Afterall 48 Autumn Winter 2019

This is the Afterall anniversary issue 48, Autumn/Winter 2019—"Looking Back, Looking Forward: 20 Years of Afterall"—which reflects on changes and fractures in the art world over the last two decades of Afterall journal.

Issue 48 returns to some of the guiding questions of Afterall: how art negotiates the ubiquitous tension between local conditions and global exchanges; how it is to be experienced by its publics as more than just a rarified, luxury product; and what forms artistic practice can take in a world begging for change. It asks how artists can help us imagine a way out of current impasses, towards a bigger transformation.

This issue presents new commissions from artists and writers alongside specially selected essays from previous editions of Afterall, introduced by new reflections by their respective authors, and with a foreword by Charles Esche. Artists such as Kerry James Marshall, Juan Downey, Trinh T. Minh-ha and Inji Efflatoun are brought together anew through the voices of authors Kobena Mercer, Manuela Carneiro da Cunha and Helena Vilalta, Joshua Fausty and Kaelen Wilson-Goldie. Miguel A. Lópezrevives the question of the historicisation of Latin American art of the 1960s and 70s, questioning the implications of a "Latin American Conceptualism," while Patrick D. Flores looks at the legacy of social realist painting in the Philippines, reflecting on the intersection of postcolonial discourse, historical imagination and political practice. And in light of cultural activism in the digital era, Stéphanie Jeanjean considers the legacy of video collectives in France in the 1970s, tracing their radical approach to class and gender politics. Taken together, these texts propose a move beyond narrow modes of criticality and towards the more propositional qualities of decolonial thought.

Seven new commissions bring artists and ideas to Afterall that seek to find new ways of doing and thinking. As presented by Portia Malatjie, Dineo Seshee Bopape engages Afro-diasporic spiritual practices as means to conjure the eradication of anti-black worlds. Also invested in the multiplicities of existence, May Adadol Ingawanij examines how Karrabing Film Collective’s short films use the comedic as a generative element, while Anders Kreuger considers the work and Instagram account of Babi Badalov as projects of demodernisation. Madina Tlostanova speaks of decolonial creativity in the Post-Soviet context as one of the few remaining paths to what she describes as re-futuring; and decolonial thought also imbues Peter D. Sipeli’s spoken word practice, which traces pathways to ancestral homelands lost in Polynesian history in the advent of colonisation and evangelisation. His project The Sleeping Ancestors, featured in this issue, is a reminder of the importance of indigenous spirituality in generating new knowledge and forms of living. Questioning our entanglements with the violent rituals of industrialised capitalism, Heather Davis explores the links between extractivism and visuality in the work of Mary Mattingly and Otobong Nkanga, and Tony Chakar interrogates the political possibilities of abandoning hope in hopeless times. And to finish, an afterword by Mark Lewis addresses the lived experience of Western modernity in the process of decline.