di/visions CATHERINE DAVID For twenty years now it is clear that there has been an opening up of major international contermporary art events and network to a larger number of artists from non-European and/or non-Western geopolitical and cultural regions. Indeed, some of these artists have begun to make their presence felt in the market and in the great private and public collections. An ambient discourse-a blend of cynicism and naivete-wishes to ascribe this to the beneficial results of economic globalization (the increasing flow of goods, works and ideas) and to the "democratization" which is supposed to go with it. If one examines the situation with greater care and lucidity, the limits, if not actual perverse consequences, of this phenomenon quickly come to light. Thus, opacity frequently displaces transparency and "grey zones"(1) begin to appear on the political and legal map of the world where precarious political, social and economic conditions raise obstacles to the activity and visibility of artists in many countries. Furthermore, the majority of exhibitions, art fairs and art periodicals tend to favour works that aestheticism clichés and stereotypes (of "Africa" or of "Islam") that fulfil the expectations of the Western public and market to the detriment of more complex and less direct proposals. This should invite us to greater modesty and imagination in the method and manner of our collaboration and, in particular to ask our selves, as the Thessaloniki Biennale gives us the oportunity to do, about the condition sof a productive encounter- with dissent as well as dialogue - between the contemporary aesthetic production of very diverse regions and cultures. A brief glance at recent events shows that numerous exhibitions are still organized in the manner of "Magiciens de la Terre" which, under the generous pretext of doing away with Eurocentered and Eurocentric modernity, juxtaposed the works of artists of the western avant - garde with the works of "other cultures" (Latin America, Africa, Asia, with the Arab and Muslim world being conspicuously omitted) and thus, in fact, reproduced simplistic and obsolete opposites such as center / periphery, West / the rest of the world, modernity / tradition, taking for granted the epistemic centrality of the West, without questioning either its historicity or the ways in which it was constructed. So what emerged from the ostentatious co-presentation of the works of Daniel Buren and others with Aboriginal paintings - and with the indicative absence of major works by Helio Oiticica (Rio de Janeiro 1937-1980), Bhupen Khakhar (Mumbai 1934-Baroda 2003) or other significant artists from the non-European or non-Western avant-garde of the 60s and 70s - was the idea of a possible "outside" or "alternative" to Western modernity (understood and shown in its most "canonical" form) in the guise of a non-or anti-modernity. Thus, systematically opposing the abstract and conceptual forms of the western avant-garde works that utilize the materials (earth, feathers, etc,) and the forms of a folklorised archaism or tradition, what was being made light of, spirited away by sleight of hand (as if into a sort of black hole or blind spot) was nothing less than the radical modernity and the historicity of non-Western practices and cultures, this "anti-colonial modernity" which is absolutely synchronized with the modern project - of which the colonial project is a constituent element(3)- and which is defined by Hamid Dabashi as "(shifting) the emphasis away from the impact of European modernity on the colonized world and towards the responses of the colonial world to their colonial occupiers by way of producing effective (not alternative)modernities"(4). This denial of historicity has also contributed to the distorted conception of the works of contemporary non-European or non-Western artists who thus seem to "appear" or "emerge" (I am intentionally borrowing this suspect terminology used by journalists and certain critics) from a historical vacuum, spontaneously generated without any relation - whether due to a rupture with the past or to amnesia - to the work and the history of preceding generations (5). This decontextualisation of the works becomes even more damaging as access remains limited to collections that would allow a greater knowledge and comprehension of the formation of complex modernities in the various regions and countries in question. The same remark could be made about the lack of studies and exhaustive catalogues that could be compiled so as to organize significant corpuses of works and critical commentaries. Situations differ of course in terms of the material wants and the degree of urgency. In most large Latin American countries significant private and public collections were assembled very early on, whereas the situation remains a matter of concern in a large number of countries in the Arab world and other places where collections and museums of modern art are either non-existent or very mediocre, as are catalogues, monographs and other critical material in general. Thus, in the Middle East, it will soon be impossible for one to see or think about the history of modern art except if one manages to access a few large and very private collections which are not well documented. As for monographs or exhibitions that shed light on the work of a few modern non-European artists, these are still rare in the great museums of the West, and they are not in the position to reverse the general trend. In this context, we can digress to ask ourselves about the cultural or political strategy (or pure commercial strategy in the case of the Louvre?) that leads the elites of the Gulf and the Emirates to buy the name and expertise of the Louvre for millions of euros rather than create collections for a great international museum of modern art that would for once give particular attention to the development of modernities in the Arab world. I have dwelt on some of the structural and methodological problems that raise obstacles to the understanding and more prices reading of those specific episteme which anti-colonial modernities(6) construct as it seems to me that this is an issue of great significance in the discussion of contemporary works which are rooted in these modernities. However, the noting and assessment of such examples in the artistic output of these modernities, although they can facilitate the pinpointing and understanding of certain genealogies and ruptures, do not necessarily lead to a causal relationship between historicity and cultural practices and the radical innovation of the works, or, the new "partition of the sensible"(7) that these works achieve by redefining the spaces, roles, function and their uses. Within the temporary context of the exhibition, the complexity and frequently idiosyncratic relationship of these works with the societies and cultures of their origins can function as echoes of other works, whose references one can better identify, but that are not subject to the instrumental logic and the formatting of the market, and establish a critical distance (whether through silence or a syncope, or even the change of speeds and durations) that has nothing to do with the playful reproduction of advertising stereotypes and consensual configurations that too many artists impose on us in lieu of expressing dissent. Because it is only in the gaps, in the suspension of communal experience and habits that other distances and relationships can be built among places and activities, between being and their functions. And it is this exigency and singularity of possible "other" sensitive and cognitive configurations, both poetical and political, tried out in one work or another, which seem to me able to bring together, for the duration of this exhibition, artists coming from such diverse cultural and geopolitical horizons and who subvert the boundaries of the here and the elsewhere. Translated from the Greek by Tania Kantziou NOTES: 1. Achille Mbembe |