This Issue was produced under the auspices of the research program Dexter Bang Sinister at Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen, January 21 – October 28, 2012, curated by Rhea Dall. The program, devised by Angie Keefer, David Reinfurt and Stuart Bailey together with writer-critic-curator Lars Bang Larsen, was based on Lars’s just-completed PhD dissertation at the University of Copenhagen, A History of Irritated Material: Psychedelic Concepts in Neo-Avantgarde Art. In practice, a large part of the so-called research played out in the form of an exhibition set up to explore the notion of *black & white psychedelia*— halfway closing the doors of ...

When Hurricane Sandy tore through the Eastern US on the eve of the presidential elections, it seemed that a certain fatigue had found a strange mirror image in the libidinal force of completely absurd weather patterns, that a tired resignation to a lack of options in the political sphere had actually mutated into an apocalyptic revolution in the atmosphere. It was as if a negative omen had come with the prospect that the next global insurgency could arrive by way of non-human forces altogether—totally external to markets, but also to people… Editorial Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, Anton Vidokle Emancipation of the Sign: Poetry ...

Everything changes with the circus. It makes the unbelievable real and the familiar unfamiliar. Formalized during the Victorian era, the institution emerged and evolved through industrialization, drawing on elements of ancient roman rituals, street performances, and esoteric knowledge. Testing the limits of the physical, the circus requires enormous expertise, artistry, endurance, and courage. extraordinarily, it makes danger into entertainment, wild animals into performers, gravity into an illusion. though the rituals and acts of this spectacle have transfixed audiences for centuries, in recent years it has begun to lose its urgency, no longer holding the same sway over audiences. As Federico ...

This year’s Annual is published in tandem with a long-term installation of The Serving Library’s collection of (mostly) framed objects at 019, an artist-run exhibition, performance and work space in a former welding factory in Ghent, Belgium. Apparently, the sole common denominator of the objects in the collection — which range from paintings, photographs, and record sleeves, to a can of green paint, a German car license plate, and an ouija board — is to have appeared as illustrations in an issue of The Serving Library Annual or one of its immediate antecedents, Bulletins of The Serving Library or Dot Dot ...