SESSION: A Call to Action: Transnational Artistic Solidarities and Decolonial Alliances, 1960s–1970 (PART 2)
Founded in London in 1974, Artists for Democracy (AFD) brought together a group of international artists and activists, including Cecilia Vicuña, John Dugger, David Medalla, and Guy Brett. The collective aimed to support liberation movements across Asia, Africa, and Latin America, as seen in its first major project, the Arts Festival for Democracy in Chile, held at the Royal College of Art. This event was a direct response to the 1973 Chilean coup d’état and featured meetings, exhibitions, and other activities.
AFD embodies the ethos and sensibility prevalent among artists and cultural practitioners in the 1960s and 1970s. In dialogue with initiatives such as the 1974 Venice Biennale, CAYC in Buenos Aires, and FESTAC ‘77 in Lagos, AFD proposed a vision of art rooted in exile, solidarity, and a decolonial imagination, contributing to South-South alliances and alternative circuits of cultural production that challenge institutional and geopolitical boundaries.
In what ways can these forms of artistic collaboration offer new frameworks for transnational approaches in art history? We invite contributions that investigate artistic practices, initiatives, and strategies that emerged in connection with anti-imperialist movements and solidarity with what was then referred to as the “Third World”. Decolonial approaches focusing on marginalised epistemologies and counter-hegemonic forms of dissent are particularly encouraged. Papers exploring the intersection of art, migration, identity, and collective memory are also welcome.y is neither to tame Turner’s intractability, nor to shore up the centrality of his art, but instead to open art history to the dispersions and displacements that have become so much a part of Turner’s afterlives.
Session Convenors:
Paulina Caro Troncoso, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso
Roberta Garieri,, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne
Speakers:
Isabel Taube, University of Manchester
James Baldwin and Transnational Solidarities in Britain in the 1960s, ‘70s and ‘80s
In 1985, writer James Baldwin was photographed with artist Aubrey Williams and poet and activist Linton Kwesi Johnson at an exhibition organised by Creation for Liberation,the cultural wing of the anti-racist journal, Race Today, whose manifesto (published in theexhibition’s catalogue), was rooted in the group’s commitment to alternative circuits ofcultural production and decolonial alliances, which aimed to ‘fuel and fortify the radicalapproach being expressed by the artist’ and to ‘transcend and transform the bankruptcy of cultural and intellectual life here in Britain’. The same year, Baldwin presented an award on behalf of the Greater London Council — who had declared the previous year,1984, as an ‘anti-racist year’ in London — to the young writer, David Dabydeen, who had recently published his groundbreaking work, Hogarth’s Blacks: Images of Blacks in Eighteenth Century British Art, the earliest attempt to explore the significance of people of African descent in the 17th century work of the British artist, William Hogarth.Drawing upon new archival material and new oral histories undertaken for the ongoingArts and Humanities-funded project, ‘James Baldwin and Britain’ (the University of Manchester), this paper extends Rob Waters’ claim that James Baldwin was witness to the race politics of post-colonial Britain (2013) by mapping the writer’s underexplored role as witness to, and influence on, the art and cultural production of British based artists, activists, intellectuals, and organisations in Britain from the 1960s to 1980s.
Mathilde Ayoub, Cergy Paris University – Institut national du patrimoine
Art, Politics, and Pan-Arabism: The Founding of the General Union of Arab Plastic Artists in 1971 Damascus
The creation of the General Union of Arab Plastic Artists marked a pivotal moment in Syria’s artistic and political history. Established in Damascus from December 6 to 12, 1971, the Union was founded by Syrian artists such as Mahmoud Hammad and Fateh Moudarres. The inaugural conference issued strong recommendations calling for a collective of Arab artists that would “support the struggle of the Palestinian people” and affirm that visual artists “bear full responsibility at this critical stage, so that art may fully play its role in construction, liberation, and resistance against colonial challenges.”
The newly formed group decided to organize a traveling exhibition—later transformed into a biennial—and proposed twenty-seven measures defining the role of Arab artists and enhancing their status in society.This initiative generated a series of exhibitions, meetings, and inter-Arab conferences, culminating in the first Baghdad Biennale in 1973, which brought together artists from across the Arab world “from the Gulf to the Ocean.”
While expressing solidarity with the Palestinian and broader Arab causes, the artists also sought to engage with the transnational art scene through participation in international events such as the Venice and São Paulo Biennales—where, in the same year, a delegation of thirteen Syrian artists exhibited. Although Syria had previously been relatively isolated in artistic terms, the establishment of this pan-Arab union—only a few years after the Arab defeat of 1967—reconfigured the dynamics of Arab artistic solidarity and positioned Syrian art within a wider regional and global dialogue.
Dzmitry Suslau, University College London
Sculptural Solidarities: Non-Aligned Modernism and Decolonial Networks at Yugoslavia’s Forma Viva, 1961-1974
This paper examines how, from the 1960s onwards, Yugoslavia’s Forma Viva sculpture symposia became a crucial platform for equitable transnational artistic exchange that reflected the country’s founding principles of anti-imperialism, anti-fascism, and peaceful coexistence.[1] Launched in 1961 to coincide with the inaugural Non-Aligned Summit in Belgrade, Forma Viva brought together artists from across the Global North and South, creating a horizontal space of exchange that challenged the centre/periphery dichotomy.
Building on and complicating Videkanić’s (2019) concept of ‘non-aligned modernism’, which identifies Yugoslav modernism as a decolonial set of artistic practices that refused autonomy from the political, this paper asks how sculptural form, curatorial mediation, and transnational collaboration at Forma Viva both enacted and unsettled the Yugoslav state’s cultural ambitions. Focusing on works by symposia participants such as Sankho Chaudhuri (India, 1961), Louis Mwaniki (Kenya, 1972), and Ian Walters (UK, 1974), it examines how collaboration among artists from diverse contexts generated a more complex and reciprocal model of cultural exchange than that envisioned by official frameworks of cultural diplomacy.
Reading sculpture, display, and archive in tandem, the paper argues that Forma Viva constituted a complex space of encounter, where artistic practice, ideological aspirations, and institutional structures were continuously negotiated. In tracing these layered interactions, the paper highlights how the symposium materialised the tensions and possibilities of Non-Aligned cultural production in the 1960s and 1970s.
[1] Videkanić 2019, 4.
Laura Moure Cecchini, Università degli Studi di Padova
The Galleria Due Mondi (1965-1978): Latin American Art in Rome
Although the Galleria Due Mondi played a vital part in facilitating artistic exchanges between Latin America and Italy from its founding in 1965 until its closing in 1978, it remains largely unexplored in the considerable literature concerning postwar Roman contemporary art galleries.
Drawing from unpublished archival records, oral histories, and press reviews, this paper reconstructs the gallery’s operations and its distinctive exhibition strategy. This approach involved three primary components: a focus on Latin American art, showcasing well-known artists such as Oswaldo Guayasamín, Wifredo Lam, Antonio Berni, and Roberto Matta (often marking their first exhibition in an Italian commercial gallery); an emphasis on prints, including displays of Chilean, Cuban, and Mexican political graphic arts; and close collaborations with influential Communist Italian critics, like Enrico Crispolti and Mario de Micheli, who were deeply invested in the Latin American art scene.
Despite its ambitious plans and support from Latin American embassies and established Roman galleries, Due Mondi struggled to cultivate a significant market for Latin American art in Italy.
Yet the gallery’s history illuminates the efforts of a group of Italian critics and gallerists to champion Latin American art in Italy. It also provides a fresh perspective on transnational solidarities, highlighting missed opportunities but also the central role of Rome in the 1960s and 1970s as a focal point for such conversations – driven by sustained artistic and political interest in fostering a special bond between Italy (then home to Europe’s largest Communist party) and Latin American leftists intellectuals.
Duccio Nobili, Scuola Normale Superiore
Learning from Mexico. Albe Steiner and the Taller de Grafica Popular
The concepts of ‘solidarity’, ‘Atlantic networks’ and ‘Third Worldism’ are typically employed in the context of the Cold War of the 1960s and 1970s. However, it is possible to apply these methodological frameworks to analyse earlier post-war phenomena. A notable example of this is the Mexican travels of Italian graphic designer Albe Steiner between 1946 and 1949.
This case study overturns the traditional ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’ dynamics: when Steiner left Milan after the end of the Second World War, the city had been disrupted by German bombing and intellectual life was struggling to return to normal. Furthermore, Mexico City was perceived as a socialist utopia at the time, ruled by the Institutional Revolutionary Party (Partido Revolucionario Institucional) and welcoming Spanish dissident artists and intellectuals exiled by the Francoist regime. Steiner was a committed communist (his uncle was Giacomo Matteotti, the Italian Socialist Party secretary killed by Mussolini in 1924) and the opportunity to experience such a vibrant intellectual environment and to work in a collective artistic laboratory such as the Taller de Gráfica Popular (TGP), which spread leftist revolutionary ideas through graphic and visual communication, was a unique chance for him to reflect on his role as an intellectual in Italian post-war society. In fact, upon his return in 1949, he attempted to implement what he had learned in Mexico by organising collective teaching sessions to educate the next generation of graphic designers. Furthermore, his interest in Latin America remained strong throughout his life, as evidenced by the numerous solidarity posters he created following the Chilean coup d’état of 1973.
In this paper, I aim to contribute to the creation of new methodological frameworks for transnational approaches in art history for two reasons. Firstly, following Piotr Piotrowski’s ideas on horizontal history, the transatlantic collaboration between Steiner and the TGP allows us to decentralise the research perspective by treating the Italian and Mexican contexts as equals. Secondly, Astrid Erll’s concept of ‘travelling memory’ enables to conceive the travels of artists from a horizontal and transcultural perspective.
Hannah Healey, Courtauld Institute of Art
Forms of Solidarity: Rasheed Araeen’s Holes in the Earth (1975) at the AFD Victory Vietnam Festival
As the fall of Saigon was transmitted across the world in April 1975, radical activists and artists globally were captivated by the triumph of revolutionary struggle over American imperialism. In London, Artists for Democracy responded by organising ‘People of the World Learn from Indochina: Homage to Ho Chi Minh And the Victory of the Indochinese Peoples’ in their squatted gallery space, the group’s first attempt to replicate their inaugural ‘Arts Festival for Democracy in Chile’. The event celebrated the promise of liberation through armed revolutionary struggle and while the festival poster and displays were plentiful with red stars, portraits of Ho Chi Minh and quotes from the revolutionary leader, an installation by Rasheed Araeen offered an alternative artistic strategy for declaring solidarity with the Vietnamese people. In Holes in the Earth (1975), Araeen eschewed the customary emblems of the revolution and instead replicated the image of the individual bomb shelters that had become ubiquitous in urban centres of north Vietnam. Recasting the modernist forms of his installation as homages to the engineering ingenuity of the north Vietnamese forces and the resilience of ordinary Vietnamese people, Araeen sought to construct a transnational visual language of solidarity that countered hegemonic notions of artistic influence. While Araeen would later propose that AFD ultimately failed to deal with the question of cultural imperialism in radical artistic practice, Holes in the Earth at the Victory Vietnam Festival is testament to one member’s attempt to adopt experimental artistic practices to the creation of anti-imperialist art.
Hattie Spires, Independent Scholar
Disciplined struggle: Sybil Atteck and the ‘West Indian Renaissance’
This paper focuses on the life and work of Chinese-Trinidadian artist Sybil Atteck (1911-1975) to assess the extent to which a ‘West Indian Renaissance’ emerged in Trinidad in the 1950s to 1960s within the visual arts. Atteck has been described as the ‘mother of visual arts’ in Trinidad. She established the Art Society of Trinidad and Tobago in 1943 mentoring artists such as Althea McNish, yet posthumous literature on her is scant. Atteck took advantage of the paths laid down by empire, training at the Regent Street Polytechnic in London in 1935 and collaborating with the British Council to build an artist community in Port-of-Spain. Her artistic practice negotiated American and European modernism through the strategic use of indigenous subjects to shape a national identity during and beyond the country’s independence decade (1960s). I argue that Harlem Renaissance discourse shaped her artistic practice. Via which channels did this discourse circulate in Trinidad? Which individuals associated with the movement visited Port-of-Spain and move in her circles? Did these connections emerge out of opposition to colonial suppression? Atteck’s painting and sculpture reveal Trinidad to be a highly networked centre for a burgeoning intelligentsia, artistic community, and incubator of anticolonial thought, sharing commonalities with Harlem in New York and Accra, Ghana, mediated through Britain; a network of which Atteck was not only a part but to which she was foundational. This paper contributes towards a more connected, global history of art, one in which Europeans are not the sole agents of artistic production.
Taras Gembik, Zachęta – National Gallery of Art in Warsaw / University of Warsaw
Joanna Kordjak, Zachęta – National Gallery of Art in Warsaw / University of Warsaw
Global Connections — Abandoned Friendships
In our paper, we revisit the networks of global artistic relations forged during the socialist era in Poland, when the Zachęta Gallery in Warsaw functioned as a soft-power instrument of cultural diplomacy. Zachęta was both an important host of art imported from nations aligned with the socialist agenda and an exporter of Polish art abroad — a visible token of artistic and humanitarian freedom within the Soviet Bloc. Artistic exchanges at that time, focused on regions and countries of the global majority, including Latin America, India, Vietnam, and Palestine, were at once expressions of emancipatory and unifying aspirations and deeply entangled in relations of dependency rooted in the exploitation of natural resources, cheap labour, and asymmetrical political alliances.
We draw from archival sources, material culture, and historical exhibitions to examine the remains of the so-called “internationalist friendships” formed before 1989, as well as contemporary interpretations of this shared past in cultural memory. Our paper contributes to this panel by foregrounding Eastern Europe not merely as a peripheral witness, but as an active participant in global circuits of anti-imperialist cultural exchange. We reassess Polish state institutions — such as Zachęta — as both agents of Cold War soft power and sites of transnational artistic encounters shaped by ideological pressures and symbolic diplomacy.
We present findings from a long-term research project, which took the form of a 2025 exhibition featuring historical works (e.g., arpilleras from the Conflict Textiles collection at Ulster University) alongside new commissions by artists including Ibrahim Mahama, Minerva Cuevas, Marina Naprushkina, Colectivo Punto Espora, and the Aravani Art Project. By tracing these complex aesthetic and political legacies, we aim to reflect on the unfinished promises of socialist internationalism and its afterlives in contemporary art.