“Lead, zinc, copper, coal, gold, cadmium, silver, oil, tungsten, corundum, gasoline, nickel, marble, Glauber’s salt [and] phosphorites” flow from Kazakhstan through the “full arteries of railroads,” delivering its “industrial blood” across the Soviet Union “to feed the factories and plants,” before returning “in the shape of airplanes, tractors, excavators, automobiles [and] turbines.” This entry, under the heading “Socialist Metabolism,” appeared in an issue of the ...| ARTMargins Online
This article considers artworks that recorded the construction of four mega dams in Ukraine, the Caucasus, Central Asia and Siberia between the 1930s and 1960s, which as exemplary hydroforming projects trailblazed the expansion of the socialist developmentalist model to the non-Russian territories of the Soviet Union. As centrepieces of the planned economy, mega dams performed as engines of the expansion of heavy industry, as infrastructural hubs for resource extraction, as drivers of social ...| ARTMargins Online
This article examines the Turkestan-Siberia Railroad (Turksib) through its visual culture, exploring how film, painting, and print media portrayed its role in reshaping the Kazakh steppe. Analyzing Victor Turin’s Turksib (1929), American maps, Soviet periodicals, and paintings by Victor Ufimtsev and Abilkhan Kasteyev, it investigates how these works framed perceptions of infrastructure and environmental transformation. Situating Turksib within global infrastructural imaginaries and Soviet k...| ARTMargins Online
This article examines the temporal narratives embedded in the artistic representations of coal mining in post-war Poland, specifically focusing on the 1950s Upper Silesian region. By analyzing artworks from the period, including heroic socialist-realist representations of miners and practices of non-professional artists, supplemented by the insights from press, popular literature and documentary film, this article highlights how different cultural expressions engaged with both the prehistoric...| ARTMargins Online
This article examines how socialist realist paintings in Albania depict the transformation of nature during the country’s path to industrialization, revealing both the ideological aspirations and the material realities of socialist modernity. Moving beyond a simplistic reading of these artworks as mere propaganda, the study explores the variation in representations of nature—sometimes tamed, sometimes coexisting, and at times resisting transformation. It argues that these paintings, in th...| ARTMargins Online
This review essay focuses on recent publications that examine the art of former Soviet territories – the book Beginning in the Middle: Conversations on the Post-Soviet (2022), the reader As Though We Hid the Sun in a Sea of Stories: Fragments for a Geopoetics of North Eurasia (2023), and the catalog Art in the Age of the Anthropocene (2023) of the eponymous exhibition –, aiming to understand how the three engage with postcolonial and the Anthropocene discourses. While Art in the Age of th...| ARTMargins Online
An entire mountain vanished in the 1950s in the Western Carpathians of Romania. Its uranium-rich rocks were transported by train to be processed into nuclear fuel in Sillamäe, in the former Soviet Union, now Estonia. Some were converted into nuclear warheads. Following the breakup of the Soviet Union in the 1990s, those warheads were decommissioned and dismantled. Since 1995, the Megatons to Megawatts economic deal between Russia and the United States has transformed nuclear weapons into ele...| ARTMargins Online
“When Thoughts Change, Brush and Ink Cannot Remain Unchanged” is an open letter by renowned ink painter Fu Baoshi after his 1960 sketching tour organized by the Jiangsu Chinese Painting Academy. This tour was a pivotal event in integrating traditional ink painting with Socialist cultural production, a response to the ideological demands of the Socialist state following the establishment of the People’s Republic of China. The article highlights the challenges faced by ink artists in adap...| ARTMargins Online
An open letter by renowned ink painter Fu Baoshi after his 1960 sketching tour organized by the Jiangsu Chinese Painting Academy. ARTMargins, Volume 14, Issue 2, pp. 134-141. doi:10.1162/artm_a_00418 https://direct.mit.edu/artm/article/14/2/134/131436/When-Thoughts-Change-Brush-and-Ink-Cannot-Remain The post When Thoughts Change, Brush and Ink Cannot Remain Unchanged appeared first on ARTMargins Online.| ARTMargins Online
This issue of ARTMargins marks a return of the journal’s essay component, leading with an extensive exploration of socially engaged art by John Roberts, who questions what art as a form of social and aesthetic praxis can or cannot achieve beyond the remit of art itself. Roberts approaches socially engaged art as a form of radical aisthesis that draws, among other things, on the aesthetics of the negative that characterize parts of the historical avant-garde. ARTMargins, Volume 14, Issue 1, ...| ARTMargins Online
The article analyzes the global context of socially engaged art, through focusing on the critical relationship between the Zapatista and Rojava insurgencies, post-alter globalization politics and socially engaged art in period of unipolar American imperialism, and the planetary consolidation of neoliberalism. In what ways does socially engaged art globally derive its production of modes of direct democracy from the ‘enclave politics’ of the Zapatista and Rojava? And to what ends are the v...| ARTMargins Online
As a post-68 phenomenon of the Yugoslav cultural scene, the Bosch+Bosch group was established by young artists from the multicultural Vojvodina in 1969. In addition to generational cohesion, the group’s identity was defined by the conceptual and experimental agenda of the New Art Practice and the hybridity of languages and cultures. Although most of them belonged to the Hungarian-speaking minority culture, their intellectual horizon was defined by the majority Yugoslav culture, which was op...| ARTMargins Online
The emergence of mail art in Poland in the beginning of 1970s coincided with the popularization of neo-avant-garde and conceptual art in the region. Its first comprehensive theocratization came with the NET manifesto written by Andrzej Kostołowski and Jarosław Kozłowski in 1971 which proposed a creation of a network of exchange of art that was based on openness, engagement, expansion and decentralization. At the same time the transformation of the political landscape in the country followi...| ARTMargins Online
This article foregrounds the Japanese artist Imai Norio’s contribution to the development and critique of the moving image in the context of Japanese contemporary art and society in the 1970s. While existing art historical scholarship has primarily discussed Imai’s work as a part of the collective activities of the Gutai Art Association (1954–72), I focus on his film and video works created after the dissolution of the group in 1972. The 1970 World Exposition in Osaka served as a critic...| ARTMargins Online
This article reexamines the 1960s work of Iranian painter and stage director Bahman Mohassess (1931–2010) through the lens of parody, highlighting his nuanced critique of both Western cultural dominance and Iranian political realities. A close analysis of Mohassess’ 1965 Untitled painting, against the backdrop of his 1967 Tehran staging of Luigi Pirandello’s Henry IV, reveals his subversive appropriation of the equestrian motif—a loaded symbol in post-1953 coup Iran, where Reza Shah...| ARTMargins Online
This essay reviews two publications that center on the agency of visual culture in shaping modern life and subjectivity in 1950-70s Lebanon. Rooted in cultural anthropology, Zeina Maasri’s Cosmopolitan Radicalism: The Visual Politics of Beirut’s Global Sixties (2020) and Kirsten Scheid’s Fantasmic Objects: Art and Sociality from Lebanon, 1920-1950 (2022) depart from poststructuralist models of visual studies, emphasizing instead the concrete materiality and affective strength of the art...| ARTMargins Online
This project takes its inspiration from a long interview and a study of a number of private social media accounts of men advertising their services as massage therapists on gay dating apps, in a city where intimacy between men is both governed and controlled by the state. ARTMargins, Volume 14, Issue 1, pp. 116-131. doi:10.1162/artm_a_00408 https://direct.mit.edu/artm/article/14/1/116/130988/Only-Massage The post Only Massage appeared first on ARTMargins Online.| ARTMargins Online
In her 1965 essay “Lustro rzeczywistości czy uległe tworzywo” [mirror of reality, or submissive material], presented here in its first English translation as “Reflection or Creation,” Urszula Czartoryska investigates the photographic medium’s capacity for creative intervention. Among her case studies are Polish photographers Karol Hiller, Zbigniew Dłubak, and Fortunata Obrąpalska, who she situates as interconnected, international artists working within a context that encompasses...| ARTMargins Online
ARTMargins, Volume 14, Issue 1, pp. 156-165. doi:10.1162/artm_a_00407 https://direct.mit.edu/artm/article/14/1/156/130982/Reflection-or-Creation-from-The-Artistic The post “Reflection or Creation” from The Artistic Adventures of Photography appeared first on ARTMargins Online.| ARTMargins Online