Remembered Once Again

At first glance the week's cultural news has nothing in common; a festival in Venice, the unlived life of a teenager imagined 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, and at the end 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 damaged in the war, 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 on the first day of sale. 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. Instead it rebuilds the years that would have been his had he 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 also painted skyscrapers, bridges and buildings. Those works were scattered among museums but never drew the attention they deserved. Now the Detroit Institute of Arts has pulled her skyscrapers out from all those flowers and, for the first time, put them on view together.

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 of the entire African continent opened under the title Shifting the Center; a program that, in the words of its organizers, sets out to see African architecture not from outside and through the eyes of others, but from within and in its own language. In São Paulo, the Museum of Art is rewriting the art history of its continent with the exhibition cycle Latin American Histories, with artists whose names, until 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: stories told from one generation to the next, which now, for the first time in the form of a novel, have won the major literary prize of a country that until recently paid this subject little attention.

All of these are signs of the times. An era in which trust in a single official narrative has faded, and artists, in East and West and North and South, have turned to details, forgotten memories and personal experience. Literature and art are the mirror of our history and culture, wherever on this earth we happen to be. Perhaps the main question of art today is no longer what we should show, but what, until now, we have failed to see.