[Q&A] Parapolitics: Cultural Freedom and the Cold War / by Nida Ghouse
Channel: Jnanapravaha Mumbai
Date: 2023-06-13

It is a well-known fact that the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) secretly funded culture during the Cold War. The project, Parapolitics: Cultural Freedom and the Cold War, is not about revealing that scandal, despite the lack of engagement it has met from museums. Rather, it questions whether the canon of Western modernism can be “globalized” retroactively, without confronting the ideological structures and institutional narratives that supported and exported it. Employing the history of one of the CIA’s front organizations, the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), Parapolitics reconsiders the political appropriation of aesthetic form — such as the instrumental use of abstraction and realism — in the 20th century. It traces how the struggle for hegemony during the Cold War helped shape the way modern art came to be defined and defended as “free”— that is, fundamentally individual and beyond ideology. Drawing attention to what the binary logic of the Cold War overshadowed, excluded, and rendered impossible, Parapolitics seeks to recover the conflict lines that have animated artistic choices and that implicitly haunt the field of contemporary art until today.

About Nida Ghouse:
Ghouse is a writer and curator. She curated Parapolitics: Cultural Freedom and the Cold War (with Anselm Franke, Paz Guevara, and Antonia Majaca, 2017), is editing the forthcoming publication (2019), and is working towards an exhibition in the framework of The New Alphabet (2020), all at Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin. Her writing will appear in the publication accompanying Natascha Süder Happelmann’s presentation for the German Pavilion at the 58th Venice Biennale (2019).

This free public lecture was held at Jnanapravaha Mumbai on Thursday, January 24, 2019.