Outside the Frame, Finally Seen

At first glance the week's cultural news has nothing in common; a festival in Venice, an old case reopened in Chicago, an exhibition in Detroit of a painter we thought we knew, tapes that sat in a closet for sixty years, and the first architecture biennale of the whole African continent in Nairobi. But set the pieces side by side and one question appears. How does art today tell the stories that were always left outside the official frame?

In Venice, Mohsen Gharaei's Falling House brought Laleh Marzban the Orizzonti award for best actress. The film takes its camera inside a single house, where power, fear and resistance show in the smallest daily gestures. On stage, in Persian, Marzban gave her prize to the women of her country. A story that did not fit the official frame of her country's national media left the house, reached Italy, and won.

The same week, in Tehran, the restorers of Golestan Palace were collecting and coding broken pieces of wood and tile to set them back in place; and in London the British Museum had brought the Bayeux Tapestry from France to England for the first time in nearly a thousand years, with tickets through December gone in hours. The East was mending what had been broken and the West was celebrating what had survived. It is the same work, keeping memory; only the circumstances differ.

At Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Photography, If Emmett Till Lived does not repeat the image of the fourteen-year-old's death in 1955. It builds instead the years he might have lived; an imagined album of work, school and ordinary days for a man denied the chance to live them. Here art steps away from the familiar image of death and becomes a tribute to an unlived life.

In Detroit, a new exhibition of Georgia O'Keeffe unsettles the picture we carry of her. In collective memory she is flowers and the New Mexico desert, yet for decades she painted skyscrapers, bridges and buildings. The works were always there; they were simply out of sight behind the more famous ones. Now, for whatever reason, her skyscrapers have been pulled out from all those flowers. What are they meant to say?

The same happened to John Coltrane. More than sixty hours of his playing in nightclubs between 1960 and 1964, recorded by a fellow musician for himself, are emerging in the year of his centenary. What no one planned to keep is now a record of a period when the artist was changing his language, and in that other language it tells an era from another point of view.

If the North of the world spent this week recovering its archives, the South spent it writing an archive it never had. In Nairobi, the first architecture biennale for the whole of Africa was held under the title Shifting the Center; a program meant, in its organizers' words, to see African architecture not from outside and through others' eyes but from within and in its own language. In Sao Paulo, the museum of art is rewriting the art history of its continent in a series called Latin American Histories, with artists who a few years ago appeared in no official history at all. And in Australia the novel of the year is a book drawn from the oral history of the Yolngu people, a history that has left centuries of neglect behind it; stories told from one generation to the next, now for the first time in the form of a novel, taking the top literary prize of a country that until recently did not write those people into its own history.

None of this is a new movement; it is a sign of the times. A period in which trust in the single official story has thinned, and artists, East and West, North and South, have gone looking for details, forgotten memories and personal experience. Literature and art are the mirror of our cultural history, wherever on earth we happen to be. Perhaps the main quest