Issue 21 Out Now
Artists featured: Nasreen Mohamedi, Michael Rakowitz and Heimo Zobernig
Essays on Colombian film and pornomiseria, Raphael Montañez Ortiz’s destructivist cinema and Alejandra Riera’s book Maquetas-sin-cualidad
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Afterall Issue 21Summer 2009
Nasreen Mohamedi
Essays: Grant Watson and Anders Kreuger
Michael Rakowitz
Essays: Stephanie Smith and Sofía Hernández Chong Cuy
Heimo Zobernig
Essays: Diana Baldon and Mark Kremer
Essays:
Michèle Faguet on Colombian film and pornomiseria
Chon A. Noriega on Raphael Montañez Ortiz’s destructivist cinema
Events, Works, Exhibitions
Angelika Bartl on Alejandra Riera’s Maquetas-sin-cualidad
María Berríos on undocumented rumours in 1970s Chile
Pawel Polit on Foksal Gallery and the ‘theory of place’
We are pleased to announce the publication of Afterall issue 21.
The issue brings together a number of histories of the archive. Michèle Faguet writes on the ethics of documentation of social misery by looking at pornomiseria, a movement in Colombian film of the 1970s that specularised images of the poor and downtrodden. Chon A. Noriega considers the merits of the destruction of the archive, through a study of the found-footage film practice of Raphael Montañez Ortiz, a US Latino artist and founder of El Museo del Barrio.
The question of what constitutes the canon is also at play in the artists’ section, in which Grant Watson and Anders Kreuger look at the Indian artist Nasreen Mohamedi, whose elegant drawings and works on paper intersect with Minimalism and Constructivism. Diana Baldon and Mark Kremer consider the decades’ long career of Heimo Zobernig, who reverses the historical tendency of abstraction towards aesthetic purity and fills his paintings, sculptures, videos and exhibition designs with a discursive history of colour and form. Finally, Stephanie Smith and Sofía Hernández Chong Cuy look at the work of Michael Rakowitz, in whose projects – such as the import/export Iraqi date company he ran from a storefront in Brooklyn – storytelling becomes paramount.
In the closing section of the journal, Angelika Bartl discusses Alejandra Riera’s puzzle-like assemblages of her work as provisional maquetas or models. María Berríos analyses stories of dissident artworks in Pinochet’s Chile, and considers the potential benefits that documentation through rumour may have for art history and activism. Lost chapters are also at the heart of Pawel Polit‘s discussion of the ‘theory of place’, one of the early, unfulfilled principles of the Foksal Gallery in Warsaw.
Afterall also publishes several series of books. Our latest two titles are Chris Marker: La Jetée by Janet Harbord and Hanne Darboven: Cultural History 1880 – 1983 by Dan Adler. For more information on the One Work series please visit www.afterall.org/books_onework.html
Afterall journal is co-published by Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design, London and the School of Art at the California Institute of the Arts, Los Angeles, in association with MuHKA, Antwerp.
Issue 21 can be purchased in bookshops across the UK, Europe and America.
For more information on Afterall or to subscribe, visit our website: www.afterall.org
