Vong Phaophanit and Claire Oboussier: Three Decades, Four Moments

'Three Decades, Four Moments' is based on two interviews that took place in 2016 and 2017 with the artists Vong Phaophanit and Claire Oboussier in their studio in London. The text foregrounds a number of works by Phaophanit/Oboussier, signalling four ‘moments’ in their artistic practice over several decades, at turns identified (and resisted) as individual, collective and collaborative. In these, we may find coincidences, correspondences and divergences from the three (or four) ‘moments’ in Stuart Hall’s essay – moments that interrogate the space of the ‘international’; that complicate the ‘problem space’ of the 1980s; and that inhabit what Zeigam Azizov, cited in Hall, calls ‘ “the migration paradigm” – boundaries and border crossings, liminal and disrupted places, voyaging and displacement, fault lines…’ Works discussed include Neon Rice Field (1993); Line Writing (1994); Atopia (1997 and 2003); All That’s Solid Melts into Air (Karl Marx) (2005-6); and It Is As If (2015).

'Rethinking British Art. Black Artists and Modernism's is a special issue of Art History, edited by Sonia Boyce and Dorothy Price, that looks closely at the multi-faceted genealogies of Black British modernism since the arrival of the ‘Windrush generation’. It brings together a range essays in different formats by artists and art historians to centralize the lack of attention paid to the material and conceptual nature of artworks made by Black British artists, and asks how a reappraisal of their work can contribute to an expanded understanding of modernism.

Contributors: Sonia Boyce, Alice Correia, Katy Deepwell, David Dibosa, Lubaina Himid, Joleen Loh, susan pui san lok, Kobena Mercer, Dorothy Price, Maud Sulter, Allison Thompson

• Publisher
• https://atopia.org.uk
• https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/...