Taking as its premise that the proposed epoch of the Anthropocene is necessarily an aesthetic event, this collection explores the relationship between contemporary art and knowledge production in an era of ecological crisis. Art in the Anthropocene brings together a multitude of disciplinary conversations, drawing together artists, curators, scientists, theorists and activists to address the geological reformation of the human species. Contributors include Amy Balkin, Ursula Biemann, Amanda Boetzkes, Lindsay Bremner, Joshua Clover & Juliana Spahr, Heather Davis, Sara Dean, Elizabeth Ellsworth & Jamie Kruse (smudge studio), Irmgard Emmelhainz, Anselm Franke, Peter Galison, Fabien Giraud & Ida Soulard, Laurent Gutierrez ...

For How To Sleep Faster we were looking for contributions that focused on The Body in Pain. The title is taken from the book by Elaine Scarry, which examines pain with regard to ‘making’ and ‘unmaking’ the world. Thinking about Guantanamo Bay as the emblem of the time we’ve come of age, thinking about the political use and the political meaning of pain inflicted: war, torture, natural disaster and disaster capitalism, shock therapy economics and shock therapy for uncooperative or dysfunctional subjects. Institutional violence and the violence of institutions Pain is what we know and the limit of what we know: ...

The implications around climate change have far-reaching consequences but they can also have far-reaching benefits. The e-publication Ecologising Museums explores how museums and cultural institutions can face the issue not only head-on, but from all angles. To what degree are the core activities of collecting, preserving and presenting in fact attitudes that embody an unsustainable view of the world and the relationship between man and nature?

Although the worlds we inhabit are invariably composed of sensations and sense-makings, it is a peculiar challenge to perceive ourselves sensing. Because our human-centred sensory habits are so difficult to discern, we can often mistake them for natural tendencies. As an attunement to the aesthetics of sensation, the exhibition Logics of Sense—presented in two parts at the Blackwood Gallery, University of Toronto Mississauga—examines sense-in-the-making, from the surface of incorporeal events to a multiplicity of decentralized perceptions, and from itinerant geo-methodologies to the various disciplinary frames and frameworks that artistic intelligence retrofits for emergent social and political realities. Logics of Sense 1: Investigations (September ...

What might a contemporary artistic practice look like that expresses the sensitivities of Roma in Switzerland and in Europe, that unravels their history and sets the record straight on the erroneous assumptions that extend to the present, that examines them thoroughly and with a dash of fluxist humor, and that responds flexibly to actual developments in art and minority politics? Not all of the performances and actions conceived and shown by the Roma Jam Session art Kollektiv (RJSaK) in recent years fulfill each of these points, but RJSaK’s work operates on all of these levels simultaneously. Morphing the Roma Label ...

“This year, the Reader looks at ‘Acts’ – at instruments of legislation, at things within and outside the law, and at ‘acts’ – as different ways of ‘doing’ things in society and culture. Several essays echo and complement themes that have emerged in earlier readers. Piracy, borders, surveillance, claims to authority and entitlement, the language of expertise, the legal regulation of sexual behaviour and trespasses of various kinds have featured prominently in previous Readers. This collection foregrounds these issues in a way we hope can make a series of coherent but autonomous and interrelated arguments…”

We share our interest in Social Practices in the arts. Therefore I initiated a curatorial project for the Postgraduate Programme in Curating, ZHdK, Zürich around the topic of Social Sculptures. The project took place in four different steps over a period of time of one and a half years, the curatorial concept was changed and further developed and produced by the artists, students/ participants and lecturers. The first step was to initiate an archive on artistic practice which an interest in communities, which was shown twice, once at the White Space, Zürich and secondly at Kunstmuseum Thun. The archive was ...

Titled T/Here, the third issue of the Blackout Magazine convenes artists, writers and curators to think from and through the surviving traces of transient art processes. Investigating around memory gaps and non-linear narratives, T/Here weaves together an archival quilt of curatorial and artistic practices dealing with notions of proximity and distance from the events, and their subsequent irruption into the present through documentation. If all history is contemporary when there is a consciousness of ways in which it is performed, as John Berger suggests in his novel G., how is this history going to be documented, by whom and how ...