHESS, France, and IDAES-UNSAM
14
Catalina Valdés, PhD Candidate in History, Art History Track
(IDAES - UNSAM, Argentina)
One of the most unmistakable visual manifestations of nineteenthcentury European imagination in relation to America is
costumbrismo. This genre describes social types and popular
subjects characterized by their habits, trades, costume, and
environment. Gauchos, caipiras, huasos, and peasants; mestizos
and mulattos of all kinds, indigenous peoples from different
cultures and regions, and Africans from multiple origins, populated
illustrated albums, atlas, and magazines, often transferred from
drawing or watercolor to print culture through engraving and
photography.
The Latin America costumbrista iconography of the nineteenthcentury is a research field that, until recently, primarily focused on
two areas: the iconographic identification of the costumbrista
images produced during the early Republican period and the
analysis of the European gaze that produced them. The objectivity
effect of these two lines of work obscured the exploration other
research areas. In the past decade, however, two new lines of work
have been successfully opened: the development of methodological
and historiographical tools to study print culture, and the recovery
of local (South American) costumbrista artists. These two areas–
and specially the second one–have unsettled the binary hypothesis
that proposed these images as the reflection of the Western’s gaze
from peripheral societies.
This paper would like to focus on a novel area of work: collectors.
We will pay close attention to a South American network of
historians and collectors modeling identity narratives throughout
the twentieth-century. This presentation follows the lead of a
previous study of the costumbrista watercolor series’ De Santiago a
Mendoza. This series was attributed to what appears to be the nonexistent figure of French artist Alphonse Giast (a painter that
according to the “national narratives” of different countries was
active in the Southern Cone between 1820 and 1840). The
iconographical study of Giast’s costumbrista images led us to
identify peculiar similarities with the work of other artists active in
15
different geographical areas within the Americas in the same
period (in other words, we found striking iconographical
similarities for contexts as different as Argentina, Chile, and
Colombia).
In this paper, then, we will address the aims and national agendas
of the network of historians, bibliophiles, and antiquarians from
Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Colombia, active between 1940 and
1980, connected to each other through correspondence, exchange
of art works, and contact dealers in Europe, associated with a
common purpose: to build a coherent corpus of images for the
distinctive national histories of every nation. We will explore the
ways in which costumbrista images became the source of an alleged
collective (South American) and distinctive (national) memory,
while we will interrogate the ideological agenda of these collectors
and their personal and shared motivations to assemble such
images.
Victoria L. Rovine: “Style Migrations: Tracing South-South
Networks through African Dress Practices”
Victoria L. Rovine, Associate Professor, University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill
African dress innovations offer vivid insights into the circulation of
forms and styles along South-South routes of exchange, past and
present. Clothing is an exceptionally active participant in these
transcultural networks. Because dress practices are flexible, highly
visible, and widely accessible, the medium lends itself to
innovations that reach across cultures and regions. Indeed, even
high fashion--the rarified market in designer-centered garments--is
widely accessible to dress innovators as a source of inspiration via
popular images. I will employ a series of case studies, including
mid-20th century embroidery from West Africa that found
inspiration in South Asia; contemporary fashion design from East
Africa inspired by East Asian forms; and textiles whose lineage
encompasses colonial Dutch East India and coastal West Africa.
16
In addition to analyzing their cultural contexts and formal
characteristics, this paper will investigate the symbolic outcomes of
these movements of textiles, garment styles, and other dress
elements, exploring the identities and associations of these
products of South-South circulations. What do these dress
elements signify as they enter markets? In many instances, the
influence of non-local cultures may be foregrounded, while in
others this aspect of a style’s origins may be obscured, as it is
absorbed into new contexts. Indeed, these dress forms may become
emblems of local culture, completely erasing the non-local
elements of their genealogies.
The absorption of new fashion influences across cultures
exemplifies a process that Kwame Anthony Appiah labels
“contamination,” a term he prefers to globalization
(Cosmopolitanism 2006). In his conception, contamination
enriches cultures, offering a model of cultural change that values
transformation rather than preservation. Framed by this model of
the flow of influence and inspiration across cultures, this paper also
draws on Richard Wilk, James Ferguson, and others who have
investigated the forms and meanings produced at the intersection
of cultures. I aim to demonstrate that dress innovation is a
powerful lens through which to view the circulation of forms in
South-South interactions.
17
- PANEL 2 –
Cities, routes, regions: placing South-South
circulations.
Chair: Dominique Malaquais
Dominique Malaquais, Senior researcher at the Institut des
Mondes Africains, CNRS
Yin Ker: From Santiniketan to Yangon & Beyond:
Considerations on an Ashram’s Vision for a Contextualised
Narrative of Modern Burmese & Southeast Asian Art
Yin Ker, Assistant Professor (Art History), School of Art, Design
& Media, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
While Western art was a necessary point of reference for Southeast
Asian artists in the twentieth century, it was only one amongst
many competing visual systems and ideologies, each negotiating
the boundaries of its modus operandi in relation to those of others.
Since its inception in 1919, the art school at Śāntiniketan, the
ashram founded by Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1951)
in Bengal, urged the relativisation of the Western construct of “art”.
It was the hub of intellectuals and artists from across Asia and
beyond, including Southeast Asia’s most prominent artists of the
modern period: Fua Haripitak (1910–1993) from Thailand, Affandi
(1907–1990) and Rusli (1916–2005) from Indonesia and Bagyi Aung
Soe (1923/24–1990) from Myanmar. Artistic traditions from across
space and time were studied and practised simultaneously, and
“art” was not merely engaged at the stylistic and conceptual levels,
but also experienced as a means of seeing, representing and
interpreting the nascent worlds emerging from the struggles for
political autonomy. It expressed the aspiration of artists on the
periphery of Euramerican centres to measure up to global
standards of modernity on their own terms while pursuing a
spiritual freedom devoted to “the highest end of life”. Most
singularly, Śāntiniketan advanced an alternative interpretation of
18
modern art based on Tagore’s definition of the modern as
“independence of thought and action, not tutelage under European
schoolmasters”: artists need not and must not ape the Western
construct of “art”.
Through the life and art of Bagyi Aung Soe, Myanmar’s “father of
modern art”, from his immersion in Śāntiniketan in 1951 until his
death in Yangon in 1990, this paper examines the extent to which
the ashram’s pedagogical programme embodying Tagore’s
universalist aspirations, unswerving faith in humanist ethics and
atemporal vision of the modern partaking in a synergetic
relationship with the traditional is pertinent to challenging the
premises of the prevailing unilateral, form-biased and nationalistic
narrative of twentieth-century art in Southeast Asia. In other
words, it investigates the potential of the Śāntiniketan-Yangon axis
as an archetype for writing a parallel narrative of modern art in
Myanmar, if not Southeast Asia. Inferences on the Burmese artist’s
interpretation and assimilation of the teachings implemented by
Tagore’s right-hand man and artist Nandalal Bose (1882–1966) will
be made from his writings, drawings and paintings – most of which
were magazine illustrations, Myanmar’s platform for experimental
art for more than half a century until the 1990s, and a consummate
example of the inappositeness of art history’s binary opposition of
commercial and fine arts in this part of the world. In expounding
Śāntiniketan’s vision of art and the artist, as well as its take on
tradition and modernity, this paper also points to the reasons
behind Aung Soe’s and some of his fellow Southeast Asian artists’
frustrations in integrating into the international art world today.
Maria de Fátima Morethy Couto: Entre Paris et Londres:
contacts et rencontres des artistes sud-américains en Europe
(1950-1970)
Maria de Fátima Morethy Couto, Instituto de Artes/UNICAMP
and TrAIN/University of the Arts London
Le principal objectif de ma communication sera de mettre en
évidence les intersections entre artistes, marchands et critiques de
19
deux hémisphères distincts, qui ont fait en sorte que non
seulement Paris mais également Londres se transforment, des
années 1950 aux années 1970, en espaces réceptifs à un certain art
latino-américain. Si dans les années 1970, New York commencerait
à s'imposer comme possibilité concrète de résidence ou d'exil pour
de nombreux artistes, dans les années 1960, c'est l'Europe, et en
particulier Paris, qui continuait à éveiller le plus d'intérêt. De
nombreux artistes latino-américains restaient fascinés par la
diversité culturelle de la capitale française et considéraient Paris
comme le centre mondial des arts. De fait, Paris a accueilli alors un
grand nombre d'artistes provenant d'Amérique du Sud, dont Lygia
Clark, Mira Schendel, Sérgio Camargo, Carlos Cruz-Diez, Jesús
Soto, Julio Le Parc et Alejandro Otero. L'arrivée de ces artistes sur
cette scène plurielle et cosmopolite a été facilitée par l'intérêt
manifesté par certains marchands, comme Denise René, pour un
art à caractère constructif et/ou cinétique, qui était devenu la
marque déposée de groupes d'avant-gardes du Brésil, d'Argentine
et du Venezuela dans les années 1950. Dans ce contexte, il convient
de souligner la participation de Soto à l'exposition Le mouvement,
réalisée en 1955 et le prix reçu par Le Parc à la Biennale de Vénice
de 1966.
Certains des artistes susmentionnés ont également exposé à
Londres à cette époque. La galerie Signals, dirigée par de jeunes
gens enthousiastes et en activité entre 1964 et 1966, a été un espace
privilégié de présentation de leurs travaux. La galerie Whitechapel
sera quant à elle toujours évoquée par les Brésiliens en raison de
l'exposition d’Hélio Oiticica en 1969, qui y a été transférée après la
fermeture de Signals. Il convient de souligner que ce réseau
londonien, qui a eu Guy Brett comme une figure de proue,
s’intéressait vivement pour l’art cinétique, quoique il fût compris de
manière assez élargie.
Bien que l'on ne puisse nier l'existence ou l'importance d'initiatives
culturelles à caractère officiel, promues par des institutions
brésiliennes ou sud-américaines, comme le Ministère des Affaires
étrangères, les Ambassades ou les Consulats, dans le but de
stimuler le rôle politique des arts, ce qui m'intéresse ici est surtout
d'analyser la création d’un circuit «alternatif».
20
Même si dans l'historiographie de l’art brésilien, le passage
d’Oiticica à Londres et le séjour de Clark à Paris occupent une place
importante, rares sont encore les recherches sur les connexions
entre les artistes brésiliens et les artistes originaires d'autres pays
sud-américains ayant vécu ou exposé dans ces deux villes entre
1950 et 1970. Le débat sur l'intérêt suscité en Europe par les travaux
de ces artistes se limite en général au cadre des études
monographiques consacrées à chacun d’entre eux. Je souhaite
contribuer à une vision plus ample de ce réseau tissé de manière, si
ce n'est spontanée, tout au moins assez peu organisée, et qui a été
capable d'effacer les frontières entre les cultures dites centrales et
les cultures périphériques.
Maeline Le Lay: Les circulations artistiques entre la RD
Congo, le Rwanda et le Burundi: de l’Empire colonial belge à
l’Afrique des Grands Lacs
Maeline Le Lay, Chargée de recherche CNRS, Laboratoire Les
Afriques dans le monde (UMR 5115)
En 1949, le prix littéraire de la Foire coloniale de Bruxelles était
raflé par le singulier récit de Saverio Nayigiziki, Escapade
ruandaise. Journal d’un clerc en sa trentième année. Justin, le
héros, y relatait sa fuite et ses errements dans une région qui n’était
pas encore très connue sous le nom d’ « Afrique des Grands Lacs »,
un espace englobant le Rwanda le Burundi, la RD Congo et
l’Ouganda. Cinq ans plus tard, en 1954, l’auteur publiait sa pièce de
théâtre, L’Optimiste, sous forme de feuilletons, dans la revue de
l’Union Africaine des Arts et des Lettres d’Elisabethville, Jeune
Afrique. En 1956, une troupe de danseurs intore du Rwanda et un
groupe de tambourinaires du Burundi étaient dépêchés à
Élisabethville, aux côtés de groupes de nombreuses ethnies du
Congo (Kasaï et Katanga) pour participer l’événement Changwe
Yetu (« Notre fête », en swahili), un grand show musical et
chorégraphique de type folklorique, initialement créé pour célébrer
le jubilé de l’U.M.H.K. (Union Minière du Haut-Katanga) et qui fut
par la suite donné à l’Exposition Universelle de Bruxelles de 1958.
Ces circulations artistiques au sein de l’Empire colonial belge
21
encouragées à la fin de la période coloniale, lors de
l’institutionnalisation tardive de la scène artistique par les autorités
coloniales (et de l’intégration des écrivains aux milieux
intellectuels), répondaient à un impératif de propagande pour
servir « l’œuvre civilisatrice » de la Belgique. Il s’agissait, en cette
décennie qui voyait lentement vaciller l’entreprise coloniale, de la
renforcer en chantant la grandeur et l’unité de l’Empire du
Royaume. Il va de soi que ces mobilités étaient, dans ce contexte
impérial, fortement contraintes et contrôlées (ainsi que le
démontrent les archives de l’organisation de Changwe Yetu) ; mais
qu’en est-il des circulations dans le même espace composé de pays
désormais indépendants, plus d’un demi-siècle plus tard ? On ne
saurait ici lister les collaborations artistiques en œuvre dans la
RGLA (Région des Grands Lacs Africains) francophone tant elles
sont nombreuses et se multiplient depuis une vingtaine d’années.
La richesse de cette dynamique tient au fait qu’elles mobilisent tant
les circulations spatiales - entre artistes de l’Est (Goma, Bukavu,
Bujumbura, Kigali), de l’Ouest (Kinshasa) et du Sud (Lubumbashi)
- que disciplinaires, réunissant autour d’une même création,
chorégraphes, comédiens, musiciens, cinéastes etc. Prenant acte de
ces circulations grandissantes d’une ville à l’autre, l’on peut se
demander quels sont les apports de ces collaborations aux scènes
artistiques locales, en termes d’esthétique, de dramaturgie et de
rapport avec le public. Par ailleurs, quels réseaux d’acteurs sociaux notamment de la société civile et des institutions internationales –
sont mobilisés par les artistes pour permettre et faciliter ces
échanges ? Et réciproquement, quel est le poids, sur la scène
artistique, du pouvoir situé au « Nord » dans la circonscription de
cet espace (culturel) et le tracé de ses frontières poreuses,
esquissées le long des conglomérats de conflits ? L’appellation «
(Afrique des) Grands Lacs » ne désigne, en effet, pas seulement un
espace géographique façonné par les lacs et les collines ; il est aussi
un label politique sculpté, ou du moins affuté, par le «
gouvernement » humanitaire (Fassin) et la communauté
internationale.
22
Fanny Gillet: De l’Union nationale des artistes plasticiens
algériens à l’Union arabe des arts plastiques: pour une
analyse des échanges artistiques à l’échelle panarabe (19701979)
Fanny Gillet, doctorante, IMAf, EHESS.
Née en 1963 au lendemain de l’indépendance de l’Algérie sur le
modèle des unions corporatistes issues des régimes socialistes,
l’Union nationale des artistes plasticiens (UNAP) est la première du
genre au Maghreb. Sous l’impulsion du modèle algérien, la Tunisie
avec l’Union nationale des arts plastiques et graphiques (1968) et le
Maroc avec l’Association marocaine des arts plastiques (1972)
suivent cet exemple d’organisation associative qui permet aux
plasticiens de toutes tendances esthétiques de se réunir pour
exposer et bénéficier de subventions. Si dans les premières années
qui suivent l’indépendance algérienne, les expositions organisées
sont majoritairement tournées vers la création des artistes locaux et
les pays politiquement « frères » du bloc Est, exception faite du
Premier festival panafricain d’Alger en 1969, la programmation
s’oriente plus spécifiquement vers les pays arabes dans les années
1970. Désormais volontariste et structurée mais aussi orientée et
exclusive, comme le montre la mise sous tutelle de l’UNAP par le
parti-État F.L.N. (1968), le programme de la Révolution culturelle
porté par le ministre Ahmed Taleb-Ibrahimi (1970-1977) a pour
objectif de promouvoir le patrimoine d’une Algérie porte-parole
des pays du Tiers-Monde. Appuyée par la mise en place de
l’ALECSO (Arab League Educational, Cultural and Scientific
Organization), cette dynamique transrégionale qui permet de
rendre compte de la reconfiguration des circulations déterminées
par l’orientation idéologique du gouvernement s’observe avec la
participation des artistes à des événements officiels, à l’image des
semaines culturelles (Irak, Koweït, Syrie, Bahreïn, Tunisie, Maroc,
Qatar) et de la Première biennale d’art arabe à Bagdad en 1973. Du
point de vue artistique, cet événement unique est l’occasion pour
les artistes du monde arabe de se rencontrer et de confronter leurs
réflexions au cours de débats intenses portant principalement sur
les rapports tradition/modernité et, du point de vue politique, pour
l’Irak de réaffirmer son leadership par la création d’une Union
23
arabe des arts plastiques. Témoignant d’un contexte favorable à
l’échange culturel, la dynamique de la biennale encourage les
artistes du Maghreb à se rassembler à l’échelle régionale que vient
concrétiser l’organisation de l’exposition « Les peintres maghrébins
à Alger » (1974) et l’ « Exposition d’artistes arabes consacrés à la
Palestine » (Maroc, Algérie, Tunisie, 1975). Néanmoins, les
dissensions internes aux unions d’artistes ainsi que les fragilités
diplomatiques mettent en échec la vision utopique d’une unité
arabe. Soulignant la complexité des mécanismes de solidarité
identitaire, l’analyse de cet épisode éphémère permettrait ainsi de
mieux saisir les enjeux politiques que sous-tendent les débats
esthétiques qui ont traversé les pays arabes dans les années 1970.
C’est en nous appuyant sur les recherches que nous avons mené
concernant les arts plastiques dans l’Algérie post-indépendante que
nous tenterons de reconstituer la dynamique des circulations
artistiques entre les pays du monde arabe à partir de sources
documentaires publiques et privées (catalogues, revues, presse,
compte-rendus publiés par l’ALECSO et l’UNESCO) et d’entretiens
effectués entre 2011 et 2014.
24
ROUNDTABLE
Past Disquiet Narratives and Ghosts from The
International Art Exhibition for Palestine, 1978
Kristine Khouri, Rasha Salti,
Claude Lazar, Nasser Soumi
Chair: Catherine Dossin
Catherine Dossin, Associate Professor at Purdue University, USA,
Vice Director of Artl@s
Rasha Salti and Kristine Khouri are writers, independent researchers
and curators. Together, they founded the Group “History of Arab
Modernities in the Visual Study”, a research platform focused on the
social history of art in the Arab world. Their current work is focused
on the history of the International Art Exhibition in Solidarity with
Palestine (Beirut 1978). This research was transformed into the
exhibition Past Disquiet: Narratives and Ghosts of the International
Art Exhibition for Palestine, 1978, which opened at the Museu d'Art
Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA) (2015).
Claude Lazar was born in Alexandria in 1947 but, following the Suez
Crisis of 1956, his family left Egypt for France. He studied art at the
Académie de la Grande Chaumière and the École des métiers d'art.
Lazar participated actively and enthusiastically in the May '68
movement, and over the years joined several militant groups, many
connected to the visual arts, including the Cinema Department of
Vincennes University, the Front Culturel Révolutionnaire, the Front
des artistes Plasticiens (FAP), La Jeune Peinture and its Collectif des
Peintres Antifascistes and Collectif des Peintres des Pays
Arabes. Lazar became very close with Ezzedine Kalak, a
representative of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in
Paris, who organized the International Exhibition for Palestine in
1978 in Beirut to which Lazar took part. After the assassination of
Kalak in August 1978, Lazar started working with art galleries,
mostly in France and in United States.
25
Nasser Soumi was born in Palestine in 1948. He studied art at the
National School of Fine Arts in Damascus, Syria, from1971 to 1977,
continuing his studies at the National School of Fine Arts in Paris
France, from 1980 to 1982. Soumi is a painter and primarily an
installation artist. He transforms a variety of ordinary materials into
works of art. His work is an assembling of "eclectic and handmade
objects". His use of the different tones of the indigo blue colour
evokes the Mediterranean Sea and gives an impression of navigation
and nomadic movement towards a faraway land.
For a little more than five years, Rasha Salti and Kristine Khouri
have conducted research about and around an exhibition of an
exceptional scale and scope that took place in Beirut in the middle
of the civil war and whose archival and documentary traces have
been almost entirely lost.
Titled International Art Exhibition for Palestine, it opened at Beirut
Arab University on 21 March 1978, comprising some two hundred
works donated by artists hailing from nearly thirty countries. The
works in the exhibition were intended as the seed collection for a
museum in exile, which would take the form of an itinerant
exhibition meant to tour the world until it could be repatriated to a
free and democratic Palestine. The International Art Exhibition for
Palestine was organised by the Palestine Liberation Organization’s
(PLO) Plastic Arts Section of the Office of Unified Information. In
1982 the Israeli army advanced on Beirut and held the city under
siege, with the objective of forcing the PLO to leave. The building
where the collection was stored was shelled, and the exhibition’s
paper trail destroyed. All that remained of the exhibition’s story
were the memories of those who made it happen and of those who
visited it.
The history of exhibitions conjure the political, social, cultural,
economic and of course artistic realms in which they were
produced. The case of an exhibition by a political organization,
held in a nonmuseum space, offers thinking about exhibitionmaking practices beyond traditional art institutions. The 1978
International Art Exhibition for Palestine embodies hundreds of
26
individual gestures of support for Palestine through donation of
artworks and help in organizing. When looking at these
individuals, and the networks and collectives they were a part of,
the event of the exhibition expands beyond the collective gesture:
for many artists, this was simply an instance of political
engagement and solidarity. Retracing the history of The
International Art Exhibition for Palestine surfaces the history of
another, rarely explored versant in the art world, namely of artists
who formed collectives, associations, exhibitions, salons and
museums in solidarity with political causes. One of the captivating
outcomes of the research was the emergence of a speculative,
worldly cartography of anti-imperialist and liberation struggles
interlaced with struggles for local social and economic justice.
KEYNOTE ADDRESS: Anthony Gardner
South as Method: Fetish, Farce or Force?
Anthony Gardner, Associate Professor at the University of Oxford
The increasing focus on south-south relations in cultural, economic
and political spheres alike has been a striking development in
recent years. Amid the reclamation of south-south histories – some
recent, some centuries old – and growing recognition of the
importance of southern perspectives today, what has also become
clear is that south is more than just a place. It is a practice, a
politics and even a method for (re-)imagining geo-cultural
relations. But whose south is this? And what does it actually mean
to work “south-south”? I want to address these questions by
bringing together two research projects I have worked on: one
recent (a “curated book” called Mapping South); the other ongoing
(on “biennials of the south”). These two projects reveal quite
different pressures, but also different prospects, for approaching
south-south relations that may allow us to think further on the
times, geographies, difficulties, and possibilities of south-south
cultural relations.
27
- PANEL 3 –
Biennales of the South: expectations and
influence.
Chair: Anthony Gardner
Anthony Gardner, Associate Professor at the University of Oxford
Nuria Querol: The Delhi Biennale: Paradoxical Conditions in
South-South Axes of Global Art and Politics
Nuria Querol, King's College London, Department of Culture,
Media and Creative Industries Research, Faculty Member
The prominence of Indian contemporary art in biennales
worldwide correlates with the multiplicity of biennale circuits,
where Indian artists and curators have had a significant role,
particularly in South-South axes. Places previously considered as
peripheral, such as biennales in Havana, Gwangju and Fukuoka,
have recurrently engaged with Indian art practitioners. This is
relevant since South-South axes expand the geopolitical
cartographies of the global and bring forward counter hegemonic
forces and ideas that inform art and culture. However, while the
participation of Indian art practitioners in Southern biennale has
received critical attention, Southern biennales in India have yet to
be comprehensively examined. This is especially necessary when
we consider biennales that have been proposed, yet never realised,
such as the Delhi Biennale in the 2000s, which is the case study for
this paper. The Delhi Biennale, although it never materialised,
succeeded in putting forward debates on the possibilities of
biennales to establish connections in a horizontal way, and on the
most appropriate model for the Indian context, focusing on the arts
and artists from the Asian region. As such, this case study provides
a unique opportunity to examine contemporary discussions on
perennial exhibitions, but, more importantly, to further interrogate
the conditions through which Southern biennales can emerge in
India and what political trajectory they may follow.
28
In this paper, I discuss the inception of The Biennale Society in
Delhi, which put forward the proposal of the biennale, and examine
its foundational aims and how it has evolved over the years. Among
the questions I ask are: which conditions have facilitated the
debates and emergence of the proposed Delhi Biennale? How did
this proposal relate to the ideas and politics of the global South,
and what factors shaped the ultimate non realisation of this
exhibition? To answer these questions, I draw on in depth
interviews with members of The Biennale Society and with artists,
curators and academics who were involved with the discussions or
commented on them. Furthermore, I draw upon two main
international symposiums organised by The Biennale Society to
discuss the possibility of the Delhi Biennale: The Making of
International Exhibitions: Siting Biennales (New Delhi, 2005) and
Elective Affinities, Constitutive Differences: Contemporary Art in
Asia (New Delhi, 2007), as well as other related printed and digital
materials. The proposed Delhi Biennale is considered in relation to
the then existing India Triennale, to tease out the points of
convergence and departure in South-South dialogues and
networks. It is my contention that by paying attention to a biennale
that did not happen, we could learn more about what does happen,
such as the Kochi Muziris Biennale, thus adding to the complexity
of our understanding of biennales, curatorial practices and SouthSouth axes, challenging the hegemony of the North while
questioning their practical consequences in and from the South.
Nora Greani, Chercheur post-doctorante du Labex CAP:
Laboratoire d’excellence « Création, Arts et Patrimoines »
(LAHIC / IIAC – Musée du Quai Branly – HiCSA).
Souvent citée, jamais vraiment analysée, la Biennale d’Art Bantu
Contemporain (BABC) occupe une place marginale parmi les
recherches menées sur les manifestations vouées à la promotion de
l’art africain. Directement liée au projet politique du Centre
International des Civilisations Bantu (CICIBA), cette biennale
29
itinérante apparaît sur la scène artistique africaine dès 1985. A cette
date, ni Les Magiciens de la Terre, exposition parisienne qui ouvre
officiellement la voie à l’art contemporain africain, ni Dak’Art,
biennale artistique africaine de référence, n’ont pas encore vu le
jour. La biennale bantoue occupe donc une position avant-gardiste
du point de vue de l’histoire de l’art contemporain africain, telle
qu’elle est généralement envisagée de nos jours.
En accord avec la mission du CICIBA de promouvoir et préserver «
les valeurs authentiques des civilisations bantu » (CICIBA 1983)1,
les œuvres sélectionnées se caractérisent par une mise à l’honneur
de l’exotisme. Les artistes sont tenus de représenter une Afrique
originelle et paisible, destinée à trancher avec le cours réel des
évènements sur le continent entre 1985 et 2002. Chacune des sept
éditions de la biennale reposait sur un postulat simple en
apparence et pourtant sujet à controverses: l’existence d’un socle
culturel commun aux Bantous. Or, la population bantoue étant
évaluée par les promoteurs du CICIBA eux-mêmes à plus de cent
cinquante millions d’individus répartis dans plus de vingt états, il
apparaît légitime de s’interroger. Comment prétendre saisir
l’homogénéité culturelle d’un ensemble humain aussi vaste ?
Quelles sont les caractéristiques propres à l’art bantou
contemporain ? Existe-t-il, en fait, un geste créateur proprement
bantou ?
Accueillie par quatre capitales africaines et conçue comme une
reprise en main par les Africains de « leur » histoire, la BABC
constitue un exemple particulièrement intéressant de circulation
artistique « Sud-Sud ». A l’appui de nos recherches doctorales, nous
proposons de dresser un premier bilan de cette manifestation.
Nous analyserons la portée du concept « bantou » et son
association à une communauté artistique contemporaine tout en
nous attachant à mettre en lumière le contexte historique et
politique dans lequel s’inscrit la biennale.
30
Thomas Fillitz, Professor, Dept. of Social and Cultural
Anthropology, University of Vienna
The biennial of Dakar, Dak’Art, was founded in 1992. After its first
venue, the Senegalese government decided to dedicate it to
contemporary art of Africa. But the meaning of that new
orientation was not explicit. At the venues of 1996 and 1998, artists
from Senegal and Francophone West Africa dominated the
selection. By the year 2000, the biennial’s selection committee
started considering as well artists from the African Diaspora. By
2008, the latter notion was replaced by the one of artists having a
citizenship of an African state, wherever they are living. By these
times, the selection committees aimed at considering more broadly
contemporary art production from larger areas of Africa – while
East African artists still remain largely at the margins.
Base on my ethnographic researches on Dak’Art (2008-2014), my
paper will examine these changes of the foci of Dak’Art in the
context of the concept of global art and the communication
between African artists. What is the importance of that biennial for
artists living and working in African countries? Why are young
African artists living in the Diaspora interested in exhibiting in
Dakar? What are present-day implications for Dak’Art – still
positioning itself as the biennial of African contemporary art
although there are, meanwhile, other biennials and triennials on
the continent?
Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel, Associate Professor of Modern Art, ENS,
Director of Artl@s
Olivier Marcel, 2014-2015 Artl@s Postdoc, ENS/IHMC
Exhibition catalogues are a major primary source for art history:
they provide information on events, artists and their artworks; they
help retrace their histories and career trajectories. The goal of
31
BasArt, a project developed by the Artl@s team, is to use exhibition
catalogues to study global artistic circulations geographically and
quantitatively. BasArt is a database designed to accommodate every
possible catalogue format since the first one ever published, in the
17th c. Paris. It consists of a growing collection of catalogues that are
transcribed, georeferenced, and verified by a multidisciplinary team
of scholars. This database will soon be combined with a query
interface that will facilitate the study and mapping of complex
circulations and trajectories while fostering transnational,
transperiod and multiscalar approaches.
Since the end of the 19th century, the practice of editing exhibition
catalogues has spread globally, albeit in different ways and
intensity. Gathered systematically, on a global scale and over a long
period, this source can be a key for “decentering” art history of
modern and contemporary times. Indeed, the big numbers of
quantitative methodology are also those of the small, the less
affluent and less celebrated.
This presentation aims to discuss the feasibility and to illustrate the
benefits of bringing such a tool to art margins, looking at the
institutional rise of contemporary art within Africa around the
1990’s. At that period, events pertaining to contemporary art
blossomed throughout the continent. We hereby retain three: the
CICIBA, Dak’art, and Johannesburg biennales. The geographical
implications of these encounters have not yet been fully assessed in
a comparative and circulatory perspective. What are the actual
flows generated by these events and between them? What are the
patterns and the concrete networks that emerged at that time?
What is their place within the global geography of contemporary
art? These questions require going beyond reputation and claims
made by organizers or commentators. Such discourses can be
confronted to the “distant reading” provided by the geographical
information of exhibition catalogues.
32
-PANEL 4 –
Southern connections and non-connections.
Chair: Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel
Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel, Associate Professor of Modern Art, ENS,
Director of Artl@s
Annabelle Boissier, Chercheuse Associée, Aix Marseille
Université, CNRS, LAMES UMR 7305
Cette communication a pour objectif de retracer l’évolution
institutionnelle du champ de l’art au sein de la région AsiePacifique entre les années 1970 et les années 2000. Trois types de
développement seront pris pour exemple: les transformations
parallèles des deux grandes institutions phares de la région – le
Fukuoka Asian Art Museum et la Queensland Art Gallery ; les
restructurations de nombreux festivals nationaux en événement de
portée internationale ; et l’implantation des maisons de ventes aux
enchères à Hong Kong et à Singapore. Les données utilisées sont
issues d’un travail de recensement effectué auprès des musées de la
région, ainsi que de la base établie par l’Asia Art Archive sur les
biennales. Elles proviennent également d’une enquête
ethnographique menée sur le monde de l’art contemporain
thaïlandais.
La description de ces évolutions mettra en avant la rupture que
représentent les années 1990 dans le développement institutionnel.
On arguera que la visée de ce tournant a été l’internationalisation
des réseaux régionaux de reconnaissance établis à partir de la fin
des années soixante-dix. Leur spécificité a été de prendre en charge
une activité souvent gérée par les institutions spécialisées établies
dans les grands centres dominants, comme l’Asia Society de New
York. À leur différence, leur localisation en Asie même a conduit
ces institutions à développer une perspective très différente sur la
33
production artistique de la région: parce que les diasporas n’y sont
pas ou peu représentées, mais aussi parce qu’elles ont mis l’accent
sur la diversité artistique de la région sans vouloir présager de la
prédominance d’une catégorie esthétique sur une autre. Ce faisant,
leurs conservateurs ont abondamment circulé dans la région les
menant à constituer de réseaux d’amitiés professionnelles et à
acquérir une connaissance importante de la production.
De même que les interactions avec les acteurs occidentaux de l’art
contemporain international, les relations des acteurs thaïlandais
avec les commissaires et les conservateurs de la région AsiePacifique ne sont pas exemptes de forme de domination.
Néanmoins, l’analyse des carrières des artistes, mais aussi des
commissaires, montre que la circulation régionale a eu un effet
d’entrainement indéniable. On pourra ainsi dire que si la
mondialisation artistique des années 1990 a particulièrement mis
en valeur l’art des pays d’Asie, c’est aussi qu’ils y étaient
institutionnellement préparés.
Emmanuelle Spiesse: Acteurs de l’art du Nigeria ; artistes
visuels et marchés de l’art (début des années 2000)
Emmanuelle Spiesse, Chercheur associée LAM (Les Afriques dans
le Monde)
Même si depuis des décennies, la production artistique du Nigeria
est considérable, cela semble encore peu perceptible sur la scène
artistique internationale. Bien sûr, Bruce Onobrakpeya (artiste
nigérian), El Anatsui (artiste ghanéen vivant au Nigeria) avaient
intégré la Biennale de Venise en 1990, Dilomprizulike (artiste
nigérian vivant en Allemagne) expose à Africa Remix en 2005, mais
cette reconnaissance ne permet pas de questionner les stratégies
que les différents artistes adoptent pour être reconnus sur le
marché local et/ou tenter de parvenir à sortir de ce qui peut être
perçu comme une quasi invisibilité sur les marchés de l’art
occidentaux.
La communication s’appuie sur de nombreuses enquêtes menées
sur le terrain et accorde une large place au point de vue des acteurs
34
de l’art nigérians. Elle a comme objectif de donner à voir les
différentes stratégies que mettent en place les artistes nigérians
pour pénétrer ou tenter de pénétrer les différents marchés de l’art
locaux, nationaux et/ou internationaux. Formations et productions
artistiques, capital relationnel, origine géographique, situation
économique, sont alors interrogés comme autant de paramètres
déterminants dans les trajectoires d’artistes et dans la capacité de
ceux-ci à se placer ou pas internationalement… Grâce aux facteurs
locaux présentés, quels sont les marchés auxquels peut accéder
l’artiste nigérian ?
Camila Bechelany and Camila Maroja: From the South and
Back Again. Constructing Latin American Art at the Biennale
de Paris (1977) and at the Bienal Latino Americana de São
Paulo (1978)
Camila Bechelany, Doctoral Candidate (ABD), CAPES Brasil
scholarship fellow Centre de Recherches sur les Arts et le Langage
(EHESS)
Camila Maroja, Doctoral Candidate (ABD), Duke University,
Durham, US
In the 1970s Latin American artists and critics were concerned with
legitimizing and constructing a regional consciousness across the
Americas. Parallel to this regional emphasis, Latin American artists
and critics participated in intense transatlantic dialogues,
continuing an internationalizing tradition that was welcomed by
institutions on both sides of the Atlantic.
During the mid-1970s, a significant number of Latin American
artists were living in Paris, mostly to escape from the totalitarian
regimes in their home countries. Cognizant of this fact, the Paris
Biennial artistic director Georges Boudaille organized a Latin
American art section in 1977 and invited the Uruguayan critic Angel
Kalenberg to curate it. Stating that “Latin American art was
virtually unknown in Europe at the time,” Kalenberg decided to
provide a context that would allow the French audience to properly
read the artworks. To that point, Kalenberg opened the section
35
with a diapositive presentation of 480 images that visually
presented Latin America. The images—currently kept at the
Bibliothèque Kandinsky—display a curious regional panorama
from Latin America’s pre-Colombian temples to its contemporary
art production, alternating vernacular and modern in a
circular/non-linear form. Rather than providing context, it ended
up reinforcing a folkloric vision of Latin America.
A year later, the São Paulo Biennial Foundation promoted the first
Latin American Biennial coordinated by the critics Juan Acha and
Silvia Ambrosini. Guided by the theme “Myths and Magic”, the
show did not include the traditional division according to national
representation. Rather, the artworks were divided according to subthemes of “myths of origin,” which were arranged by ethnicity.
There were five myths of origin: Myths and Magic of Indigenous
Origin, African Origin, Euro-Asiatic Origin, and Mestizo Origin.
Ultimately, the biennial showcased an idea of the region similar to
Kalenberg’s slides, as the use of ethnographical divisions gave a
folkloric accent to the show. Latin American critics and artists
heavily criticized the 1978 show and a meeting of Latin American
critics definitively terminated the regional biennial in 1980.
Departing from an analysis of Kalenberg’s arguments, our paper
examines the conceptual and aesthetic correspondences between
the two curatorial constructions—the 1977 Latin American section
in Paris and the 1978 Bienal Latino Americana in São Paulo—
focusing on the receptions that they triggered. By doing so, we
hope to contribute to a deeper understanding of the recent
construction of a Latin American identity in the visual arts both in
the Americas and in Europe. With the advantage of hindsight and
from a decentered viewpoint, we can extrapolate why the Latin
American effort to shape an artistic identity pleased a European
audience, but was rejected in Brazil.
These early curatorial efforts, even if unsuccessful, deserve to be
revisited as they reveal how the circulation of ideas and concepts
created a certain “Latin American art” that has since been revisited
in shows like the Havana Biennial and the Mercosul Biennial in the
late 1980s and 1990s.
36
Chanon Praepipatmongkol: Modern Islamic Art Beyond the
Middle East
Chanon Praepipatmongkol, Ph.D. Student, History of Art,
University of Michigan
If in recent years “Islamic art” has increasingly been considered
problematic as a conceptual parameter for organizing art historical
inquiry, proposed alternatives that foreground geography over
religion—the “Association for Modern + Contemporary Art of the
Arab World, Iran + Turkey” being a notable example—prove
equally unwieldy and contestable. Such designations continue to
focus on areas traditionally associated with Islamic art history,
while excluding the question of globalized Islam. A tentative
attempt to decenter the geography of postwar Islamic art history,
this paper revisits the 1965 Afro-Asian Conference in Bandung,
Indonesia as a moment when Islam was employed as a term for
thinking South-South artistic affiliations and exchanges that would
bypass both Middle Eastern and Euro-American centers.
Among the artists most invested in the concept of global Islamic
solidarity at the 1965 conference was A.D. Pirous (b. 1933). While
best known today for paintings of Qur’anic verses, Pirous’s early
calligraphic works in the 1960s and 1970s carry an anxiety about the
authority of writing—an urgent concern given the ascendance of
Indonesian Islamic reform movements that attempted to restrict
local syncretic and hybrid religious practices in favor of a purer
form of scripturalist Islam. Pirous’s interest in the materiality of the
calligraphic line and other localizing features belie his desire to
draw public attention to an alternative interpretation of Islam that
would attenuate a unidirectional attraction to Mecca and that
instead foregrounds the long history of Islamic material and visual
culture in Southeast Asia itself.
Pirous’s works not only had an impact on national debates
surrounding the proper role of religion in modern Indonesian art,
but also was an intervention in the international art world. If the
1976 World of Islam blockbuster exhibition in London had created
a new market for Islamic art, it also advanced a highly depoliticized
understanding of Islamic art in the West premised upon the
37
metaphysical unity of Arabo-Islamic aesthetics. In making specific
references to famous objects from Aceh, Indonesia—where Islam
first arrived in Southeast Asia nearly a thousand years ago—Pirous
raises his commitment to local material culture as source of
authority against an essentialist understanding of Islamic art.
Pirous’s investment in the syncretism of Islamic and indigenous
arts found in areas east of Aceh—whether in island Southeast Asia
or Oceania—offers a model for thinking about the geography of
Islamic art that need not depend on diffusion, exchange, and traffic
through Middle Eastern centers.
While on one level this paper addresses the lack of Southeast Asian
narratives in Islamic art history, more importantly it attempts to
model an approach to modern and contemporary Islamic art that
embraces the syncretic nature of Islam as a negotiation of lived
religious experience, local cultural traditions, and imagined global
community (umma). A renewed attentiveness and commitment to
parsing the complexity of religion has never been more urgent in
the study of global contemporary art.
38
KEYNOTE ADDRESS: Andrea Giunta
Simultaneous abstractions: Nasreen Mohamedi
and the constellation of Latin American Art
Andrea Giunta, Professor at the Universidad de Buenos
Aires/CONICET/University of Texas at Austin, USA
Any evident theme is visible in the drawings of Nasreen Mohamedi.
Observing them from my foreigner condicion, I search for marks of
a distinct identity. Apparently, her works could belong to any
European or Latin American abstract artist. The common base is
that all of these works came out of a global climate marked by
postwar abstraction. This presentation explores the reasons of this
homogenizing perception and test a hypothesis I have been
developing concerning the art of the postwar period in global
capitals—a hypothesis that might overthrow the idea of the
periphery and advance instead a notion of simultaneous avantgardes; that is, avant-gardes engendered in the specific climate of
the postwar period, which developed in distinct ways in different
cities worldwide. I try to avoid notions such as “decentered,”
“peripheral,” or “hybrid,” because they function around an
imbalance, a center that is taken as a parameter. I would like to
analyze a constellation of images in order to explore the cultural
materials that are condensed within it, and the intervention its
appearance came to mean in a particular situation.
39
- PANEL 5 Trauma, memory and visibility in/of the South.
Chair: Zahia Rahmani
Zahia Rahmani, Director of the program Art et Mondialisation,
Institut National d'Histoire de l'Art, Paris
Benjamin O. Murphy Synchronicity, Historicity, and Juan
Downey's Ethnographic Present
Benjamin O. Murphy, PhD Candidate, Dept. of Art and
Archaeology, Princeton University
As its title suggests, Juan Downey’s Video Trans Americas project
was about global circulation. Begun in 1971, it consisted of an
ambitious travel itinerary in which Downey collaborated with
communities across Latin America to produce video recordings
that played with the medium’s unique technical properties, and
whose ultimate goal was to create a network of Latin American
interconnectedness. Video’s capacity for feedback, specifically,
provided Downey with a model for exchange in which people from
diverse locations would interact with representations of themselves
and others on screen. This conceptualization, moreover, entailed a
particular concept of time. Like synchronous video feedback, the
social relations Downey pursued through the project implied a
simultaneous occurrence in time of different cultures, their beingin-sync with each other in the contemporary moment. This notion
is most visible in the last installment of the project, for which
Downey recorded several tapes with the Yanomami people, an
indigenous group of the upper Amazon rainforest, between 1976
and 77. Replete with footage of Yanomami individuals using video
cameras and television monitors to produce mirror images of
themselves through feedback, these videos stage a vision of
Yanomami culture as coinciding, synchronously, with itself in the
present.
40
My paper intervenes into the discourse surrounding Downey’s
Yanomami videos in order to suggest an unexplored relationship
between the temporality of synchronicity these videos present and
concepts of global circulation and cultural difference. It is in
anthropology, and particularly in several key texts from that
discipline’s period of intense self-critique, that I find the richest
critical framework for understanding the temporal dimensions of
the tapes. The privileging that Downey and his interpreters give to
a certain type of technologically determined present tense of
feedback – perceivable in their emphases on its “immediacy,” its
“simultaneity,” its “synchronicity,” its “real time properties,” etc. –
aligns itself strikingly with the long-standing anthropological
research convention known as the ethnographic present. A
present-tense descriptive mode that stresses the temporal
coincidence of a culture with the researcher who studies it, the
ethnographic present had come under sharp criticism by
anthropologists in the 1970s and 80s who saw in it a synchronic
bias that tended to portray foreign, “primitive” culture as
essentially lacking history. In his insistence on the appropriateness
of instant feedback as a descriptor for Yanomami society, Downey
unwittingly participated in this ahistorical, primitivist fantasy.
However, the videos themselves are more complicated than this.
For, in addition to instant feedback, they also exploit video’s
capacity for playback, though this latter function has received little
attention in the literature surrounding the works. It is the noninstantaneity of playback, the temporal spacing it introduces into
the presumed synchronicity of the tapes, that constitutes the
Yanomami videos’ most important contributions for theorizing
structures of difference within global exchange. Time, the
Yanomami videos suggest, never coincides with itself, a suggestion
which has great bearing for the large scale dynamics of
synchronization (of markets, capital, language) with which
historians have characterized the processes of globalization. By
considering the instances in the Yanomami videos in which the
synchronicity of feedback is interrupted or broken down by
playback, I interpret these works as proposing an alternative to the
homogenizing present tense of globalization through their
41
articulation of video as a medium that contains temporal difference
within itself.
Devika Singh: India and South-South Formations: Responses
to the Bangladesh War of 1971
Devika Singh, Smuts Research Fellow at the Centre of South
Asian Studies, University of Cambridge, Research Associate at
Sidney Sussex College.
The paper analyzes South-South formations in South Asia and
considers Indian artists’ reaction to the Bangladesh war of 1971. It
analyzes how images of the conflict struck artists in the ‘long 1960s’
and interrogates the role of art and of the photographic medium in
creating or reinforcing existing hierarchies within South Asia. As in
the case of independence and the partition of India and Pakistan in
1947, that was documented by photographers including Sunil
Janah, Henri Cartier-Bresson and Margaret Bourke-White, the birth
of Bangladesh churned out a large number of what Jacques
Rancière calls ‘naked images’. These are linked by ‘the trace of
history, of testimony to a reality that is generally accepted not to
tolerate any other form of presentation’. In the aesthetic realm, 1971
is bound up with images of communal violence and mass migration
that recall the violence of 1947 when Bengal was divided between
West and East Bengal, India and Pakistan. Yet, contrary to
Partition, the body of documentary images that resulted from this
conflict is seldom examined.
This is surprising considering the international attention that was
raised by the Bangladesh war, best exemplified by George Harrison
and Ravi Shankar’s ‘Concert for Bangladesh’ at Madison Square
Garden in New York. Happening one year after the end of the
Biafra crisis, the conflict in Bangladesh and its atrocities were
widely documented in the international press and relayed by
intellectuals and artists across the world including André Malraux.
It is however Indian, rather than Western, military intervention in
East Bengal that ended the conflict and led to the creation of
Bangladesh. If a global or cosmopolitan conscience lobbying for
42
peace had indeed been mobilized, it was ultimately regional
politics (including India’s desire to curb the potential spread of the
Naxalite movement across South Asia) that arguably put an end to
the war.
The paper thus analyzes the circulation and dissemination of
photographs of the conflict and Indian artists’ reaction to it,
including that of artists Bhupen Khakhar and K.G. Subramanyan of
the so-called Baroda group. The paper probes India’s changing role
within the hierarchies of the international system and considers
artists’ position vis-à-vis the politics of the Non-Aligned Movement
and Third-Worldism. Contrary to many studies of art and
globalization and of documentary that often reinforce a simple
hierarchy between the ‘North’ and the ‘South’, the paper asks
crucial questions on India’s role in the representation of other
South Asian countries. At the present time, when Indian art clearly
dominates our understanding of South Asia across the globe, and
India has become the prime site for the collecting, archiving and
display of art across the region, the paper analyzes a foundational
moment for the hierarchies of South-South relations in South Asia.
Katja Gentric: Memórias, Íntimas, Marcas: Angola - Cuba South Africa
Katja Gentric, Chercheur associé au Centre Georges Chevrier,
Dijon
A triad of notions and a geographical triangle structure this artistic
project initiated by the Angolan artist Feranado Alvim in 1997. In
order to uncover memories of the war that ten years earlier
confronted South-African soldiers with Angolan troops backed by
Cuban forces, Fernando Alvim invites the Cuban artist Carlos
Garaicoa and the South-African/Zimbabwean Gavin Younge to
Cuito Cuanavale, the site of the decisive battle in southern Angola.
South Africa initially denied involvement in the Angolan war, and
as a result memories have remained traumatic and repressed. From
an Angolan point of view the confrontation takes place during the
final stage of a very long and traumatic civil war. During their 2143
day sojourn at Cuito Cuanavale Alvim, Garaicoa and Younge create
film, sound recordings and images, furthermore collecting material
traces of the war. The exhibition is shown first in Luanda and then
in Cape Town. For later editions shown in Pretoria and in
Johannesburg more artists, South African and Cuban, join the
project, which is then taken to Lisbon and Antwerp, adding artists
form more African and European countries.
While the initial ambition of the project was to create an archive of
personal war memories, the later phases complicate its reasoning.
The first and foremost critique to be voiced is the fact that while
Alvim claims: “the exhibition is more a dialogue between victims
than between winners and losers” certain victims in this war are
not heard at all. The second doubt is created by the ambition to
take this “dialogue between victims” to Europe. Should it be
concluded that in the long run this triangular venture between
three southern countries seeks the confirmation of Europe for its
success? Or is the project redeemed, as the artists claim, by the
circumstance that it “brings the dialogue back” to the colonial
powers?
Research on Memorias Intimas Marcas can rely on the rich material
published by the organizers of the different phases of the project: a
catalogue, a book, sound recordings, videos and a journal. The
exhibition received varied and well-informed critical responses in
the specialized press and personal analyses by the participants
prove to be of great interest. Read against the broader background
of writings by for example Gerardo Mosquera, Luis Camnitzer, or
Georges Didi-Huberman, Memorias Intimas Marcas takes on the
status of a trigger initiative. It is an initiative taken at a crucial
moment when making an archive of the intimate traces of memory
of the Angolan conflict and of political lies in general, need to be
addressed as questions of extreme urgency. Silencing these
memories should not be considered an option. However, the
project opens up a second cluster of crucial artistic preoccupations
of the XXth century: the question of traces. What is the link
between actions and the fingerprints left behind? Is mark making
and keeping an inventory of traces essential to the work of an
44
artist? Do artists from post-traumatic situations have a privileged
understanding of this constellation of notions?
Bindu Bhadana: Index of the Disappeared: Navigating the
Archive
Bindu Bhadana, Doctoral candidate in Cluster of Excellence “Asia
and Europe in a Global Context” at the University of Heidelberg
To navigate the dialectical relationship between art history and the
archive, this paper takes up an ongoing archival project by two
diasporic artists from India and Afghanistan, Chitra Ganesh (b.1975,
US) and Mariam Ghani (b.1978, US).
Ganesh and Ghani have collaborated on Index of the Disappeared
since 2004. The two artists explore the mass immigrant detentions
and deportations in the US since 9/11[most of whom were Arab and
South Asian Muslims] and their radically limited representation,
through wide ranging forms of media including video and the web.
They create critical texts, a series of imagined portraits and sitespecific installations in the form of a library or reading room of an
archive.
The archival collection includes factual post 9/11 documents
available in the public domain. Ganesh and Ghani intervene with
imaginary accounts, connecting official documents with testimony
and personal narratives to create a counter archive of excluded
histories which provide a deeper, more nuanced understanding of a
traumatic reality.
Tracing the ways in which censorship of speech and data blackouts
have created real absences in real lives, their translation of ‘raw
data’ brings audiences face to face with the specific detail of lives
impacted by post 9/11 disappearances and uncovers patterns that
find legitimacy in the power structures of the ‘Global North.’
Interweaving the fields of artistic research, activism and knowledge
production with the media and political sphere, the project serves
as a good example to show how aesthetic practices can overcome
45
the abstractions of political debate through specific details of
personal experience and become a forum for public discourse.
As a South-South collaborative project positioned within the
North, the Index of the Disappeared positions itself as a critical
documentary strategy in order to articulate global issues such as
civil rights and liberties, migrations and terrorism that the
contemporary world is increasingly grappling with.
FILM PROJECTION
Christine Douxami, Philippe Degaille
Fesman 2010, du Nord au Sud de l'Est à l'Ouest
Christine Douxami, IMAf-IRD, Philippe Degaille, Captures
Production.
Ce documentaire s'intéresse à la Négritude et ses concepts revisités
par les artistes du Festival Mondial des Arts Nègres (Fesman)
présents à Dakar pour cette 3e édition du festival en 2010. En se
penchant plus particulièrement sur les artistes plasticiens et de
théâtre le film questionne les identités prescrites et leurs
contraires, les identités revendiquées, par les artistes eux-mêmes au
sein de leur travail artistique. Le thème du Fesman 2010, la
Renaissance Africaine, est également interrogé par les artistes.
46
- PANEL 6 A southern turn in art?
Chair: Andrea Giunta
Andrea Giunta, Professor at the Universidad de Buenos
Aires/CONICET/University of Texas at Austin, USA
Kevin Murray: South Ways - art undercurrents across the
latitude
Kevin Murray, Adjunct Professor at the RMIT School of Art,
Australia, and coordinator of Southern Perspectives www.southernperspectives.net
What we might call 'the post-colonial project' has moved in recent
years to realign hierarchical vertical structures of knowledge to
reciprocal horizontal exchanges. In the geopolitical arena, this is
manifest in the development by BRICS of an alternative to the IMF.
In the social sciences, the emergence of Southern Theory through
the work of Connell and Santos has sought for a knowledge
framework that is pluralistic yet critical. Mignolo has sought to
extend this to art and design, but it remains at an abstract level
that illustrates ideas rather than creates new lateral platforms.
Rather then extend the existing art system to include the south, the
challenge is to re-think the practice of art outside the conventional
means of representation.
Emerging from the South Project in Australia, the Southern
Perspectives network has been promoting south-south exchange of
ideas. Last year, the project South Ways sought to develop
alternative platforms for creative practice in the south. This
attempted to propose platforms that were alternative to the value
of art as a commodity in the capitalist market. Its method was to
align concepts of southern theory with specific verbs. The focus
was on what art does, rather than means. The actions were to
bestow, to open, to swap and to glean. Roundtables in Australia
47
and New Zealand developed alternatives within these frameworks.
This are:
- A festival of the public gift
- Open source art
- A locally distributed biennale
- Museum of Southern Memory
These are under continuing development along with the
Vakanomodi Project, which looks at silence as an expressive
medium from a Melanesian perspective.
The paper will outline this process and offer a critical framework
for art in the south as a series of flows that facilitate horizontal
connections. If possible, I would welcome the challenge of
organising a roundtable following this methodology at the Paris
conference.
Andrew Weiner: Chorus, Screen, Pistol: Regional Socialism
Against the Global Contemporary
Andrew Weiner, Assistant Professor of Art Theory and Criticism,
Department of Art and Art Professions, Steinhardt School, New
York University
If the geographic orientation of contemporary art exhibition has
shifted toward a “decentered internationalism,” as the organizers of
this conference propose, such a shift would seem closely linked to
the recent emergence of the “global contemporary.” This term has
quickly become a popular, influential rubric for the exhibition and
reception of new art; it has been the subject of numerous scholarly
conferences and publications, and has also been the theme of many
biennials, whether implicitly or explicitly. Broadly speaking we
might even say that the global contemporary is the frame of
reference from which much current art derives its significance. At
first glance this development might seem beneficial, if not
surprising, given the way it has brought together the wellestablished academic discourse of globalization with more recent
critical and art-historical discussions of contemporaneity. Some
might even claim that the global contemporary occupies a
48
privileged position of criticality, given its proximity to the
transnational protest movements that have forced their way on to
the world stage in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis.
However, this paper takes a different point of departure –– namely,
that the global contemporary can’t neatly be extracted from the
hegemony of advanced neoliberal capitalism. As scholars like
Dipesh Chakrabarty and David Harvey have argued, the global is
often as much ideologeme as it is concept, a false universal that
conjures away political antagonisms while masking the function of
international divisions of labor. And while much of the art world
views contemporaneity as a self-evident good, few seem to register
the ways in which the exchange of art effectively converts different
forms of marginality and “nowness” into surplus value, or the role
that critics and art historians play in this process. Against these
tendencies, this paper engages the following questions: In what
ways can we understand the global contemporary as something like
the “cultural logic” of neoliberal hegemony? What type of artistic,
critical, and curatorial practices might best oppose this
instrumentality or normativity? And what sort of political and
theoretical implications emerge from this shift in viewpoint?
The paper argues that the history of transnational socialisms within
the Non-Aligned Movement is one important site from which we
might begin to work through such questions. It begins by
criticizing several symptomatic aspects of recent critical discourse,
focusing on a questionnaire on “the contemporary” circulated by
the U.S. art journal October. The paper then examines two cases in
which contemporary art has elaborated an alternative, oppositional
mode of regionalism and globality, focusing on examples that
address the history of pan-Arab socialism: a video essay by Marwa
Arsanios, which draws on the socialist magazine Al Hilal; and two
performances by Samah Hijawi, one of which restages modified
versions of Nasser’s speeches in public spaces in Jordan, the U.A.E.,
and occupied Palestine. The paper closes by examining the recent
exhibition Meeting Points 7, in which the curatorial collective
What, How, and For Whom? sought to position the history of
regional socialisms as a critical counterweight to symptomatic
idealizations of the global contemporary.
49
practices?
Cristiana Tejo, PhD Candidate, University of the State of
Pernambuco, Brazil, Member of IKT – International Association
of Curators of Contemporary Art,
The etymology of curating comes from the latin word curare, which
means “take care” and it is a practice generated by the development
of the collections and institutions in Europe. But what would
happen if we take another etymological road from the South
American indigenous meaning of curare: “a plant extract that
causes poisoning or immobilizing the enemy”? Is it possible to
understand the curatorial practice as a critical force that crosses
several fields and temporalities, beyond the concepts and models
generated in hegemonical contexts?
As Quijano points out “decolonial thinking is the recognition and
implementation of a border gnosis or subaltern (Mignolo 2000: 88),
a means of eliminating the provincial tendency to pretend that
Western European modes of thinking are in fact universal ones
(Quijano 2000: 544)”. Would be possible to extend this principle of
"provincialising" and "decolonize" to the realm of curatorial field of
knowledge and practice that emerges with the field of Western art?
As each context generates an ecology of art that responds to the
local environment and also to an international sphere, then we ask
ourselves what are the ways of thinking and doing curated by
regions such as Africa and Latin America that are made invisible by
the world's mainstream art. How decolonize curatorial practices? I
do not expect to answer this complex question, but to interrogate if
it is possible to decolonize curatorial practices and what would that
mean. The postcolonial discourse has been assumed by some
institutions and agents of the art world and the desire for new
connections South – South has been recognized as a legitimate
desire. However, what can we say about postcolonial practices in
the curatorial field, estrategies and beyond the illustration of some
decolonial thesis? In this paper, I will investigate two recent events
st
that happened in Brazil: 31 Bienal de São Paulo, directed by
50
Charles Esche and the 3rd Bienal de Arte da Bahia, curated by four
brazilian curators. Both projects departed from a postcolonial
approach but reached different results. What kind of knowledge
emerged from this two initiatives?
Discussion: Daniel Quiles in conversation with Mabel Tapia and
Annabela Tournon of the Red Conceptualismos del Sur
Daniel Quiles, Assistant Professor, The School of the Art
Institute of Chicago, USA, 2013-2014 Artl@s Postdoc
Mabel Tapia, RedCSur coordinator (2015), PhD Student
(EHESS/UBA)
Annabela Tournon, RedCSur member, PhD Student
(EHESS/CEHTA)
La Red Conceptualismos del Sur (RedCSur) is a collective initiative
bringing together a set of researchers and artists scattered around
various parts of Latin America and Europe, and which proposes to
establish itself as a platform for common thought and action
dealing with contemporary relations between art and politics. It
was founded in 2007 by a group of researchers concerned about the
need to intervene politically in the neutralization processes of
critical potential of a set of 'conceptual practices' that took place in
Latin America since the early sixties. Last years, the RedCSur has
been involved in a long term reflection on uses and politics of
archives, working on the organization and constitution of some of
the most important artists archives in South America. Recently, the
network led the research project about the 1980's. The exhibition
and the publication “Losing the human form. A seismic image of
the 1980's in Latin America” produced in collaration with the Reina
Sofia Museum represented the culmination of the project's first
phase and it was presented in Peru and in Argentina.
51
-
Closing Debate –
Is the South a place, a mobile condition of
domination and invisibilization, a global
commodity, a geopolitical ideology, or an
academic chimera?
Chair: Sven Spieker
52
Our Thanks Go To
Gisèle Vivance, Ecole normale supérieure, Département d’Histoire
et Théorie des Arts
Alexandre Cadain, Ecole normale
d’Histoire et Théorie des Arts
supérieure,
Département
Annabelle Milleville, LabEx TransferS
The South-South Conference
could not have happened without
the generous support of:
The Agence nationale pour la Recherche
The LabEx TRANSFERS
The Institut d’Histoire moderne et Contemporaine, CNRS/ ENS
The Département d’Histoire et Théorie des Arts, Ecole normale
supérieure, Paris
The ARTL@S Project
www.artlas.ens.fr
53

Untitled - ARTL@S

Transcription

Documents pareils

South Park en visite à Amsterdam

biography - Experimental Project

Art et sport. Barcelone 1975: Ve Biennale du sport dans lart.

Plan des bâtiments - Lycée Français Charles De Gaulle de Londres

Créer son personnage South Park

nouveauté - Galerie du Jour

Étapes de la prise en charge de l`anaphylaxie