Böcker utgivna av Sternberg Press

A supplement to exhibitions held at Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach, and Muzeum Sztuki, Lódz, this book centers around the apple as an art object and as a case study in biodiver sity under threat. Developed over the course of an ongoing, five-year correspondence between artist Antje Majewski and the Polish conceptual artist Pawel Freisler, the project explores the idea of diversity in all of its possible meanings and manifestations, tying together collaborative and associatively connected works by Majewski and Agnieszka Polska, Freisler, Piotr Zycienski, and Jimmie Durham in a museum exhibition dealing with the apple.The remarkable range of ornaments in Freisler's collection of carved, dried apples is echoed in the diverse colors and shapes found in Majewski's paintings of different apple varieties, while her film The Freedom of Apples traces the fruit's genetic reduction to a handful of commercially profitable varieties, an undertaking that requires making sense of the complex relationships behind global food production in capitalism, genetic technology developments in the agricultural sector and in politics and legislation, but also of dissenting voices in favor of another kind of community economy and the pr eservation of diversity. Freisler and Majewski founded a new tradition of planting apple trees in the city space as a communal activity that brings together diverse groups and individuals. So far, two hundred local-variety apple trees have been planted by tree adopters in Mönchengladbach and Lódz.Copublished with Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach, and Muzeum Sztuki, LódzContributorsJimmie Durham, Anders Ettinger, Pawel Freisler / Piotr Zycienski, Katherine Gibson / Ethan Miller, Antje Majewski, Agnieszka Polska, Joanna Sokolowska, Susanne Titz, Fundacja Transformacja

In this innovative take on early video art, Ina Blom considers the widespread notion that analog video was endowed with lifelike memory and agency. Reversing standard accounts of artistic uses of video, she follows the reflexive unfolding of a technology that seemed to deploy artists and artistic frameworks in the creation of new technical and social realities. She documents, among other things, video's emergence through the framework of painting, its identification with biological life, its exploration of the outer limits of technical and mental time control, and its construction of new realms of labor and collaboration. Enlisting a distinctly media-archaeological approach, Blom's new book--her second from Sternberg Press--is a brilliant look at the relationship between video memory and social ontology.

In essays, poems, sketches, and photographs, twenty authors challenge the exclusive human claim to intelligence. Can contemporary art's practitioners change the way we perceive nature? In The Wild Book of Inventions, twenty authors employ a variety of forms, including speculative essays, poems, pencil sketches, and photo essays, to challenge the exclusive human claim to intelligence by pointing to, or inventing, new forms of coexistence for all life-forms. Far more complex than the necessary and continuous exercise of critique, these contributions introduce new ways to experience culture. Contributors Nabil Ahmed, Armen Avanessian, Hannah Black, Kristina Buch, Tyler Coburn, Ann Cotten, Paul Feigelfeld, Fernando García-Dory, Kenneth Goldsmith, Anke Hennig, Ingela Ihrman, Tiphanie Kim Mall, Chus Martínez, Momus, Ingo Niermann, Trevor Paglen, Filipa Ramos, Lin May Saeed, Emily Segal, Johannes Willi

Cave is a series of publications featuring commissioned and republished explorations, anecdotes, research, documents, case studies, essays, and scenarios on how to think and practice contemporary collecting. The first issue of Cave looks into the territory of the public collection considering it both a semantic ground for institutional collecting as well as political and cultural infrastructure.Artists, scholars, and other thinkers address the role of museums and collections for identity-making and territorial representation, the increasing invisibility of the collection, productive and problematic processes of inclusion and exclusion, and what seems to be a general distrust towards history in the contemporary art museum. As such they speculate on radical yet tangible strategies for the activation and sedimentation of the collection in the contemporary art museum from the point of view of its architecture, scale, locality, history, organizational model, display, research, and collecting methodologies.Published with CAHF--Contemporary Art Heritage FlandersContributorsBeirut, Clémentine Deliss, Kersten Geers, Jef Geys, Anders Kreuger, Maarten Liefooghe, Jens Maier-Rothe, Doris Maninger, Winke Noppen, Louise Osieka, Jasper Rigole, Marije Sennema, Els Silvrants-Barclay, 3Maarten Van Den Driessche, Richard Venlet, Pieternel Vermoortel

New Institutionalism, a mode of curating that originated in Europe in the 1990s, evolved from the legacy of international curator Harald Szeemann, the relational art advanced by French critic and theorist Nicolas Bourriaud, and other influential factors of the time. New Institutionalism's dispersed and varied approaches to curating sought to reconfigure the art institution from within, reshaping it into an active, democratic, open, and egalitarian public sphere. These approaches posed other possibilities and futures for institutions and exhibitions, challenging the consensual conception, production, and distribution of art. Practitioners engaged the art institution with renewed confidence by imbuing it with the potential for new aesthetic experiences and different relationships among artists, institutions, and spectators beyond engrained modernist ideologies. Working in these new modes, the art institution could become a site of fluidity, unpredictability, and risk. What Ever Happened to New Institutionalism? reflects upon the aspirations of these curatorial strategies and assesses their critical efficacy today within the landscape of contemporary art and globalized culture. The first in a series of readers examining changing characteristics of art institutions, this publication thinks through New Institutionalism by bringing together facsimiles of seminal texts, new critical essays, a history of trends and practices, and commissioned artist projects and contributions. These are complemented by documentation from the inaugural year of programming at the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University focused on reimagining CCVA as a twenty-first-century institution.Copublished with Carpenter Center for the Visual ArtsContributorsMartin Beck, Nina Beier, Silvia Benedito, Ulla von Brandenburg, Katarina Burin, Simon Dybbroe Møller, Jonas Ekeberg, Alex Farquharson, Fernanda Fragateiro, Simon Fujiwara, James Goggin, Tone Hansen, Owen Hatherley, Henriette Huldisch, Damon Krukowski, Le Corbusier, Maria Lind, Markus Miessen, Eline Mugaas, Elise Storsveen, Gloria Sutton, James Voorhies, Naomi Yang, Amy Yoes

Chen Zhen (1955-2000) is largely recognized as one of the most important artists of the global art scene. His work thrived from his singular and intense life experience of migrating and working across different continents and cultures. The recent exhibition at the Rockbund Art Museum in Chen's native city of Shanghai reflected on his lifework, at once unique and complex, critical and optimistic, and its attempts to provide innovative responses to the diverse challenges of the changing world, from the end of the Cold War to the rise of of global capitalism and new geopolitical conflicts. Chen proposed to constantly reexamine the realities and histories of what he viewed as an exciting new world, full of problems--like a giant with an overmuscled body and an exhausted heart.This catalogue presents an art-historical angle on Chen Zhen's unique way of questioning his experience of globalization through art. It includes documentation of the eponymous exhibition at Rockbund Art Museum (May 30-October 7, 2015), along with detailed sketches of both existing and unrealized projects.Copublished with Rockbund Art Museum, ShanghaiContributorsLarys Frogier, Hou Hanru

On Productive Shame, Reconciliation, and Agency prompts a unique crossdisciplinary inquiry into the productive potential of the affect of shame. This book contests the ontological understanding of shame and the psychoanalytical interpretation of it based on personal traumatic experiences linked to lack, loss, memory repression, and absence. Rather, the book builds on complex issues (initially proposed by Paul Gilroy) that concern the coming to terms with a grim colonial and imperial past: How can one deal with the personal and collective memories of "paralyzing guilt" after dreadful atrocities and genocides? How can such negative experiences be transformed into "productive shame" (not only for the perpetrators but also for the victims and witnesses)? This collection of essays, discussions, and interviews reflects on the intersection of the historicity, materiality, and structures behind culturally constructed race and racism, anti-Semitism, anti-Romaism, and queer shame across different disciplines, fields, and theories (for example, in philosophy, art and art history, visual culture, architecture, curating, postcolonial history, gender and queer studies). Various case studies and artistic projects employing collaborative and participatory research methods are analyzed as practices that empower the process of turning shame into productive agency. The ensuing role of productive shame is to prevent the recurrence of the institutional structures, patterns, and events that are responsible and constitutive of racism, and has been contextualized in recent debates on political responsibility and reconciliation in Europe and Africa.ContributorsTal Adler, Eva Blimlinger, Andrea B. Braidt, Jasmina Cibic, Das Kollektiv, Zsuzsi Flohr, Eduard Freudmann, Tímea Junghaus, Jakob Krameritsch, Jean-Paul Martinon, Suzana Milevska, Helge Mooshammer, Peter Mörtenböck, Trevor Ngwane, Karin Schneider, Primrose Sonti, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Working Group Four Faces of OmarskaPublication Series of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, vol. 16

This publication documents the exhibition "United States of Latin America," held at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MOCAD), in collaboration with the Kadist Art Foundation. Bringing together their shared and ongoing engagement with artistic practices from Latin America, Jens Hoffmann and Pablo León de la Barra have assembled one of the most significant contemporary survey's of recent art from the region. Hoffmann and de la Barra's project draws attention not only to the geographic territories of Latin America itself, but also to its relation within the wider scope of the Americas, and its position in a global artistic context. This book offers a framework for critical insight into artworks dealing with crucial social, industrial, or ecological concerns, and also for interrogating the very categories and terminologies used to construct the notion of Latin America. This catalogue includes a conversation between Stefan Benchoam, Fernanda Brenner, Eduardo Carrera, Camila Marambio, and Marina Reyes Franco (moderated by Heidi Rabben), a glossary, a reflective essay by Hoffmann "after the fact," and images from the exhibition.Copublished with Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit and Kadist Art FoundationContributorsStefan Benchoam, Fernanda Brenner, Eduardo Carrera, Jens Hoffmann, Pablo Léon de la Barra, Camila Marambio, Heidi Rabben, Marina Reyes Franco

On the occasion of Ane Hjort Guttu's 2015 Festival Artist exhibition at Bergen Kunsthall, presenting her latest film work, this substantial monograph gathers reflections on recent projects and offers insight into the artist's work and methodology. Guttu's new film Time Passes (2015), and commissioned by the institution, debates the contradictory and complex issues around the uses of and rights to public space, urban poverty and inequality, and the responsibility of the artist to produce commentary. An essay by Kim West introduces Guttu's work as portraiture filmmaking crossing the gaze of the documentarian with a decidedly subjective point of view; Pablo Lafuente situates the work in relation to the responsibility of education and critical consciousness; and Ekaterina Degot draws out questions on the egalitarian character of contemporary art, particularly in light of the ideals highly present in the social imagination of Norway, "the last welfare state." The texts are accompanied by visual essays and an artist interview with Halvor Haugen. This publication presents a framed view on this artist's recent works, and takes a position on the role of the artist and the potential of art as a critical and political tool.Copublished with Bergen KunsthallContributorsMartin Clark, Ekaterina Degot, Ane Hjort Guttu, Halvor Haugen, Pablo Lafuente, Steinar Sekkingstad, Kim West

Equal parts Borges, Burroughs, Baudrillard, and Black Ops, Dispute Plan to Prevent Future Luxury Constitution charts a treacherous landscape filled with paranoid master plans, failed schemes, and dubious histories.Benjamin H. Bratton's kaleidoscopic theory-fiction links the utopian fantasies of political violence with the equally utopian programs of security and control. Both rely on all manner of doubles, models, gimmicks, ruses, prototypes, and shock-and-awe campaigns to realize their propagandas of the deed, threat, and image. Blurring reality and delusion, they collaborate on a literally psychotic politics of architecture.The cast of characters in this ensemble drama of righteous desperation and tactical trickery shuttle between fact and speculation, action and script, flesh and symbol, death and philosophy: insect urbanists, seditious masquerades, epistolary ideologues, distant dissimulations, carnivorous installations, forgotten footage, branded revolts, imploding skyscrapers, sentimental memorials, ad-hoc bunkers, sacred hijackings, vampire safe-houses, suburban enclaves, big-time proposals, ambient security protocols, disputed borders-of-convenience, empty research campuses, and robotic surgery.In this mosaic we glimpse a future city built with designed violence and the violence of design. As one ratifies the other, the exception becomes the ruler.e-flux journal Series edited by Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, Anton Vidokle

This volume is a collection of dynamic and engaged writings by art historian John C. Welchman on a range of contemporary European artists: Vasco Araújo, Cosima von Bonin, Jan De Cock, Orshi Drozdik, Susan Hiller, Andy Hope 1930, Michael Kunze, Nathaniel Mellors, Miguel Palma, José Álvaro Perdices, Sascha Pohle, Thomas Raat, Nicola Stäglich, and Xavier Veil-han. Anchored in concerns that emerged in the late 1960s and 1970s, Welchman poses thoughtful and provocative questions about how these artists receive and negotiate the social and aesthetic histories through which they live and work. Past Realization inaugurates XX-XXI, John C. Welchman's two-part series on European art from this and the last century, which will be followed by a series on West Coast artists and one on the work of Mike Kelley.

Jalal Toufic is a thinker and a mortal to death. He was born in 1962 in Beirut or Baghdad and died before dying in 1989 in Evanston, Illinois. This second edition of a collection of his essays whirls around the appearance of the unworldly in art, culture, history, and the present.

Meditations inspired by Polys Peslikas's exhbition at the Cyprus Pavilion at the 2017 Venice Biennale.Faint on stage? Umm Kulthum never did. It was the the audience that swooned when she sang. ButwWhat if, overcome by the power of her song, the singer herself had passed out? What would have ensued during the sudden silence? Umm Kulthum faints on stage is the title Polys Peslikas coined for one of the paintings in his exhibition The future of colour at the Cyprus Pavilion during the 57th Venice Biennale in 2017. This book offers stories and thoughts inspired by Peslikas's paintings. A retrospective meditation on the exhibition, the book includes a piece of punk existentialist poetry by the artist group Neoterismoi Toumazou; an interview of celebrated ceramist Valentinos Charalambous by pavilion curator Jan Verwoert, conducted during a visit to Nefertiti's bust at the Neues Museum in Berlin; a short story by New York-based artist-writer Mirene Arsanios, echoing the 1980s childhood experience of temporarily living in Cyprus; and a contextual essay about the work of Peslikas.ContributorsMirene Arsanios, Valentinos Charalambous, Louli Michaelidou, Neoterismoi Toumazou, Jan Verwoert

Seven years in twenty-first century contemporary art, as seen in a series of columns by curator and writer Maria Lind.Seven Years offers a subjective chronicle of contemporary art during the second decade of the twenty-first century, seen through a series of columns by curator, writer, and educator Maria Lind. Writing for the print edition of ArtReview, Lind considers individual artworks and exhibitions and contributes to conversations and debates developing in the art world and beyond. She explores work by Haegue Yang, Hassan Khan, Uglycute, Tania Perez-Cordova, and Walid Raad, among others, and discusses such exhibitions as dOCUMENTA (13), the Sharjah Biennial 12, the 3rd Ural Industrial Biennial, and several editions of the Venice Biennale.Lind's writings are accompanied by other texts: artists Goldin+Senneby discuss Lind's materialist approach through the use of the word "hand" in the introduction to the volume; Sofía Hernández Chong Cuy reflects on how writing can affect curatorial work, and vice versa; artist Ahmet Öğüt conducts an imagined interview with Lind; and Philippe Parreno weaves a summary of the years between 2010 and 2018, highlighting the notion of potentiality. A postscript by Lind's fellow curator Joanna Warsza compiles a glossary of the book's key ideas and terms.ContributorsGoldin+Senneby, Sofía Hernández Chong Cuy, Ahmet Öğüt, Philippe Parreno, Joanna Warsza

One day I went to interview Dan Graham about the legendary John Daniels Gallery in New York, which he ran from 1964 to '65. Right after I arrived, Dan started talking to me about Michel Butor and his fascination with the writer's work back in the 1960s. I merely asked: "And did you ever meet him?" Dan answered: "No. Some people wanted to introduce us, but it never happened." I asked: "And would you like to meet him?" And he said, with his very own smile: "Of course I would." --From the editor's prefaceIn the fall of 2013, Dan Graham and Mieko Meguro traveled with Donatien Grau to a town in the French Alps to meet Michel Butor, one of the foremost innovators of postwar literature. This is their conversation.Michel Butor is a writer. He redefined the genre of the novel, notably with Second Thoughts (1957), further developing new forms with Mobile (1962) and other fundamental works. Dan Graham is an artist. A major retrospective of his work was held in 2009 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Whitney Museum, New York; and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.

One common feature of the wave of recent revolutions and revolts around the world is not political but rather architectural: many erupted on inner-city roundabouts. In thinking about the relation between protest and urban form, Eyal Weizman starts with the May 1980 uprising in Gwangju, South Korea, the first of the "roundabout revolutions," and traces its lineage to the Arab Spring and its hellish aftermath.Rereading the history of the roundabout through the vortices of history that traverse it, the book follows the development of the roundabout in Europe and North America in the early twentieth century, to its subsequent export to the colonial world in the context of attempts to discipline and police the "chaotic" non-Western city. How did an urban apparatus put in the service of authoritarian power became the locus of its undoing? Today, as the tide of revolt that characterized the Arab Spring seems to ebb, when nations and societies disintegrate by brutal civil wars and military oppression, the series of revolutions might seem like Dante's circles of hell. To counter this counter-revolution, Weizman proposes that the immanent power of the people at the roundabouts will need to find its corollary in sustained work at round tables--the ongoing formation of political movements able to enact political change. The sixth volume of the Critical Spatial Practice series stems from Eyal Weizman's contribution to the Gwangju Folly II in 2013, an exhibition curated by Nikolaus Hirsch with Philipp Misselwitz and Eui Young Chun for the Gwangju Biennale. Weizman and the architect Samaneh Moafi constructed a folly composed of seven roundabouts and a round table in front of the Gwangju train station, one of the central points in the events of May 1980.Critical Spatial Practice 6With Blake Fisher and Samaneh MoafiEdited by Nikolaus Hirsch, Markus MiessenFeaturing photography by Kyungsub Shin

The significance of Jean-François Lyotard's innovative 1985 exhibition Les Immatériaux and the "curatorial turn" in critical theory.In 1985, the philosopher Jean-François Lyotard curated Les Immatériaux at Centre Georges Pompidou. Though widely misunderstood at the time, the exhibition marked a "curatorial turn" in critical theory. Through its experimental layout and hybrid presentation of objects, technologies, and ideas, this pioneering exploration of virtuality reflected on the exhibition as a medium of communication and anticipated a deeper engagement with immersive and digital space in both art and theory. In Spacing Philosophy, Daniel Birnbaum and Sven-Olov Wallenstein analyze the significance and logic of Lyotard's exhibition while contextualizing it in the history of exhibition practices, the philosophical tradition, and Lyotard's own work on aesthetics and phenomenology. Les Immatériaux can thus be seen as a culmination and materialization of a life's work as well as a primer for the many thought-exhibitions produced in the following decades.The significance of Jean-François Lyotard's innovative 1985 exhibition Les Immatériaux and the "curatorial turn" in critical theory.Forthcoming from the MIT Press

New spatial notational systems for protecting and regaining Indigenous lands in the United States.In The Language of Secret Proof, Nina Valerie Kolowratnik challenges the conditions under which Indigenous rights to protect and regain traditional lands are currently negotiated in United States legal frameworks. This tenth volume in the Critical Spatial Practice series responds to the urgent need for alternative modes of evidentiary production by introducing an innovative system of architectural drawing and notation. Kolowratnik focuses on the double bind in which Native Pueblo communities in the United States find themselves when they become involved in a legal effort to reclaim and protect ancestral lands; the process of producing evidence runs counter to their structural organization around oral history and cultural secrecy. The spatial notational systems developed by Kolowratnik with Hemish tribal members from northern New Mexico and presented in this volume are an attempt to produce evidentiary documentation that speaks Native truths while respecting demands on secrecy. These systems also attempt to instigate a dialogue where there currently is none, working to deconstruct the fixed opposition between secrecy and disclosure within Western legal systems.

As an artists' book, Aftershow engages with the recent film installations of Pauline Boudry/Renate Lorenz. Installation shots, research material, scripts, and film stills give an insight into the artists' investigation of performance in film and their dense net of references to experimental film, the history of photography, sound, and underground (drag) performances. The book's title alludes to an interest in opaque events that are belated, left backstage or off-screen. A number of (fictitious) letters to friends and collaborators such as Sharon Hayes, Yvonne Rainer, Ginger Brooks-Takahashi, and Jack Smith place the work of Boudry & Lorenz in a context of debates around temporalities, activism, the archival, decolonizing practices, and queer histories.Published following the exhibition "Patriarchal Poetry" at the Badischer Kunstverein, September 27- November 24, 2013.

"Museum Off Museum," the two-part exhibition at Bielefelder Kunstverein, explored the concept of the museum from an artistic and outside perspective. The exhibition investigated the subjective potential of museum-based narratives and the current interest among artists in the "museum" as a space of reflection within global circumstances. This book documents each of the exhibition phases and outlines all of the contributions to this substantial project. Lavishly illustrated, with color throughout, it contains more than thirty artistic and scientific statements in form of essays, interviews, visual statements, and exhibition documentations.Copublished with Bielefelder KunstvereinContributorsÖzlem Altin, Kader Attia, Eric Baudelaire, Juana Berrío, Beatrice von Bismarck, Peggy Buth, Nikita Yingqian Cai, Cathy Carpenter, Isabelle Cornaro, Jeremy Deller, Sam Durant, Dirk Fleischmann, Lucie Fontaine, Simon Fujiwara, Camille Henrot, Luis Jacob, Anna Jehle, Cynthia Krell, Bruce Lacey, Dainius Liškevičius, Antonia Marten, Chus Martínez, Doreen Mende, Mihnea Mircan, Yuki Okumura, Karl-Josef Pazzini, Philippe Pirotte, Kevin Schmidt, Slavs and Tatars, Barbara Steiner, Nora Sternfeld, Thomas Thiel, Steven ten Thije, Peter Weibel, Ricardo Valentim

After the first EP volume on the activities of the early Italian avant-garde, the second volume in the series identifies the current fascination with fiction across art, design, and architecture. Practitioners and theorists explore this strategy by pushing the debate into both speculative and real-fictitious terrains. Newly commissioned interviews, artist projects, and essays shed light on topics such as parafiction and algorithmic ambiguity. Included in the volume is one of the final interviews to be published with novelist and semiotician Umberto Eco; a conversation with Bruce Sterling, in which the science-fiction author responds to designers who reference his writings; and design theorist Vilém Flusser's 1966 essay "On Fiction," in its first English translation. The EP series fluidly moves between art, design, and architecture, and introduces the notion of the "extended play" into publishing, with thematically edited pocket books as median between popular magazines ("single play") and academic journals ("long play").ContributorsPaola Antonelli, The Atlas Group (1989-2004), Alex Coles, Anthony Dunne, James Dyer, Umberto Eco, Experimental Jetset, Vilém Flusser, Verina Gfader, Huib Haye van der Werf, Will Holder, Sophie Krier, Carrie Lambert-Beatty, Lucas Maassen, Valle Medina, Philippe Morel, Rick Poynor, Fiona Raby, Benjamin Reynolds, Hiroko Shiratori, Bruce Sterling

Rethinking Density: Art, Culture, and Urban Practices considers new perspectives and discussions related to the category of density, which for a long time has been part of urban-planning discourses and is now regaining the attention of artists and practitioners from a number of different disciplines. In an interplay of models, coping strategies, and experimental approaches, this publication combines research from cultural studies, artistic research, sound studies as well as architectural and urban theory. The issues discussed include the consideration of retroactive architectural design as a means to retrace the historical layers of a city, a proposal for spacesharing concepts as instruments for urban revitalization processes, and a case study on the potential for new sonic social spaces as subversive modes to undermine prevailing power structures.ContributorsAnna Artaker, Anamarija Batista, Marc Boumeester, Meike S. Gleim, Nicolai Gütermann, Gabu Heindl, Improvistos (María Tula García Méndez, Gonzalo Navarrete Mancebo, Alba Navarrete Rodríguez), Sabine Knierbein, Szilvia Kovács, Elke Krasny, Brandon LaBelle, Antje Lehn, Carina Lesky, Agnes Prammer, Nicolas Remy, Nikolai Roskamm, Angelika Schnell, Jürgen Schöpf, Christabel Stirling, Johannes Suitner, Katalin Teller, Iván Tosics, Ivana Volic, Marie-Noëlle YazdanpanahPublication Series of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, vol. 20

Ageing Process, Lara Favaretto's first monograph, documents the artist's works from the 1990s to her most recent installations presented in the 2015 exhibition "Good Luck!" at MAXXI in Rome. Structured like a manual, this volume accompanies entries on her works with essays by critics and experts from various disciplines who tackle themes complementary but not directly connected to the artist's practice. Favaretto, who also edited the book, explains: "I decided not to follow any chronological or alphabetical order, but to instead suggest a unified discourse by making the reading experience flow as smoothly as possible, following an underground web of references between the texts that would elude any scansion dictated by the sequence of dates or letters."Copublished with Mousse PublishingContributorsPeter Eleey, Anthony Huberman, Lisa Le Feuvre, Jörg Heiser, Martin Herbert, Francesco Manacorda, Daniel McClean, Markus Miessen, Dieter Roelstraete, Joshua Simon, Jalal Toufic, Brian Kuan Wood

From 2008 to 2014 Sabine Folie was the director of the Generali Foundation--more than twenty-years after (plus que 20 ans après) the collection and exhibition venue formed in 1988. She helped establish the institution's reputation for generating new critical discussion on contemporary art through revisiting modernism. This survey publication, richly illustrated with photographs and source materials, indexes and contextualizes the works acquired for this definitive collection during Folie's tenure, along with giving insight into how the corresponding exhibitions were curated.Reviewing the collection's relation to recent art-historical discourse, the essays selected for the publication, written by theorists and artists, reflect on themes in contemporary art including linguistic devices, the dismantling of representation and the reorganization of pictorial space, the changing roles of the artist and the museum throughout modernity, the relationship between the subject and the environment under conditions of globalization and postcolonialism, and the artistic processing of history and the production of memorial culture. Commentary and works are featured by Lothar Baumgarten, Marcel Broodthaers, Ernst Caramelle, Peter Downsbrough, Harun Farocki, Morgan Fisher, Stéphane Mallarmé, Klaus Scherübel, Josef Strau, Ana Torfs, Joëlle Tuerlinckx, and Ian Wallace, among others.The artworks in the Generali Foundation, some of which have never been exhibited before, are organized here as an exhibition in book form. Moreover, a key focus of both artistic production and the collection during Folie's directorship was on "the book" as work and medium. The book is not only a topical medium that historicizes Conceptual art, but also a means to place the interests of this collection in focus--namely, revisions of modernity in the context of the contemporary proliferation of the reproduced image and modes of display. Copublished with Generali Foundation, ViennaContributorsAnna Sigrídur Arnar, Christa Blümlinger, Georges Didi-Huberman, Sabine Folie, Rachel Haidu, Tom Holert, Gabriele Mackert, Michael Newman, Elisabeth von Samsonow

A study of the intersecting fields of art history, ecology, visual culture, geography, and environmental politics.While ecology has received little systematic attention within art history, its visibility and significance has grown in relation to the threats of climate change and environmental destruction. By engaging artists' widespread aesthetic and political engagement with environmental conditions and processes around the globe--and looking at cutting-edge theoretical, political, and cultural developments in the Global South and North--Decolonizing Nature offers a significant, original contribution to the intersecting fields of art history, ecology, visual culture, geography, and environmental politics. Art historian T. J. Demos, author of Return to the Postcolony: Specters of Colonialism in Contemporary Art (2013), considers the creative proposals of artists and activists for ways of life that bring together ecological sustainability, climate justice, and radical democracy, at a time when such creative proposals are urgently needed.

Essays, artistic text contributions, and curatorial statements on the German writer Hubert Fichte's fascination with Afro-diasporic arts and religions.Can the ethnological observations and feelings on Afro-diasporic cultures from a German writer be "restituted"? What are the possibilities and limits of using self-reflection and gay sexuality as research tools? Since 2017, the exhibition and publication project Hubert Fichte: Love and Ethnology has followed this question through Hubert Fichte's cycle of novels History of Sensitivity. Fascinated by Afro-diasporic arts and religions, Fichte (1935-1986) traveled to cities including Salvador da Bahia, Santiago de Chile, Dakar, New York, and Lisbon. Translations of Fichte's novels became the basis for critical local receptions and new artistic works in these cities. This book brings together essays, artistic text contributions, and curatorial statements from the projects in Salvador da Bahia, Rio de Janeiro, Santiago de Chile, Dakar, New York, and Lisbon, as well as extensive photo series depicting the artistic works from the exhibition at Haus der Kulturen der Welt.Love and Ethnology is a collaboration between Goethe-Institut and Haus der Kulturen der Welt, supported by S. Fischer Stiftung and S. Fischer Verlag.

The simultaneous emergence of the serial killer and the assembly line as expressions of the rationality of modern production methods.In 1896, at the age of 35, Henry Howard Holmes, whose real name was Herman Webster Mudget, became the first serial killer in the United States, confessing to dozens of crimes. To carry out his activities quietly, he built in Chicago a building so vast that his neighbors called it the "Château." Located just a stone's throw from the most sophisticated slaughterhouses in the world, lethal, practical, and comfortable, Holmes's building was equipped with the latest innovations. A rational, cozy masterpiece of crime dressed in slippers, Holmes's project fit perfectly into the functionalist project of the modern world.In The Murder Factory, Alexandra Midal examines the almost simultaneous emergence of the industrial revolution and the figure of the serial killer. Far from being a coincidence, it marks the rationality of new production methods--of which the assembly line and serial murder are two expressions. In the Holmes case, an antihero of modern history can shed light on the treatment of living things brought about by this economic, mechanical, and cultural revolution.H. H. Holmes's confessions, published in the Philadelphia Enquirer just before his execution in April 1896, follow Midal's text.

In recent years, debates surrounding the concept of art have focused in particular on installation art, as its diverse manifestations have proven to be incompatible with the modern idea of aesthetic autonomy. Defenders of aesthetic modernism repudiated installation-based work as no longer autonomous art, whereas advocates of aesthetic postmodernism abandoned the concept of aesthetic autonomy altogether. Juliane Rebentisch asserts that installation art does not, as is often assumed, dispute aesthetic autonomy per se, and rather should be understood as calling for a fundamental revision of this very concept. Aesthetics of Installation Art thus proposes a new understanding of art as well as of its ethical and political dimension.

New approaches to the ocean enabled by the new field of (microbial) oceanography. In recent years, a new field of scientific research has been put forward, the so-called (microbial) oceanography, which offers a new mapping of the ocean from its shiny surfaces to lightless sea floors. Oceanography combines techniques of molecular biology, gene sequencing, bioinformatics, and remote sensing, among others. Oceans are a crucial factor in global climate and necessary condition for human survival on earth, and findings from oceanography can help people better understand life (and survival) in the Anthropocene.Not only are all life forms of marine origin, but the oceans also host extremophiles--that is, microbial life forms living under extreme conditions of heat, cold, lack of light--which are integral to understanding what possible alternative life forms might look like. It may be that such mainly anthropogenic forces as overfishing, pollution, deep-sea mining, and acidification suggest that a new concept of the ocean--Anthropocean--needs to be discussed. New approaches in cultural studies as well as in the history of sciences are shifting our vision of the ocean, considering the previous realm of immeasurable broad and depth as a fundamental contrast to a human history and culture in order to rewrite it. Edited in dialogue with Stefan Helmreich Copublished with the V-A-C Foundation Contributors Penny Chisholm, Robert Danovano, Sabine Höhler, Jessica Lehman, Naomi Oreskes, Helen Rozwadoski, Philip Steinberg, Cindy van Dover