“Situated Practices and Conditioned Positions”
Afterall is pleased to present issue 47, Spring/Summer 2019—”Situated Practices and Conditioned Positions”—which looks at how artists investigate their own histories, how place informs politics, and art as a way of repositioning one’s being in the world.
Just as Gülsün Karamustafa’s 1970s Prison Paintings index a complex intertwining of personal-political trajectories, the artists presented in this issue offer singular perspectives on histories otherwise not seen or told, expanding the possibilities of an “aesthetics of evidence” and complicating our understanding of ever-changing alliances of powers and world orders. Vasif Kortun traces how Karamustafa’s work evolved via political and social changes in Turkey during a period of violence; and Ana Longoni looks at how Karamustafa and others’ struggles, incarcerations and tactics of survival in Turkey find parallels in those of cultural producers in Argentina at the time and afterwards.
The excavation of liberation struggles and colonial legacies can be a way to hold a mirror up to the present, as Vijay Prashad observes of the films of Naeem Mohaiemen. Kaelen Wilson-Goldie situates Mohaiemen’s archival impetus alongside his advancement from writer to film-maker, linking him to the annals of “missing films” that serve as productive points of departure in search of a truth, never arriving at a moment of release. Connecting Vietnam’s earliest encounters with the West to contemporary post-colonial, post-war memory, Nora A. Taylor reviews Thảo Nguyên Phan’s artist book Voyage de Rhodes, where watercolours painted over the seventeenth century travelogues of Alexandre de Rhodes conjure colonial blind spots, fever-dreams and fictions.
Taking on “truth” as a material and constructive practice, Charles Stankievech unpacks art’s forensic turn, highlighting the potential for one-dimensionality or co-option for political agendas; and Daria Ghiu looks at the uses of Constantin Brâncuși in Romania to address exhibition reconstruction and ‘counter-homage’ as techniques against the instrumentalisation of art. The work of Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook blurs cultural and phenomenological languages: looking at her early work, Clare Veal examines how the artist unravels contemporary art’s formal techniques through an “intermedial” approach; while Filipa Ramos identifies Araya’s work with non-human animals as a challenge to social and natural hierarchies.
This issue also pays attention to the reshaping of art scenes and practices through collective and institutional work. Serubiri Moses’s exhibition history of three projects by African women artists and curators since the 1990s offers a corrective to existing art histories of the continent, engaging counter-histories of African feminist collectivity. Reiko Tomii explains the vital role of “rental galleries” in the historical development of Japanese avant-garde movements; Carlos Garrido Castellano and Jerssi Esperança Restino Paulo look at current Afro-Portuguese creative initiatives in relation to the exclusions of Lisbon’s art scene; and Michael A. Mel analyses decolonial methodologies at the Australian Museum through its engagement with contemporary art practices from Papua New Guinea.
Afterall issue 47 will be launched with a conversation between Naeem Mohaiemen and Charles Stankievech on Monday 29 April at the University of Toronto.
Afterall Books is pleased to announce the latest title in the One Work series: Walker Evans: Kitchen Corner by Olivier Richon. Forthcoming titles in the series include Sharon Lockhart: Pine Flat by Howard Singerman and Mark Leckey: Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore by Mitch Speed. Forthcoming from Afterall’s Exhibition Histories series is FESTAC ’77: The Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture, edited by Ntone Edjabe and Akin Adesokan, co-published with Chimurenga.
Afterall journal is published by Central Saint Martins, London, in editorial partnership with M HKA, Antwerp; the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore; the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design, University of Toronto, and in association with the University of Chicago Press.
Afterall is now available as an e-book edition, free to download for subscribers. Subscribe here.
