Wang Chong and the Theatre of Immediacy: Technology, Performance, and Intimacy in Crisis

In early January 2020, when Chinese theatre director Wang Chong (b. 1982) arrived in New York to remount his production of Nick Payne's Constellations for the Public Theater's Under the Radar Festival, he couldn't have predicted that this would be the last time for months that he would watch his actors from the middle of a full house. By the time his work-in-progress solo show, Made in China 2.0, opened at the Asia TOPA Festival in Melbourne, Australia, at the end of that February, it was clear that there would be no live theatre in Wang's hometown of Beijing for some time. All of China was on lockdown as the disease now tragically familiar as COVID-19 swept the country. Then, as Wang returned to Beijing in early March, businesses around the globe were shuttering, theatres were going dark, and theatre artists were confronting an unprecedented challenge to their personal safety, livelihoods, and ability to make meaningful art. In short order, some well-resourced theatre institutions began to stream performance recordings and reconfigure their seasons for online platforms. Only a month after returning home, Wang Chong joined this mass online movement with his production of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, streamed live on 5–6 April 2020 as Dengdai Geduo.

Geoffrey Pugen’s Apocalyptic Utopias

At the intersection of technology and the natural world, humanity becomes a ghostly presence in “Weather Room,” Geoffrey Pugen’s 2020 solo show at MKG 127. De-centring the presence of the human figure, the exhibition becomes an investigation of the “hyper-sublime,” asking the question: who does this hyper-sublime world belong to, if not humanity?

Valuing Grief

This chapter traces Baltermants’s entry into the art photography market. In the mid-1960s, he had his first New York City exhibition alongside other well-known photojournalists, including Robert Doisneau and Irving Penn. From there his work was included in a Metropolitan Museum show, and he was often the lone Soviet representative in major photography shows. In the 1970s, Baltermants began giving Grief visual context by exhibiting other images taken that same wartime day in Kerch. In 1983, Baltermants had his first solo show in New York City, and although reviewers loved his wartime work, reviewers panned the overall show. The critical appreciation for his wartime work and disappointment at his postwar Soviet “propaganda” did not dampen a few intrepid collectors’ interest in bringing him to the Western art photograph market and adding financial value to the list of values his photography possessed.

“We Were Looking for Our Violins”

This essay examines a creative dialogue between painters and poets, among them Nissim Ezekiel, Adil Jussawalla, Bhupen Khakhar, Arun Kolatkar, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, Gieve Patel, and Sudhir Patwardhan, in Bombay (Mumbai) during a period that encompassed Khakhar's first solo show at the Jehangir Art Gallery in 1965 and the publication of four books of poetry by Clearing House, an independent press established in 1976 by Jussawalla, Kolatkar, Mehrotra, and Patel. Through a close analysis of word and image, it illuminates the distinctive aesthetics and politics of these artists encapsulated by the terms lifting and loafing. The Bombay painters and poets came to lifting—documenting and defamiliarizing—their environment by citing and subverting street signs, advertisements, state propaganda, calendar art, film posters, and newspaper photographs. They took to loafing—a mode of critical observation and analysis, and the pursuit of committed deprofessionalization and translation across spaces—and mobilized the ordinary, yet extraordinary, spaces of the paan (areca nut wrapped in betel leaf) shop and the Irani restaurant as metaphors of artistic sociability and subjectivity. Through lifting and loafing, the Bombay painters and poets offered a critique of nationalist and bourgeois values, as well as the artistic establishment represented by associations and institutions such as the Progressive Artists Group and Jamsetjee Jeejebhoy School of Art. They diverged from their predecessors and peers in an emphasis on everyday life and found objects, and in bringing together the visual and verbal worlds exemplified by the Baroda (Vadodara)-based journal Vrishchik.

Tekle, Afewerk (1932–2012)

Afewerk Tekle was Ethiopia’s leading modern artist, famously known for introducing Western techniques of painting and sculpture to Ethiopia, and for his government commissions under Haile Selassie I and the infamous Derg regime of Mengistu. A prolific artist, Afewerk Tekle worked on Pan-African and Christian themes in particular, using diverse media from drawings, paintings, murals, mosaics, stained-glass windows, and sculpture, as well as designs for stamps, playing cards, posters, flags and national ceremonial dresses. His work was strongly influenced by Pan-African ideals and the optimism of the 1950s at the height of liberation movements sweeping across Africa. Afewerk Tekle first went to England to study engineering in 1947, and was later helped by British Suffragette Rita Pankhurst (1882–1960) with his artistic career and training at the Central School of Arts and Crafts and the Slade in London. Tekle returned to Addis Ababa in 1954, where he held his first solo show at the Municipality Hall, the first significant modern art exhibition in Ethiopia, which brought international attention to a new generation of modern Ethiopian artists.

Audience Expectations of Autobiographical Performance

The relationship between performers and the audience is built on the creation of fictional worlds by the actors and the acceptance of what is real or not within these worlds by both the performer and the actor. Metatheatre, or theatre that is self‐reflexive or aware of its theatricality, fosters a relationship with the audience that is more complex and nuanced than the one that occurs in regular theatre. The created worlds in metatheatre and the characters that populate them can collapse on themselves making the audience’s task of determining the truth more difficult. An audience’s relationship with the performer becomes convoluted when the play is an autobiographical solo show. In this circumstance, the audience expects realness and is less willing to see lines between worlds blur. This presentation will investigate why the audience needs such realness and truth from autobiographical solo shows when it is willing to overlook it so often in other performances. The talk will include an autobiographical performance to exemplify the audience‐performer relationship identified within the presentation.

Sidewalk’s Cloud (2014)

Kader Attia lives and works in Berlin and Algiers. His first solo exhibition was held in 1996 in the Democratic Republic of Congo. In 2003, he gained international recognition at the 50th Venice Biennale. In 2014, he was awarded the Berlin Art Prize: Jubilee Foundation 1848/1948. Recent exhibitions include Culture, Another Nature Repaired (solo show), Middelheim Museum, Antwerp; Contre Nature (solo show), Beirut Art Center; Continuum of Repair: The Light of Jacob’s Ladder (solo show), Whitechapel Gallery, London; Repair. 5 Acts (solo show), KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin; Construire, Déconstruire, Reconstruire: Le Corps Utopique (solo show), Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; the Biennale of Dakar; dOCUMENTA(13) in Kassel; Performing Histories (1) at MoMA, New York; and Contested Terrains, Tate Modern, London.

‘Dissemblage’ and ‘Truth Traps’: Creating Methodologies of Resistance in Queer Autobiographical Theatre

After more than thirty years of solo autobiographical theatre created by LGBTQQIA performers throughout the West, the primary focus of shows made by artists of these identities has more or less remained stable since 1980. In 1982, queer performance artist Tim Miller presented the autobiographical solo show Post-War, and he is part of what is now a tradition of presenting out, celebratory, authentic LGBTQQIA stories onstage. As a self-identified trans performance artist and performing researcher, I have taken part in this practice. Performances, extending from Miller in 1982 to J MASE III in 2014, continue to revolve around the necessity of ‘coming out’, presenting the stories of how we came to know and experience the ‘truths’ of our identities. Performance theorist Deirdre Heddon confirms that these autobiographical works have largely been concerned with, and successful in, ‘using the public arena to “speak out”, attempting to make visible denied or marginalized subjects, or to “talk back”, aiming to challenge, contest and problematize dominant representations and assumptions about those subjects'. Works such as Miller's Glory Box (1999), which used his personal history of having a partner who is not a US citizen to discuss gay marriage and legal immigration for same-sex couples, and trans and Tamil performer D’Loco Kid's D’FaQto Life (2013), which presented an intersectionally marginalized trans person of colour's experience and narrative, have been critical in supporting political and personal empowerment for audiences and performers alike.

Amputated Architectures

Holly Hendry is a sculptor based in London. Graduating from the Slade School of Art, University College London in 2013, Hendry was the inaugural Woon Fellow at Northumbria University, a significant prize for young and emerging artists. Hendry held a twelve-month residency at Baltic 39 in Newcastleupon-Tyne, culminating in her first solo-show at Gallery North, Hollow Bodies. Her work is concerned with the spatial, material and structural qualities of architecture and how space is experienced in historical and contemporary contexts. Currently in the first year of a two-year sculpture MA programme at the Royal College of Art, London, Hendry sat down with reviews and insight editor Ed Wainwright to discuss the intersections of art and architecture, the architecture of hollowness and the cut, and how her sculpture interrogates architecture for its silent symbolism.

To Paris and Back: Violeta Parra's Transnational Performance of Authenticity

In 1964, at what was surely the acme of her career, Violeta Parra became the first Latin American to have a solo show at the Louvre. During the five-odd weeks that her artwork was on display, Parra was at the museum every day. She chatted with visitors, put finishing touches on her tapestries, sang songs, played her guitar, served empanadas, and turned the exposition hall into a veritable Chilean ramada. The exhibit received favorable reviews in the press, and was visited by important dignitaries and a who's who of the Parisian and expatriate Latin American artistic community. Parra sold several of her tapestries, including one to the Baroness Rothschild. By all accounts, the show was a great success.