Third Text
Issues
Volume 38, 2024
Issue 3
Number 188, May 2024
A Toxic Hospitality?: Racism, Museums and Decolonial Interventions 249–269
Joana Monbaron
Drawing upon discussions with artist Dalila Mahdjoub, who shared her doubts regarding the implications of her participation in recent projects branded as decolonising museums, this article is an attempt to contextualise, and then problematise, the commissioning of artistic interventions dealing with European museums’ colonial legacy. It begins with a genealogy of artistic interventions, highlighting the importance of a ‘humanitarian’ spirit in the arts. It further explores the similarities between the diversity policies that Sara Ahmed analysed throughout the 2000s and the ‘decolonial turn’ in European museums after 2010. This is followed by the consideration of the different spatial and temporal frames that artistic interventions entail, which generate an unequal situation that Olivier Marboeuf defines as ‘toxic hospitality’. This reading allows us to identify a continuity between the criticisms levelled at diversity policies and the invitation to artists to intervene as a means of decolonising museums, which often participates in ‘keeping whiteness in place’.
Dealing with Nordic Colonialism: Agency and Othering in Two Art Projects Invoking Living Ethnographic Displays 270–292
Hanne Hammer Stien and Cathrine Baglo
In this article we explore two art projects that each, in their own way, thematise Nordic European colonialism and exhibition culture, and the relationship between the two. ‘European Attraction Limited’, by the Swedish-Norwegian artist Lars Cuzner and the Sudanese-Norwegian artist Mohamed Ali Fadlabi, was presented in the context of the Bicentenary of the Norwegian Constitution in Oslo in 2014. The Sámi-Norwegian artist and architect Joar Nango’s ‘European Everything’ was commissioned for documenta 14 (2017), which took place in both Athens and Kassel. The article discusses the art projects in relation to a historical exhibition practice that they directly or indirectly invoke, namely the so-called ‘living exhibition’, and the continuation of this tradition in the biennale culture of today. By emphasising this contextualisation and comparing the two art projects, we explore which opportunities for articulation of historical and contemporary agency the projects open or close. Moreover, how do ‘European Attraction Limited’ and ‘European Everything’ in their respective approaches relate to Nordic colonialism in the past and in the present? Central to our investigation are the terms agency, presence, hybridity and relationality.
Joy Gregory and Philip Miller: Seeds of Empire in Black Anthropocenes 293–314
Bergit Arends
British photographer Joy Gregory and South African composer Philip Miller’s exhibition ‘Seeds of Empire: A Little or No Breeze’ (2021) was a very personal, research-based body of work, shown at Empire House, a Georgian townhouse in Lambeth, London (UK). The collaborative works explore and experiment with the representation of an enslaved Black individual named Rose, by taking up the natural scientist Hans Sloane’s medical and weather observations from 1687 to 1689 that were published in his ‘A Voyage to… Jamaica’. The artworks combine effects of coloniality and forms of plant knowledge of the Caribbean with contemporary Jamaicans’ testimonies on migration to the United Kingdom. The Anthropocene, specifically Black Anthropocenes, critically frame these events. The artists’ engagement with historic sources that originate in the plantation system and its inherent violence, turn to becoming British in the present however by re-performing the past, thereby shaping a long history from the sixteenth century onwards.
Between Predator and Prey: Views of Whiteness in Denilson Baniwa’s Performances and Visual Art 315–329
Oscar Svanelid
This article focuses on the works of Denilson Baniwa, a prominent artist in the Indigenous contemporary art movement in Brazil. The purpose is to examine views of whiteness, which, in Baniwa’s performances and visual images, intertwines with shamanism and an Amerindian cosmology of predation and revenge. The theoretical approach of the article is not restricted to art history but draws on a broader range of anthropological literature and cultural theory. Furthermore, the article discusses how Baniwa’s art contributes to the cultural debate and research on Brazilian modernism with a critical focus on the issue of race. This foregrounds a critique of how the Brazilian avant-garde claimed to have incorporated Indigenous cosmologies into an anthropophagic sense of Brazilianness. The methodology used in the article is based on visual theory, emphasising the experience of artworks that claim a right to look back. This reframes the viewing of art into a question of friendship and enmity, or even life and death.
A Post-Soviet Experiment: Coining ‘Moscow Actionism’ 330–348
Joanna Matuszak
This article revisits the politics of naming and investigates the origins of the term ‘Moscow Actionism’. Why was the term introduced in curatorial literature published around 1995 in Western Europe? Why was it coined to present performances by Anatolii Osmolovskii, Aleksandr Brener and Oleg Kulik, if these artists had already made names for themselves in Russia? Touted by the Moscow press as ‘revolutionaries’, they were already invited to participate in exhibitions abroad. Their success came prior to the term ‘Moscow Actionism’. The author argues that the term was coined to counteract persistent Western stereotypes about Russia as wild, primitive and exotic. The coinage mimicked Western art history nomenclature in an attempt to secure a positive reception for Russian artists, yet it simultaneously succumbed to the hegemony of the Western art history lexicon. As the term entered scholarly literature, it prevailed and generated the erroneous view that Moscow Actionism stands for all Russian performance art in the 1990s.
Self-Imagining: Self-Portraits as Resistance to Ethno-Nationalism and Right-Wing Populism in East-Central Europe 349–365
Maria Alina Asavei
While Western Europe’s visual cultural resistance to populism is often highlighted in both the media and academic studies, resistance to populism through artistic and cultural production is very seldom addressed in the academic studies dedicated to East-Central Europe. This does not mean that the cultural producers from the former East do not confront the surge of neo-populism in the region. How do artists understand and figure out cultural alternatives and resist right-wing populist politics and its culture in East-Central Europe? What are their strategies to react against ‘culturally popular’ formats and ethnoreligious nationalist culture in an age of generalised anxiety? This article focuses on alternative archives of visual art against populism, within which it addresses self-portraits, double-self-portraits and multi-self-portraits understood as visual cultural productions that resist the pre-existing depictions of ‘the people’ – employed by the right-wing populist entrepreneurs – to polarise societies into friends versus enemies.
How to Decolonise Art and Science?: On the African Origins of European Civilisation 366–386
Anita Seppä
This article critically examines the colonialist and Eurocentric narratives in the history of art and science, focusing on the overlooked influence of Egypt/Africa on European civilisation. The author explores the complex interactions between Egyptian and Greek cultures, emphasising the impact of climate change on the rise and fall of these civilisations. By re-evaluating traditional art historical perspectives through a decolonising lens, the article sheds light on the intertwined relationship between environmental factors and cultural development. Through an intersectional analysis of archaeological evidence, the text reveals lesser-known aspects of Greek culture, highlighting that many Greek scientists and artists learned their ideas in classical Egypt, and in Africa. The author calls for a more inclusive and holistic approach to art history, emphasising the need to integrate Indigenous knowledge systems and address the impact of climate change on human societies.
THIRD TEXT is published in print and online by Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group