In the third of a series, timed with the specially-themed November-December issue of frieze, we asked five artists, curators and writers, whose work has been involved with the challenges of decolonizing culture, to discuss the projects that have informed their thinking – from exhibitions and publications to more intangible and transient networks, whose effects are often more felt than documented, though no less significant.
Click on the artist’s name to jump to their entry.
Devika Singh
Kapwani Kiwanga
Naima J. Keith
Raqs Media Collective
Zoe Butt
Christian Kravagna, Transmodern, 2017
kravagna-cover.jpg

Christian Kravagna, Transmoderne, 2017. Courtesy: b_books
Devika Singh
Devika Singh is an art historian and curator based in Paris, France. She recently curated ‘Planetary Planning’ at the Dhaka Art Summit, Bangladesh (2018), and co-curated ‘Gedney in India’ (CSMVS, Mumbai, India, 2017 and Duke University, Durham, USA, 2018). Her book on art in India in a global context will be published by Reaktion Books.
Christian Kravagna’s recently published Transmoderne: Eine Kunstgeschichte des Kontakts (Transmodern: An Art History of Contact, b_books, 2017) is an incisive contribution to the decentering of art history.
While we are witnessing the much-needed recognition of extra-European modernisms (be they, for example, South Asian or Latin American), one of the most pressing issues today, for both museums and the academy, is how to articulate different histories of art within a narrative that is truly connected and multi-centred. The book focuses on productive moments of transcultural contact, understood not only as geographically diverse forms of modernism, but as the way art has engaged with different political positions. Kravagna favours a history of contact – articulated around the in-depth analysis of case studies pertaining to African American art and, in one instance, Indian modernism – over an overarching ‘global’ approach. The publication tracks a complex history of linkages between race and culture in the 20th century. It aims to rethink these categories and their connections from the perspective of artists and pioneering thinkers of transmodernism who have long been marginalized in dominant Euro-American discourses. It does so by giving voice to a constellation of historical agents that brought art into dialogue with anti-colonialism, pan-Africanism and the American civil rights movement. The book opens new ways of re-envisioning existing histories of European and North American art and provides a much-needed corrective to studies that foreground an overly presentist approach to the global.
Jeneen Frei Njootli
jfn3.jpg

Jeneen Frei Njootli, from the series ‘Red rose ad lidii’, 2017. Courtesy: the artist and Fierman Gallery, New York
Kapwani Kiwanga
Kapwani Kiwanga is an artist based in Paris, France. In 2018, she exhibited at Esker Foundation, Calgary, Canada, ArtPace, San Antonio, USA, and as part of Glasgow International, UK. Her work will be included in forthcoming exhibitions at Whitechapel Gallery, London, UK, Albertinum Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Desden, Germany, and a solo show at MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, USA, opens in February 2019.
In the work of Jeneen Frei Njootli legibility is thwarted. The artist’s varied practice incorporates performance, installation and sound, often produced, with the help of contact microphones, using varied materials such as caribou antler and steel. On occasion; Frei Njootli’s voice, sometimes speaking or singing in Gwich’in, escapes readability as it travels through matter – in low-frequency layers amplified through bodies, materials, space and delayed time. In Frei Njootli’s work nothing is given, yet it is generous, at times intimate, for those willing to do the work of pulling knowledge through their own bodies.
Frei Njootli’s affirms a presence while evading possession. The artist offers dust, and imprints in lieu of objects in a branch of work that could be described as residual imagery. An object, a body, an action, is not held in an exhibition space, yet it is present in the form of a placeholder that allows it to exist sovereignly elsewhere.
Presence through absence; existence through refusal: the artist undermines the comfortable triangulation of seeing<>understanding<>possessing by asserting an autonomous zone in colonized territory.
‘Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power’, 2017–19
el162.3_ps9.jpg

Ming Smith, When You See Me Comin’ Raise Your Window High, 1972, vintage gelatin silver print, 28 x 36 cm. Courtesy: the artist and Steven Kasher Gallery © Ming Smith
Naima J. Keith
Naima J. Keith is the Deputy Director and Chief Curator at the California African American Museum in Los Angeles, USA. She is also the co-Artistic Director, with Diana Nawi, of Prospect New Orleans, USA, opening fall 2020.
When ‘Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power’ opened Tate Modern in 2017, I knew it would be a gamechanger. Including works by more than sixty African American artists spanning 1963 to the early 1980s, the ambitious exhibition gives important historical and critical perspective on a broad spectrum of revolutionary – and often overlooked – black artistic practice of the last fifty years. Curated by Mark Godfrey and Zoe Whitley, the show is organized by artistic approaches and affinities, creating links across geographical regions and decades. ‘Soul of a Nation’ not only gives crucial context to artists such as Sam Gilliam and Barkley L. Hendricks (who only late in life have received the attention their work merits), but also introduces lesser known names who likewise worked toward social change through their art. Other surprises include Frank Bowling, born in Guyana and generally viewed within the field of postcolonial British art: Bowling lived in New York from 1966 into the 1970s, where he was a contributing editor to Arts magazine and was mentored by the influential art critic Clement Greenberg, making him a pivotal figure in understanding the full narrative of gestural and colour field painting. ‘Soul of a Nation’ aims at nothing less than transforming the canon of postwar American art as we know it – and, in the process, exposing its inherent racial biases. Long overdue, its effects will be far-reaching as it thankfully travels to several institutions across the US at a moment when amplifying the voices and political inroads of black creators could not be more necessary.
Sources
macba-181030-002.jpg

‘In the Open or in Stealth’, 2018, installation view, MACBA, Barcelona. Courtesy: MACBA, Barcelona; photograph: Miguel Coll
Raqs Media Collective
Raqs Media Collective (founded 1992) are artists based in Delhi, India. In 2018, they have had solo exhibitions at K21 Kunstsammlung, Düsseldorf, Germany and Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, UK. Not Yet At Ease, commissioned by 14–18 Now, is on show at FirstSite, Colchester, UK, until 20 January 2019. ‘In the Open or in Stealth: The Unruly Presence of an Intimate Future’ runs at MACBA, Barcelona, Spain, until on 17th March 2019.
One of the ways in which the colonial legacy deprives people everywhere (not just in ex-colonies) is through a conscious and unconscious limitation on the kind of ‘sources’ that can be accessed in the course of a contemporary practice or conversation. Our intellectual formations and day-to-day exchanges make it possible to ‘naturalize’ a default universalization of Euro-American ‘sources’. ‘Sources’ from other histories and locations remain consigned to particularity. A counter-move would require the dismantling of the vocabulary of eminence and marginality, of metropolis and periphery, and the launching of a poly-axial play of sources.
In the Open or in Stealth’, the exhibition that we are curating at MACBA, Barcelona, works with a constellation of sources. They range from an erotic print from Japan where the embrace of an octopus is also the blurring of the human boundary, to a juggler’s ability to keep things fluid in India, to the laws of courtly love in early medieval Europe, the suicidal tendencies in robots, a mathematical equation for forms of anacoustic reasons and a notion of infinity in the performance of a raga, in Hindustani classical music.
These sources bring different trajectories to and from the present moment – to unearth tendencies, to anticipate futures, to resurrect what may be haunting us, even unconsciously. They locate an archipelago of conditions, where no singular history, cultural matrix or even value system is central. This – we argue – displaces what colonizes us all.
Saigon
Zoe Butt
Zoe Butt is a curator and writer, currently the Artistic Director of The Factory Contemporary Arts Centre, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam; and contributing curator, Sharjah Biennial 14, 2019.
There is a boy who stands often on the corner. Always with the same blue shirt, and vacant gaze. It matches the absent look on the lady who sits on her plastic chair at the bottom of my stairwell. His feet are cracked, nails black. Her floral pantaloons are tired. Both their bodies hang like garments on clothes racks. Like the paintings that hang as if a moulding blemish on the city’s museum walls. The shell of life is more telling than the substance here. The dominant architecture, the peeling colonial facades, the irony of neon, impressionable with its kitsch and decay. The reason for existence here is overlooked by the need to appear. ‘Oh, but you must be wary of the art that is imitative of a Western style.’ But did you not bring your Western institutions here? Did you not alter our schools, our traditions and replace them with your forms of thinking? Did you not tell me that my own was backward and that I should adapt to yours? So why do you now tell me that my style is not worthy? Why can you not feel how I have turned what you proffered me into mine? No wonder my globe feels caught in limbo. Here there is little space for our ideas to be validated; we are the chaos, the ‘developing’ agents, the parasites feeding and festering in authoritarian desire for capital. Where is the city for misfits, for a history of morphisms?
Read Decolonial Documents: Part One here and Part Two over here.
Kapwani Kiwanga
Naima J.Keith
Raqs媒体集体
Zoe Butt
Christian Kravagna, Trans., 2017 kravagna-..jpg

Devika Singh是法国巴黎的艺术历史学家和馆长。她最近在孟加拉国达卡艺术峰会(2018年)上策划了“行星规划”,并共同策划了“印度的Gedney”(CSMVS,孟买,印度,2017年,杜克大学,达勒姆,美国,2018年)。她在全球范围内关于印度艺术的书将由ReaKots书籍出版。克里斯蒂安·克拉瓦尼亚最近出版的《跨现代:艾恩·昆斯基希特·德·康塔克特》(跨现代:接触的艺术史,b_.,2017)对艺术史的深入研究作出了深刻的贡献。当我们目睹欧洲以外的现代主义(例如,南亚或拉丁美洲的现代主义)迫切需要得到承认时,今天博物馆和学术界最紧迫的问题之一是如何在真正联系的叙述中阐述不同的艺术史。多中心。这本书着重于跨文化接触的富有成效的时刻,不仅被理解为地理上不同的现代主义形式,而且被理解为艺术参与不同政治立场的方式。Kravagna赞成接触历史——围绕着对与非洲裔美国人艺术相关的案例研究的深入分析,在一个例子中,印度现代主义——而不是总体的“全球”方法。该刊物追踪了二十世纪种族和文化之间复杂的联系历史。它旨在从长期以来在欧美主流话语中被边缘化的跨现代主义艺术家和先驱思想家的角度重新思考这些范畴及其联系。它通过向一群使艺术与反殖民主义、泛非主义和美国民权运动进行对话的历史代理人发出声音。这本书开辟了重新设想欧洲和北美艺术现存历史的新途径,并为那些前景过于呈现式的全球研究提供了急需的修正。JeNEN FRI NJOOTLI JFN3.JPG WPA6022602IMG JeNEN FEEI NJOOTLI,从系列的“红玫瑰广告Ldii”,2017。礼貌:艺术家和菲尔曼画廊,纽约KAPWANI Ki旺a WPA60300 3BR KAPWAI Ki旺a是一个艺术家在巴黎,法国。在2018,她展出了在埃斯克基金会,卡尔加里,加拿大,佩斯艺术中心,圣安东尼奥,美国,作为格拉斯哥国际,英国的一部分。她的作品将被包括在即将到来的展览在怀特查尔画廊,伦敦,英国,阿尔伯蒂纳斯塔特里克什昆斯塔伦根,Desden,德国,和一个单人展在麻省理工学院列表视觉艺术中心,剑桥,美国,在2019年2月开幕。在Jeneen Frei Njootli的作品中,易读性被挫败了。艺术家的不同的实践结合了性能,安装和声音,经常产生的接触麦克风,使用不同的材料,如驯鹿鹿角和钢。有时,弗雷·恩乔特利的声音,有时用Gwich’in说话或唱歌,在穿过物质——通过身体、材料、空间和延迟时间放大的低频层——行进时,难以读懂。在Frei Njootli的工作中,什么都没有给出,但是对于那些愿意通过自己的身体来获取知识的人来说,它是慷慨的,有时是亲密的。Frei Njootli在逃避占有时肯定存在。艺术家提供灰尘和印记代替物体在一个可以被描述为残留图像的作品中。一个物体,一个物体,一个动作,不是在展览空间中举行的,而是以一个占位符的形式呈现的,这个占位符允许它独立存在于其他地方。因缺席而存在;因拒绝而存在:艺术家通过主张殖民地自治区来破坏观看<>理解<>占有的舒适的三角关系。《民族之魂:黑色力量时代的艺术》,2017-19 el162.3_ps9.jpg,


Raqs媒体收藏(创建于1992年)是印度德里的艺术家。在2018,他们已经在K21昆斯塔姆龙、杜塞尔多夫、德国和惠特沃思艺术画廊,曼彻斯特,英国举办了个人展览。现在还不安逸,由14—18号委托,在英国科尔切斯特的第一个地点展出,直到2019年1月20日。《公开还是秘密:不羁存在的亲密未来》在西班牙巴塞罗那的MACBA上映,直到2019年3月17日。殖民遗产剥夺各地(不只是前殖民地)人民的方式之一是通过对在当代实践或对话中可以获得的“来源”的有意识和无意识的限制。我们的知识形态和日常的交流使得“归化”欧美“来源”默认的普遍化成为可能。来自其他历史和地点的“来源”仍然被赋予特殊性。一个反措施将要求消除名望和边缘词汇、大都市和外围词汇,并发起多轴来源游戏。在公开或隐秘的展览中,我们在巴塞罗那的麦克巴展出的作品有一系列的资料来源。它们从日本的色情印刷品到印度杂耍演员保持事物流动的能力,到中世纪早期欧洲的宫廷爱情法则,机器人的自杀倾向,形式数学方程式在印度斯坦古典音乐中,一个声音的原因和一个无限的概念。这些来源带来了不同的轨迹,从现在到现在——发掘趋势,预测未来,复活可能困扰我们的东西,甚至无意识。他们找到一个群岛的条件,没有奇异的历史,文化矩阵,甚至价值体系是中心。我们认为这取代了我们所有的殖民地。西贡·佐伊·巴特是越南胡志明市工厂当代艺术中心的馆长兼作家,现任馆长兼艺术总监。有一个男孩经常站在拐角处。总是穿着同一件蓝色的衬衫,茫然的凝视着。它与坐在我楼梯间的塑料椅子上的女士相形见拙。他的脚裂开了,指甲变黑了。她的花束裤累了。他们的身体都像衣服一样挂在衣架上。就像那些挂在城市博物馆墙壁上的模模糊糊的画。生命的外壳比这里的物质更具说服力。占主导地位的建筑,剥落殖民立面,霓虹灯的反讽,易受其媚俗和腐朽。这里存在的原因被需要出现而忽略了。“噢,但是你必须小心模仿西方风格的艺术。”但是你没有把你的西方机构带到这里来吗?你没有改变我们的学校,我们的传统,用你的思维方式取代它们吗?你没有告诉我我自己是BAC吗?
FRIZE特稿 ARThing编译