An unnamed woman--a mother--struggles to survive in the face of state repression, neighborhood surveillance, extreme weather, and familial control. Alienation and dire frustration mount as an unnamed woman--a mother--struggles to survive in the face of state repression, neighborhood surveillance, extreme weather, and familial control. Told through one side of an epistolary exchange, Custody of the Eyes (Los Vigilantes) presents letters bookended by dense ramblings by the mother's son, who struggles to speak and write and spends most of his days in lockdown rearranging his "vessels," hysterically laughing, drooling, writhing, and withdrawing--a state that will ultimately consume his mother as well. This is a story that explores how power is enacted on and through the body--the physical, the social, and the political. Custody of the Eyes reconfirms the essential, constitutive nature of language and expression in power and freedom.
An attempt to feel and investigate the quality of time, with references to Jonathan Crary, Paul B. Preciado, Charles Baudelaire, and Walter Benjamin. "This book could have been called The Contemporary Condition of Sleeping and Reading in the Heart of (and in Spite of) the Logosphere and Various Media Streams, but frankly, I Can't Sleep sounds better, plus it's true."--Lionel Ruffel The diaristic form of I Can't Sleep is an attempt to feel and investigate the quality of time, making reference to Jonathan Crary, Bernard Stiegler, Yves Citton, Paul B. Preciado, Charles Baudelaire, and above all Walter Benjamin. Written in a style that borrows not from classical forms of theory or prose, but operates in between fiction and nonfiction to investigate the very concept of the contemporary, I Can't Sleep uses a quite old but often renewed method--in this sense a very contemporary one--consisting of starting from one's own personal situation.
Alternative forms of curatorial and institutional work suitable to our novel conditions, when the relationship between physical and online work must be revised. In our current era of global pandemic and violent political upheaval, the question must be asked: What is our future and whose voices will announce it? These can only be situated voices, each with its own body and space, formed through dialogue within their own communities and in reaction and resistance to dominant discourses. Museum director, curator, and writer Zdenka Badovinac argues that these situated voices of people, artworks, and exhibitions, rooted in the local, can bring incisive, productive change. The call of these voices, in rethinking art, curation, and institutions, is the subject of this powerful essay.
A tribute to Elisabeth Wild's kaleidoscopic and vibrant collages, with contributions that frame the importance of this singular artist's work and life. This beautifully designed monograph exhibits Elisabeth Wild's kaleidoscopic and vibrant collages. Using cutouts of commercial imagery from glossy magazines, Wild composes a dimensionless reality that is witty yet menacing, ancient yet immortal. Imagining figures that are structural and anatomical, her work presents a shimmering dream logic. Wooden totems and stone altars, woven rugs, and precious stones are the cosmic architectural inhabitants that unveil the artist's fantasies. Along with Wild's collages, this volume includes contributions by poet Negma Coy, curator Adam Szymczyk, art educator and writer Barbara Casavecchia, art historian and critic Noit Banai, and gallerist Karolina Dankow of Karma International, all which frame the importance of this singular artist's work and life. Born in Austria, Elisabeth Wild (1922-2020) fled to Argentina during WWII with her parents. In 1962 the family escaped the regime of Juan Peron and found a new home in Basel, Switzerland. Wild opened an antique shop at St. Johannstor which became the outlet for her creativity at the time and also supported her and her family financially. Until her death at the age of 98, Wild was carefully crafting her light-hearted, joyous abstract worlds walking the line between construction and deconstruction. Alongside her daughter, Vivian Suter, Wild has exhibited at Kunsthalle Basel, documenta 14, and the Powerplant in Toronto.
A conversation about design, filmmaking, Afrofuturism, world-building, and other topics with Hannah Beachler, Academy-Award-winning production designer of Black Panther. Hannah Beachler is known as an award-winning production designer, but she tells an audience that she considers herself to be more of a story designer. As film stills and concept art from a few of those stories--Moonlight, Miles Ahead, Creed, Lemonade, and Black Panther--flash across a screen, Beachler engages in a meandering conversation with Jacqueline Stewart and Toni L. Griffin about set building and curation, urban design, location scouting, Afrofuturism, fictional histories, and Black feminist narratives, and illustrates her role: a designer behind on-screen tableaux that provide not only visual feasts of artistry and imagination, but also intimate spaces of emotion, humanity, and constructed memory.
An in-depth focus on artist and filmmaker Emilija Skarnulyte's Sirenomelia, a cosmic portrait of one of mankind's oldest mythic creatures--the mermaid. A mermaid dives through the Cold War ruins of nuclear submarine tunnels above the Arctic Circle in this in-depth focus on Sirenomelia by artist and filmmaker Emilija Skarnulyte, a poetic and scientific meditation on the artist's iconic cinematic installation exploring post-human mythologies, future archaeology, and the invisible structures that enfold us, from the cosmic and geologic to the ecological and political. With essays, interviews, and excerpts from Andrew Berardini, Roland Penrose, Nadim Samman, and Alison Sperling. Set in far-northern territories where cold, Arctic waters meet rocky escarpments on which radio telescopes record fast-traveling quasar waves, Sirenomelia links humans, nature, and machines and posits possible post-human mythologies. Shot in an abandoned Cold-War submarine base in Olavsvern, Norway, Sirenomelia is a cosmic portrait of one of mankind's oldest mythic creatures--the mermaid. The artist, performing as a siren, swims through the decrepit NATO facility while cosmic signals and white noise traverse the entirety of space, reaching its farthest corners, beyond human impact.
Tracing the relation between fascism and settler colonialism.In the aftermath of World War II, the recently liberated nations in Europe were swift to resume colonial oppression abroad. On May 8, 1945, the day victory was celebrated by the Allies, the French police massacred hundreds of townspeople in Sétif, leading the French editor Claude Bourdet to ask, "Are we the Gestapo in Algeria?"In Europe, what is called "fascism," poet Aimé Césaire argued in his famous essay "Discourse on Colonialism," is just colonial violence finding its way back home. In White West, contributors challenge the Eurocentrism that undergirds the current concept of fascism, tackling the under-theorized relation between settler colonialism and National Socialism via the "proto-totalitarian" scene of colonial expansion and its racialized concept of personhood, in order to counter the antipolitical nature of a concept such as the West, and the resurgence of fascist doctrines this notion engenders.ContributorsNorman Ajari, Florian Cramer, Angela Dimitrakaki, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Quinsy Gario, Larne Abse Gogarty, Rose-Anne Gush, Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Sven Lütticken, Olivier Marboeuf, Rijin Sahakian, Nikhil Pal Singh, Françoise Vergès, Marina Vishmidt, Giovanna Zapperi
Olaf Holzapfel's work proves the indissoluble connection between human settlement, technique, and abstraction. Elementary space-generating methods like plaiting, weaving, and latticing--age-old settler techniques--stem from natural linear entities. These techniques are exceptional in that they don't differentiate between technique or machine, or whether a structure is purely functional, for living, or auxiliary. Holzapfel scrutinizes the perception and presence of material within space and whether an image discourse can exist without these physical modules. For him the landscape, and the material it contains, is more than a symbol that fixes identity; rather, it becomes a transmitter.Holzapfel's exhibition at the Lindenau-Museum Altenburg, on occasion of being awarded the Gerhard-Altenbourg Prize 2014, explores the interstices between craft and art, and consequently, between orality and literacy. Much of his work presented in this catalogue--framework installations, hay images, and straw images are displayed in this book--was made together with farmers and craftspeople; by transforming age-old handiwork into contemporary art, Holzapfel unsettles the division between nature and culture, and tradition and modernity.
Turning Inward comprises a selection of texts by international artists, critics, and curators, which aims to renegotiate the relationship between centers and peripheries in contemporary art worlds. In the context of advanced globalization, the distributed agency of networked power structures can hardly be localized any longer in geographical terms. Yet, if we are to turn our attention away from geographical--that is, horizontal--relations, we can conceive of the central and peripheral as vertical phenomena that can coexist spatially in the shapes of social constructions, genealogies, or epistemic formations. Against this backdrop Turning Inward provides a heterogeneous range of critical reflections upon contemporary art and its modes of production, distribution, and consumption. Reaching far beyond the spatial metaphor, the positions assembled in this volume touch on fields such as art history, philosophy, economics, gender studies, urbanism, language, and education.ContributorsJohn Beeson, Svetlana Boym, Marta Dziewanska, Philipp Ekardt, Felix Ensslin, Orit Gat, David Joselit, William Kherbek, John Miller, Reza Negarestani, Matteo Pasquinelli, Dieter Roelstraete
This book is published on occasion of Ulrike Grossarth's eponymous retrospective at the Generali Foundation in Vienna. Both the book and the exhibition trace the evolution of Gossarth's practice, with a particular emphasis on her training as a dancer in the 1970s, to draw connections between the early years with her sculptural settings and actions and her most recent work, which engages with history more generally. In her contributing essay, Ulrike Gossarth states that the title--Were I Made of Matter, I Would Color--is a counter-model to the fundamental Descartian formula "I think therefore I am," a position which exists between consciousness and disembodiment, in a state of incompleteness. Rainer Borgemeister discusses the artist's actions from 1978 to 1987, which were preceded by her critical engagement with modern dance. Further contributions from Mieke Bal, Michael Glasmeier, and Elliot R. Wolfson discuss Grossarth's practice in relation to history, the body, and polymorphism.Copublished with the Generali Foundation, ViennaContributorsMieke Bal, Rainer Borgemeister, Sabine Folie, Michael Glasmeier, Ulrike Grossarth, Dietrich Karner, Elliot R. Wolfson
What makes crime stories fascinating is that the divisions between the criminal, the victims, and the audience are constantly blurred: we are all potential victims and could perhaps become criminals ourselves.While the exhibition "The Crime Was Almost Perfect" at the Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art in Rotterdam functioned more as a "space for experimentation," this publication aims to investigate not only detective fiction but the more theoretical, philosophical, and aesthetic aspects of the genre. Published following the closing of the exhibition, this catalogue should be considered a continuation of the project, as a resource in itself, rather than simply documentation or commentary.Taking a more literary approach to the theme, the publication includes commissioned fictive works and three relevant theoretical essays. The essays were chosen, not only to address the participating artists' practices or artworks, but to provide analysis of some of the issues raised in the exhibition. The publication includes Tom Morton's story "The Thick End" and Astrid Trotzig's "threat letters," as well as essays by Michael Zinganel and Alexandra Midal, and Karl Marx's "The Productivity of Crime."This book is published on the occasion of the group exhibition "The Crime Was Almost Perfect," curated by Cristina Ricupero at Witte de With, Rotterdam, January 24-April 27, 2014. Copublished with Witte de With ContributorsAlexandra Midal, Tom Morton, Cristina Ricupero, Astrid Trotzig, Michael Zinganel
The conviction that an arts school can be a pedagogical nexus dedicated to the transmission of knowledge, experimentation, and research. If you immerse yourself at Lake Zurich, a hedge-fund office, a botanical garden, or a land-art piece built on ruins, is it possible to discern an energy particular to art? Art as a form of energy capable of encompassing the whole of life, more powerful than finance and its algorithms? Art as science or speculative fiction? We dwell in castles with Schrödinger's cat until we give form to the formless: molecules and failed soldiers, art spaces previously owned by the mafia. We share tips about the tricks of the trade--only to intervene, emancipate, culminate, collapse, and (re)emerge. Let us look everywhere for ideas, and let us be gloriously out of touch: may we grow our capacity and courage to love. Catastrophism, miniskirt, particle. This book arises from the activities of the MA Fine Arts program at the Zurich University of the Arts in 2019. It reflects the conviction that an arts school can be a pedagogical nexus dedicated to the transmission of knowledge, experimentation, and research as much as a locus for civic and critical debate and exhibition, involved in its community, locally and globally.
The catalog Sharon Lockhart Noa Eshkol accompanies the eponymous exhibition at TBA21--Augarten in Vienna by Sharon Lockhart (November 23, 2012-February 24, 2013) which consists of a complex installation of videos, photographs, and archival material, composing a subtle and sensuous portrait of the Israeli choreographer, dancer, researcher, and textile artist Noa Eshkol (1924-2007). The book features nine essays, installation photographs of the works on show, film stills, archival material from the Noa Eshkol Foundation (notations, journals, notes), and wall carpets by Noa Eshkol.ContributorsWalead Beshty, Ramsay Burt, Ifat Finkelman, Martina Leeker, Steve Paxton, Howard Singerman, Noémie Solomon, Eva Wilson, Daniela Zyman
A massive anthology of texts, visual material, and research on TBA21's commissions and the foundation's vast collection of over 700 artworks. "What survives after the artwork?" asks curator and researcher Natasha Ginwala in one of the essays in Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary: The Commissions Book, a new and comprehensive publication by the art foundation Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary (TBA21), founded by Francesca Thyssen-Bornemisza in Vienna, Austria, in 2002. "The artwork is not just the thing in itself, but also the metaphysical infrastructure and unfinished relationships that produce it," Ginwala writes. In that sense, this anthology of texts, visual material, and research on TBA21's commissions and the foundation's vast collection of over 700 artworks serves as vivid testimony to the processes and relationships that enabled them. In over 1,300 pages The Commissions Book engages with more than 100 works of art, proposing a speculative topography that organizes and weaves together sequences of potential narratives and interrogations along with close examinations of different works of art and a collective archive of images. The stories embedded in these works, as well as in TBA21 and TBA21-Academy's practice--an itinerant site of transdisciplinary research and cultural production engaging with the oceans--is a story of making new connections, or rather creating interconnections. Bringing together visual and written material from TBA21's commissioning practice and vast history of exhibitions and live events, The Commissions Book also goes beyond the foundation's archives to present new works and commissions by Cecilia Bengolea, Claudia Comte, SUPERFLEX, and Territorial Agency, amongst many others. New essays by Natasha Ginwala's and such transdisciplinary feminist thinkers as Astrida Neimanis and Eva Hayward transcend individual artistic positions and ask questions that lie at the core of TBA21's program.
An analysis of the contexts in which curating takes place: why curate art these days and in the name of which interests? If we ask where the curating of art occurs these days--in which places, which kinds of place, and how--apparent answers immediately appear: everywhere, expanding as if to ubiquity. Yet at the same time, we sense, with fragile purpose. In this, his newest book, Terry Smith explores the contemporary contexts of curating, looking for less apparent answers. It will map the dimensions of the visual arts exhibitionary complex, including its dialectical dance between institutionalization and deinstitutionalization; the persistence of professional classifications of curatorship; the given and changing categories of art exhibitions; the increasing variety of curatorial styles; the underthinking about publics; and (undistracted by curationism) the changing roles of art making and exhibiting art within an exhibitory iconomy that is at once viral and consumptive. A mapping of this kind might help us towards some answers to the more important questions: why curate art these days and in the name of which interests?
The first monograph on artist and filmmaker Leslie Thornton: essential, foundational scholarship on her influential work in film and video. Produced on the occasion of a major solo exhibition of Leslie Thornton at the MIT List Visual Arts Center, as well as a recent solo exhibition at Kunstverein Nurnberg, this richly illustrated volume will be the first monograph on this important artist and filmmaker, and offers essential, foundational scholarship on Thornton's influential work in film and video. Thornton's early encounters with experimental, structuralist, and cinéma vérité traditions fueled her iconoclastic take on the moving image and gave shape to her practice of weaving together her own footage and voice with archival film and audio. In part through her forceful and dynamic use of sound, Thornton exposes the limits of language and vision in her works, while acknowledging the ways that language and vision nevertheless remain central to scientific discourse and narrative in general. Her work consistently interrogates modes of representation and the violence of looking, pushing beyond critiques of the gaze to consider biases in perception, or the way voice and sound can undermine an otherwise dominant visual narrative. Copublished with MIT List Visual Arts Center and Kunstverein Nürnberg
The object as obstacle or obstruction, and of the artwork as an aesthetic and political objection.Forms of Abstraction engages with abstraction not as a formal option in art, or as an airy theoretical speculation, but as an operational force that has redesigned our world, and continues to do so. What Alfred Sohn-Rethel has called the "real abstraction" of value-form molds the world, and does so in conjunction with the real abstractions of the law and of technoscience. In this first volume, Objections, Sven Lütticken takes his cue from the Latin root of object, obiectum--which refers to something put before the subject, something thrown in one's way--pursuing this sense of the object as obstacle or obstruction, and of the artwork as an aesthetic and political objection. Lütticken sees artists engaging with materiality and value, with subatomic particles and radiation as well as with the objectification of human and nonhuman organisms. Along the way, we encounter theoretical objects such as the fetish, the plaster cast, the patented bacteria, the buried radioactive container, and the contemporary artwork itself. Lütticken analyzes contemporary art as a set of aesthetic practices revolving around problematic and questionable objects that can act as productive objections.Among the artists discussed are Agency, Kader Attia, Stanley Brouwn, Antje Ehmann and Harun Farocki, Andrea Fraser, Hans Haacke, Carsten Höller and Rosemarie Trockel, Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Sean Snyder, and Jonas Staal.
Monday Begins on Saturday is the title of a fantasy novel from the 1960s about a magical research institute in the Soviet Union, written by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. It is also the title of the first edition of Bergen Assembly, a new triennial of contemporary art. The project--which takes the form of an exhibition and this book--imagines a contemporary rewriting of the novel as an archipelago of fictitious research institutes. Through an aggregate narrative of essays, works of fiction, artworks, heterogeneous research materials, and curatorial notes, it delves into the idea that contemporary "artistic research" may be the place where the dialectical materialist magic of Monday Begins on Saturday has its afterlife.ContributorsJan Verwoert, Our Literal Speed, Boris Groys, Pavel Pepperstein, Renata Salecl, Benedict Seymour, Konstanze Schmitt, Pelin Tan and Anton Vidokle, Ritwik Ghatak, Aleksandr Rodchenko, Clemens von Wedemeyer, Stephan Dillemuth, Roee Rosen, Christian von Borries, Keti Chukhrov, Josef Dabernig, Olga Chernysheva, Wladyslaw Strzemiński, Carlfriedrich Claus et al.
Texts and artistic contributions that respond to questions of feminism, authorship, sexuality, and empowerment. Where are the tiny revolts? is the first book in a new annual series published by CCA Wattis Institute, a contemporary art center and research institute in San Francisco. Each book in the series is driven by a central question: what are we learning from artists today? Unconnected to an exhibition program, Where are the tiny revolts? is rooted in the Wattis's artist-driven research institute. It is a place to explore and share some of the texts and visual work that emerge over the course of an entire year of discussions and public programs. Instead of providing documentation of projects with artists, Where are the tiny revolts? offers other ideas, voices, and references generated by conversations with and about artists. The first book in the series, informed by themes related to the work of Dodie Bellamy, revolves around questions related to contemporary forms of feminism and sexualities, the rebirth of the author, and ways in which vulnerability, perversion, vulgarity, and self-exposure can be forms of empowerment. The texts cover a broad array of styles, including memoir, theoretical essay, art historical analysis, poetry, and fiction. The visual elements are equally diverse, ranging from photographs to collage to drawing.
Amazonia as a place, a subject, a point of view, and a socio-ecological world. Amazonia: Anthology as Cosmology is devoted to Amazonia, its peoples, allies, and nonhuman spirits, and their myriad material and immaterial practices, from certain cosmopolitics and visual languages to past and present forms of resistance. In all their various lines (and circles) of ecological and epistemological thought, the artists, elders, writers, theorists, shamans, curators, poets, and activists whose ideas, images, and struggles compose this book, are concerned with Amazonia as both a place and a point of view. Through the weaving of voices, myths, ancestors, and territories, and all their radical subjectivities, we understand language in this anthology in an extended sense: as testimony, textile, painting, river, forest, animal, ancestor, song, spirit, and sacred medicine. Amazonia: Anthology as Cosmology inquires into decolonial feminisms and Indigenous temporalities, externalized memory and erasure, sacred plants in the shadow of pandemic corporate-state extractivism and systemic violence, the activist possibilities of the mythic imagination, and the common visual matrices of the Amazonian universe. The book also weighs the Western imaginary of the Amazon, both its colonial roots in racial capitalism and its corporate, technological, paternalistic present. Centered, however, is Amazonia itself, in all its many and numinous worlds and languages--visual, oral, botanical, ancestral, cosmological--by which it becomes narrated, passed on, and then narrated again. ContributorsMaria Thereza Alves, Christian Bendayan, Rita Carelli, Felipe Castelblanco, Carolina Caycedo, Hernando Chindoy Chindoy, Tiffany Higgins, Márcia Wayna Kambeba, knowbotique, Davi Kopenawa, Ailton Krenak, Renata Machado, MaurÃcio Meirelles, Harry Pinedo, AnÃbal Quijano, Djamila Ribeiro, Pamela Rosenkranz, Abel RodrÃguez, Maria Belén Saéz de Ibarra, Barbara Santos, Paulo Tavares, Daiara Tukano, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro
In recent years, it has been possible to discern a growing interest in diagrams. The exhibition Schaubilder (Diagrams) explores how these developments affect the worlds of images in contemporary art. This publication presents ten artists who deal with diagrammatic forms in their work. The additional text contributions from the perspectives of art theory, philosophy, and information design encourage an ongoing discussion of the theme.Copublished with Bielefelder KunstvereinContributorsNicolas Bourquin, Ruth Buchanan, Gerhard Dirmoser, Nikolaus Gansterer, Philipp Hamann, Luis Jacob, Eva Kotátková, Susanne Leeb, Michael Najjar, Alexandre Singh, Marcus Steinweg, Niloufar Tajeri, Thomas Thiel, Jorinde Voigt, Kirsten Wagner
A look, through the work of Ilona Németh, at the transitioning social and economic infrastructure of Eastern Europe. Eastern Sugar was the name chosen by Générale Sucrière and Tate & Lyle for their joint venture to acquire sugar factories across Central Europe after the fall of communism in 1989. In the mid-2000s, the Franco-British consortium cashed in its investment to take advantage of a European Union compensation scheme and permanently shut down its sites. This book takes as its starting point artist Ilona Németh's extensive research into the history of sugar production in the region, from its beginnings in the early nineteenth century, when northern sugar beet emerged as a competitor to southern sugar cane, to the social impact of the rapid decline of the industry in the era of peak globalization. The fate of Eastern Sugar is explored as a microcosm of the mechanisms of postcommunist transition across Central Europe from the opportunism of financial speculators to the endemic corruption of privatization, posing the question of whether neoliberal marketization was the only viable exit strategy from state socialism. Contributions dealing with the social and environmental legacies of Caribbean sugar plantations situate the sugar histories of Eastern Europe within the spread of a monocultural system based on (neo)colonial extractivism. Through critical texts, conversations, and artistic interventions, Ilona Németh: Eastern Sugar restores complexity to the history of the rapid decline of the Slovak sugar industry, and by extension the wider social and economic infrastructure of transition in Central Europe, while at the same time opening up planetary trajectories for postcapitalist alternatives. ContributorsEdit András, Fedor Blasčák and Rado Baťo, Johanna Bockman, Kathrin Böhm, Anetta Mona Chișa, Cooking Sections, Annalee Davis, Maja and Reuben Fowkes, Ferenc Gróf, Dusan JanÃček, Edit Molnár, Ilona Németh, Michael Niblett, Raj Patel and Jason W. Moore, Joanna Sokolowska, Imre Szeman, Raluca Voinea copublished with Slovak National Gallery, Bratislava
Jos de Gruyter & Harald Thys's art casts a merciless perspective on reality. Through their numerous artistic approaches--including installations, video, drawing, sculpture, performance, and photographs--the artist duo visualize their imaginings of the parallel world inherent within the modern human psyche, along with how it manifests itself in the everyday aspects of life and civic conformity. Everything from work, leisure, and family, to social class, masculinity, and marginalization are envisaged through convening an unlikely cast of nonprofessional actors, family members, friends, beards, objects, and mannequins alike, often in banal, homespun settings rife with awkward power dynamics. This book accompanies their major exhibition at M HKA of the same title--the term they use for their particular conception of the parallel world. Narratives and criticism by Michael Van den Abeele, Nav Haq, Jennifer Krasinksi, Dieter Roelstraete, and artist Peter Wächtler are presented along with photos, drawings, and text illustrating the unsteady barriers and tense contact between "Optimundus" and the real world. Copublished with M HKA and Kunsthalle Wien
Slow Narration Moving Still takes Florian Zeyfang's 2009 solo exhibition at the Bildmuseet in Umeå as its starting point and ends with the artist's newest work shown at Künstlerhaus Stuttgart and KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin. The arrested film, the silent video still, the rhythm of the slide projector--Zeyfang's videos, slideshows, and installations explore a politics of form. Along the lines laid out by experimental film, the works explore, in the language of a "minor medium," the possibilities of minimal narratives.But this publication is more than a monograph. On the occasion of the 2009 exhibition, Anselm Franke and Marc Glöde prepared lectures on the perception of slides in art, Walter Benjamin's complex notions of the "dialectic image" and the "image sphere," and the horizon as the border of visual operation. For this volume they developed these ideas further into subjective analyses of artistic narration. Ariane Müller tosses a stone in a lake and Adnan Yildiz talks with Zeyfang about image, time, and the narrating archive. An interview by Bildmuseet's director Katarina Pierre runs through the publication, and an extensive index translates the concept of Zeyfang's films into the printed format.Copublished with Bildmuseet, Academy of Fine Arts, Umeå universitet, and Künstlerhaus StuttgartContributorsAriane Müller, Marc Glöde, and Anselm Franke; interviews by Katarina Pierre and Adnan Yildiz
Can practice-led research in the arts develop legal frameworks for understanding the future of digital technologies and their relationship to airspace? Topologies of Air and Lesions in the Landscape are two major bodies of work by Shona Illingworth. Informed by the artist's long-term investigations into individual and societal amnesia, these projects critically examine the devastating psychological and environmental impacts of military, industrial, and corporate transformations of airspace and outer space. Employing interdisciplinary research and collaborative processes, Illingworth's practice uses creative methodologies to visualize and interrogate this proliferating exploitation of airspace. Through the development of a proposed new human right, Topologies of Air and Lesions in the Landscape connect diverse cosmologies, knowledges, and lived experiences to counter the colonization of the sky and protect individuals, communities, and ecologies from ever-increasing threats from above. ContributorsCaterina Albano, Amin Alsaden, Jill Bennett, Giuliana Bruno, Martin A. Conway, Anthony Downey, Conor Gearty, Derek Gregory, Nick Grief, Andrew Hoskins, Catherine Loveday, Issie Macphail, William Merrin, Renata Salecl, Gabriele Schwab, Gaëtane Verna
Once described as "Italy gone Marxist," Georgia, located in both an advantageous and vulnerable geopolitical position between the Black Sea, Russia, Central Asia, and the Middle East, enjoys a Mediterranean climate and viniculture in combination with a community-oriented and self-determined spirit. Its informal, vernacular, and palimpsestic architecture--reflected in the stunning former Ministry of Highways erected in 1975--reveals the uncanny anticipatory and progressive potential of a place where the past is neither monumentalized nor destroyed, but built upon. Taking the exhibition "Frozen Moments: Architecture Speaks Back" (2010) as its starting point, this guidebook maps the social, urban, and art discourses of the country's post-Soviet years as seen from its hilly capital of Tbilisi. The publication accompanies the exhibition of the Georgian Pavilion at the 55th International Art Exhibition--la Biennale di Venezia titled "Kamikaze Loggia," curated by Joanna Warsza. Copublished by the Other Space Foundation and Casco--Office for Art, Design and Theory ContributorsEi Arakawa, Ruben Arevshatyan, Levan Asabashvili, Bouillon Group, George Chakhava, Thea Djordjadze, Didier Faustino, Yona Friedman, Nana Kipiani, Nikoloz Lutidze, Marion von Osten, Nini Palavandishvili, Gela Patashuri, Lali Pertenava, Marjetica Potrč, Richard Reynolds, Slavs and Tatars, Gio Sumbadze, Sophia Tabatadze, Ãric Troussicot, Jan Verwoert, Aleksandra Wasilkowska, et al.
A singularly authoritative--yet also anti-authoritative--gathering of a life's work in art, education and activism.For more than half a century, the artist Luis Camnitzer has been concerned with the same things. The essays gathered in this book outline a radically democratic and frequently provocative vision of both art and education. In the first essay, written in 1960, Camnitzer proposes curricular change of the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes in Uruguay, part of a collective effort to bring the school up to the ideal level Camnitzer and fellow artists, students, and educators desired. And in the final essay Camnitzer sums up what he would want an art school to be if he applied to one today--suggesting (with typical dry wit) that the first effort to improve art education may not have succeeded. Working across such mediums as printmaking, sculpture, language, and installations, Camnitzer's work investigates how power is exercised and can be challenged in society. An influential teacher, over the six decades covered by this volume, he has interrogated the power structures inherent to the practice of art at the same time as he explores its liberating potential. Many of these texts are published here for the first time. The book offers a singularly authoritative--yet also anti-authoritative--gathering of a life's work in art, education and activism.
An examination of the use of modernism in the twentieth-century battle for US hegemony, through the activities of the CIA-funded Congress for Cultural Freedom.Parapolitics confronts the contemporary fate of intellectual autonomy and artistic freedom by revisiting the use of modernism in the twentieth-century battle for US hegemony. It builds on a major exhibition at Haus der Kulturen der Welt (2017-18) that took as its starting point the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF)--an organization covertly funded by the Central Intelligence Agency in order to steer the Left away from its remaining commitment to communism. Paying particular attention to CCF activities in the non-European world during a period of decolonization and the Civil Rights Movement, Parapolitics assembles archival documentation from five continents alongside a selection of historical artworks to explore the context in which artists negotiated the framing and meaning of their work. A rich reference book for future researchers and everybody interested in the legacy of modernism, the publication also presents more than thirty newly commissioned contributions by contemporary artists and scholars.
Martin Beck's exhibition "Panel 2--'Nothing better than a touch of ecology and catastrophe to unite the social classes...'" draws on the events of the 1970 International Design Conference in Aspen (IDCA) and the development of the Aspen Movie Map to form a visual environment that reflects the interrelations between art, architecture, design, ecology, and social movements. The 1970 IDCA marked a turning point in design thinking. The conference's theme, "Environment by Design," brought together venerable figures of modern design in the United States, including Eliot Noyes, George Nelson, and Saul Bass; environmental collectives and activist architects from Berkeley such as the Environmental Action Group, Sim Van der Ryn, and Ant Farm; as well as a group of French designers and sociologists, among them Jean Aubert, Lionel Schein, and Jean Baudrillard. The conference quickly escalated into a site of unresolvable conflict about communication formats and the potential role of design for environmental practices in a rapidly changing society. The ensuing decade heralded the development of an interactive navigation system, which used the same Colorado resort town as its test site. The Aspen Movie Map--initiated by MIT's Architecture Machine Group (the predecessor to the Media Lab) and partially funded by the US Department of Defense--is an image-based surrogate travel system using footage filmed in Aspen. Meant to prepare users for quick orientation in places they have never been to, the Aspen Movie Map was a seminal prototype for today's military and consumer navigation systems. The Aspen Complex documents two versions of Beck's exhibition--at London's Gasworks and Columbia University's Arthur Ross Architecture Gallery--and brings together yet unpublished archival material and new research on the 1970 IDCA and the Aspen Movie Map.
A prominent critic and theorist considers the criteria of value for collecting and storing works of art. In modernity, the museum was the institution that made art accessible to the broader public. An artwork was collected if it was considered beautiful, passionate, engaged, or critical--and primarily if it was deemed historically relevant. But today, with the total availability and saturation of images, the museum has lost its privileged status as the exclusive place for the display of art. In our age of digital media, how does a particular artwork get selected for a museum collection? Which symbolic criteria must this artwork satisfy for it to obtain value? And in what ways does the institution of the museum remain relevant? Logic of the Collection is framed by Boris Groys's original and provocative proposition: an artwork is considered historically relevant if it fits the logic of the museum collection. In these critical essays, the distinguished philosopher and theorist of art and media analyzes the relationship between the logic of the collection and various modern ideologies. He reflects on the explosion of art production and distribution through the ascendency of digital media as well as the ways in which the accumulated artworks will be collected and preserved in the future, as the potential limits of public and private collections are reached.
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