By Nicole-Ann Lobo, Victoria McCraven, and Tobias Rosen

“Bandung to Berlin: Art, Decolonization, and the Cold War,” A&A's graduate student conference, took place October 31–November 1. The event was organized by Nicole-Ann Lobo, Victoria McCraven, and Tobias Rosen. Atreyee Gupta, Associate Professor of Global Modern Art and Modern and Contemporary South and Southeast Asian Art at the University of California, Berkeley, gave the keynote lecture, titled “From Berlin to Bandung, or Third World Aesthetics before Third World Politics.” 

The conference included a lunch workshop, visits to Special Collections, a reception at the Princeton University Art Museum, and a day-long schedule of graduate student speakers. These activities provided unique vantage points onto “Third World” organizing and politics from the 1930s until the present day.

The conference began with a lunch workshop, “Decolonization and the Cold War in Contemporary Art and Visual Culture,” where participants briefly shared objects that hold resonance for our current sociopolitical climate. Conference participants began to connect over a number of questions that served as guides for the discussions to come. Can decolonization be monumentalized? What do we do with failed artistic projects that have emerged from decolonial agendas but have been subsequently incorporated into totalitarian states? How do you navigate the stakes of your work in contexts where there is censorship and remnant Cold War suspicion? 

Next, participants visited Special Collections to view an assortment of objects relating to transnational solidarity, including Tricontinental covers, OSPAAAL posters, a Russian postcard dedicated to Patrice Lumumba, and Black Panther Ephemera, among others. One highlight was a discussion around an elegy penned by Léopold Sédar Senghor for his deceased son, which includes a large abstract illustrated score. The combination of memory and abstraction, the somber, yet invigorating tone, and how it spurs a parallax view of Senghor’s decolonial agenda from the 1980s, made us think of the object as a kind of metaphor for the conference. In the evening, participants gathered over wine and sushi at Art on Hulfish for a reception co-sponsored by the Princeton University Art Museum, where they could also look at the exhibition Under a Southern Star: Identity and Environment in Australian Photography.

On Friday, community members, students, staff, faculty, and senior scholars attended Bandung to Berlin which included three panels and a spectacular keynote by Professor Atreyee Gupta. For most of the day, over fifty people attended the conference, creating a collegial atmosphere that complimented the formal presentations. 

The first panel, “Public Art through and beyond Red Migration and Global Capital,” considered the effects of transnational migration and ties on public exhibitions and popular art. It was moderated by Tobias Rosen and included presentations by Suhyun Choi, PhD candidate at Columbia University, Klaudia Ofwona Draber, PhD candidate at the University of Reading, and Jonathan Mandel, PhD student at Princeton University.

The second panel, “Localizing Transnational Solidarities: Bandung, Beirut, Hong Kong,” examined the geographic bounds of solidarity in three case studies. It was moderated by Nicole-Ann Lobo and included presentations by Patriot Mukmin, Ph.D. student at the University of Melbourne, Natasha Gasparian, Ph.D. candidate at the University of Oxford, and Genevieve Trail, Ph.D. candidate at the University of Melbourne. 

The final panel, “(Self)-Fashioning the Nation: Cold War Diplomacies,” looked at self-fashioning and nation-building, moderated by Victoria McCraven and included presentations by Amelia Ames, Ph.D. candidate at Princeton University, Weerada Muangsook, Ph.D. student at the University of St. Andrews, and Nectar Knuckles, Ph.D. student at Princeton University.

The co-organizers thank the Department of Art & Archaeology, the Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton Special Collections, and conference co-advisors Irene Small and Chika Okeke-Agulu for helping to make this conference possible.