Bøger udgivet af Sternberg Press

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.

A crossdisciplinary inquiry into the practices and forms of assembly making, through multiple times and geographies. Assemblies are ancestral, transcultural ways of coming together as a community. Over the past decades, multiple social movements have reappropriated these forms of collective organisation as a prominent component of political struggle, to defend radical visions of democracy. At the same time, governments across the globe have sought to reframe public deliberation as a response to the failures of representative democracy. How can we analyze this double movement, and could assemblies of equals once again offer possibilities to reimagine and renew the ways politics is practiced? To address these questions, we need to move beyond simply asking what assemblies can do, and instead examine how they are made. This means departing from the shores of a speculative, deliberative ideal and restoring attention to both their diversity of forms, and their capacities to perform, deform, and transform. Bringing together accounts written by those who practice assemblies, and contributions from artists, activists, historians, philosophers, and social scientists, as well as three architectural experiments that attempt to imagine models for a future assembly, the book proposes a critical inquiry into the potential of assemblies to shape political subjects. From assemblies in Indigenous territories of Brazil to those of the Yellow Vests in France, from medieval communes to street parliaments in Africa, from citizens' assemblies set up by public authorities to practices forged from emancipatory traditions, What Makes An Assembly? examines the tensions that exist in all assemblies between the need for form and the danger of formalization; between the scripts, rituals, and architectural settings from which they derive, and their capacity to erupt and emerge anew. ContributorsAyreen Anastas, Andreas Angelidakis, Hans Asenbaum, Frédérique Aït-Touati, Richard Banégas, Sandra Benites, Jean Godefroy Bidima, Patrick Boucheron, Florence Brisset-Foucault, Manuel Callahan, François Cooren, Armando Cutolo, Pascale Dufour, Ben Eersels, Tallulah Frappier, Rene Gabri, Delphine Gardey, Alana Gerecke, Andrés Jaque/Office For Political Innovation, Laurent Jeanpierre, Pablo Lafuente, Laura Levin, Stacey Liou, Catherine Malabou, Charlotte Malterre-Barthes, Florian Malzacher, Piersandra Di Matteo, Markus Miessen, Raumlabor, Philippe Urfalino, Yellow Vests, Aleksandra Wasilkowska, Ana Terra Yawalapiti

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

Television as cultural container, and as intermedia interface with the book as medium.This Is Television addresses the increasingly obsolete medium of television by way of the medium of the book--by extension commenting on media's continuous changes of form and format. Through an interplay of theory and artistic research material, the book extends Judy Radul's ongoing investigation of media with an idiosyncratic perspective on television--while still feeding off collective experience. The book thematizes television as a cultural container, both in its format as a "box" for content and as an ideologically saturated apparatus for reception. With sections titled Craig, Oral History, Moon, Display, Landing, End of Analog etc., the book charts our identification with specific media and a nostalgia connected with the obsolescence of technology. Springing from a desire to engage intermedia form by way of a book about television, and to commit to the ambiguity of its title's announcement, This Is Television is organized around three central chapters: "This," "Is," and "Television" are individually interpreted in newly commissioned essays by Honor Gavin, Ana Teixeira Pinto, and Diedrich Diederichsen, with additional short texts by Judy Radul.Copublished with DAAD Artists-in-Berlin ProgramContributorsDiedrich Diederichsen, Honor Gavin, Ana Teixeira Pinto, Judy Radul

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.

A study of how the rhetoric of painting remains omnipresent in the field of art.Painting seems to have lost its dominant position in the field of the arts. However, looking more closely at exhibited photographs, assemblages, installations, or performances, it is evident how the rhetorics of painting still remain omnipresent. Following the tradition of classical theories of painting based on exchanges with artists, Isabelle Graw''s The Love of Painting considers the art form not as something fixed, but as a visual and discursive material formation with the potential to fascinate owing to its ability to produce the fantasy of liveliness. Thus, painting is not restricted to the limits of its own frame, but possesses a specific potential that is located in its material and physical signs. Its value is grounded in its capacity to both reveal and mystify its conditions of production. Alongside in-depth analyses of the work of artists like Édouard Manet, Jutta Koether, Martin Kippenberger, Jana Euler, and Marcel Broodthaers, the book includes conversations with artists in which Graw''s insights are further discussed and put to the test.