‘Institutional critique’ is best known through the critical practice that developed in the late 1960s and early 1970s by artists who presented radical challenges to the museum and gallery system. Since then it has been pushed in new directions by new generations of artists registering and responding to the global transformations of contemporary life. The essays collected in this volume explore this legacy and develop the models of institutional critique in ways that go well beyond the field of art. Interrogating the shifting relations between ‘institutions’ and ‘critique’, the contributors to this volume analyze the past and present of institutional ...

Based on Walter Benjamin’s seminal essay “The Author as Producer,” an array of theorists have developed approaches towards an aesthetics of production. The texts of this issue investigate how Benjamin’s arguments may serve as a ground for reflecting and theorizing current art practices. What are the consequences of political art’s function of “supplying the capitalist production apparatus, not changing it”? How can artistic methods subvert cooptation following Brecht and Tretyakov? Where are there new models of artists/intellectuals as producers and “specialists” rather than experts for the universal?

It’s unclear how many people still alive today can remember feeling the strange, warm rains that fell over the riverside city of Pripyat on the Ukraine-Belarus border in late April 1986. Pripyat was built in 1970 to serve the nearby Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, dedicated to harnessing the mirnyy atom (“peaceful atom”) for the Soviet Union. For the past thirty-six years, Pripyat and a surrounding exclusion zone of inconsistent bounds bridging swaths of today’s Ukraine, Belarus, and a bit of Russia have been off limits to most human beings. In this issue of e-flux journal, Svitlana Matviyenko disagrees with Paul ...

“How Much Fascism?” asked the curatorial collective WHW. Quite a bit, it would appear. As always, the prefix “neo-” can stand for many differences in the repetition, yet the noun asserts itself with all the subtle grace of an elephant in the room. Historical fascism, too, was a many-headed hydra, and scholarly struggles over exact definitions are ongoing, and will continue, for there is no Platonic Idea, but rather a set of historically grown family resemblances – revolving around tropes such as a cult of strong male leadership that will reverse a country’s decline, the identification of the cause of ...

Imagine a big roll call. Names of nations, creeds, and genders are called out. Everyone is supposed to join their kin. Several hours later the crowd is all divided up into groups and subgroups, all neatly arranged on a large grid. There is just one person left. And this person says, “Sorry guys, I’m with the universe. Where do I go?”… Editorial—“Strange Universalism” Hito Steyerl, Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, Stephen Squibb, and Anton Vidokle Only Intelligent Planning Can Save Us Boris Buden and Darko Suvin The Color of Women: An Interview with YPJ Commanders Dilovan Kobani, Nirvana, Ruken, and Zerin Hito Steyerl and Rojava Film ...

The cooperation between the World of Art programme (in frame of of the SCCA−Ljubljana, Center for Contemporary Art) from Ljubljana and the Postgraduate Programme in Curating , Zürich, has taken place on different levels from spring 2011 till summer 2012; it has involved intensive visits of students and lecturers in both cities as well as a shared project that was carried out at International Centre of Graphic Arts (MGLC) in Ljubljana; this is being followed up by the present anthology of articles taken from the World of Art Archive archive of lectures and conversations from 1997 till today. Texts, conversations ...

This publication accompanies FUTURE LIGHT, including the exhibitions “Escaping Transparency” at the MAK Vienna, “Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz. Loving, Repeating” at Kunsthalle Wien as well as four off-site commissions within the framework of the VIENNA BIENNALE 2015: IDEAS FOR CHANGE (11 June−4 October, 2015).

In the early years of the 21st century, Europe seems uncertainly placed between a deep sense of its own historical importance and anxiety about where it may go in the future. The European project, which for many of our institutions was a guiding principle, has run aground on the rocks of neo-liberalism and an economic priority that forgot about society’s politi- cal and cultural dimensions. The national project, on which the foundations of our museums (along with most of Europe’s other cultural institutions) were based, retains little of its 19th century ambitions to progressive, democratic thinking. As a result, cultural ...

The symposium “Revisiting Black Mountain College: Cross-Disciplinary Experiments and Their Potential for Democratization (in Times of Post-Democracy)” asked questions in relation to anti-democratic tendencies in many countries worldwide. How can education still hold up democratic values, while at the same time presumably measuring its success by careers in the market? This issue brings together contributions from participants of the conference and adds further contributions by Andres Janser, Olga von Schubert, Caroline Adler, Boris Buden, Lucy Bayley, Sascia Bailer, Simon Fleury, Gilly Karjevsky, Asli Uludag, and Mieke Matzke.The interview by Ronald Kolb with Bitten Stetter, Brandon Farnsworth, Dorothee Richter, Jochen Kiefer, Martin ...

Today, after Post-Communism has ended in chaos and confusion, we are entitled to ask: was it a condition, or a transition; a rise or a decline; progression, regression or simply a time-lag? Has it ever shaped its own form of social being, a unique mode of economic production, a politics of its own, a culture? Or was it just another interregnum of history, full of morbid symptoms we cannot get rid of? Most of the essays in this book search for answers to questions in works of art. Not because art possesses a superior knowledge on history, but because the knowledge ...