Issue 53

Cross-Eyed and Painless in Toronto: A Borderline Case

Artist Luis Jacob brings together into a speculative encounter seminal Toronto figures such as media theorist Marshall McLuhan, artists General Idea, as well as writer and painter Wyndham Lewis and his experience in the city.

The Exhibition as Medium: Some Observations on the Cybernetisation of the Institution and the Exhibition

By going back to the critical moment of the cybernetisation of the museum and of the exhibition, this essay aims to put forward a thesis considering the exhibition as medium.

Logic of the Written Word and Oral Logic: Conflict at the Heart of the Archive

In this first translation in English of his work, Senegalese philosopher Mamoussé Diagne presents his fundamental thesis that traditional African civilisations are civilisations of orality.

Becoming Ethnic in China: A ‘Good Story’ Told in Painting and Dialect

Offering a sweeping historical view leading up to the present, Hera Chan and Alvin Li consider the development of ‘ethnic minority painting’ in the People’s Republic of China.

Revisiting Stan Douglas’s ‘Cinema of Operations’

Film and media scholar Jihoon Kim discusses Stan Douglas’s practice against a series of art and film historical-critical paradigms that have addressed the status of the moving image in exhibition contexts.

Repetition, Montage, Archive… Stan Douglas

In this in-depth essay, art historian and critic Shep Steiner explores the significance of the number two in Stan Douglas’s work. As Steiner demonstrates – covering works from the 1990s to the past 10 years – two encapsulates a logic that unfolds through most of the artist’s production. Two as that which structures montage; two-channel moving image installations; or two, as in the relationship between history and the archive.

On African Opera. A Conversation with Anawana Haloba

In this conversation with Afterall editors, artist Anawana Haloba discusses her research into African operatic traditions and philosophy, as manifested in her experimental opera How to (re)pair my Grandmother’s Basket (2021). Conceiving of ‘re-pair’ as a way of setting things together in their relationality, Haloba seeks to recuperate traditions that were ‘epistemologically disenfranchised’ following the rupture of colonialism.

Museum as Preface: Walid Raad’s History of Art in the Arab World

Looking at three of Raad’s works, part of the larger, multi-volume project Scratching on Things I Could Disavow: A History of Art in the Arab World , the article considers the (im)possibilities of writing an alternative history of art within the already defined frames of museums – institutions encompassing both the sedimentation of cultural practices stemming from colonial legacies and the stratifications of new formations of political and economic power.

Thinking Blackness in Pan-American Artistic Networks: The Case of the Bienal de São Paulo

Art historian Bruno Pinheiro examines early editions of the Bienal de São Paulo (1951–59). Through a detailed discussion of the relationships between local interests and the ideals of Pan-Americanism, the author shows how racial questions became part of artistic and curatorial conversations as well as how the construction of Pan-American networks excluded Black artists.

The Space of a Metaphor: On Mediterraneanism in the Event-Institution

Focusing on the four editions of Manifesta that took place in Mediterranean cities, Chiara Cartuccia considers the curatorial risks of reducing the multitudinous space of the Mediterranean sea into a unified, functional metaphor. Probing into the ‘imaginative geography’ of the Euro-Mediterranean projected by Manifesta, the article calls for an event-institution capable of going beyond the metaphorical limits of curatorial fantasy, to set up a relation of care with its hosting territory.