Vienna Art Week: Tracking the Routes of Modernism

Artistic mobility, protagonists, platforms, networks
Internationale Konferenz und Film-Screening im Rahmen der Vienna Art Week 2018

Teil 1 der Konferenz findet am Freitag, 23. November von 11 bis 18 Uhr in der Akademie der bildenden Künste Wien statt.

Sprache: Englisch

Friday, November 23
Academy of Fine Arts Vienna
Aula, First floor, Augasse 2–6, 1090 Vienna

11:00
Welcome: Rector Eva Blimlinger
Introduction: Christian Kravagna

11:30
Sanjukta Sunderason: Drawing Histories: Visual Rhetorics of Freedom in Lotus

This paper explores the play of image and text, idiom and rhetoric in Lotus, the trilingual mouthpiece journal of the Afro-Asian Writers’ Association begun in 1968. Emerging during the transitional decades of decolonization in the mid-twentieth century, Lotus was harnessed to transnational platforms of cultural and political activism. While it grappled with the tensions of plural languages, affiliations, and visualizations, it also carried emotive and intellectual negotiations around
the idea and limits of freedom across Asian and African contexts and peoples. Exploring the intertwinements between thought and image, writings and drawings, as well as between histories and imaginaries, I will argue that in the
genre of illustrated periodicals like Lotus, a ‘visual rhetoric’ of decolonization can be identified, where freedom is as much
of arrival as of a dialectical and incomplete struggle.

Sanjukta Sunderason is a historian, researching and writing on twentieth-century left-wing aesthetics and intellectual histories of visual art during decolonization. She is based in the Netherlands where she is Assistant Professor of Modern South Asian Studies at Leiden University.

12:15
Devika Singh: The Outstretched Hand of Humanity: Towards an Interpretation of Transmodernism in India

The paper uses the artworks Isamu Noguchi conceived in India to analyse how artistic mobility shaped the cultural plurality of modernism. Though there has been a strong interest in foreign artists’ engagement with India, they have not been integrated within a history of art in India, thus unintentionally reasserting the power of established centres to serve as places of intermixing and transculturality. The paper argues that art in India has been co-constituted by local, national and global ideological pressures and imaginations and that India served as a place of passage. It assesses how transnational exchanges resulted not only from foreign artists bringing with them innovative art and ideas, but also from artists encountering hybrid forms and concepts that had been transformed in India, starting with the Greco-Arab traditions of the Jantar Mantar observatories that inspired Noguchi.

Devika Singh is an affiliated scholar at the Centre of South Asian Studies (University of Cambridge) and a member of the Global Art Prospective (Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art, Paris). She is currently writing a book on art in post-independence India for Reaktion Books.

Q&A moderated by Simone Wille

13:00–14:30 Lunch break

14:30
Ahu Antmen: “As if Paris never had a greater artist…”: André Lhote and Turkish Modernism

In an interview in the Turkish daily Akşam, the artist Ali Sami Boyar states in a fury: “All the young artists educated in Paris these days become followers of modern art, and André Lhote is among their prophets. Whoever returns from Europe seems to have visited his studio. Lhote, Lhote, Lhote… As if Paris never had a greater artist.”

The art scene in Turkey in the 1930s would hear much more of Lhote, specifically through the “D Group” who were interested in Cubism not only as a new artistic style, but a modern visual language that could serve as the metaphor for new Turkey. These artists found in the artistic discourse of Lhote not only a vision for the future, but the safe anchor of Western classical tradition, a significant reference in a culture inclined towards Western values as the path towards modernization. This paper looks at how André Lhote, rather than other modern artists, became such a significant figure in internalizing an idea of modernism in Turkey.

Ahu Antmen is an associate professor of modern and contemporary art at Marmara University Faculty of Fine Arts in Istanbul. She has contributed to various publications, including Artists in their Time (2015), Unleashed: Contemporary Art from Turkey (2010) and Beyond Imagined Uniqueness: Nationalisms in Contemporary Perspective (2010).

15:15
Mehri Khalil: Cairo, Paris, and Beyond: The Networks that Shaped Modern Egyptian Art

This presentation explores modern Egyptian art by examining the travels, cross-cultural connections and dynamics of three artists. Mahmoud Mokhtar, Samir Rafea and Hamed Abdalla were three politically engaged artists who created intensive networks in Cairo where they grew up, and then in Paris where their journeys abroad began. The three would later travel to a number of countries around the world, including Algeria and Denmark. While Paris was a place of convergence where the artists confronted the reality of the Orientalist gaze, they quickly broke down these perceptions and fully integrated themselves into the international artistic life that the capital provided. In summary, this paper will
enable its readers to discern between the hybrid and composite identities that shaped these artists’ lives so that they
may better understand the cultural plurality of modern Egyptian art.

Mehri Khalil is an Egyptian artist and a PhD candidate at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, where she explores transcultural influences on art, and more particularly, Egyptian artists in Paris. She holds a master’s degree in Arts
Administration and Policy from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Q&A moderated by Noit Banai

16:00–16:15 Coffee break

16:15
Simone Wille: St. Margarethen and the potentiality of trans-national postwar sculpture: Opening pathways for a radically new artistic subjectivity

The core idea for launching the European Sculptor Symposium in St. Margarethen, Austria, co-initiated by the artist Karl Prantl (1923–2010) in 1959, was the desire to reach across frontiers and to establish aesthetic and formal positions within the changing space of the postwar era. Until 1976 international sculptors gathered here almost every year for several weeks with a like-minded spirit to create work under circumstances that are free from the constraints of the studio space and national confinement. St. Margarethen nurtured a new artistic subjectivity in an attempt to propose a unique, off-center along with a transnational mode of artistic operation. This paper will investigate some of the routes that led artists such as Alina Szapocznikov, Magdalena Wiecek, Krishna Reddy and Makoto Fujiwara, to participate in the symposium in a remote place in Austria.

Simone Wille is an art historian, researching and writing on twentiethcentury trans-regional artistic movements. Her publications include her book Modern Art in Pakistan. History, Tradition, Place. Routledge, 2015. Her current research project titled: Patterns of Trans-regional Trails. The materiality of art works and their place in the modern era. Bombay, Paris, Prague, Lahore, ca. 1920s to early 1950s, is funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF).

Q&A moderated by Christian Kravagna

17:00 Wine & Bread

Die Konferenz Tracking the Routes of Modernism rückt Formen des künstlerischen Austausches zwischen europäischen und außereuropäischen Zentren moderner Kunst in den Blick. Auf diesem Weg wird es möglich, die Bedeutung jener Netzwerke, Routen und Passagen neu zu bewerten, aus denen die mehrfach übersetzten Modernismen des 20. Jahrhunderts hervorgingen. Die Diskrepanz zwischen konventionellen Modellen moderner Kunstgeschichtsschreibung, die europäischen Meisternarrativen gehorchen, und einer „globalen“ Geschichte der modernen Kunst erscheint dabei in einem neuen Licht. Im Gegensatz zur weit verbreiteten Feier der Globalisierung der Kunst seit dem Ende des Kalten Krieges fokussiert diese Konferenz auf die nach wie vor vernachlässigten globalen Modernismen des frühen und mittleren 20. Jahrhunderts. Diese kulturellen Bewegungen, der künstlerische Austausch und seine Routen finden vor dem Hintergrund von Prozessen der Dekolonisierung eher in transnationalen als in internationalen Räumen statt. Sie zu diskutieren bedeutet, sich von einer monokulturellen Konzeption des Modernismus zu verabschieden und sich um ein besseres Verständnis der Herausbildung künstlerischer Zentren in Asien, Afrika und den Amerikas zu bemühen.

Organisiert von / organized by: Christian Kravagna (Akademie der bildenden Künste Wien) und / and Simone Wille (Universität Innsbruck, FWF Der Wissenschaftsfonds)

Mit Beiträgen von / Contributors: Ahu Antmen, Gabriele Genge/Angela Stercken, Mehri Khalil, Christian Kravagna, Maurita Poole, Devika Singh, Tereza Stejskalová/Marta Edith Holečkova, Sanjukta Sunderason, Simone Wille

In Kooperation mit / In cooperation with: Vienna Art Week