S'inscrivant dans les réflexions soulevées par la programmation de Documenta 15, ce numéro explore, d'une part, les nouvelles formes d'engagement dans l'art et la culture visuelle palestiniens comme moyens de lutte contre l'effacement en cours et, d'autre part, de nouvelles compréhensions des géographies des pratiques et des histoires de l'art.
Lumbung One entered the apparatus of documenta to fold it in on itself, and unsettled even the expectations of documenta fifteen being a 'Global South' exhibition. In this regard, one of the most common and unreflected statements about ruangrupa's project was expressed through the question where is the art? And yet, among the evident and profusely palpable ecosystemic experiments – ruangrupa defining ecosystem or, in Bahasa Indonesia ekosistem, as the 'collaborative network structures through which knowledge, resources, ideas, and programs are shared and linked' – and the unfolding of the project as one foregrounding collectivity, sociality and decentralised organisation, it is also the quality, diversity and amount of artworks that stood out. We feel that the specificity of some of these works has rarely been addressed, the art press, both commercial and academic, focussing mostly on either the overarching concept of lumbung or the stigmatisation of ruangrupa. Even if some of the projects presented in Kassel were able to become independent from the event as a whole, this was only thanks to an acceptance of the loss of control built-in in lumbung. In this regard, the present issue is premised on the intention to examine some of the collectives included in Lumbung One and their work with the attention we deem they deserve but have not been given yet. If only three of the nine contributions in this issue directly engage with projects in lumbung one, the escalation of the attacks and destruction of Gaza since October 2023 have magnified, retrospectively and in horrific ways, the West's resistance to, if not its attempts to suppress subaltern and Global South worldviews that had played out in Kassel. Following Lumbung One's cascading logic, this issue then branches out, on the one hand, towards further engagements with Palestinian art and visual culture as a way to fend off ongoing erasure and, on the other, towards new understandings of geographies of art practices and histories.
Afterall Journal, revue d'art, d'analyse contextuelle et de recherche fondée par Charles Esche et
Mark Lewis en 1998, rassemble, deux fois par an, des réflexions approfondies sur le travail d'artistes contemporains, des essais sur l'histoire de l'art et la théorie critique. L'articulation entre les essais monographiques, qui constituent l'épine dorsale de chaque numéro, et les essais et exposés portant spécifiquement sur l'histoire de l'art et de la culture, replace la pratique artistique individuelle comme principe central du paysage artistique contemporain tout en
créant un lieu pour une approche réflexive de la culture visuelle contemporaine en général.
Editée par Elisa Adami, Amanda Carneiro, Nav Haq, Mark Lewis,
Adeena Mey, Charles Stankievech et Chloe Ting, la revue est publiée par Central Saint Martins en association avec University of Chicago Press et en partenariat de recherche et d'édition avec le M HKA (Anvers), la Faculté d'architecture, de paysage et de design John H. Daniels (Université de Toronto) et le NTU Centre for Contemporary Art (Singapour).
