The second issue of Field Notes continues to address AAA’s core questions, examining the manifestations of Asia, its methodologies, maps, networks, and geographies. This issue proposes the archive as a method to illustrate the way in which initiatives like AAA are taking the archive to counter, complicate, and reimagine systems in which narratives of modern and contemporary art are being produced, circulated, and understood. How do archives of today respond to contemporary conditions through practice? What can an archive look like – what forms does it take (published anthologies, network of archives, physical archive, exhibition platform, online database)? Who are the ...

This e-book offers the findings of the conference ‘Conceptualism – Intersectional Readings, International Framings: Situating “Black Artists & Modernism” in Europe After 1968’ at the Van Abbemuseum Eindhoven, 7–9 December 2017, presented by Black Artists & Modernism in collaboration with the Van Abbemuseum. The conference and the accompanying e-publication gathered artists, curators and academics to consider two broad, overarching questions: Firstly, how to rethink conceptualism intersectionally and internationally as a strategy rather than as a movement; and secondly how to situate ‘black artists’ and ‘modernism’ within Europe? The conference and corresponding publication includes key note lectures by Iris Dressler and ...

Deviance can be understood as veering away from the entrenched path. For the modern art museum these paths emerged from the west’s understanding of itself and by inference its relationship to others. An exploration of deviant practice necessarily involves undoing long-held institutional, racial, geo- and bio- political formations. We therefore understand the prefix ‘de’ (‘off’) in deviance in relation to notions of demodernising, decolonising, deprivelleging or deneoliberalising – key strategies we hope to explore. The focus is on two research tools: – Archives: The Van Abbe understands the archive as encompassing the collection of art works, the library’s collection and the museum’s paper ...

Deviance can be understood as veering away from the entrenched path. For the modern art museum these paths emerged from the west’s understanding of itself and by inference its relationship to others. An exploration of deviant practice necessarily involves undoing long-held institutional, racial, geo- and bio- political formations. We therefore understand the prefix ‘de’ (‘off’) in deviance in relation to notions of demodernising, decolonising, deprivelleging or deneoliberalising – key strategies we hope to explore. The focus is on two research tools: – Archives: The Van Abbe understands the archive as encompassing the collection of art works, the library’s collection and the museum’s paper ...

The Mediation Group is made up of curators, educators, mediators, art practitioners, and thinkers-by-doing; essentially, people related to education and public programmes, people who work in or are associated with museums, and members of the L’Internationale Confederation. However, this is not just a working group or support group. Rather, it is also a reading group, a debate group, and, above all, a group of people who are looking for new ways of thinking together, sharing experiences, and having fun. While they are all committed to the OME program activities and materials, their work also involves engagement through mutual affective support. ...

I Think My Body Feels, I Feel My Body Thinks: On Corpoliteracy is a gathering of texts and textures from lyricists, theorists, organisers, artists and practitioners. The publication draws from recent programmes, acquisitions and trajectories within the Van Abbemuseum, alongside essays and new commissions to explore different modalities of – and relationships to – corpoliteracy. The book comprises writing, sound and video work, a queer sign glossary with sixteen video entries, and edited conversations. The term corpoliteracy was coined by curator and polymath Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung and speaks to a consciousness of mind and body rhythm-equity. Ndikung’s thinking has been ...

Living with Ghosts: Legacies of Colonialism and Fascism is a constellation of essays, conversations and images that point to the manner in which the legacies of colonialism and fascism reverberate in our present conjuncture. The impulse for producing this issue was a question of whether it may be possible to trace the connections between the violences of the colonial project through the horrors of fascism to current forms of racism, identitarianism and populism – what we initially called ‘an arc’ of colonialism-nationalism-fascism. These shifts are palpable in the contemporary political uncertainties expressed in this collection of texts. Each of the contributors reflect ...

This collection of essays, interviews and images results from L’Internationale’s current focus on the 1990s and, in particular, our wish to identify actions and alliances from that era that form constellations with our own. Most optimistic claims made during that period were hubristic – not least the promise that technology and post-Cold-War politics would turn the world into a super-connected ‘global village’, and that the ensuing spread of civic society and liberal democracy would usher in ‘the end of history’. Cultural institutions – including the museums and galleries that compose the L’Internationale confederation today – were charged with the task ...