A recurring idea in the current issue of ARTMargins is difference and contradiction. While art historiography has often treated artistic styles and movements as integrated and consistent wholes, with bookended beginnings and closures, and treated artists as equally stable authorial voices rooted in their respective dispositions, art practice for the most part is marked by contradiction rather than consistency, challenging us to capture the dynamism that contradiction and difference produce in art. In staying with difference, therefore, we begin to understand the political stakes of a medium, the ideological journeys of artists, the contradictions of the avant-garde, the artistic maneuvers of official state infrastructures, and the creative power of hybridity—despite the limits placed on it by the enclosures of nation, language, style, or epistemology. The articles in this issue gesture in these directions.

The material in this issue spans the entire 20th century: from Japan in the 1920s and 1930s, to Romania in the 1970s, to Poland during the 1980s and 1990s, combined with a diverse body of artistic media: mixed media, art criticism, graphic arts, performance arts, lace-work, international exhibitions, infrastructures, and art criticism. The contributors invite us to reconsider the fixities with which we approach questions of ideology, political affiliations, official and unofficial art, transnational exchange, and the relations between art and cultural policy, as well as questions of gender and labor, in order to understand what is seen as national culture.

In Małgorzata Kaźmierczak's “‘Real Time Story Telling’: A Performance-Art Festival in the Context of International Networks during the Transitional Period in Poland before and after 1989,” we find politico-artistic maneuvers of artists from socialist Eastern Europe in the shadow of political instability during the 1980s and 90s. Kaźmierczak argues that the imposition of martial law in Poland on December 13, 1981, shaped the position of performance artists in the Polish art world during the early 1990s. The article's focus is the first large performance-art festival in Poland after 1989, Real Time Story Telling, which was organized in Sopot and Gdańsk in 1991 by Galeria Działań and curated by artist and art theorist Jan Świdziński. The author proposes that the ephemeral and often anti-institutional nature of performance art implied noncommerciality and nonconformism. Even when more galleries were opening in Poland in the 1990s, performance artists could not use the privileges of an emerging free market. Real Time Story Telling established the first space for Polish performance artists to develop social and professional ties that were critical for the sustenance of a counterhegemonic medium such as performance.

In “The Problem with Film: Murayama Tomoyoshi's Variations on the Visible,” André Keiji Kunigami explores the rich yet understudied film theory written by Japanese multimedia avant-gardist Murayama Tomoyoshi (1901–77) in the 1920s and 30s. Foregrounding the artist's complex affiliations with socialist aesthetics, the author presents Tomoyoshi's rejection of oculocentric theories of representation in art for a more dynamic transmission between art and life—what Tomoyoshi called “moving aesthetics (dōteki bigaku).” Tomoyoshi's interactions with photography and film, Kunigami argues, create moments of tension in his idea of vitality as a union of art and life without representation. Yet, by the 1930s, Tomoyoshi found in the filmic medium a constructive ontology whereby film was no longer seen as the indexical representation of the visual, but as the producer of reality—combining the object's montage, analysis, and animation. Figures such as Tomoyoshi, Kunigami argues, need to be read not by making clear-cut distinctions between “aggressive imperialist and ardent resister,” so often deployed in socialist as well as nationalist art histories, but rather via structural contradictions that uniquely mark “nonwhite” projects of modernity.

A similar drift of argumentation is used in Cristian Nae's article, “Constellational Modernisms: ‘Socialist Humanism’ and ‘Contextual Art’ in Ion Bitzan and Wanda Mihuleac's Graphic Art of the 1970s,” which forms part of a special issue based in ArtMargins Online, edited by Zuzsa László, “Regional Resonances: In Search of the Transnational in Central East European Art of the 1970s” (https://artmargins.com/regional-resonances/). In this article, we are invited to view artistic maneuvers beyond the strict opposition between official and nonofficial art under socialism. Using the notion of “constellation” as it was developed by Walter Benjamin, Nae presents an intertwined field of national and international exhibitions as components of the same state-supported ecosystem. Two descriptive concepts, Nae explains, reveal this intertwined aesthetics: “humanist realism,” which developed in the context of “socialist humanism” and was used by socialist art critics; and “contextual art,” a category used by the artists Jan Świdziński, Hervé Fischer, and Wanda Mihuleac and by the art historian Paul Ardenne. Such concepts were developed, Nae argues, to cope with the instability of artistic practices in times of political shifts. Such a dynamic play of difference within socialist art also carried within it more “uncomfortable” mixtures of Conceptual art, abstraction, Pop, and postminimalism. While such stylistic experimentations could be read as antagonistic to Socialist Realist aesthetics, they reveal, Nae argues, a dynamic and “cunning” negotiation of political demands in a socialist state.

Tausif Noor reviews three books addressing interfaces of modernism, policy, and infrastructure: Sarah-Neel Smith's Metrics of Modernity (2022), which investigates changes in Turkish modernist art discourse between 1950 and 1960; Devika Singh's International Departures (2024), which is devoted to the dynamics of internationalism in Indian postindependence art between 1947 and the 1980s; and Karin Zitzewitz's Infrastructure and Form (2022), which focuses on Indian contemporary art between 1991 and 2008. These books bring to the fore how national and international ideologies, as well as state and nonstate actors, intersect with different economic and political agendas in giving shape to artistic modernism. Moving beyond the nation-driven art histories and ideological demarcations of the Cold War, all three books convey, as Noor argues, the nuanced, differentiated formation of internationalism in Turkey, India, and the wider Global South.

Cian Dayrit's Artist Project, Militant Mappings: A Template Toolkit, looks at mapping through the lens of community work among marginalized peoples. In a series of maps produced during workshops that took place in protest camps, picket lines, community festivals, and at times online, Dayrit presents the potential forms that cognitive mapping can take as a counterhegemonic practice and as an artistic-pedagogical and activist strategy for emancipatory politics. Such maps emerge via community dialogues around stories of violence, such as land grabs, displacement, militarization, and the contested access to resources, among others.

In the Document section, we present Sofia Gotti's “Modern Art, Indigeneity, and Nationalism in Paraguay: An Introduction to Josefina Plá's ‘Ñandutí: Crossroads of Two Worlds’,” which studies the genealogy and significance of Ñandutí lacemaking in Paraguay. Gotti argues that Plá's text, published in 1983, foregrounds how the labor of Indigenous Guaraní women making ñandutí lace is not a silent Indigenous element in the “mestizaje” of Paraguayan national culture but, rather, is an agent of Indigenous difference that combines the colonial, the Indigenous, the female, the nationalist, and the mestizo, thus disturbing monovalent and homogeneous understandings of national identity. As Ariella Azoulay has argued, reading infrastructures and paradigms through difference creates possibilities for new potential histories. As we begin drawing new storylines for the art histories we want to tell, we also inevitably create more heterogeneous cartographies of artistic knowledge. The implications of difference-as-method thus seem quite substantial, both for much-needed globally connected art histories and to satisfy the epistemic demand for decolonizing art's histories.