Internationalising Arts, Gaining Visibility: Internationalisation of the National Art Gallery through the Promulgation of the Malayan Identity and Commonwealth Ideals

The early history of the Malaysian National Art Gallery has been thoroughly elucidated through many different sources but its role as promoter of Malaysia’s art in the first ten years of its early formation have never been critically examined. This paper will trace the transnational relationship of the National Art Gallery through its exhibitions co-organised with the Commonwealth Institute in London within the larger context of the post-World War II period and the British decolonisation in Malaya. This paper will situate and contextualise its research on Malaya’s early exhibition history on multiculturalism and the Malayan identity framework, and later draw the link and connection between the Commonwealth Institute and the context of its establishment in Britain and the establishment of the National Art Gallery in Malaya. Subsequently, this paper will trace and demonstrate the importance of these early exhibitions to be understood in the larger context of (a) the need to exert international visibility during the period of Confrontation and (b) the exhibition as a platform that mooted the Malayan identity that aligns with the core values and principles of the Commonwealth. As such, this paper demonstrates that the transnational relations between the National Art Gallery and the Commonwealth Institute in the realm of Malaysia’s exhibition history must be analysed in tandem with the issues that are faced by a new British Commonwealth country, i.e., Malaysia during the immediate post-war period.

The Global Archive and the Future of Poetics

In defining “the global archive,” this essay refers, first of all, to the historical development of exhibitions in Germany that address a global horizon, a distinct cultural project since at least the Enlightenment. After 1945, modern art, which had been removed from public view by the Nazi state, was reintroduced as a project of reeducation as much as aesthetics. Documenta, beginning in 1955, exhibited modern and later artists in the destroyed buildings of the city of Kassel, and expanded its formal and cultural address to a global scale over its fifty-year history. Documenta itself became a kind of continuous archive of its own exhibition history, a mode of formal presentation that increasingly relied on the works it presented. Here I read in detail the archival strategies and form of dOCUMENTA 13, arguably a highpoint of this effort to archive globality as it emerges. Theorists from Michel Foucault, Fredric Jameson, and Arjun Appadurai to the “critical regionalism” of Cheryl Herr and the “negative globality” of Alberto Moreiras assist in the project of comprehending the “archive as form,” seen in a series of artists working on a global scale.

Family in colour: integrating colour into Sally Mann’s Family Pictures

Over her forty-year career photographer Sally Mann (b. 1951) has become synonymous with black-and white large format photography and nineteenth-century processes, used to depict her family, their environment, and the landscapes of the southern U.S.A. Yet Mann has worked with a variety of processes including colour. This thesis focuses on the printed Cibachromes and unprinted colour transparencies, taken between 1990 and 1994, that make up Mann’s Family Color collection, part of Family Pictures series, the well-known black-and-white photographs of her three children. It outlines work done in situ in the artist’s archive, the consequent discovery of a number of unprinted colour transparencies, and their integration into Mann’s studio through digitization and organization of the collection. An exploration of the production and exhibition history of Family Color is followed by a close-reading of a selection of printed colour photographs from the series, as well as the newly discovered, unprinted images. These comparisons enable the series to be situated within Mann’s larger practice opening up areas for future research.

Preservation after Exhibition: A Qualitative Study of TIFF’s Film Exhibition Documentation

This thesis argues for the importance of preserving film object exhibition documentation for the benefit of future research, using TIFF’s exhibition program as the dominant case study. Academic writing on film exhibition is discussed through works that focus on the physical film object/screening, the film exhibition institution, and the film object beyond celluloid. The thesis analyzes what constitutes strong documentation, using examples from professionals and other film exhibition institutions. TIFF’s film exhibition department history is listed as a form of preserving the full list of exhibitions that were housed at TIFF. The material preserved by TIFF regarding their exhibition history has been quite limited. The exhibition files are included and then analyzed to determine what is missing that may limit future study. Successes in preservation are also addressed. Lastly, potential steps to address gaps in documentation are detailed.

Family in colour: integrating colour into Sally Mann’s Family Pictures

Over her forty-year career photographer Sally Mann (b. 1951) has become synonymous with black-and white large format photography and nineteenth-century processes, used to depict her family, their environment, and the landscapes of the southern U.S.A. Yet Mann has worked with a variety of processes including colour. This thesis focuses on the printed Cibachromes and unprinted colour transparencies, taken between 1990 and 1994, that make up Mann’s Family Color collection, part of Family Pictures series, the well-known black-and-white photographs of her three children. It outlines work done in situ in the artist’s archive, the consequent discovery of a number of unprinted colour transparencies, and their integration into Mann’s studio through digitization and organization of the collection. An exploration of the production and exhibition history of Family Color is followed by a close-reading of a selection of printed colour photographs from the series, as well as the newly discovered, unprinted images. These comparisons enable the series to be situated within Mann’s larger practice opening up areas for future research.

Preservation after Exhibition: A Qualitative Study of TIFF’s Film Exhibition Documentation

This thesis argues for the importance of preserving film object exhibition documentation for the benefit of future research, using TIFF’s exhibition program as the dominant case study. Academic writing on film exhibition is discussed through works that focus on the physical film object/screening, the film exhibition institution, and the film object beyond celluloid. The thesis analyzes what constitutes strong documentation, using examples from professionals and other film exhibition institutions. TIFF’s film exhibition department history is listed as a form of preserving the full list of exhibitions that were housed at TIFF. The material preserved by TIFF regarding their exhibition history has been quite limited. The exhibition files are included and then analyzed to determine what is missing that may limit future study. Successes in preservation are also addressed. Lastly, potential steps to address gaps in documentation are detailed.

ВРЕМЕННАЯ ВЫСТАВКА "МУЗЕЙ ЗЕМЛЕВЕДЕНИЯ В ЗЕРКАЛЕ ИСТОРИИ МГУ" (К 70-ЛЕТИЮ МУЗЕЯ)

The article devotes to the description of recent temporary exhibition located in the Earth Science Museum’s rotunda. The exhibition exposition combines materials on such important to Lomonosov Moscow State University (MSU) anniversaries as the 265th anniversary of MSU, 75Th anniversary of victory in the Great Patriotic War, the 70th anniversary of the resolution on the establishment of the Earth Science Museum and the 65th anniversary of its first exhibition. History of creation and developing of the museum affairs at Lomonosov Moscow State University, museum’s collections formation are summarized. Temporary museum expositions’ features are examined; main collection and event exhibition expositions in the Earth Science Museum since 2009 are highlighted. Research, fund, exhibition, coordination, publishing, educational and enlightening activities of the museum are characterized. The article includes photos of the exhibition stands and other fragments of the expositions.

Medieval contexts and modern realities of a Genocide-survivor artwork

This article is a critical review of Heghnar Watenpaugh’s monograph The Missing Pages, which traces the history of the thirteenth-century Zeytun Gospels from its creation to the 2010s, when several of the manuscript’s illustrated folios became subject to a restitution claim through a lawsuit filed by the Armenian Church against the Getty Museum. It highlights the importance of Watenpaugh’s publication on assembling and clarifying the impressive itinerary of the Zeytun Gospels, the manuscript’s sociocultural functions, as well as the historiographic research on Cilician miniature painting conducted by the author in the framework of this book. In the present article, several issues raised in the book are critically explored from different angles, expressing a partial or significant difference of opinion when it comes to some of the interpretations and contextualizations proposed by Watenpaugh. These include: Watenpaugh’s nonexhaustive consideration of the Zeytun Gospels’ colophons, which stand as the most authentic documentations on the manuscript’s history prior to the twentieth century; her tracing of parallel examples of artifacts that survived the Genocide based not on scholarly research but on popular narratives (and on contemporary literary writings); the discussion of bilingual coins minted by the Armenian king Hetum I and the Seljuk sultan Kaykhusraw II as cases of “complex identities of the period”, without delving into these complexities, and, thus, not doing justice to the nuances of the medieval context of their rule; some aspects of the history of scholarship on Cilician miniature painting; and the way Watenpaugh presents two of the most prominent historians of Armenian art, Sirarpie Der Nersessian and Karekin Hovsepian, and their attitudes toward the ownership and acquisition of Armenian cultural heritage by western art institutions, which appear to be less than balanced in The Missing Pages. Finally, some reflections on contemporary exhibition practices of survivor artifacts, whose current locations of preservation are often a consequence of (cultural) genocide and dubious acquisition practices, require clearer and more in-depth presentation, at least as far as the exhibition history of the Zeytun Gospels and its separated folios is concerned.