People make their own history, but they do not make it of their own free will; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances but under immediate circumstances, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with transforming themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to ...

Those who think of contemporary art as a cultural activity tend to rely on performance to bring a degree of variation to the exhibition format. Given its nature as an event, performance can lend a program a rhythm. Contradictory Statements, Michèle Graf and Selina Grüter’s proposition for Fri Art, involved a series of appropriative strategies as well as a method of what you could call programming performance. In doing so, it deviated from the prevailing tendency, which establishes a dialectical opposition between performance and exhibition – in much the same way that the living oppose death.

Episode 4: Fear Selina Grüter & Michèle Graf, Miriam Laura Leonardi, Hannah Weinberger in conversation with Chus Martínez and Quinn Latimer. Promise No Promises is a podcasts series produced by the Women’s Center for Excellence, a research project between the Art Institute and the Instituto Susch—a joint venture with Grażyna Kulczyk and Art Stations Foundation CH. The Women’s Center for Excellence is conceived as a think tank tasked to assess, develop, and propose new social languages and methods to understand the role of women in the arts, culture, science, and technology, as well as in all knowledge areas that are interconnected with the field ...

This publication presents the transcript of a discussion between the eleven artists invited to participate in a group exhibition at Fri Art Kunsthalle Fribourg in October 2018. This discussion was organized by Ramaya Tegegne the day before the opening. The participants share experiences and recommendations regarding working conditions and, in particular, the question of the valorization of artistic labor. The discussion gathered Jay Chung & Q Takeki Maeda, Michèle Graf & Selina Grüter, Jason Hirata, Ghislaine Leung, Jason Loebs, Cassidy Toner, Anaïs Wenger, Constantina Zavitsanos and Ramaya Tegegne. The title is borrowed from the American writer, civil rights activist, and self-described ...