Héctor Pérez Frutos (as installed by Daniel Aguilar Ruvalcaba). Las Dos Fridas, 1997; oil paint; 5 ft. 8 in. x 5 ft. 8 in.; exhibition view. Courtesy of Museo de Arte Moderno. Photo: Ramiro Chaves.

Acha was a Marxist who believed that Latin American artists shouldn’t impulsively follow the trends set by international conceptual art, but instead develop their own practices in line with their continent’s issues. He inspired and accompanied a generation of artists who, like him, witnessed and in different ways suffered the consequences of the continent’s political turbulences. Some of Acha’s ideas about art are laid out in the essay “Por una Nueva Problemática Artística en Latinoamérica (Toward a New Artistic Problematic in Latin America)”[1], published in 1973 in the magazine Artes Visuales.[2] In the essay, the critic states: “The need to give our countries a new social and cultural turn brings with it the need to ask up to what point we can and should give art a new course.” It wasn’t Acha’s role to define what this new course was, but as the exhibition hints, some artists dared to imagine it and put it into practice, aided by his presence and the context they all shared.

David Alfaro Siqueiros. The Partisan; exhibition view. Courtesy of Museo de Arte Moderno. Photo: Ramiro Chaves

The first room of the exhibition exemplifies some of the critic’s most recurrent ideas, such as the distinctions between art, design, and craft from their methods of production, distribution, and consumption. Daniel Aguilar Ruvalcaba uses a reproduction of Frida Kahlo’s Las Dos Fridas (The Two Fridas, 1939)[3] as the center of an installation triptych. Frida Artística (Artistic Frida, 2016) is composed by the famous painting (a 1997 copy of Héctor Pérez Frutos from Kahlo’s 1938 original, both owned by the museum) and a scheme printed on the wall and taken from Acha’s writings in which the artist identifies the specific ways in which these artworks were produced, distributed, and consumed as art. For instance, a skilled and academically formed artist was the producer; the product is formalist and “pure,” yet a fetishized commodity; and its distribution is mediated by the art market. At its right, in Frida Artesanal (Handcrafted Frida), the artist placed a few dozen colorful souvenirs depicting the original painting bought with 4,000 pesos (around 185 USD) in a local market over a frame the exact same size of the original but turned backward to symbolize legal marginality; next to it one can read the same scheme applied to the depiction of the work as handcraft. A similar exercise is displayed in the opposing wall, with licensed items bought from the Frida Kahlo Museum characterized as design.

Despite the artist’s obvious digestion of Acha’s theoretical frames, the overall work feels unnecessarily illustrative, falling short of delivering a more potent commentary on the way the stated characteristics not only exist but indeed define and greatly limit production in all three systems of creative endeavor today. However, this difficulty indicates a larger problem of the exhibition: the need to assess Acha’s theoretical body critically and place it in context with other models (such as the very similar but more developed political economy theory that not only recognizes the structures of power, ownership, and distribution in effect in art and popular culture, but that enunciates their long-term consequences).

Juan Acha. Por una Nueva Problemática Artística; exhibition view. Courtesy of Museo de Arte Moderno. Photo: Ramiro Chaves.

In the following room the legacy of Muralism and ideological art, a leitmotif in Acha’s writings, is explored in an archival display that includes a facsimile of Felipe Ehrenberg’s powerful essay “El Nuevo Mural Mexicano Es Tamaño Doble Carta (The New Mexican Mural Is Tabloid in Size),” published in May 1976, and other positions from the same debate by the critic Raquel Tibol and the artist Arnold Belkin. Acha, very much like Ehrenberg, campaigned for a political and social art free from the nationalist and ideological baggage that overpowered Muralism; in Ehrenberg’s words, for a turn towards public art, not art for the public.[4] Next to these fascinating documents stands David Alfaro Siqueiros’ The Partisan (1968), a grand-scale painting of a figure pulling the reins of an imposing horse as if preventing an imminent crash. The contrast in size and intensity between this painting and the adjacent documents illustrates the tensions lived by thinkers and artists who at the time struggled to either monumentalize their views, methods, and politics—Siqueiros famously declared “There is no route but ours”—or to bring into the mainstream a new idea of what art should stand for (in other words, the cyclic struggle between the hegemonic, the residual, and the emergent as theorized by Acha).

Hersúa. Model of Sculptoric Space (Maqueta del Espacio Escultórico), 1979. Photo: Ramiro Chaves.

The exhibition continues to explore other strands of Juan Acha’s thought by reviewing in passing the art and artists that interested him, culminating in the stunning models and images of the still standing Espacio Escultórico (Sculptural Space)[5]—a landmark of public art inaugurated in 1979 and a brilliant response to Acha’s challenge to artists to create unique, fundamentally contextual works—authored by Hersúa, Federico Silva, Helen Escobedo, Manuel Felguerez, Mathías Goeritz, and Sebastián.

This exhibition is part of the commemorations of Acha’s 100th birthday, an unprecedented celebration for a theoretician whose writings are just beginning to be widely disseminated. As a relevant inventory of Acha’s most public interests, the exhibition succeeds. But as becomes obvious throughout the show, Acha’s combative ideas remain locked inside his writings in interesting—but monotonously displayed—documents that are unappealing to the uninformed viewer. Simplicity, approachability, and a clever sense of humor were characteristics of Juan Acha’s pen; perhaps curators and artists shouldn’t forget this in the hopefully many future critical approaches to his ideas.

Juan Acha: Por una Nueva Problemática Artística is on view through January 22, 2017.

[1] You can read the text in English here: http://post.at.moma.org/sources/29/publications/281.

[2] A copy of Artes Visuales is part of the archival display in the exhibition.

[3] Perhaps the museum’s most famous and visited work, currently on view in Paris.

[4] Felipe Ehrenberg, “El Nuevo Mural Mexicano Es Tamaño Doble Carta,” Revista Plural 12, September 1977.

[5] You can see it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bBNyitdospc, and you can read (in English) about a recent fight to save it here: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/02/arts/design/in-mexico-city-a-battle-over-a-building-and-the-art-in-its-shadow.html.

Dennis Adams. Patriot, 2002; C-print mounted on aluminum; 40.5 x 54 in. Courtesy of Centre National des Arts Plastiques, Paris. Photo: Galerie Gabrielle Maubrie.

Based on Didi-Huberman’s extensive research, the exhibition guides the viewer into an iconographic exploration of what makes humans revolt. Apparently the answers are in the uninspired organizing themes—“Elements (Unleashed),” “Gestures (Intense),” “Words (Exclaimed),” “Conflicts (Flared Up),” and “Desires (Indestructibles).” The exhibition opens with Dennis Adams’s Patriot (2002), a large-format photograph of a red plastic bag floating against a white and blue background—a partly cloudy sky. Striking in its literal nature relative to the exhibition’s ethos, Adams’s work also exemplifies what the show achieves by requiring the spectator to imagine the possible curatorial narratives (which were previously and lengthily developed in a text that is absent from the show and only invoked in the aforementioned categories).

With colors reminiscent of the French flag, Adams’s photograph activates a chain of associations that demonstrate the appearance across time and geography of what Aby Warburg called the “accessories of movement” and what Didi-Huberman terms “aesthetic formants” and identifies as gestural markers of uprising. In the exhibition, these include Man Ray’s Moving Sculpture (La France), a 1920 black-and-white photograph of white drapes and airing garments, full of weightless movement under the drying sun; Hélio Oiticica and Leandro Katz’s Parangolé–Encounters in Pamplona (1972), three photographs of a performance—in which large pieces of red, green, or black fabric were worn and perceived as colors in motion—staged in Pamplona three years prior to the death of Francisco Franco; and, on an opposing wall, Roman Signer’s video Rotes Band (Red Tape) (2005), a metaphor of uprising, in which a reel of red ribbon is unleashed by a wind coming from the floor, depicting an exhilarating moment of tension between order and anarchy.[1]

Hélio Oiticica and Leandro Katz. Parangolé–Encuentros de Pamplona (Encounters in Pamplona), 1972; C-print on paper and cardboard; 9.2 x 19.29 in. Courtesy of Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid.

The body in its political dimension has a prominent role in the next section, “Gestures (Intense),” in which connections between works of art and documents are made through the identification of other aesthetic formants—in this case, the gestures of the body resisting subjugation and ultimately, literally, rising against it. The human hand is significant in some of the show’s most memorable art works, like Jack Goldstein’s A Glass of Milk (1972), in which the artist hits with increasing intensity the surface of a table holding a glass of milk until it falls and spills, or a series of four images by Gilles Caron documenting demonstrations in Redon (1967) and Londonderry (1969), in which different men are photographed in the act of throwing stones against an invisible or blurred Other. With subjects that at times rise almost entirely from the ground, as if throwing their whole bodies as extensions of the rocks, these images sum up the notion of the uprising as a collective moment of rupture, in which the irrational forces of turmoil become contagious.

Roman Signer. Rotes Band (Red Tape), 2005; color video with sound; 2:07. Courtesy of Galerie Art Concept.

The works of art lose some of their primacy as the exhibition further explores the dynamic essence of uprisings: often chaotic and violent actions. Powerful photographs of 20th-century barricaded strikers in France, Spain, Mexico, Bolivia, Greece, and the United States have in common the communities that constitute them: people working in unison and risking their lives to act toward a shared goal. Images like the anonymous portrait of the stoic Fortino Sámano (1917), taken an instant before he was executed, and the nearby photograph by Manuel Álvarez Bravo of a Murdered Striker (1934) placed alongside works like Robert Filliou’s Optimistic Box No. 1 (1968)—a wooden box containing a cobblestone with the label, “We don’t throw stones at each other any more”—make conceptual art seem like a naïve footnote of life; they make one wonder about art’s capacity to respond and interpret the severe problems of the present through the intrinsically individualistic practices of contemporary artistic production.

Manuel Álvarez Bravo. Murderer Striker, 1934; gelatin silver print; approx. 7-1/2 x 11-1/4 in. Courtesy of Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris, Roger Viollet, Estate of Manuel Álvarez Bravo.

In the exhibition’s final section, “Desires (Indestructibles),” Estefanía Peñafiel Loaiza addresses less visible uprisings. Working in proximity to a detention center in Paris and informed by the stories of abuse and internal upheavals suffered by the center’s population of undocumented immigrants, the artist created a video, And They Go into the Space that Your Gaze Embraces: Smoke Signals (2016). In this work, the artist’s shadowed hands move over a light box, revealing a series of transparencies related to her research of the center. The background is simultaneously illuminating and blinding, creating such high contrast that even when the images can be seen individually, they remain indistinguishable—much like the frequent abuses in the center that, although documented in oral histories, remain hidden behind closed doors and in plain sight.

Estefanía Peñafiel Loaiza. Et Ils Vont Dans l’Espace qu’Embrasse ton Regard: Signaux de Fumée (And They Go into the Space that Your Gaze Embraces: Smoke Signals), 2016; HD video; 37:10’. Courtesy of the Artist.

Soulèvements is an important exhibition, summing up a year of uprisings of all kinds. At the end of this year of surprises and fiascos, much inspiration and awareness of history are needed to believe again in the power of imagination—not to move mountains (for it is men and women working together, risking it all, that move mountains), but rather to create a different future, one of fewer uprisings and more revolutions.

Soulèvements is on view at Jeu de Paume National Gallery, Paris, through January 15, 2017.

[1] Georges Didi-Huberman, et al., Uprisings (Paris: Gallimard, Jeu de Paume, 2016), 295.

Rosângela Rennó. Exhibition view with (left to right) Los Angeles (Lori Shepler, Los Angeles Times); Senador Camará (Wania Corredo, O Globo News Agency); Assunción (Ruben Alfonso, Reuters), 2009; Digital print, inkjet, on Hahnemülle Photo Rag 308 paper; 
66 x 44 in. Courtesy of the artist.

In Body of Soul (the state of the world) (2003-2016), Rosângela Rennó amplifies and digitally modifies newspaper pictures that document a diverse range of public demonstrations. From a distance, Rennó’s three large-format photographs show crowds, but are zoomed in to focus on one person who stands holding a small portrait of, presumably, a lost loved one. From afar, the images are crisply legible, but sharpness dissolves as viewers approach the images and the halftone dots that were hard to distinguish from a distance appear outsized when up close. It becomes evident that the dots are not uniformly distributed; there are different densities deliberately arranged throughout the image, with tighter and smaller dots composing the image of the loved one, thus rendering it visible from all distances.

Although in her artist statement, Rennó aims to create a link between the spectator’s reflection in the frame’s glass and the daguerreotype technique of mirror imaging, what is most striking in the context of this show are the work’s titles. Each is named for the image’s original photographer, or the operator for Barthes: Ruben Alfonso from Reuters, Lori Shepler from the Los Angeles Times, and Wania Corredo from O Globo. It is the photographers who are identified—a surprising contrast to their amplified yet anonymous subjects. However, it is not these photographer’s original works we are seeing, but an image cropped and modified by Rennó to highlight a certain feeling; thus the work shifts not only each image’s authorship, but also its original punctum. By focusing on the image within the image, Rennó is altering the photograph’s effect from one that emphasizes the force of collective mobilization to the power of an individualized story, while granting the right of those who have already physically disappeared to not be swallowed in a sea of mechanically flattened visual narratives.

Teresa Margolles. El Exhumado, 2014; Armchair and plastic wrap; 47 x 35 x 43 in; C-print; 64 x 48 in. Courtesy of the artist.

In El Exhumado (The Exhumed, 2016), Teresa Margolles disrupts the safe distance between viewer and image by bringing a piece of evidence—a specter itself—out of the photograph that hangs in the gallery’s wall and placing it in the exhibition space. Concerned by structural violence in northern Mexico, Margolles photographed a dilapidated home in Juárez, a city infamous for its permanently high rate of femicides and drug-related crimes. In the photograph we see a sofa—framed by wooden ornaments and once flamboyant red upholstery highly significant of a middle class status—trapped beneath the rubble of the collapsed ceiling. Exhumed as if it was a wounded body, the sofa now stands stoically in the gallery, its colors and features barely visible under protective plastic that wraps it and keeps it together. By saving this object from its otherwise inevitable demise, the artist refuses to accept what appears to be an unchangeable, doomed fate of Juárez, while also invoking a powerful embodiment of human struggle into the otherwise immaculate exhibition space.

Fredi Casco. The Return of The Sorcerers, Vol. 1, 2005; Digital prints; 7.8 x 9.8 in., each. Courtesy of the artist.

In the gallery’s lower floor, Fredi Casco’s The Return of The Sorcerers (2005, 2011, 2012) is presented in its three volumes, each a separate episode in which the artist uses a different set of photography-based strategies to confront the toxic legacy of Alfredo Stroessner, Paraguay’s dictator from 1954 until 1989. The eponymous horror story by Clark Ashton Smith, written in 1931, seems to have influenced the artist whose dark humor is unmistakable even when dealing with his own country’s most harrowing episodes. While in Smith’s story the unarticulated limbs of a corpse come back from the grave to haunt its killer, in Casco’s work, it is the lost or amputated images—collected by the artist in Asunción’s flea markets—of military men and their enabling cronies that come back to our present day to be identified, if only metaphorically, as culprits in the many crimes of Stroessner’s regime.

Fredi Casco. The Return of The Sorcerers, Vol. 1, 2005; Digital print; 7.8 x 9.8 in. Courtesy of the artist.

Twenty-four black-and-white pictures belonging to Volume 1 of the series line three walls of the gallery. At first sight the photographs appear to document diverse state dinners with middle-aged men and women, older military and clergymen, and what looks like leaders from different countries talking, signing papers, and drinking in official monotony. Upon closer inspection, we see that these characters not only appear homogenous in attire and attitude, but they’ve actually been digitally cloned; some have had their faces interchanged, while the heads of others have been covered with gas masks. The effect is both comical and disturbing, as the artist’s manipulations highlight the fact that in order to succeed in its genocidal enterprise, the Paraguayan dictatorship required—as all repressive regimes do—the compliance of an interchangeable set of minions coming from civil, religious, and political circles, both national and internationally.

From Strossner’s years of cold-blooded rule in Paraguay to present day Juárez, Spectres presents a distressing picture of a continent in which institutions seem to suffer systemic amnesia. The artists in this exhibition prevent their respective specters from vanishing by zooming into appropriated images to get to their symbolic cores, unearthing the symbols of a domesticity interrupted by crime and corruption, and by creating archives and imagining their corresponding stories out of what the system conveniently deems trash.

Written in the first person, Camera Lucida was Barthes’ attempt at grasping the power of photography to invoke the dead in the eyes of the living. For as important as the spectrum was for him, it was the spectator—himself in grieving—who was at the center of his argument. In these images it is again the spectator who is pressed to recognize the power of photography to have effects on things far larger than sentiment, indeed making us see and feel, but also forcing us to remember, think, and even act.

Spectres is on view at Mor Charpentier through December 22, 2016.

[1] Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981).

Francesc Ruiz. Exhibition view, No Words, 3 Walls, 3D Porn, 2016; Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Aurélien Mole.

Montag’s wordless comic is an item that has been the object of study and speculation of media critics and comic scholars for decades. In creating Fahrenheit 451’s Comic, Ruiz followed the footsteps of the film’s production designer, and ultimately discovered a link between Truffaut’s production and James Bond films of the time. By mixing the visible frames of the comic in the film, strips from James Bond comics published in the 1960s, and his own drawings, Ruiz put together an eight-page broadsheet, published by Captures Éditions to coincide with the show and to be available to be read in the exhibition space.

Francesc Ruiz. FAH (8), 2016; Chinese ink and watercolor on paper; 11.8×15.7 in. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Aurélien Mole.

No Words, 3D Walls, 3d Porn takes its name from the three forms of entertainment in Bradbury’s novel and presents eight original comic panels by Ruiz and a mural that symbolically transforms one of the gallery walls into a television screen with eight vertical wall-to-wall color bars. The colors illuminate the room and evoke a now bygone time when electronic transmissions were concentrated in just one appliance. On each side of the wall Ruiz has placed five and four comic panels respectively, grouped according to their palette’s similarity to either side of the color spectrum painted on the wall. On the far left, closest to the white bar, there are two panels corresponding to what is shown in the comic from the film: somewhat abstract and monochromatic scenes that, as wordless comics specialist Jessie Bi remarked, “seem to function as a panoptical zapping” in which neither sequences or emotions are evident.

Is Montag reading these comics as one would watch the news—a decontextualized feed of “factoids,” in Bradbury’s own words—or could there be some other, indiscernible code behind the arrangement of the panels in relation to the color wall? Ruiz tests both possibilities in his own reconstruction. Some lively colored panels show recurring characters in recognizable, if only brief–sequences, while others seem to be the grouping of otherwise loose pieces from different stories. Ruiz’s use of James Bond comics is evident, with some frames clearly bringing to mind action sequences, car chases, or the plotting of menacing groups. The artist’s construction shows the versatility of the comic form with panels that, however muted, are full of action and emotion, sharply contrasting with the lethargy in the broadsheets created by Truffaut to be read by Montag. This opposition makes one wonder about how carefully crafted Truffaut’s comic must have been in order to render it both malevolent—with certain panels showing what looks like a Ku Klux Klan meeting—and yet deeply monotonous.

Francesc Ruiz. FAH (6), 2016; Chinese ink and watercolor on paper; 11.8×15.7 in. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Aurélien Mole.

In unearthing a possible story for this mysterious fifty year-old comic, Ruiz brings to the foreground a tired, yet still ongoing debate about the value of graphic narratives as compared to literature. Both Bradbury and Truffaut tacitly agreed on the negative potential of comics, a medium the film director—who rendered his comic wordless while Bradbury only mentions “comics” in his novel—deemed significant only as a measuring rod for established narratives in books, a medium that, in contrast, seemed unquestionably precious.

In consonance with mass society theories of their time, Bradbury and Truffaut imagined a world devoid of what they considered high culture—exclusively books—and where popular culture was just a cheap tool used by a fascist state to anesthetize the people, impose ideologies, and perpetuate its repressive regime. Although the arguments have changed, and comics are discussed and described with new attention and discourse, the medium must still fight to be recognized as an art form in its own right. Whether with or without words, the medium of comics and its many layered aesthetics, narrative implications, and contextual significations remain an open field that has just begun, with the help of artists like Francesc Ruiz, to be truly expanded.

No Words, 3 Walls, 3D Porn will be on view through December 17, 2016.

La Barbe. Au Patriarcat, les Hommes Reconnaissants [To the Patriarchy, the Grateful Men]; digital print; 8.3 x 11.7 in. Courtesy of La Barbe. Photo: Charles Duprat.

Through a modest exhibition of well-known works, viewers can follow the actions of the Guerrilla Girls, from their appropriation of Ingres’ Odalisque and Slave to create their iconic poster, Do Women Have to Be Naked to Get Into the Met. Museum? (1989), to a more recent billboard, Disturbing the Peace (2016). Through a series of quotes in Disturbing the Peace, one witnesses the apparently swift continuation of sexism from the times of the Hindu Code of Manu (dated between the 3rd century BCE and the 2nd century CE), which states, “A woman must never be free of subjugation,” to the present-day vociferous speech of Donald Trump.

Guerrilla Girls. Disturbing the Peace, 2016 (installation view); plastic banner; 83 x 118 in. Courtesy of Michèle Didier. Photo: Charles Duprat.

In a similar tone, the most recent publication by the Guerrilla Girls (published in 2016 by mfc-michèle didier), The Hysterical Herstory of Hysteria and How It was Cured, From Ancient Times Until Now (2009, 2011, 2016), is a didactic narration in the form of a board book. Available on a table for viewers to read, the book contains the ludicrous and ultimately domineering strategies used by prevailing patriarchies to tame and override the bodies and minds of women.

Unlike the Guerrilla Girls, who call themselves “the consciousness of the art world,” the members of La Barbe have chosen to go beyond art to expose the upsetting picture of social life in the 21st century in the country that gave birth to the Revolution and the Declaration of the Rights of Man in 1789. Out of 425 academics registered in the Institut de France, 394 are men; 100 percent of all general attorneys in the past 300 years have been men; 84 percent of experts presented in the media are men, who receive around 25 minutes of airtime, compared to the 1.35 minutes received by their women counterparts; and only once since its creation in 1955 has the Palme d’Or been awarded to a woman. The list goes on, spanning art, culture, economy, politics, science, and sports. Throughout their interventions, the members of La Barbe read aloud these and other statistics[1], a fraction of which can be read in twenty-seven small sheets in the walls of the gallery, each one corresponding to one public action. The tiny, hardly legible texts, arranged as a clean installation privileging bulk over detail, do little to amplify the urgent messages contained therein.

La Barbe. Installation view, forty-two slogans over panels; digital prints, 8.3 x 11.7 in. Courtesy of La Barbe. Photo: Charles Duprat.

Echoing the culture-jamming strategies of the Guerrilla Girls, La Barbe alters French sayings to create ironic phrases that act as visual punchlines for their interventions. In an adjacent room, visitors face a wall covered by forty-two of these phrases, each printed over a black background and bordered by an ornamented frame. The frame gives the phrases an air of authority that contrasts with the farcicality in some statements and the depressing literality in others: “One of every two men is a man,” “Let the best continue winning,” and “In Cannes, women show their faces, men their films.”

While clearly influenced by the Guerrilla Girls, La Barbe has managed in its relatively short existence to be a non-hierarchical organization with presence in over eight cities in France and a very open platform for anyone who wishes to be part of their actions in a variety of capacities. This approach allows La Barbe to be free from the issues of authorship and creative control that the Guerrilla Girls have recently resolved in court, which prompted two of its most prominent members to reveal their identities after three decades of anonymity.

Guerrilla Girls. Guerrilla Girls and La Barbe, 2016; installation view, mfc-michèle didier. Photo: Charles Duprat.

As part of the Guerrilla Girls workbook, mfc-michèle didier also got its own history checked. Lying shyly by the gallery’s entrance on an almost imperceptible piece of paper, the record revealed that in its five years of existence, only three exhibitions were by women. When faced with the question of how he was planning to address this in the close future, the editor-turned-gallerist replied with a smile, noting that three out of five exhibitions in the present season will be from women artists.

The Guerrilla Girls and La Barbe will be on view at mfc-michèle didier in Paris, France, through November 12, 2016.

[1] A comprehensive list of statistics, sorted by field, can be found on labarbelabarbe.org (section “Cible”) and on ousontlesfemmes.org, a website created by the Societé des Auteurs et Compositeurs Dramatiques, an organization that published earlier this year the results of a five-year study on gender disparity in the field of culture. Their brochure is available for visitors to pick up at the exhibition.

Exhibition view with documents of the Singapore Art Archive Project, circa 1960; facsimiles, black-and-white photographs, ephemera; variable dimensions. Courtesy of Koh Nguang How. Photo: Aurélien Mole.

Here in the present, a facsimile of “The Truth About the Colonies” sets the tone for Anywhere But Here, a group exhibition at Bétonsalon Center for Art and Research in Paris, in which contemporary artists explore the ongoing effects of colonial rule in Southeast Asia. The exhibition places a strong spotlight on Cambodia, where the French Protectorate was active from 1866 though 1953, and interlaces histories of colonialism with anecdotes and personal experiences using various forms of media. The exhibition reflects upon the high stakes at play for those who are forced to, in the words of Surrealist André Breton, “leave everything.”

Tran Minh Duc’s Private Sorrow (2015), is an installation composed of a worn-out sofa characteristic of the era of Louise XVI, during which Prince Canh, a member of the last dynasty of Vietnam, spent five years in Paris negotiating a treaty that would later mark the start of the colonization of Vietnam. Upon his return to Asia, the prince, whom we see in époque attire in a small portrait within the exhibition, found himself lost, displaced, and unknowingly anticipating the future of generations of his uprooted countrymen. A plastic mirror completes the installation, giving a sense of strangeness to the works, as well as their distorted reflections across the room. Among these distortions and transpositions is Cambodia Crises (2016), a video piece by Duc in which he sits in front of a camera next to a well-intentioned but ineffective translator who futilely reads aloud one of the few historical books written by a Cambodian about the Khmer Rouge regime members. Despite the accuracy of the history being orated by the translator, the text is written and spoken in Khmer, a language unknown to Duc, who remains bewildered onscreen, perhaps as awkward and helpless in his own culture as Prince Cahn.

Tran Minh Duc. Private Sorrow, 2016; installation; variable dimensions. Courtesy of the Artist. Photo: Aurélien Mole.

At the center of the gallery, Thao-Nguyen Phan’s harrowing installation Heads (2014) is inspired by the “Ma Mot” trees used for healing rituals in northern Vietnam. In Phan’s iteration, what hang in lieu of amulets are little brass heads representing peasants’ whole bodies, instead of single bones, and jute of varying widths, as well as sleigh bells and rusty sickles. These objects resonate powerfully with the story of the 1945 famine in north Vietnam in which two million people died after following colonial orders—from both the French and Japanese—to halt production of rice, and to instead produce jute, a crucial material for the production and distribution of gunpowder. An appropriate reaction to this state-sponsored horror is provided by an adjacent sculpture by the exiled king Hàm Nghi (Tu Xuân), in which a naked and ashamed Eve (1925) turns her back on us, covering her eyes in deep desolation.

Thao-Nguyen Phan. Heads, 2014; dried jute shred, cast bronze heads, bells, sickle blades; variable dimensions. Courtesy of the Artist. Photo: Aurélien Mole.

Lyno Vuth’s and Vandy Rattana’s videos round off the exhibition, interrogating history from a contemporary perspective while demanding a paradigm change in the policies of the future. On the ground floor is Vuth’s UNTAC Project (2016), a brief promotional video from the so-called “Transformational Authority” of the United Nations, which is played backward, thus losing the straightforward delivery that is typical of micro-videos that deliver “information” through social media. In a video box on an upper floor, Rattana directs our gaze to the Cambodian countryside, where subtitles succinctly narrate the story of an anonymous victim of an anonymous conflict. This unknown protagonist is imprisoned, tried, and murdered unjustly in the deceptively calm fields of Cambodia, which in present reality is littered with active land mines and undiscovered mass graves. The story is written and not spoken, pointing at the urgent work needed to unearth not only the bodies of countless anonymous victims, but also highlighting the trauma and unspeakable injustice hidden in the silence of a nation.

Khvay Samnang. Object of Magic, 2016; installation; variable dimensions. Courtesy of the Artist. Photo: Aurélien Mole.

Next to this video, running along the ceiling, is Felix González-Torres’ Untitled (Portrait of Robert Vifian) (1993). An appearance of the subject of this portrait, Robert Vifian—a notorious Franco-Vietnamese chef and contemporary art collector, who moved to Paris after the fall of Saigon—is scheduled for an upcoming event at the gallery. Perhaps, then, a more compelling link will be made for a piece that, although in line with the curatorial discourse, feels somewhat out of proportion and not entirely comfortable alongside works by young artists bravely dealing with the hard facts of their nation’s history.

Vuth Lyno. UNTAC Project, 2016; installation, laser print on recycled paper, metal, single-channel video with sound; 2’18”. Courtesy of the Artist. Photo Aurélien Mole.

Anywhere But Here is an exhibition of political substance that, from a curatorial perspective, tries to make sense of France’s colonial legacy in Southeast Asia. The exhibition shows that, unlike the Surrealists of the early 20th century, contemporary artists from the region and those who lived through the diaspora are unwilling to leave everything. They are instead eager to take it all. Identity, ritual, history, and anecdote are carried into the work with both sorrow for what has been lost or cannot be repaired, as well as hope for new systems of knowledge and justice that are interlaced in our present.

Anywhere But Here will be on view through November 5, 2016.

Kapwani Kiwanga. White Gold: Morogoro, 2016; installation; 236 x 196 x 157 in. Courtesy of La Ferme du Buisson. Photo: Emile Ouroumov.

A monumental installation, White Gold: Morogoro (2016), welcomes the viewer and acts as the show’s contextual and museological heart. The evocative work is composed of a generous amount of sisal suspended from steel strings. Originating from southeast Mexico, the resistant fiber has been successfully cultivated since the late 19th century in the region of present-day Tanzania, once part of the colony of German East Africa.[1] Its production has played a major role in the country’s economy, from the colonial era through independence.

Kapwani Kiwanga. Kinjeketile Suite (detail), 2015–16; installation; variable dimensions. Courtesy of La Ferme du Buisson. Photo: Emile Ouroumov.

The installation grounds the artist’s explored narratives in material relations of production; even when Kiwanga refers to alchemy or explores the interplays of politics and culture, specters of exploitation and struggle linger in the background. Next to White Gold: Morogoro, which appears like an innocent white cloud, Kinjeketile Suite (2015–16) occupies two facing rooms in which archival materials related to Nyerere’s efforts are arranged to create symbolic interplays with references to Kinjeketile’s revolution. For instance, photographs of monuments and street murals reminiscent in style of the art that Emory Douglas produced for the Black Panther Party are positioned next to a copy of the Arusha Declaration, in which Nyerere originally presented his policies of self-reliance. In the same room stand twelve pots of castor bean, one of the deadliest plants in the world and an important ingredient of Kinjeketile’s maji-maji.

Invocations of the shaman-turned-national-hero run throughout the exhibition: in the plants he used to create a magic potion that would transform German bullets into water; in the distinctively patterned Kanga fabrics worn to signify tacit support for the Maji Maji rebels; and in the Swahili song that Kiwanga sings (“This man, Kinjeketile, he is courageous! In the mountains he defeated the colonizer!”). The artist’s voice is heard around the ground floor of the exhibition, recounting stories of liberation and unrest, successfully connecting the otherwise awkward architecture while elevating orality over the hegemonic texts of history to keep alive memories of power conflicts.

Kapwani Kiwanga. Uhuru ni Kazi, 2016; video installation. Courtesy of La Ferme du Buisson. Photo: Emile Ouroumov.

Upstairs, Uhuru ni Kazi (2016)­ offers a fascinating window into the thoughts of regular farmers trying to make sense of ujamaa during Nyerere’s presidency. Here, six short black-and-white films made by Gerald Belkin during the 1960s document discussions and candid exchanges among men, some of whom are reluctant to accept the ujamaa principles (“Everybody likes exploiting—I like exploiting, you like exploiting—everybody!”) while others point to the practical paradoxes that the introduction of development brings to the socialist project: “Do you believe in living together, or do you believe in building an economy?” a young man asks straightforwardly in one of the films.[2] In the background, wallpaper patterned with alternating phrases—“Uhuru ni kazi” (meaning “freedom is work”) and “Uhuru ni jasho” ­(“freedom is sweat”)—creates a clear contrast between these once-official slogans and the substantial complications that come from their application.

Somewhere between idealism and pragmatism stands Ujamaa (2016), a three-channel video installation placed in an adjacent darkened room, where a montage of documentaries produced in 1976 and 1977 by Yves Billon and Jean-François Schiano show smiling women, children, and men plowing the Tanzanian land with melodic rhythm, telling with their physical gestures a story of joy and solidarity beyond the grip of propaganda.

Kapwani Kiwanga. Ujamaa, 2016; video installation. Courtesy of La Ferme du Buisson. Photo: Emile Ouroumov.

Kiwanga neither celebrates nor judges the objects of her examinations, and although the works presented rely heavily on archival material, the attention of the artist is clearly on the future, an idea she elegantly conveys in Nursery (2016), which occupies the last room of the show. There, a gallery assistant gracefully explains the plants’ healing and subversive properties and their roles in diverse uprisings around the world and across the ages: some are hallucinogenic, some produce or heal rashes or even provoke abortions. Insisting again on the power of orality (and the lack of it in most museums and galleries), Nursery hints at something growing and perhaps eventually maturing into a renewed rebellion.

Neither Kinjeketile’s revolt nor Nyerere’s regime were entirely successful. The warrior was beheaded in 1905 and his movement crushed in 1907 after heavy human losses, and Tanzania was independent until 1964; the statesman stepped down after twenty-one years in power, having decreased infant mortality, increased life expectancy, and increased literacy to eighty-five percent while failing to achieve any long-term economic stability. Still, the exhibition conveys hope that, as articulated by Franco Berardi, “Revolt against power is necessary even if we may not know how to win.”[3]

Ujamaa will be on view through October 9, 2016.

Notes:

[1] In Mexico, sisal has its own history of political conflict, war, and systematic human exploitation. A history of the haciendas offers an introduction to the industry of sisal (or henequen, “Yucatan’s green gold”): https://www.jstor.org/stable/25119171?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents.

[2] Afrotopia, by the Senegalese economist and thinker Felwine Sarr, provides a current take on the neocolonial weight of development for African countries. Sarr’s views are conveyed in an interview (in French): http://www.lemonde.fr/afrique/article/2016/03/29/l-utopie-africaine-selon-felwine-sarr_4891657_3212.html.

[3] Franco Berardi, Heroes, Mass Murder and Suicide (London: Verso, 2015).

Edgardo Aragón. Mesoamerica: The Hurricane Effect, 2015 (detail of map); HD video, color, sound; 16:20, with 10 maps. Coproduction: Jeu de Paume, Paris, Fondation des Arts Graphiques et Plastiques and CAPC Musée d’Art Contemporain de Bordeaux. Courtesy of the Artist and Jeu de Paume.

Magnus’ monsters take on a new dimension in Mesoamerica: The Hurricane Effect, Edgardo Aragón’s exhibition of maps, a video, and an accompanying publication at Jeu de Paume in Paris. Aragón takes viewers on a journey that starts with an array of ten maps that illustrate the economic and political forces struggling for control of the region comprising Mexico and Central America known as Mesoamerica. Departing from an 1857 map that, as the artist notes in the publication, “interestingly” includes the totality of the region as part of the United States’ territory, we perceive Mesoamerica as a route for the trafficking of people, drugs, and natural resources.

The sea creatures depicted in the maps of yore are used here to represent the main culprits: drug lords, political parties, and mining companies. Although clearly destructive, the beasts in Olas Magnus’ map remain at bay in the vastness of the cold sea, whereas in Aragón’s interpretation they almost cover entire countries, turning them into vulnerable vessels doomed to sink. Three final maps show us Oaxaca, the small town of Cachimbo in the state of Chiapas, and a route traced in red between the two that hints at the trip developing in the single-channel video projected in an adjacent room.

Edgardo Aragón. Mesoamerica: The Hurricane Effect, 2015 (detail of maps); HD video, color, sound; 16:20, with 10 maps. Coproduction: Jeu de Paume, Paris, Fondation des Arts Graphiques et Plastiques and CAPC Musée d’Art Contemporain de Bordeaux. Courtesy of the Artist and Jeu de Paume.

The first image—a wind turbine tower ablaze, its white blades still turning in the air—sets a gloomy, disturbing tone. Viewers follow Aragón on a road trip from Ocotlán to Cachimbo, encountering on the way a hydroelectric plant, a wind park, and their surrounding stories of social injustice. Contemplative shots of a silent, deserted landscape alternate with views of the road and the artist’s smartphone screen, where he shows us maps and hashtag searches relating to local news of industrial accidents. The role of social media in the dissemination of otherwise ignored local scandals echoes the now internationally known murder of forty-three students from the neighboring state of Guerrero in 2014.

The story of Cachimbo resonates throughout the region thanks to policies like the North American Free Trade Agreement signed between the U.S., Canada, and Mexico in 1994, and the Mesoamerica Project, a development plan with dubious long-term goals established in 2008 by then-president Vicente Fox. In line with the reality of these policies, Cachimbo—a town regularly battered by hurricanes—is surrounded by sources of energy and natural wealth, yet the locals have no access to any of it. Aragón’s mission to bring to this town some much-needed electricity, if only in the form of what appears to be a small motorbike battery, is as absurd as it is significant.

Edgardo Aragón. Mesoamerica: The Hurricane Effect, 2015 (detail of video); HD video, color, sound; 16:20, with 10 maps. Coproduction: Jeu de Paume, Paris, Fondation des Arts Graphiques et Plastiques and CAPC Musée d’Art Contemporain de Bordeaux. Courtesy of the Artist and Jeu de Paume.

The profusion of references employed by the artist may prove challenging for a public who may know only the generalities of the complex and idiosyncratic relations of power and capital in Latin America, yet the artist’s choices seem to be an appeal and an insistence to be read and understood in his own undiluted terms.

Aragón lays out a final, if impossibly thick, layer of meaning in a beautiful last scene in which a fragment of Andrés Henestrosa’s The Men Dispersed by the Dance (1929) is read aloud while a small electric fan whirls, powered by the artist’s battery. Henestrosa’s work is fundamental to the Mexican movement of indigenous narrative, and his prose is used by the artist to point to a conflicting religious syncretism between the ancient Zapotec cosmogony and an imposed Christianity that dictates compliance to adversity, turning tragedy of all kind into an unchallenged part of everyday life.

Contemporary art from Mexico often shows the urgent need of its producers to engage with the social issues in the world around them. As Edgardo Aragón shows in his unapologetic work, these issues are centuries old, scary, and more destructive than any sea monster. Maybe, like Olas Magnus’ creatures, their horrors also precede great social upheaval. Only time will tell.

Mesoamerica: The Hurricane Effect by Edgardo Aragón is on view at Jeu de Paume through May 22, 2016. It will travel to the Musée d’Art Contemporain de Bourdeaux, where it will be on view from September 15 until November 6, 2016.