arte&ensaios a/e Special Issue Transnational Correspondence

"Arte & Ensaios (Art & Essays) is published by the Postgraduate Programme in Visual Arts (PPGAV) at the School of Fine Arts (EBA) at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ). This special issue arises from a collaborative project between PPGAV and the research centre for Transnational Art, Identity and Nation (TrAIN) at the University of the Arts London (UAL).

Participants from each institution met in September 2006 at the Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro to initiate a conversation about establishing a sustainable, dynamic field of knowledge regarding contemporary art from beyond Western Europe and the USA. The project culminates in a two-day symposium (14th and 15th September 2007) at Tate Modern that will consider how intwined national and international contexts are negotiated in producing, exhibiting and interpreting art. The symposium coincides with the exhibition Helios Oiticica: A Body of Colour at Tate Modern. Oiticica is indeed central to the debate on the transnationality of artistic practice and unsurprisingly is a recurrent subject throughout the pages of this journal.

Edited by Michael Asbury, Guiherme Bueno, Gloria Ferreira and Milton Machado, this issue maintains the journal's general format and constituent sections. An exception is the commission of the artist Sutapa Biswas as the first non-Brazilian to design the edition's [front] cover. She joins a prestigious list of Brazilian artists previously commissioned for this task that includes: Amilcar de Castro, Alusio Carvao, Antonio Dias, Carmela Gross, Cildo Meireles, Abraham Palatnik, Lygia Pape, Eduardo Sued and Carlos Zilio. Interviewed by Michael Asbury, Biswas discusses her work and its relation to her life experience.

Other than contributions by members from both departments, which includes specially commissioned essays as well as previously published texts pertaining to the debate, curators Moacir dos Anjos and Fernando Cocchiarale were invited to participate. In general, each contribution acknowledges the fact that the study of art at a transnational level is informed, inevitably, by one's individual and institutional geopolitical position. It is also the case that the prefix 'trans' invokes an idea of flux and, if we were to use a scientific analogy, such movement is produced by inequality, by differential of forces acting on a body. It was important therefore that this edition should not focus exclusively on the axis Brazil-Britain, but offer a broad set of perspectives on the development of transnational practices in art and their articulation of geopolitical constraints.

Guy Brett's involvement with artists from countries beyond Europe and the USA began in the mid-sixties, at a point when the attention of British artists and critics was directed primarily towards events in New York. Interviewed by Linda Sandino, and commissioned specially for this edition, he discusses the role that artists from Brazil played within his trajectory as art critic, and the dissemination of art from so-called peripheral cultures in the late eighties, a period marked by a combination of residual prejudice and the gradual opening of possibilities for artists from 'non-central' locations to operate within the 'culture capitals'.

As is the case with previous editions of Arte & Ensaios, a number of reference texts have also been selected for inclusion. The role of this section is to introduce new audiences - primarily via translation - to the critical thought of important authors. Writers previously included in this section have included Roy Ascott, Hans Belting, Guy Brett, Benjamin Buchloh, Douglas Crimp, Hubert Damisch, Thierry de Duve, Hal Foster, Michael Fried, Jean-Claude Lebensztejn, Craig Owens, Jean Luc Nancy and Gilles Tiberghien. Because this issue is bilingual, the introductory role of this section functions in two sections, and we are delighted that the authors of key essays originally written in either Portuguese or English have generously allowed their words to be both reprinted and translated. The reference texts included in this issue provide a brief overview of the developent of a 'transnational' curatorial practice: from Kynaston McShine's introduction to the exhibition Information (1970: MOMA, New York) to the emergence of consciously transcultural exhibitions. Essays by Rasheed Araeen and Hon Hanru, together with correspondence between Vasif Kortun and Cuauhtemoc Medina, outline issues that have affected and continue to affect the field of curtaorial practice. Originally written in Portuguese, essays by Tadeu Chiarelli and Paulo Sergio Duarte offer insightful analyses from a Brazilian perspective."