Distributed

Book published by Open Editions (2018)

For those who would seek to influence others, the distribution of ideas is paramount. Similarly, for those holding ambition to secrete knowledge for reasons of authority dissemination is key. The same ... [more ▼]

For those who would seek to influence others, the distribution of ideas is paramount. Similarly, for those holding ambition to secrete knowledge for reasons of authority dissemination is key. The same, however, goes for those who seek to protect the fruits of intellectual labour for reasons of profit or ethical concern. This new volume in the Occasional Table series of critical anthologies focuses attention on the act of distribution as a subject for serious creative consideration and one of great social and economic importance. [less ▲]

A City Curating Reader. Public Art Munich 2018

Book published by Motto Books (2018)

What is public in public art? What are the contingencies of working outside of the protection of the institutional walls? What makes city curating? This reader takes Munich as a case study, and documents ... [more ▼]

What is public in public art? What are the contingencies of working outside of the protection of the institutional walls? What makes city curating? This reader takes Munich as a case study, and documents the projects of PUBLIC ART MUNICH 2018 dealing with political, ideological and economical shifts, spanning from the founding of the Bavarian Soviet Republic in 1919 to the arrival of refugees at the Hauptbahnhof in 2015. It contextualizes art within the broader questions of the grammar of the public sphere and of what constitutes publicness today. It also reflects on the concept of context-specific city curating, performativity and art conceived in minutes rather than square meters. Art projects, conversations and essays plot a narrative of how art can cultivate encounters with the unpredictable, negotiate the uncommonness, and provoke the counter-publics to come. [less ▲]

Blessing and Transgressing: A Live Institute

Book published by Witte De With (2018)

Published at the end of curator Defne Ayas' six-year directorship of the Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art in Rotterdam, this richly illustrated publication celebrates the institution's programs ... [more ▼]

Published at the end of curator Defne Ayas' six-year directorship of the Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art in Rotterdam, this richly illustrated publication celebrates the institution's programs and collaborations while ruminating on their realization. [less ▲]

Metropolis M no.1

in Metropolis M no.1 (2016)

Caulfield, Cauliflower, and other vegetables

Book published by MaHKU (2016)

What do you do with a show, where there is no narrative for a show? Where there is no red thread, no umbrella framework or common denominator in terms of content. When I first arrived at MaHKU halfway ... [more ▼]

What do you do with a show, where there is no narrative for a show? Where there is no red thread, no umbrella framework or common denominator in terms of content. When I first arrived at MaHKU halfway through the year, I encountered an inspiring, but scattered group of individuals, dealing with personal challenges and processes of identity formulation. The only means of unity that I was able to detect was that they seemed to be working in the same space, their studio. The frame: a particular year in a particular graduate program. Critical practice, in this context, could be imagined as parallel realities pushing in the same direction, that is, interrogating the political and spatial realities that the protagonists understand as their social and societal context. The work at play here presents polymorphous and polymathic approaches to the subjective documentation of the contemporary condition, diverse narrative takes, which often take as a starting point the personal struggle with the world, but – more precisely – the surveying of oneself as a critical being. Such practice should be understood and exercised as a sounding-board that makes visible and discloses the underlying conflicts of what one is facing, to exacerbate them, to create and nurture complications, to work with and around them in a productive way, and to then act upon them. As Jan Verwoert put it: “To learn the lesson of the ethics of art and ideas therefore means to develop a sense of simultaneous unconditional trust and mistrust in your own principles of sympathy and resentment, affiliation and animosity, identification and hostility.” Empowerment sometimes emerges in conditions that theoretically ought to thwart it. Knowledge is often generated at the edges or the gaps of ignorance. Hence, personal involvement should simply be understood as a tactic of complicit curiosity scaled to the space that one is currently inhabiting. It offers an alternative rendering of a possible practice that goes beyond the conventional understanding of discipline and vocation. It resembles a framework through which to act: not a strictly political one, but rather an arena for the discussion of how practice itself can become political. Literature is highly personal and biased. Most (good) literature has a Doppelter Boden (double layer). The narrative therefore is not only one of self-experience, but that, which can be projected onto and against a civil society. As opposed to journalism, which is supposed to report about a forensic reality, literature holds the opportunity to smuggle different narratives and messages across. A Doppelter Boden is an intrinsically spatial phenomenon, as – in order for the message to be transported and deployed – one needs to construct the very space in which a parallel reality can unfold. Holden Caulfield, the protagonist in Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, explains his love affair with the museum (Museum of Natural History) by nebulously stating parts of his personal insecurity. In life, with the world surrounding him. Like all of us, he is not only facing narratives of constant change, but also decay and loss. He demonstrates his fears and inability of dealing with conflict, confusion, and – ultimately – change. Being thrown into the dirty reality of the now, this exhibition presents a series of extremely relevant positions that deal with this very question of contemporary identity(ies) and the way in which those can be localized and grounded in a world exposed to constant flux. Maybe one of the reasons why many of us are engaged in a similar love affair with the museum is precisely its ability (and reality) to preserve and maintain a form of stoicism and silence. It is (almost) always the same. Cauliflower, as the arguably hottest (vegetable) shit on the market right now, faces the sad reality of a formerly neglected plant that has suddenly risen to fame (again). It seems that the market of the vegetable unfolds as a twofold problematic here: not only has it become more sought-after, but it is unclear for how long its net-worth will remain intact. Torn between questions of identity and a soon-to-be-dealt with dirty reality of the market, the positions in the exhibition range from Sudanese gender politics, Korean sex culture, methods of automatism, postcolonial subjectivities, to the arguable dichotomy between the craftsman and the intellectual, heritage and knowledge, architectural bastardisation, to human stewardship, the father figure, electric smog, the objectification and censorship of the female body, formats of (social) coding, to painting as spatial practice. Rather than a stable and static exhibition housed in a single institutional setting, the show is conceived as a decentralized form of localizations, depending on what the artists and the curatorial team at MaHKU saw fit. Rather than trying to contextualize the impossible, the exhibition attempts to produce moments of representation and activation, sometimes formal, sometimes informal, sometimes stable, sometimes unstable, sometimes ongoing, sometimes limited to 15 minutes, occurring in different places throughout the city of Utrecht. Instead of crudely enforcing and presenting a (fictional) narrative that did not exist in the first place, the opening of the exhibition will be used as an opportunity to informally discuss questions of identity, development, success and dirty realism in the nebula of what is commonly referred to as the art world. Partners-in-crime will be artist Flaka Haliti, cultural critic Timo Feldhaus, and curatorial consultant Marie Egger. In an essay for e-flux, Hito Steyerl suggests that falling does not only mean falling apart, it could also mean the falling into place of a new certainty: “Grappling with crumbling futures that propel us backwards onto an agonizing present, we may realize that the place we are falling toward is no longer grounded, nor is it stable. It promises no community, but a shifting formation.” Follow your instinct. Embody the willingness to govern. Collaborate when necessary. Assume responsibility. Be liable. Produce consequence: “Refraining is not an option.” [less ▲]

JILL MAGID The Proposal

Book published by Sternberg Press (2016)

The eighth volume of the Critical Spatial Practice series focuses on Jill Magid’s “The Barragán Archives,” a multiyear project that examines the legacy of Pritzker Prize–winning architect Luis Barragán ... [more ▼]

The eighth volume of the Critical Spatial Practice series focuses on Jill Magid’s “The Barragán Archives,” a multiyear project that examines the legacy of Pritzker Prize–winning architect Luis Barragán (1902–1988), and questions forms of power, public access, and copyright that construct artistic legacy. The archive of Barragán was split in two after his death—the personal archive is kept in his home in Mexico, which is now a museum and UNESCO World Heritage Site; while his professional archive was purchased in 1995 by Rolf Fehlbaum, chairman of the Swiss furniture company Vitra, from a New York gallerist. It is said that Fehlbaum bought it as a gift for his then fiancée, Federica Zanco. She is the director of the Barragan Foundation, which also holds rights to Barragán’s name. For the past twenty years the archive, housed below the Vitra headquarters, has been inaccessible to the public. With The Proposal Magid attempts to bring together Barragán’s professional and personal archives by probing the architect’s official and private selves, and the interests of various individuals and governmental and corporate entities who have become the archives’ guardians. Magid, with permission of the Barragán family, commissioned a small amount of Barragán’s cremated remains to be transformed into a diamond. The stone, set in a gold ring, was offered to Zanco in exchange for the return of the professional archive to Mexico. Magid’s artwork directly engages the intersections of the psychological and the judicial, national identity and repatriation, international property rights and copyright law, authorship and ownership, the human body and the body of work. [less ▲]

Crossbenching Toward Participation as Critical Spatial Practice

Book published by Sternberg Press (2016)

With a preface by Armen Avanessian, an introduction by Hannes Grassegger and Markus Miessen, and a postscript by Patricia Reed “At the heart of this book is a simple and profound proposition: to ‘do’ ... [more ▼]

With a preface by Armen Avanessian, an introduction by Hannes Grassegger and Markus Miessen, and a postscript by Patricia Reed “At the heart of this book is a simple and profound proposition: to ‘do’ architecture is to immerse oneself in a conflictual process of material production—participation is not a productive encounter of multiple practitioners and stakeholders, but a set of conflicts, negotiations, maneuvers, and swindles between and within a multiplicity of agents, human and nonhuman alike—equally including architects, clients, financiers, and builders, say, but also silicon, plastic, concrete, each with its conflicting aims and different material means to achieve them. Every building is thus the materialization of such encounter. So, despite the hubris of the field, none of the parties to such an encounter can ultimately control that the result—architecture (unlike real estate), according to Miessen, belongs to no one but affects and is affected by everyone—and this proposition asks that we reframe questions of ethics and politics. They can no longer be the property of an individual but a collective set of interrelations—it is through such profound departure from the terms of architecture that Miessen’s new book demands nothing less than to reimagine how we might finally become citizens.” —Eyal Weizman, Professor of Spatial and Visual Cultures, Director of the Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths, University of London “Miessen’s new book depicts in a challenging and projective manner the problem of politics in times of conceptual indeterminacy, where ‘participation’ of the civil society seems to become the salvation for the political mess we are in, especially in Europe. Well, it is not! ‘Participation’ will not eradicate the Front National, and more transparency will not deprive Orbán of his power. Civil society will not gain power by criticizing or demonstrating loudly against the European system or chatting on the Internet. The populists have understood that if you want power, you need parties. What we risk to lose in that participatory game is representative democracy in its current shape and for no good: the majority of the street is no democracy. The post-structuralist hype for participation fuels into the mills of those who want to play la volonté de tous against la volonté generale, to go back to Rousseau: yet, the plebs killed Socrates in Athens.“ —Ulrike Guerot, political scientist, founder and director, European Democracy Lab, Berlin [less ▲]

Crossbenching

Book published by Merve (2016)

What Ever Happened to New Institutionalism?

Book published by Sternberg Press (2016)

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 ... [more ▼]

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. [less ▲]

FELICITY D. SCOTT Disorientation Bernard Rudofsky in the Empire of Signs

Book published by Sternberg Press (2016)

Viennese émigré architect Bernard Rudofsky (1905–1988) is most frequently recalled for curating “Architecture without Architects,” the famous 1964 photography exhibition of vernacular, preindustrial ... [more ▼]

Viennese émigré architect Bernard Rudofsky (1905–1988) is most frequently recalled for curating “Architecture without Architects,” the famous 1964 photography exhibition of vernacular, preindustrial structures at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Far from simply a romantic or nostalgic invocation of cultures lost to industrial modernity, Rudofsky’s exhibition drew on decades of speculations about modern architecture and urbanism, particularly their semantic, technological, institutional, commercial, and geopolitical influences. Focusing on Rudofsky’s encounters with Japan in the 1950s—he described postwar Japan as a “rear-view mirror” of the American way of life—architectural historian Felicity D. Scott revisits the architect’s readings of the vernacular both in the United States and Japan, which resonate with his attempts to imagine architecture and cities that refused to communicate in a normative sense. In a contemporary world saturated with visual information, Rudofsky’s unconventional musings take on a heightened resonance. [less ▲]