Bøger udgivet af Sternberg Press

Pennsylvania State Senator Nikil Saval tells the story of an unlikely partnership between June Jordan and R. Buckminster Fuller, and their attempt to reimagine Harlem in the wake of the 1964 riots. In the tense days leading up to the 2020 American elections, then-candidate for Pennsylvania State Senate Nikil Saval addressed a virtual audience at the Harvard GSD to tell a story about Black feminist writer June Jordan and a little-known project that resulted from the aftermath of the 1964 Harlem riot. The events of police brutality and community grieving made a lasting impression on Jordan, who, while known for her work as a poet, playwright, and activist, responded with a proposal for a multiple-tower housing design. Through an unlikely partnership with R. Buckminster Fuller, Jordan's "Skyrise for Harlem" project offered a Futuristic vision for Harlem that argued for environmental redesign: "it is architecture, conceived of in its fullest meaning as the creation of environment, which may actually determine the pace, pattern, and quality of living experience." Jordan was not an architect in the conventional sense, Saval says. "But in the understanding of someone who sought to propose and build interventions in public space, she was."

A training manual of practical and experimental exercises to reclaim the means of production of the future. Training for the Future is a training camp where audiences are turned into trainees to pre-enact alternative scenarios of the future to reclaim the means of production for the future. This handbook gathers training manuals, interviews, and documentation of the various training camps that took place from 2018 to 2021.

A comprehensive overview of artist Kathrin Böhm's multifaceted, deeply collaborative, and durational practice and networks. This volume critically profiles, contextualizes, and theoretically elaborates the unique practice of the UK-based German artist Kathrin Böhm. Combining visual and textual material, it offers an overview of Böhm's exceptional modus operandi that is rooted in a highly original artistic synthesis of a range of practices. Over the last three decades, Böhm has expanded the terms of socially engaged ways of working to an unprecedented scale and breadth by producing complex organizational, spatial, visual, and economic forms. These often entail the production of complex infrastructures, manifested via projects such as Culture is a Verb (2018-21), The Centre for Plausible Economies (2018-ongoing), Company: Movements, Deals and Drinks (2014-ongoing) and the Eco-Nomadic School (2010-ongoing). The book follows a major mid-career exhibition at The Showroom, London, in 2021. Offering a significant addition to debates on contemporary art and architecture, social action, and public culture, Kathrin Böhm: Art on the Scale of Life brings together critical reflections by internationally acclaimed contributors. Spanning a wide range of critical positions and disciplines, these include Dave Beech, Céline Condorelli, Elvira Dyangani Ose, Wapke Feenstra, Katherine Gibson, Joon-Lynn Goh, Lily Hall, Yolande Zola Zoli van der Heide, Grace Ndiritu, Gerrie van Noord, Paul O'Neill, Doina Petrescu, Gregory Sholette and THEMM!!, Kuba Szreder, Gavin Wade, Mick Wilson, Stephen Wright, and Franciska Zólyom. In addition, material derived from Böhm's international networks and projects provides an in-depth impression of the deeply ingrained collaborative and durational nature of her way of working. Photographic, diagrammatic, and typographical imagery runs through the book, demonstrating the rich visual and spatial languages embedded in Böhm's work. This visual register of the book is therefore much more than a series of illustrations and acts as a counterpoint to, and extension of, the ideas elaborated in the texts. Copublished by HDK-Valand; PUBLICS; The Showroom

An examination of the introduction of a non-human actor into the field of intersubjectivity. Our most intimate spaces are increasingly sites of intersubjective relations. The widespread presence of technological networks in particular has made visible the ways in which agency and subjectivity are often distributed, engendering theories of hybrid subjects who might integrate the human with other biological or technological agents. These incursions into traditional notions of subjectivity not only destabilize our sense of autonomy but also explode the human sensorium, reminding us that it is only one of many viable systems for sensing, perceiving, and communicating. Relative Intimacies collects essays, conversations, and artworks to explore how technology now mediates our encounters and, in doing so, forms alternate, networked subjectivities. It asks how intersubjective intimacy might be theorized epistemologically, aesthetically, philosophically, and politically, and considers how such relative intimacy might connect physical matter and cybernetic systems or forge new subjectivities between constellations of actors. Bringing together academic, curatorial, and artistic perspectives, Relative Intimacies initiates points of contact between artificial, biological, and emotional intelligence. ContributorsCecilia Bengolea, Dora Budor, Lou Cantor, Constant Dullaart, Hal Foster, Kevin Gotkin, Camille Henrot, Sun-Ha Hong, Tobias Kaspar, Devin Kenny, Agnieszka Kurant, Lynn Hershman Leeson, John Miller, Frederick Cruz Nowell, X Zhu-Nowell, Samantha Ozer, Aleksandra Przegalinska, Farid Rakun, Tiana Reid, Patrick Urs Riechert, Isabel de Sena, Jenna Sutela, Elena Vogman, Emily Watlington

How urban spaces are finding new life through communities of gardeners, cooks, ceramicists, and creatives. "Rochester Square is an oasis between the trundling traffic of Camden Road and busy York Way that welcomes people of all ages, at all hours and in all weathers, to be together to grow and make things. The three animating words--clay, food, and garden--summon the organism that Francesca Anfossi and Eric Wragge have fostered. The square has become a nest of creativity that extends an invitation to dwell, make, and be happy. In this book, you will find excellently unusual ways of preparing food, examples of many of the wondrous things made and the thoughts and passionate solidarity of neighbours and friends."--Antony Gormley ContributorsFrancesca Anfossi, Francesca Astesani, Louise Chignac, Chris Fite-Wassilak, Emily King, photographs by Marta Fernàndez, illustrations by Polly Farquharson

A richly illustrated volume on the influential textile art of Elisabeth Haarr. For over fifty years Elisabeth Haarr has been one of the most significant artists in Norway. From her early experimentation with tapestry as modern visual art in the 1960s to political works with an activist message in the 1970s, and her later sculptural installations of rugs, banners, figures, and drapes, Haarr's oeuvre has significantly contributed to the consideration of textiles as a material in contemporary art. Today, her work continues to address topics such as feminism, anti-fascism, and environmental protection, and is as relevant as it was forty years ago. Elisabeth Haarr accompanies a monographic presentation by the artist at Bergen Kunsthall. Surprisingly, this is the first extensive career survey of Haarr's work, with the exception of a two-person survey with Hannah Ryggen in 2008. This book aims to provide entry points into Elisabeth Haarr's ongoing practice and is illustrated with a wide-ranging selection of works from throughout her career, as well as new works produced for the exhibition in Bergen. Iconic photos of Haarr's work show banners or other textile pieces hanging in the open, outside of the exhibition space like a flag, or in her garden blowing in the wind. The works are documented with additional material, such as research references and sources of inspiration, as well as images made by the artist during her working process to share her progress with collaborators and friends. These images often show the artist's personal milieu, such as her studio and the garden of her house in Kristiansand. This richly illustrated publication includes new texts by artist Are Blytt, curator Elisabeth Byre, poet, playwright, and novelist Cecilie Løveid, and curator Steinar Sekkingstad, and a conversation between Elisabeth Haarr and artist Eline Mugaas.

Science-fiction narratives on indigenisms and the creation of worlds. Conceived by Pedro Neves Marques, YWY is an android played by indigenous actress and artist Zahy Guajajara, who gave her the name "YWY," meaning "land" or "territory" in her native Tupi-Guarani language. The character's co-invention by a white European author and a native artist from Brazil sets in motion a dynamic that can be resolved only by being given away and shared with a plurality of voices. YWY, Searching for a Character between Future Worlds shares the fictional character of YWY with several authors from Brazil, the United States, and beyond, creating a conversation about science fiction and robotics, ecology and gender, Indigenous Futurisms, and what it means to be human.

Following the "emerging life adventures and experiences" of Sophia, a robot animated by blockchain and AI, to present a study in temporal automation. In what way do the two technologies of blockchain and artificial intelligence actualize and, crucially, automatize the cognition of time? These kinds of machines are increasingly part of both our contemporary present and our prospective future, but how do we really define a present and a future? And more important, how do these machines themselves understand, know, and sense time? Can machines really think about the present and dream the future in an autonomous way? In order to unravel these questions, Whose Time Is It? follows the "emerging life adventures and experiences" of Sophia, a robot animated by blockchain and AI, to present a study in temporal automation.

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.

Studio Experimentelles Design's politically and socially committed approach through lectures, research, conversations, and project documentation. With today's increasing income disparity, forced global division of labor, and neoliberal expansion of precariousness, a critical discussion about work is looming--even in the field of design. Since 2011, the Studio Experimentelles Design at the University of Fine Arts in Hamburg has experimented with local design support as a contemporary practice. The student-led program advocates a community-based, cooperative approach to design. In the summer of 2020, the Kunstgewerbemuseum Berlin Design Lab #6 hosted Studio Experimentelles Design's online research festival "(How) do we (want to) work (together) (as (socially engaged) designers (students and neighbours)) (in neoliberal times)?" The studio invited friends, experts, and activists to discuss self-organizing academia, artistic collectivism, care work, and creative self-exploitation. Over three weeks, talks, performances, and readings explored alternatives to the formal economy, immaterial labor in the context of aesthetic capitalism, the issue of the art strike, alienation, and new subjectivities. Divided into two parts, this compendium chronicles Studio Experimentelles Design's politically and socially committed approach through lectures, research, conversations, and project documentation from the online festival and five years of studio work. Both the festival's debate about working conditions and the studio's practice critically examine the imperative of committed designers today to radically reorient their approach, the content of their work, and their relationship with the actors for whom they design.

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 hopeful meditation on how periods of inactivity become reimagined as fertile spaces for design and how we might use this strange moment in history. "Hi, everyone. I'm speaking to you from my apartment in Oakland, though I've virtually placed myself in the rose garden nearby." Artist and writer Jenny Odell hadn't originally planned to deliver the Harvard University Graduate School of Design's 2020 Class Day Address from her living room. But on May 25, 2020, there was Jenny, framed by a rose garden in her Zoom background, speaking to an audience she could not see about the role of design in a suspended moment marked by uncertainty in a global pandemic. Odell's message, itself a timely reflection on observation, embraces the standstill and its potential to deepen and expand our individual and collective attention and sensitivity to time, place, and presence--in turn, perhaps, enabling us all, amid our "new" virtual contexts, to better connect with our natural and cultural environments. Odell unspools this hopeful meditation in Inhabiting the Negative Space, where periods of inactivity become reimagined not as wasted time but fertile spaces for a kind of design predicated less on relentless production and more on permitting a deeper, more careful look at what exactly is demanding or tapping our time and attention, and how we might use this strange moment in history to respond.

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, Maurício Meirelles, Harry Pinedo, Aníbal Quijano, Djamila Ribeiro, Pamela Rosenkranz, Abel Rodríguez, Maria Belén Saéz de Ibarra, Barbara Santos, Paulo Tavares, Daiara Tukano, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro