From the late 1980s onwards, artists and intellectuals from different geographical locations railed against certain promises of emancipation that concealed new dynamics of political and economic control exerted by countries from the geopolitical North, underscoring how traditional colonialism had been transformed into an expansion of markets in a world shaped by growing economic liberalism.   

This context led to urgent debates around cultural identity and material realities on the fringes to replace the patriotic idealism in processes of independence and narratives around the post-colonial nation as an inclusive totality of all lives, bodies and subjectivities living inside its borders. Those others, outside the European-US axis, started to seek their own spaces of representation and emergence inside this new and hostile world order — in parallel, post-colonial theories and otherness tentatively penetrated academia.  

This intellectual and political nexus would be reflected, in 1989, in initiatives such as the Third Havana Biennial in Cuba, which showed a global image of art — particularly from so-called Third World countries or those undergoing development — from a country outside the geopolitical North smarting from the fall of the socialist bloc in Eastern Europe. Particularly illuminating was the contrast between this exhibition and another held the same year: Magiciens de la terre, which, organised by the Centre Pompidou in Paris, combined “Westernised” artists with “non-Westernised” artists, yet without managing to transcend an exoticising image of decolonised territories.

Thus, the post-colonial discourse voiced from the former colonial country kept an imaginary alive that evoked past dynamics of rule over other territories, while artists active in locations hitherto distanced from the international art system (Asia-Pacific, Africa and Latin America) turned their attentions to new forms of cultural resistance and demonstrated a disillusionment with frustrated democratisation processes.