Global Fascisms – Reader

The legacy and posterity of the Tashkent Festival for Asian, African and Latin American Cinema, which was held between 1968 and 1988 in Uzbekistan.

Between 1968 and 1988, the Tashkent Festival of Asian, African, and — from 1976 onwards — Latin American Cinema was held in Tashkent, Uzbekistan. As an exercise in soft power and a response to anti-colonial movements and the socio-political upheaval of the late 1960s, the festival grew into a unique gathering for film professionals and became an important platform for South-South solidarity that went beyond the cinema halls of Tashkent. In essays and conversations by researchers, film-makers, and organizers of contemporary film festivals, the Destination: Tashkent Reader reappraises the original festival's programming, while also looking critically at its legacy. From the vantage point of Berlin-based diasporas of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, the reader also investigates how such practices of encounters and collaboration resonate within the film scenes of these three continents today.

Contributions by Cana Bilir-Meier, Souleymane Cissé, Pascale Fakhry, Zach Ramon Fitzpatrick, Sophie Genske, Timur Karpov, Ali Khamraev, Valeriya Kim, Carlos Kong, Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, Maren Niemeyer Jacqueline Nsiah, Furqat Palvan-Zade, Marie Helene Pereira, Elena Razlogova, Aykan Safoğlu, Masha Salazkina, Alex Moussa Sawadogo, Can Sungu, Echo Xuedan Tang, Sarnt Utamachote.

Archives on Show brings the potential of reformulating the social and political relevance of archives by curatorial means into focus.

Based on the specific properties, faculties and methods of curation, the volume highlights those techniques and strategies that deal with archives not only to make their genesis and history apparent but also to open them up for the future. The 22 different ways of dealing with archives testify to the curatorial participation in (re)shaping the archival logic, structures and conditions. As process-oriented, collective and relational modes of producing meaning, these curatorial practices allow for the alteration, reconfiguration and mobilization of the laws, norms and narratives that the archive preserves as preconditions of its power.

The contributions to this volume by artists, curators and theorists demonstrate approaches that curatorially insist on building other relations between human and non-human archival participants. Each is using the book to create a curatorial constellation that generates and forms new connections between different times and spaces, narratives, disciplines and discourses. Configured as a glossary, the positions assembled in this volume exemplify curatorial methods with which to treat the archive as site and tool of collective, ongoing negotiations over its potential societal role and function.

Contributions by Heba Y. Amin, Talal Afifi, Eiman Hussein, Tamer El Said, Stefanie Schulte, Strathaus, Haytham El Wardany, Julie Ault, Kader Attia, Roger M. Buergel, Sophia Prinz, Yael Bartana, Rosi Braidotti, Kirsten Cooke, Ann Harezlak, Alice Creischer, Andreas Siekmann, Octavian Esanu, Megan Hoetger, Carlos Kong, Iman Issa, Kayfa ta, Kapwani Kiwanga, Doreen Mende, Stefan Nowotny, Marion von Osten, pad.ma, Abdias Nascimento, Eran Schaerf, Magdalena Tyżlik-Carver, Françoise Vergès.

The publication of the winners of the Villa Romana Prize has taken the shape of four distinct yet interrelated booklets – an editorial series continuing the tradition of the institution to offer a space for the dissemination and reverberation of the research and work of the Villa Romana Fellows after their ten-months residency in Florence.

Each year, four selected artists are invited to live and work in the same house that, since 1905, generations of artists have continuously inhabited. They always come as a group – a constellation of four people – but all as singular artists. The opportunity of yearly publishing their work in a bundle of four separate books and within an open series allows for a larger combination of echoes across the generations of Villa Romana Fellows. A further occasion for “being singular plural.”

Contributions by Elena Agudio

Mud … and the Earth System explores groundbreaking research in Earth system sciences and highlights the challenges of communicating these findings to the public.

As once-stable “mudscapes” transform, they become both symptoms and symbols of a rapidly warming planet. This book delves into humanity’s connection to these changes through the study of ancient organic and inorganic compounds that have come alive after millennia. It poses essential questions about what these evolving ‘mud’ compounds reveal about Earth’s deep past and our imminent future.

Born from collaborative research led by artist Rikke Luther at the Interdisciplinary Research of Ocean, Climate and Society (ROCS) at the University of Copenhagen in collaboration with Earth scientist, Professor Katherine Richardson, this publication showcases how artistic practices – such as image-making, conceptual mapping, and filmmaking – enhance scientific representation.

Mud… and the Earth System features commissioned essays from experts in Earth Science, Political Aesthetics, and Molecular Geobiology. The book pairs their insights with compelling artwork, including large-scale maps of emerging ‘mudscapes’ in Svalbard, Iceland, Greenland, and Gotland.

The essays give perspectives on the DNA that is collected and stored in mud, which connects life across timescales as an evolutionary resource framing the interactions of human societies with the extreme complexities of the Earth system. Esther Leslie’s “Mud Crystal and Polar Thinking” sets the scene, followed by Karina K. Sand’s “Death and Life:  in Mud: Two Million Years in a Split Second,” and Earth scientist Katherine Richardson’s contribution “A Muddy Diary.”

As Richardson sums up, “Mud is an important medium for storing the archives that describe the history of both life and climate on Earth, and we are only just beginning to understand the fantastic stories that mud can tell.”

Contributions by Esther Leslie, Rikke Luther, Katherine Richardson, Karina Sand

Conversations about embodied strategies of knowledge production and knowledge transmission based on the choreographic and curatorial practices of about fifteen international choreographers, performers, dramaturges and curators.

In the context of the numerous ethical-political challenges of the global present, actors from the dance and choreography scene both in Berlin and internationally talk about forms of knowledge production beyond the prevailing conception found in Western modernity. They counter the mind-body separation and the notion of a universality of knowledge with multiplicities of knowledge production that emerge with and from the reality of differently situated bodies.

What potential do embodied practices offer for emancipatory movements? How can community be created through these practices, and what responsibilities does this entail? What role does the body play in the preservation and transmission of knowledge?

In this publication, edited by the choreographers and curators Martha Hincapié Charry, Sandhya Daemgen, Raphael Moussa Hillebrand and Matthias Mohr; Lukas Avendaño, Wagner Carvalho, Sandhya Daemgen, Ismail Fayed, Alex Hennig, Raphael Moussa Hillebrand, Martha Hincapié Charry, Isabel Lewis, Matthias Mohr, Prince Ofori, Mother "Leo" Saint Laurent, Léna Szirmay-Kalos, Thiago Granato and July Weber conduct conversations about embodied strategies of knowledge production and knowledge transmission based on their respective choreographic and curatorial practices.

In recent years, collective approaches to curatorial practice have become prominent, and not for the first time. While the myth of the stand-alone curator has been largely dismantled in favor of recognizing the myriad other actors and agencies—from artists to installers, from gallery attendants to directors, and others—who make their work possible, contemporary curatorial practices encompass far more than bringing simply more collaborators together. Through a collection of essays and experimental texts, Not Going it Alone: Collective Curatorial Curating offers readers a layered and contextual understanding of this phenomenon, its debates, and possibilities across a range of temporalities, positions, and geographical perspectives.

Edited by Paul O'Neill with Gerrie van Noord / Elizabeth Larison

With contributions from:
Maria Berríos / Pip Day / Sofía Olasooaga
Nikolett Erőss / Eszter Lázár
Index and PRAKSIS Teen Advisory Boards
Elizabeth Larison
Nina Möntmann
Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung
Gerrie van Noord
Paul O‘Neill
Agnieszka Pindera
Serubiri Moses
Gregory Sholette

Featuring writing and artistic practices that trace the racialized and gendered relationship between bodies and land, A Grammar Built with Rocks explores artists’ engagement with sites of physical dispossession and socio-ecological crisis, highlighting how creative research methodologies can serve as radically new place-making practices. The publication brings together a range of feminist-decolonial texts and visual contributions that explore how movement, transience, and improvisation offer alternative ways of being-together while being-in-place.  

Contributions by: Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme with Fawz Kabra, Jheanelle Brown and Julien Creuzet, Carolina Caycedo, Ryan C. Clarke and Cauleen Smith, DAAR—Decolonizing Architecture Art Research with Nicola Perugini, Sandra de la Loza, Demian DinéYazhi’, rafa esparza, Mashinka Firunts Hakopian, Tia-Simone Gardner, Raquel Gutiérrez, Suzanne Kite with Mahpíy̌a Nážinn, Candice Lin, Jumana Manna, K-Sue Park, Christine Rebet, Susan Silton, and Asiya Wadud.

The book also includes a reader, with grounding texts, sources of inspiration, and research references, by Jason Allen-Paisant, Dionne Brand, Suzanne Césaire, Lisa Lowe, Camila Marambio and Cecilia Vicuña, Robyn Maynard and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, M. NourbeSe Philip, and K. Wayne Yang.

About the editors

Shoghig Halajian is a curator, writer, and artist whose work explores queer and diasporic imaginaries, place-based practices, and experiments in collectivity and collaboration. She is co-editor of the online journal, Georgia, which is supported by a Creative Capital | Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant. Select curatorial projects include: A grammar built with rocks (Human Resources LA, One Archives at the USC Libraries, and REDCAT, 2018); At night the states (Hammer Museum, 2017); DISSENT: what they fear is the light (LACE, 2016); and rafa esparza: I have never been here before (LACE, 2015). She was a TBA21 Ocean Space Fellow in Venice (2021) and a curatorial fellow at École du Magasin in Grenoble (2011), where she co-curated the exhibition, The Whole World is Watching, on the the collective Vidéogazette (1973–76), which organized a public access television program in the city. She received her PhD in Art History, Theory, and Criticism with a specialization in Critical Gender Studies from the University of California, San Diego in 2024. 

Suzy Halajian is a curator and writer based in Los Angeles, where she serves as the Executive Director and Curator at JOAN. Her practice is invested in long-term collaborations with artists, critically engaging with the intersections of art, politics, and social histories. She explores strategies of image-making through the lens of colonial histories and contemporary surveillance states. Halajian has curated exhibitions and public programs at institutions such as Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE), ONE Archives at the USC Libraries, the Hammer Museum, and Human Resources Los Angeles, as well as Tanya Bonakdar Gallery (New York), Oregon Contemporary (Portland), Kunstverein (Amsterdam), UKS (Oslo), Galerie Hubert Winter (Vienna), and the Sursock Museum (Beirut). She also serves on the Programming Committee at Human Resources and has worked with nonprofit organizations including the MAK Center for Art and Architecture (Los Angeles) and Ashkal Alwan (Beirut). Her curatorial work and writing have been supported by the Graham Foundation, the Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant—for Georgia, a journal she co-founded and co-edits with Anthony Carfello and Shoghig Halajian—and a Curatorial Research Fellowship from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Halajian’s writing has appeared in ArteEast, BOMB, X-TRA, Ibraaz, and other publications. She holds an MA from the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College and is currently a PhD candidate in the Film and Digital Media program at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

The catalogue of the 13th edition of the Rencontres de Bamako - African Biennale of Photography, focusing on multiplicity, difference, becoming, and heritage.

The dominant narrative in this "globalized world" is, incidentally, that of singularity—of universalism, of single identities, of singular cultures, of insular political systems. With this narrative, however, comes an illusory sense of stability and stasis; identities seem inalterable, cultures are immutable, political systems prove uneasy in the face of change. Thus, in sustaining this pervasive discourse, there has been a great loss of multiplicity, of fragmentation, of process and change, and not least of complex notions of humanity and equally complex narratives.

In decentering this year's biennale On Multiplicity, Difference, Becoming, and Heritage, General Director Cheick Diallo, Artistic Director Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, and the curatorial team—Akinbode Akinbiyi (artist and independent curator), Meriem Berrada (Artistic Director, MACAAL, Marrakech), Tandazani Dhlakama (Assistant Curator, Zeitz MOCAA, Cape Town, South Africa), and Liz Ikiriko (artist and Assistant Curator, Art Gallery of York University, Toronto)—of the Bamako Encounters pay a powerful tribute to the spaces in between, to that which defies definition, to phases of transition, to being this and that or neither and both, to becoming, and to difference and divergence in all their shades. Accordingly, Amadou Hampâté Bâ's statement (Aspects de la civilisation africaine, Éditions Présence Africaine, 1972) presiding over the manifestation, Maa ka Maaya ka ca a yere kono,translates to, "the persons of the person are multiple in the person."

A key tool for negotiating the processual and shifting nature of multiplicity lies in storytelling. It is the central medium through which humanity points the lens on itself and launches an attempt at self-understanding and reflection, and the breadth of answers given throughout history testifies to the congenial nature of storytelling and multiplicity. Moreover, the stories we tell not only negotiate who we are but also expose underlying currents of who we will become in the future. This is the concern lying at the heart of the 13th edition of the Bamako Encounters—the stories we tell, the multiple facets of humanity we accommodate, notions of processuality, becoming in being, embracing identities that are layered, fragmented, and divergent, and the multifarious ways of being in the world, whether enacted or imagined. It should be emphasized that this does not apply only to questions of personal identity. On the contrary, it is a bold affirmation of transformation and transition, of becoming in an emphatic sense, and is thus equally significant for state politics. It also rings true for questions of heritage/patrimony. Embracing the kaleidoscopic legacy of our multiple heritages means to open them up and liberate the term "patrimony" from its etymological roots (the Latin patrimonium means "the heritage of the father"), imagining in its place an inclusive concept of matrimony.

Thus, in this 13th edition of the Bamako Encounters with the title Maa ka Maaya ka ca a yere kono, artists, curators, scholars, activists, and people of all walks of life are invited to reflect collectively on these multiplicities of being and differences, on expanding beyond the notion of a single being, and on embracing compound, layered and fragmented identities as much as layered, complex, non-linear understandings of space(s) and time(s).

Published following the 13th edition of the Rencontres de Bamako - African Biennale of Photography, in Bamako, Mali, in 2022.

With Saïd Afifi, Ixmucané Aguilar, Baff Akoto, Annie-Marie Akussah, Américo Hunguana, Daoud Aoulad-Syad, Leo Asemota, Myriam Omar Awadi, Salih Basheer, Shiraz Bayjoo, Amina Benbouchta, Hakim Benchekroun, Maria Magdalena Campos Pons, Rehema Chachage, Ulier Costa-Santos, Adama Delphine Fawundu, Fatoumata Diabaté, Aicha Diallo, Amsatou Diallo, Anna Binta Diallo, Mélissa Oummou Diallo, Nene Aïssatou Diallo, Binta Diaw, Adji Dieye, Imane Djamil, Sènami Donoumassou, Abdessamad El Montassir, Fairouz El Tom, Luvuyo Equiano Nyawose, Raisa Galofre, Raisa Galofre, Joy Gregory, Gherdai Hassell, Thembinkosi Hlatshwayo, Letitia Huckaby, Anique Jordan, Gladys Kalechini, Hamedine Kane, Atiyyah Khan, Gulshan Khan, Seif Kousmate, Mohammed Laouli, Maya Louhichi, Mallory Lowe Mpoka, Nourhan Maayouf, Marie-Claire Messouma Manlanbien, Botembe Moseka Maïté, Louisa Marajo, Clarita Maria, Billie McTernan, Mónica de Miranda, Arsène Mpiana Monkwe, Sethembile Msezane, Ebti Nabag, Elijah Ndoumbe, Lucia Nhamo, Samuel Nja Kwa, Nyancho NwaNri, Jo Ractcliffe, Adee Roberson, Fethi Sahraoui, Muhammad Salah, Neville Starling, Eve Tagny, René Tavares, Sackitey Tesa, Helena Uambembe, David Uzochukwu, Sofia Yala, Timothy Yanick Hunter.

Building on the notion of ‘praise,’ Adama Delphine Fawundu frames this book as a celebration of life. She honors the stories whispered to her by her mother; she adorns her body in her grandmother’s textile work; she elevates the memory of various named and unnamed Black women of the diaspora and documents the iconic small Civil War era styled white wooded praise house on a patch of land off the side of a road in South Carolina not far from Beaufort creating an intimate body of work of color photography of an interconnected history.

This book about female figures—grandmothers, mothers, daughters, artists, caregivers, storytellers, and cooks—explores a range of emotions that consume us about family life and history. It is both an art book
and a memoir. Viewing it brings us face to face with known and unknown cultures and introduces us to various art practices shared, taught, and learned through the African diasporic traditions. Fawundu connects to the self through history, joy, and beauty and offers the reader ways to navigate fear based on migration and loss. It is a gift, too, as it allows us to imagine alongside the artist.

Adama Delphine Fawundu is an artist based in Brooklyn, NY of Mende, Bubi, and Krim descent.
Through photography, video, textile-based sculptural forms, and performance, she creates embodied entities inspired by Indigenous knowledge systems and spiritual retentions across time and space. She co-authored the book MFON: Women Photographers of the African Diaspora. She is an Assistant Professor of Visual Arts at Columbia University.

Edited by Chiara Figone

Contributions by Mistura Allison, Berette S Macaulay, Niama Sandy, Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, Deborah Willis

A manifesto for the decolonization of art book fairs and publishing.

Can we decolonize art book fairs? Can we decentralize knowledge and deconstruct privilege in our contexts? Decolonizing Art Book Fairs aims to rethink through the existing and speculative frameworks of organizational practice in the art book fairs. This workbook attempts to introduce new narratives and help deconstruct the frontiers between north(s) and south(s), putting an emphasis on practitioners and initiatives from the African continent and diaspora. A workbook with (primarily newly commissioned) texts and interviews.

Contributions by Jean-Claude Awono, Yaiza Camps, Chayet Chiénin, Chimurenga, Renata Felinto, Wanjeri Gakuru, Moritz Grünke, Aryan Kaganof, Sharlene Khan, Grada Kilomba, Carla Lever, Fouad Asfour, Dzekashu MacViban, Gladys Mendía, James Murua, Tinashe Mushakavanhu, Simon Njami, Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, Monica Nkodo, O Menelick 2Ato, Pascale Obolo, Michalis Pichler, Mario Pissarra, Sergio Raimundo, Djimeli Raoul, Flurina Rothenberger, Bienvenu Sene, Bisi Silva, Kwanele Sosibo, Parfait Tabapsi, Louise Umutoni, Zamân Books & Curating.

Western societies have dismantled many of the prohibitions that ringfenced errant sexual drives in Freud’s time. The psychoanalytic project describes people caught between two fundamental and contradictory principles: One a relentless sexual drive, the libido; the other our species’ collective need for social order and harmony. Part of this harmony, for true Freudians, is embedded in the binary mutuality of men’s and women’s bodies, which remains indispensable for society to reproduce itself, even in our sexually liberated age. In this essay, Ahmari revisits the idea of ‘genitality’ arguing that perhaps the "heteronormative" orthodox Freudians were right about some things after all.

In September 2022, a young Kurdish woman, Mahsa Jîna Amini, died after being beaten by police officers who arrested her for not adhering to the Islamic Republic’s dress code. Her death galvanized thousands of Iranians—mostly women—who took to the streets in one of the country’s largest uprisings in decades: the Woman, Life, Freedom movement. 

Despite the threat of imprisonment or death for her work as a journalist covering political unrest, state repression, and grassroots activism in Iran—which has led to multiple interrogation sessions and arrests—Fatemeh Jamalpour joined the throngs of people fighting to topple Iran’s religious extremist regime. And across the globe, Nilo Tabrizy, who emigrated from Iran with her family as a child, covered the protests and state violence, knowing that spotlighting the women on the front lines and the systemic injustice of the Iranian government meant she would not be able to safely return to Iran in the future. 

Though they had met only once in person, Nilo and Fatemeh corresponded constantly, often through encrypted platforms to protect Fatemeh. As the protests continued to unfold, the sense of sisterhood they shared led them to embark on an effort to document the spirit and legacy of the movement, and the history, geopolitics, and influences that led to this point. At once deeply personal and assiduously reported, For the Sun After Long Nights offers two perspectives on what it means to cover the stories that are closest to one’s heart—both in the forefront and from afar.