I Saw a Great Show in China That Would Be Censored in the United States
ARTnews criticizes US cultural politics while reviewing “The Great Camouflage,” a contemporary-art exhibition at the Rockbund Art Museum in Shanghai that runs through April 26 (year not specified in the excerpt). Co-curators X Zhu-Nowell and Kandis Williams use 20th-century Afro-Asian solidarities—prompted in part by a photograph of W.E.B. Du Bois with Mao Zedong—as a starting point, then foreground Black feminist histories by highlighting figures such as Shirley Du Bois, Eslanda Robeson, Amy Ashwood Garvey, Suzanne Césaire, and Grace Lee Boggs. The show includes Pope.L’s Du Bois Machine (2013), an inverted monument with a child’s voice recounting a late-1990s incident involving purported relics of Martin Luther King Jr., and a video by Tuan Andrew Nguyen about Senegalese soldiers stationed in Vietnam in 1954 under French colonial rule and the families they formed with Vietnamese women. The exhibition unfolds across the museum’s five stories and is titled after a text by Suzanne Césaire, emphasizing lived, affective dimensions of revolutionary history rather than a purely didactic display.
From This Briefing
This story was covered in Museums Unearthed, Biennales in the Crosshairs