Vera Mey, Philippe Pirotte
Who’s Afraid of the Bandung Spirit?
The 1955 Asia Africa Conference in Bandung, Indonesia, is often discussed as a political failure and romanticized as a passing instance of decolonization. However, the “Bandung Spirit” has since been enthusiastically celebrated in artistic and cultural contexts for harnessing a political imagination that in the face of empire goes beyond nation-building. Yet despite continued enthusiasm for the Bandung Spirit as a framework of liberation, its audacity has been constantly subject to doubt and systematic dismissal. In our talk, we discuss how the Bandung Spirit has amplified ways of looking that break from a profoundly modernist and universalist trajectory of thought and enter daring alternatives that facilitate participatory looking, or what has been called the “right to look.” Through understanding the direction of gazes reshuffled by and the nature of visuality activated by the Bandung Spirit, we can better determine the “threat” that this defiant way of seeing the world represents and the possibilities for equality it might enable.
Vera Mey is an art historian and curator in the History of Art Department faculty at the University of York. Her doctoral research at SOAS, University of London, analyzed how the 1955 Asia Africa Conference impacted and intersected with artistic notions of critical regionalism in South-east Asia’s Cold War era.
Philippe Pirotte is Professor of Art History and Curatorial Studies at Hochschule für Bildende Künste–Städelschule. His recent research includes investigating the photographs of the writer, civil rights activist, and journalist Richard Wright, many of which were taken during the Bandung Conference.
Together, Mey and Pirotte established the research colloquium “The Color Curtain and the Promise of Bandung’ (2021–2022) and have worked on “Spectres of Bandung: A Political Imagination of Asia Africa,” an exhibition commissioned by the Gropius-Bau Berlin but whose future is now uncertain. Aspects of the exhibition emerged during their Co-Artistic Directorship of the 2024 Busan Biennale.