Böcker utgivna av Sternberg Press

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

Intersubjectivity considered as both historical phenomenon and nascent mode of present-day relation.This collection of essays considers the relationship between performance, subjectivity, and human agency. Encompassing both historical and speculative perspectives, this book explores the ways in which nonhuman (or trans/post-human) entities complicate notions of subjectivity and exert intersubjective pressures of their own on social, political, scientific, and philosophical discourses. Ranging from continental philosophy to more recent formulations that derive from systems theory, trans identity, and the emergent field of bot pedagogy, It approaches intersubjectivity as both historical phenomenon and nascent mode of present-day relation.Contributions by Anselm Franke, Avram Alpert, Boris Groys, Erika Landström, Goshka Macuga, Hannah Black, Harry Burke, Jeanne Vaccaro, Josh Kline, Lucky Dragons, Mashinka Firunts Hakopian, Natasha Stagg, Sarah Harrison, Victoria Ivanova

Giving Voices features four of Erkan Özgen's video works dealing with war, violence, and trauma--beyond the boundaries of the political, within the dimension of the private and the human. By deciding not to show images of violence and war, Özgen gives a voice to individuals and objects. Witnessing becomes a way of understanding and also resetting memory. How can we feel the realities of war, conflict, and violence? What are the cultural and social implications of war and violence, and how does society respond to war? These are some of the questions raised by Özgen's work and addressed here by social anthropologist Rik Adriaans, psychologist Jan Ilhan Kizilhan, curator Özge Ersoy, as well as writer Han Nefkens, and in conversations between the artist and Hans Ulrich Obrist, artistic director of the Serpentine galleries, and curator Hilde Teerlinck.Published with support from the Han Nefkens Foundation, BarcelonaContributorsRik Adriaans, Özge Ersoy, Jan Kizilhan, Han Nefkens, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Erkan Özgen, Hilde Teerlinck

Theorists, historians, and artists address the precarious futurity of the notion of the future.Not long ago, a melancholic left and a manic neoliberalism seemed to arrive at an awkward consensus: the foreclosure of futurity. Whereas the former mourned the failure of its utopian project, the latter celebrated the triumph of a global marketplace. The radical hope of realizing a singularly different, more equitable future displaced by a belief that the future had already come to pass, limiting post-historical society to an uneventful life of endless accumulation. Today, amidst an abundance of neofuturisms, posthumanisms, futurologies, speculative philosophies and accelerationist scenarios, there is as well an expanding awareness of a looming planetary catastrophe driven by the extractionist logic of capitalism. Despite this return to the future, the temporal horizon of our present moment is perhaps more aptly characterized by the "shrinking future" of just-in-time production, risk management, high-frequency trading, and the futures market. In Futurity Report, theorists, historians, and artists address the precarious futurity of the notion of the future itself.ContributorsMcKenzie Wark, China Miéville, Kerstin Stakemeier, Diedrich Diederichsen, Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Marina Vishmidt, Johannes Paul Raether, Felicity D. Scott, Silvia Maglioni, Graeme Thomson, Doreen Mende, Pedro Neves Marques, Achille Mbembe, Kodwo Eshun, Haytham El-Wardany, T. J. Demos, Ana Teixeira Pinto

Essays on the provocative 2008 film by Renzo Martens, Episode III (Enjoy Poverty).Investigating the economic value of one of the Democratic Republic of the Congo''s most lucrative exports (namely, poverty), Renzo Martens'' provocative film Episode III: Enjoy Poverty (2008) remains a landmark intervention into debates about contemporary art''s relationship to exploitative economies. Throughout Critique in Practice, contributors explore the work''s legacy and how it relates to the politics of representation, uses of the documentary form, art criticism, the deployment of humanitarian aid, the impact of extractive forms of globalized capital, and the neoliberal politics of decolonization. The unconventional representation of acute immiseration throughout Enjoy Poverty generated far-from-resolved disputes about how deprivation is portrayed within Western mainstream media and throughout global cultural institutions. Using a range of approaches, this volume reconsiders that portrayal and how the film''s reception led Martens to found a long-term program, Human Activities.ContributorsAriella Aïsha Azoulay, Eva Barois De Caevel, Pieter Van Bogaert, Jelle Bouwhuis, JJ Charlesworth, T.J. Demos, Angela Dimitrakaki, Anthony Downey, Charles Esche, Dan Fox, Matthias De Groof, Xander Karskens, J. A. Koster, Kyveli Lignou-Tsamantani, Suhail Malik, Renzo Martens, Nina Möntmann, René Ngongo, Paul O''Kane, Laurens Otto, Nikolaus Perneczky, Kolja Reichert, Els Roelandt, Ruben De Roo, ka˛rî''ka˛chä seid''ou, Gregory Sholette, Sanne Sinnige, Ana Teixeira Pinto, Emilia Terracciano, Nato Thompson, Niels Van Tomme, Frank Vande Veire, Eyal Weizman, Vivian Ziherl, and Artur Z˙mijewski.

See the world through the eyes of a search engine, if only for a millisecond; throw the workings of power into sharper relief by any media necessary; reveal access points to other worlds within our own. In the anthology Fiction as Method, a mixture of new and established names in the fields of contemporary art, media theory, philosophy, and speculative fiction explore the diverse ways fiction manifests, and provide insights into subjects ranging from the hive mind of the art collective 0rphan Drift to the protocols of online self-presentation. With an extended introduction by the editors, the book invites reflection on how fictions proliferate, take on flesh, and are carried by a wide variety of mediums—including, but not limited to, the written word. In each case, fiction is bound up with the production and modulation of desire, the enfolding of matter and meaning, and the blending of practices that cast the existing world in a new light with those that participate in the creation of new openings of the possible. ContributorsJustin Barton, Delphi Carstens & Mer Roberts, Tim Etchells, Matthew Fuller, David Garcia, Dora García, M. John Harrison, Simon O''Sullivan, Erica Scourti, Jon K Shaw and Theo Reeves-Evison

According to the nineteenth-century teachings of Nikolai Fedorov—librarian, religious philosopher, and progenitor of Russian cosmism—our ethical obligation to use reason and knowledge to care for the sick extends to curing the dead of their terminal status. The dead must be brought back to life using means of advanced technology—resurrected not as souls in heaven, but in material form, in this world, with all their memories and knowledge. Fedorov''s call to redistribute vital forces is wildly imaginative in emancipatory ambition. Today, it might appear arcane in its mystical panpsychism or eccentric in its embrace of realities that exist only in science fiction or certain diabolical strains of Silicon Valley techno-utopian ideology. It can be difficult to grasp how it ended up influencing the thinking behind a generation of young revolutionary anarchists and Marxists who incorporated Fedorov''s ideas under their own brand of biocosmism before the 1917 Russian Revolution, even giving rise to the origins of the Soviet space program.    This book of interviews and conversations with today''s most compelling living and resurrected artists and thinkers seeks to address the relevance of Russian cosmism and biocosmism in light of its influence on the Russian artistic and political vanguard as well as on today''s art-historical apparatuses, weird materialisms, extinction narratives, and historical and temporal politics. This unprecedented collection of exchanges on cosmism asks how such an encompassing and imaginative, unapologetically humanist and anthropocentric strain of thinking could have been so historically and politically influential, especially when placed alongside the politically inconsequential—but in some sense equally encompassing—apocalypticism of contemporary realist imaginaries.ContributorsBart De Baere, Franco “Bifo” Berardi, Boris Groys, Elena Shaposhnikova, Marina Simakova, Hito Steyerl, Anton Vidokle, Brian Kuan Wood, Arseny Zhilyaev, Esther ZonsheimPublished in parallel with the eponymous exhibition at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin.Series edited by Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, Stephen Squibb, Anton VidokleDesign by Jeff Ramsey, front cover design by Liam Gillick

A look at how the internet and post-millenial technologies have transformed our ways of seeing and birthed a new form of culture.The way we see the world has changed drastically since NASA released the “blue marble” image of the earth taken by Apollo 17 in 1972. No longer a placid slow-moving orb, the world is now perceived as a hothouse of activity and hyper-connectivity that cannot keep up with its inhabitants. The internet has collectively bound human society, replacing the world as the network of all networks. In Goodbye, World! Looking at Art in the Digital Age, writer and curator Omar Kholeif traces the birth of a culture propagated but also consumed by this digitized network. Has the internet transformed the way we see and relate to images? How has the field of perception been altered by evolving technologies, pervasive distribution, and our interaction with screens? How have artists working in diverse contexts, from eBay auctions to augmented reality, created new ways of emoting that are determined by these technologies? Focusing on a cultural and artistic landscape that has taken shape since the year 2000, Kholeif aims to put into context a new language for seeing, feeling, and being that has emerged through post-millennial technologies, and argues for a nuanced understanding of the post-digital condition. Taking cues from John Berger''s Ways of Seeing and Alvin Toffler''s Future Shock, this book—part memoir, part critical analysis—should prove essential for anyone interested in the changing world of the internet.

An examination of contemporary art''s recent emphasis on “research” and “knowledge production,” and its claims to provide a novel access to “knowledge.”Questioning the role and function of contemporary art in economic and political systems that increasingly manage data and affect, Knowledge Beside Itself delves into the peculiar emphasis placed in recent years, curatorially and institutionally, on such notions as “research” and “knowledge production.” Contemporary art is viewed here as a strategic bet on the social distinctions and value extractions made possible by claiming a different, novel access to “knowledge.” Contemporary art''s various liaisons with the humanities and the social and natural sciences, as well as its practitioners'' frequent embeddedness within transdisciplinary research environments and educational settings, have created a sense of epistemo-aesthetic departure, which concurs with the growing relevance of art as conduit or catalyst of knowledge. Discussing the practice of artists such as Christine Borland, Bureau d''études, Tony Chakar, Lina Dokuzović, Fernando García-Dory, Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Adelita Husni-Bey, Jakob Jakobsen, Claire Pentecost, and Pilvi Takala, writer and curator Tom Holert submits the gambit of conceptualizing contemporary art as an agent of epistemic politics to a genealogical analysis of its political-economic underpinnings—in times of cognitive capitalism, machine learning, and a renewed urgency of epistemological disobedience.

The revisioning of our infrastructural futures, local and global relationalities, and historical and political legacies.Forming a comprehensive picture of the multiple processes, regulations, institutions, technologies, networks, and operations that we have come to understand as the distributed infrastructural arena in which we act, yield, and plot is a perennial challenge. Over the past decade, a growing number of artists, theorists, curators, and researchers have moved from “institutional critique” to “infrastructural critique,” or toward “infrastructural speculation,” in which they explore the potential of creative infrastructure-related visions and scenarios. In attempts to counter the impasse of “the cancelled future,” art has immersed itself in systemic critiques and propositional thinking, addressing major challenges, such as the rampant financialization of the economy and runaway climate change. From questions around space settlements to the possibility of repurposing blockchain infrastructures and financial instruments for redistributive purposes, and from the diagrammatic potential of infrastructural thinking in artistic practices to scenario planning and economic strategizing, this collection of new essays brings together critical analysis from a broad group of contributors engaged in the revisioning of our infrastructural futures. Their interrogations span local and global relationalities, historical and political legacies, as well as future-oriented infrastructural hypotheses.

An analyses of the relations created by the curatorial—relations that also constitute it.In spite of the heightened interest in the curatorial since the late twentieth century, the structural conditions and potentials underpinning its special sociocultural status have yet to be defined. Taking this as a starting point, in this book, Beatrice von Bismarck outlines the curatorial—that field of cultural activity and knowledge which relates to the becoming-public of art and culture—as a domain of practice and meaning with its own structures, conditions, rules, and procedures. Von Bismarck focuses on the relations created by the curatorial—relations that also constitute it. By concentrating on the dynamic fabric of relations between human and nonhuman participants, she carries out a shift within the discourse on the curatorial: rather than foregrounding partial definitions of the activity of curating, the subjectivization of the curator, and the presentation format of the exhibition, she emphasizes the interplay of all these factors. She proposes a conceptual framework geared toward highlighting the activity, the subject position, and the resulting product as always already dynamically interrelated in its genesis, articulation, and function. Not least, this situates the curatorial condition in the context of key parameters of societal developments over the last half century.

In response to recent developments in pictorial practice and critical discourse, Painting beyond Itself: The Medium in the Post-medium Condition seeks new ways to approach and historicize the question of the medium. Reaching back to the earliest theoretical and institutional definitions of painting, this book—based on a conference at Harvard University in 2013—focuses on the changing role of materiality in establishing painting as the privileged practice, discourse, and institution of modernity. Myriad conceptions of the medium and its specificity are explored by an international group of scholars, critics, and artists. Painting beyond Itself is a forum for rich historical, theoretical, and practice-grounded conversation.ContributorsCarol Armstrong, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Sabeth Buchmann, René Démoris, Isabelle Graw, David Joselit, Jutta Koether, Ewa Lajer-Burcharth, Jacqueline Lichtenstein, Julie Mehretu, Matt Saunders, Amy SillmanInstitut für Kunstkritik Series

An examination of the notion of craft as it moves from moves from “modern craft” to “post-craft” amid new economies of making.The notion of the handmade has shifted from the margins to center stage. Craft''s value is increasingly recognized across creative, economic, social, cultural, and political contexts. Amid dissolving disciplinary boundaries and the widespread appropriation of craft, its meaning is changing. While its claims to values such as authenticity and anti-consumerism are questionable, the role of craft is poised to be optimized within the contemporary climate. Amid new economies of making, as craft moves from “modern craft” to “post-craft,” we need to examine not only the practice of craft but also its mediation and interpretation.