ART-PRESNTATION: Unfinished Conversations, Part II

The Exhibition “Unfinished Conversations” at The Museum of Modern Art brings together works by 15 artists, made in the past decade and recently acquired by the Museum. The artists that make up this intergenerational selection address current anxiety and unrest around the world and offer critical reflections on our present moment (Part I).

By Efi Michalarou
Photo MoMA Archive

“Unfinished Conversations: New Work from the Collection” considers the intertwining themes of social protest, the effect of history on the formation of identity, and how art juxtaposes fact and fiction. From Cairo to St. Petersburg, from The Hague to Recife, the artists in the exhibition observe and interpret acts of state violence and the resistance and activism they provoke. They reexamine historical moments, evoking images of the past and claiming their places within it. They take on contemporary struggles for power, intervening into debates about government surveillance and labor exploitation. Together, the artists look back to traditions both within and beyond the visual arts to imagine possibilities for an uncertain future. In the exhibition are on display works by: John Akomfrah, Jonathas de Andrade, Kim Beom, Anna Boghiguian, Andrea Bowers, Paul Chan, Simon Denny, Samuel Fosso, Iman Issa, Erik van Lieshout, Cameron Rowland, Wolfgang Tillmans, Adrián Villar Rojas, Kara Walker and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye. The title of this exhibition is inspired by John Akomfrah’s 3-channel video installation “The Unfinished Conversation” (2012), which chronicles the life and work of the Jamaican-born British cultural theorist Stuart Hall (1932–2014). Hall recognized the power that museum collections have to both shape and reflect culture and communities, contending that they are sources of inspiration “Which create thought provoking visions of our past. They provide testimony to the darkest and brightest of human history”. Jonathas de Andrade’s “The Uprising (O Levante)” was made in Recife and captures a horse-drawn cart race in the city center, which the artist himself organized in response to a proposed ordinance that would ban animals hauling carts from the city streets. In his series “African Spirits”, the photographer Samuel Fosso assumes the guises of political, intellectual, and cultural figures from Africa and the African diaspora. In her latest sculpture series, “Heritage Studies”, Iman Issa explores the contemporary resonance of historical artifacts. The three sculptures in the exhibition take inspiration from objects the artist encountered in museums. To accompany her historical riffs, Issa provides museum-style didactics that reference their original sources, identifying material, time period, and provenance. Rather than describing the objects in the gallery, the artist’s texts point to her historical inspiration. Operating at the junction where the contemporary objects and their historical contexts meet, the series proposes a new iconography that is shaped by an alternative reading of official history. Kara Walker creates historical allegories in which characters play out repulsive dramas of racial and gender bigotry with cool detachment and biting humor. Her 3-part drawing “40 Acres of Mules” (2015), was inspired by a trip the artist took to Stone Mountain Park, outside Atlanta. Considered by some to be the spiritual home of the Ku Klux Klan, the park houses the infamous granite relief sculpture depicting three Confederate leaders of the Civil War: Confederate President Jefferson Davis and Generals: Robert E. Lee and Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson. Walker’s large-scale drawing shows the generals and their horses, Klansmen, the Confederate flag, nude figures, and mules in a swirling, quasi-apocalyptic scene of domination and degradation. The central figure, a black man, his hands bound by rope, takes on the role of the martyr of Western history paintings. This work was made in 2015, a moment marked by Black Lives Matter, a mass mobilization to protest racial profiling and police brutality. The title refers to the undelivered reparations promised to emancipated slaves under the phrase “Forty acres and a mule,” or land and an animal to work it. It also calls to mind the mule-led funeral procession for Martin Luther King, Jr., whose 1962 “I Have a Dream” speech proclaimed, “Let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia”.

Info: Curators: Klaus Biesenbach, Lucy Gallun, Thomas J. Lax, Christian Rattemeyer Yasmil Raymond and Elizabeth Henderson, The Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53 Street, New York, Duration: 19/3-30/7/17, Days & Hours: Mon-Thu & Sat-Sun 10:30-17:00, Fri 10:30-20:00, www.moma.org