This spring, Aperture magazine presents “Counter Histories,” an issue produced in collaboration with Magnum Foundation and informed by their ongoing Counter Histories grant initiative, featuring artists from around the world who tell new stories about how the past informs the present. In “Counter Histories,” a broad range of artists working in both archival research and original photography question dominant historical narratives and reassemble layered and open-ended portrayals of place, culture, and community.
In Hong Kong, Billy H.C. Kwok collaborates with a grieving mother desperately searching for her son. In Nepal, Prasiit Sthapit investigates the complex role of musicians in the country’s Maoist insurrection. Alice Proujansky looks at her parents’ past as New Left activists in the United States, while Christopher Gregory-Rivera examines how Puerto Rican independence activists were surveilled for decades. And, in the years before Poland ousted a right-wing government last fall, Agata Szymanska-Medina exposed how a nationalist party worked steadily to undermine an independent judiciary.
For these artists, family and community are as essential as politics and memory. Stories of migration from Haiti to Philadelphia inspire Naomieh Jovin’s vibrant collages honoring her elders. Cédrine Scheidig engages with legacies of the Black diaspora, tracing her relationship to Afro-Caribbean history and community in French Guiana. In the Eastern Cape of South Africa, Lindokuhle Sobekwa reflects on the movement of Black migrant labor and builds what he describes as a “family tree” of the country. And Abdo Shanan, working in Algeria, looks at how the country’s independence activists have dominated public iconography, and in response builds a speculative archive for his own generation that recognizes ordinary citizens.
Issue 254
