Stedelijk Studies Journal最新文献

{"title":"A Transnational Socialist Solidarity: Chittaprosad’s Prague Connection","authors":"Simone Wille","doi":"10.54533/stedstud.vol009.art11","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.54533/stedstud.vol009.art11","url":null,"abstract":"The Indian artist Chittaprosad Bhattacharya (1915–1978) is best known for his visual reportages on the Bengal famine in 1943–1944. As a member of the Communist Party of India (CPI), Chittaprosad’s historic documents of the famine, in the form of sketches, texts and linocuts, were produced in line with the party’s demand for revolutionary popular art to mobilize the masses by means of posters as well as journalistic and documentary-style reports. Many of these works were published in the communist journals People’s War and People’s Age. This is how they circulated among intellectuals and a general readership. Chittaprosad can be situated within a socially responsive practice that is distinctive for one line of development characteristic of his native Bengal, notably represented by artists such as Zainul Abedin (1914–1976) and Somnath Hore (1921–2006). While these artists have produced compelling images in response to political crisis, the Bengal famine, and peasant rebellions, Chittaprosad’s recognition and fame gained in pre-partition India—unlike that of Abedin and Hore—was not carried into the post-partition era. His dissociation from the CPI in 1948, along with the general atmosphere in postcolonial India, with its concerns for signatures of national-modern art, left little room for a former party artist. This, I will argue, instigated him to build on a network beyond the national frame. The group of individuals from Prague that became aware of and interested in Chittaprosad around that time actively supported his career from this point on. This is how his work increasingly circulated within a transnational network that was marked by solidarity with a socialist outlook and paired with a curiosity for traditional and folk arts. These very personal connections exceeded his lifetime, and most of the documents, book illustrations, poems, and artworks related to this have not yet been studied or published.","PeriodicalId":143043,"journal":{"name":"Stedelijk Studies Journal","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1900-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116408205","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Borders of Europe – Editorial","authors":"Sjoukje van der Meulen, N.S.J.F. Zonnenberg","doi":"10.54533/stedstud.vol006.art01","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.54533/stedstud.vol006.art01","url":null,"abstract":"This issue of Stedelijk Studies aims to contribute to the historical and critical discourse on the European Union and the European integration project since 1992 in the specific field of contemporary art. In that year the Treaty on European Union (TEU) was signed in Maastricht—hence the “Maastricht Treaty”—which established the foundation of the EU. Comprising ten essays by international scholars, writers, and artists with a European nationality, background, or strong affiliation with European topics (from countries as varied as Belgium, Greece, Germany, the Netherlands, Romania, Turkey, and the United States), this issue explores whether this defining political moment is also indicative of an inevitable shift in the critical discourse in the field of contemporary art; from addressing the split and reunification of Eastern and Western European art since 1989, to broader contemporary European issues, challenges, and concerns, in search of a shared European identity within a global context. The issue opens with a roundtable discussion between four Dutch art professionals engaged with the EU’s cultural politics, networks, and projects, in which the key themes of this issue—the borders of Europe and the role of art and culture within the European project since 1992—are discussed alongside a much-needed debate on the lack of transparency in the (financial) policies conducted by the EU for the stimulus of contemporary art. Can we imagine that the contours of a new European concept and identity take shape in the informal, transnational cultures of the arts, as the Vice President of the European Commission, Frans Timmermans, suggested at the W-Europe Festival (2016)?[1] Or should this propitious view be questioned with regard to European policymaking that mediates and funds rather particular artistic developments and trends, often intersected with the promotion of creative industries?","PeriodicalId":143043,"journal":{"name":"Stedelijk Studies Journal","volume":"21 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1900-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127000032","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Reenacting the Past: Romanian Art since 1989","authors":"Mirela Tanta","doi":"10.54533/stedstud.vol006.art10","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.54533/stedstud.vol006.art10","url":null,"abstract":"In July 2007, a few months after Romania joined the European Union, on January 1, 2007, the archives of communism housed by the National Archives of Romania opened to the public. The following year, as a result of an agreement between the National Archives of Romania and the Institute for the Investigation of Communist Crimes in Romania, the online communism photo collection, containing photographs from 1945 to 1989 and from 1921 to 1944, became available on the Internet. Also in 2008, artists Ciprian Mureșan and Adrian Ghenie, in a conceptual response to this sudden presence of photographs documenting the communist history of Romania, started to paint Nicolae Ceaușescu as a mixture of personal and public snapshots of the communist leader’s life (fig. 1). “It was Ciprian’s idea,” Adrian stated in an interview with curator Magda Radu. “We wanted to find out if, given the imposed iconography [on communist artists back then and on ourselves now], it was still possible to make an aesthetically passable work.”[1] Their project brings up a daring question, which I argue still standardizes today’s studies of art produced under dictatorships in Romania and elsewhere. Could these portraits function as inspirational art/propaganda and as visual signs open to varied interpretations? Or, in art critic Boris Groys’s words, “Can you have a good portrait of a bad dictator?”[2] Ghenie explains, “My generation, we were all losers historically, economically. There was no culture of winning. Winning under a dictatorship is to make a deal with the power, which is a moral dead end. A black hole.”[3] Therefore, painting a successful portrait of a dictator must be a postmortem portrait realized outside the dictatorship, after 1989. The dictator’s portrait, once an imposed subject under the nationally-implemented aesthetic of socialist realism in Romania, suddenly became a choice within the realm of artistic interest. This way, for Ghenie and Mureșan, such an intentional return to the dictator’s portrait becomes an aesthetic quest to discover how to paint a dictator’s portrait in the wake of censorship.[4] The portrait, as a propagandistic format once imposed and ubiquitous, is now open to the possibility to fail aesthetically or to be rejected or abandoned by the artist. To learn about the past, therefore, often means repainting Ceaușescu as a father figure and a national hero, shrinking the dictator’s former palace to a small cardboard cake (Irina Botea Bucan, 2003), using documents and photographs and reconstructing images of monuments and cities (Calin Dan and Iosif Kiraly, 1995–1996), or replacing the old labels from socialist realist sculptures with new ones (Ileana Faur, 2012). Artists deconstruct historical artifacts and their symbolic meaning by dislocating historical facts from their inert official narrative and relocating them in the artist’s current personal instance. By actualizing these symbols, artists also point to the former dictatorship’s lingering ide","PeriodicalId":143043,"journal":{"name":"Stedelijk Studies Journal","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1900-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116985649","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Curating the Stedelijk Collection: A Roundtable Discussion","authors":"Beatrix Ruf, Bart van der Heide, Bart Rutten, M. Schavemaker, Fieke Konijn, R. Esner, Christel Vesters","doi":"10.54533/stedstud.vol005.art02","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.54533/stedstud.vol005.art02","url":null,"abstract":"Present are Beatrix Ruf (Artistic Director, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam), Bart van der Heide (Chief Curator, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam), Bart Rutten (at the time of the roundtable Head of Collections, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, currently director of the Centraal Museum in Utrecht ), and Margriet Schavemaker (curator and Manager Education, Interpretation, and Publications, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam). Moderated by Fieke Konijn and Rachel Esner, editors of this issue of Stedelijk Studies. Transcript and edits by Christel Vesters. This roundtable discussion was organized in December 2016 on the occasion of the current edition of Stedelijk Studies, which centers on the theme of Curating the Collection. Increasingly, museums, both nationally and internationally, are formulating new ways of engaging with their collections and showing them. Currently, with plans to rehang its own renowned collection and introduce an ongoing, research-based program that will critically reflect on and continuously (re)contextualize the artworks and themes it represents, the Stedelijk Museum provides an interesting case study in relation to the topics discussed in this issue. While reading this transcript, it is important to keep in mind that the conversation reflects discussions that took place early in the re-installation process.","PeriodicalId":143043,"journal":{"name":"Stedelijk Studies Journal","volume":"48 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1900-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131749390","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Exhibiting Surinamese Histories of Art: Curatorial Approaches Towards Diversity","authors":"Oscar Ekkelboom","doi":"10.54533/stedstud.vol011.art06","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.54533/stedstud.vol011.art06","url":null,"abstract":"In December 2020 the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam opened the exhibition Surinaamse School: Schilderkunst van Paramaribo tot Amsterdam (Surinamese School: Painting from Paramaribo to Amsterdam, 2020–2021). The exhibition displayed over a hundred paintings by thirty-six artists who were born or had worked in Suriname from 1910 to the mid-1980s. In particular, attention was paid to artists who were important for art education and the professionalization of artistic practice in the country. This is an unconventional topic for the Dutch museum, because it has not often displayed the work of Surinamese artists, let alone in the context of a Surinamese national history of art. In general, when delving into the exhibition histories of Dutch art museums, it stands out that little interest is shown in histories of art outside the west","PeriodicalId":143043,"journal":{"name":"Stedelijk Studies Journal","volume":"172 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1900-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132160120","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"New Exposure: The Arab Image Foundation and the Curatorial","authors":"D. Berndt","doi":"10.54533/stedstud.vol005.art09","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.54533/stedstud.vol005.art09","url":null,"abstract":"It is now about twenty years ago that Lebanese photographers Fouad Elkoury and Samer Mohdad, together with Lebanese artist Akram Zaatari, decided to create an organization with the aim to preserve and study photographs from the Middle East, North Africa, and the Arab diaspora. In 1997 the Arab Image Foundation (AIF) began to operate officially as a nonprofit organization in Beirut. Conceived as an initiative to gather knowledge and promote awareness about the region’s photographic heritage through locating, collecting, and conserving photographs, the AIF now holds a collection of more than 600,000 photographs from Lebanon, Iraq, Iran, Palestine, Syria, Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, and Algeria, as well as Mexico, Senegal, and Argentina, dating from the mid-nineteenth century.[1] Curatorial work defines the mission of the AIF not only in the sense that it is safekeeping and managing a collection, but also in that it has always sought to make the collection visible to the public. One major tool has been an online image database, which makes approximately 20,000 photographs accessible. Another central medium of display is the exhibition format. Since its inception, the AIF has produced fifteen exhibitions that have traveled worldwide, often accompanied by comprehensive publications.","PeriodicalId":143043,"journal":{"name":"Stedelijk Studies Journal","volume":"31 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1900-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125630105","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Immigrant Continent","authors":"E. Akcan","doi":"10.54533/stedstud.vol006.art07","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.54533/stedstud.vol006.art07","url":null,"abstract":"Few words are as undefinable with any certainty as the ones in the theme of this issue: Europe and its borders. For many of us these borders would shift when considered geographically, historically, intellectually, geopolitically, or culturally. Moreover, nothing unsettles the borders of Europe, or any continent for that matter, as effectively as the concept of migration. If one were to write a history of migrations, conceptualized as the migration of not only people, but also images, words, ideas, technologies, objects, information, and food, and if one were to put Europe in its global context by discussing the continent as a place of both arrival and departure, one would realize how porous these borders have always been. Such a history would critically acknowledge European countries’ role in the history of modernization and colonization of other countries within and outside Europe, and disclose the region’s character as an immigrant continent and diaspora of various peoples. While a scholar may not have a hard time in convincing the audience of Europe’s impact outside its borders, less is the case of Europe’s acknowledgement as an immigrant continent. Despite Germany’s long history with the “guest worker” and refugee programs after World War II, for instance, immigration has hardly changed the perception of what it means to be “German” in conservative circles, and the immigrant has constantly been judged by a measuring stick of “integration” that usually expects him or her to assimilate into a supposedly unchangeable, essentialist national identity, rather than contribute to the shaping of a multifaceted, transformed one in dialogue.","PeriodicalId":143043,"journal":{"name":"Stedelijk Studies Journal","volume":"17 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1900-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127649029","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Lose Yourself – Editorial","authors":"M. Schavemaker, Dorine de Bruijne","doi":"10.54533/stedstud.vol007.art01","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.54533/stedstud.vol007.art01","url":null,"abstract":"A logical sequence of bright-lit, white-walled spaces has become the dominant architectural model of presenting modern and contemporary art and design around the globe. However, since its first appearance in the early decades of the twentieth century, the introduction of this “white cube” model has been paired with its disruption: artists and curators have created chaotic structures in which the art breaks out of its increasingly sanitized cage and visitors are asked to engage physically, getting lost in what can best be described as labyrinthine exhibitions that often meander, both inside and outside the vicinity of the museum territory. Multiple layers instead of optical clarity, immersion instead of spectatorship, proximity as opposed to distance, chance versus rationality; these are some of the dichotic terms that come to mind when considering the relationship between the labyrinthine exhibition and its white cube alter ego. The theme of this issue of Stedelijk Studies digs deeper into both the history and topicality of labyrinthine exhibitions as curatorial model. Renewed interest in this topic arose in conjunction with the large-scale retrospective of Jean Tinguely organized in 2015–2016 by the Kunstpalast in Düsseldorf and the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. In the Stedelijk’s version of the exhibition several rooms were dedicated to the exhibitions Tinguely had (co-)curated at the Stedelijk and the Moderna Museet, Stockholm, in close collaboration with museum directors Willem Sandberg (Dylaby) and Pontus Hultén (HON), as well as artists such as Martial Raysse, Robert Rauschenberg, Niki de Saint Phalle, Daniel Spoerri, and Per Olof Ultvedt. The first exhibition, Bewogen Beweging (Rorelse Konsten), the lively overview of kinetic art which traveled from the Stedelijk to Moderna Museet and the Louisiana Museum in Humlebaek in 1961/1962, was overwhelming, chaotic, and participatory. The two following exhibitions, Dylaby (1962) in the Stedelijk Museum and HON – en katedral (1966) in the Moderna Museet, have become truly remarkable exhibitions in the history of curating. Walking into a large vagina, shooting paint, gazing at the stars in a planetarium, dancing the twist, plowing a path through a room filled with balloons… the exhibitions might easily be considered more as theme park attractions than serious art shows, comprising theatrical props instead of works of art.","PeriodicalId":143043,"journal":{"name":"Stedelijk Studies Journal","volume":"49 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1900-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126619785","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"It Takes More than the Past to Understand and Build the Archive","authors":"R. Menkman","doi":"10.54533/stedstud.vol010.art13","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.54533/stedstud.vol010.art13","url":null,"abstract":"Rosa Menkman’s video contribution It Takes More than the Past to Understand and Build the Archive (2020), commissioned especially for this issue of Stedelijk Studies, tells the story of her renowned work A Vernacular of File Formats (2010). The work is an archive of a years-long research project into file formats, which are encoding systems that organize data according to a certain syntax. A Vernacular of File Formats brings together intentionally digitally broken or “glitched” images. It centers on one source image—a portrait of the artist herself—compressed with various file formats introduced with a similar error, revealing the unique aesthetic of how they organize data. Menkman’s contribution sheds light on the decade since the work’s creation. From its 2016 co-acquisition by the Museum of the Image, Breda, and the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam to today, her video describes the historical, social, and chance contexts that originally produced this work, and how our relationship to our own images and data have evolved since—to deleterious effect.","PeriodicalId":143043,"journal":{"name":"Stedelijk Studies Journal","volume":"24 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1900-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126975153","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Temporality and Universalism in the Contemporary Ethnographic Museum: Two Collection Presentations at the Tropenmuseum","authors":"Luuk Vulkers","doi":"10.54533/stedstud.vol008.art07","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.54533/stedstud.vol008.art07","url":null,"abstract":"The Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam is currently in a process of making innovative changes to its displays. The museum aims to critically engage with its own past and simultaneously be an inclusive platform for reimagining the future. Especially for an ethnographic institution like the Tropenmuseum, these are complex tasks. The museum was founded in 1864 as the Koloniaal Museum (Colonial Museum) in Haarlem. In the first half of the twentieth century, the institute’s main purpose became to collect, categorize, and display products and cultures from the colonies, establishing a Dutch national identity and expressing cultural dominance and superiority over the country’s colonies. These colonial foundations still manifest themselves in the institute’s collection, as well as in the imposing architecture of the building that has housed the museum since 1923, determining the institute’s conditions of existence in the present.","PeriodicalId":143043,"journal":{"name":"Stedelijk Studies Journal","volume":"20 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1900-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121889794","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}