Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev Why did you begin collecting these watercolors, gouaches, and ink-on-paper drawings by Vietcong artists? Dinh Q. Lê I had seen some in the museum here in Ho Chi Minh City [Saigon]. I always admired the draftsmanship and skill that they demonstrate. But I also find it fascinating that they represent these idyllic landscapes. Even when portraying people, there is no violence in them. In late 2005, Catherine de Zegher organized an exhibition on the Vietnam War at the Drawing Center [“Persistent Vestiges”] that I was invited to participate in. She decided to include a group of these drawings. So ...

Issa Samb is a Senegalese sculptor, painter, actor, philosopher, performance artist, writer, and critic. For decades, he has been creating a galaxy of interconnected universes in which the signs of everyday life are transformed into altars to personal obsessions. One of those obsessions is politics and politicians, in particular Senegalese politicians, whom he has frequently described as mindless people. In keeping with his readings of Marxist philosophy and aesthetics, many of his sculptural assemblages take the paradigm of revolutionaries—Che Guevara, Amílcar Cabral, Ahmed Sékou Touré, Lech Wałęsa, the Black Panthers—as their subject matter, suggesting the possibility of harnessing the energy of ...

We rarely see Melanie Klein at work, at least not quite like this. It is as if we are looking over her shoulder as the contours of her theorization trace themselves across the page. When we think of Klein, the first image that comes to mind is not that of hesitancy. She had a supreme confidence, famously in her clinical interpretations, even if some of us have always suspected that such confidence was the other side of—her way of managing— the deep mental trouble and energies that she saw it as her task to excavate. More perhaps than any other ...

I was asked about the seed but find myself dreaming of soil. Seeds are many things marvelous. Most of the seeds that yield food and flavors, medicine, and flowers have been cultivated for generations by millions of people. As a material form of collective knowledge, seeds constitute one of the longest-running open-source systems in history. Agricultural diversity is not simply spontaneous but is the product of centuries of attentive cultivation and unregulated exchange. Designed to travel, the seed is a powerfully compact and mobile medium and for this reason is easily fetishized for exchange on the market. The privatization of the ...

People sometimes get irritated if you ask them the same question again, especially if it happens in the same conversation. Yet sometimes they provide different answers immediately, or let’s say two minutes after the first (think of the Oracle in The Matrix, or Bill Clinton during his trial). However, when there are forty years in between two identical questions, there’s a big chance of getting the same answer. This does not a priori mean that nothing has changed or that things have remained the same. The same answer could mirror a totally different fold of an arrival from the previous ...

Art would be like a dream, one of those “harmless psychoses” that Freud talks about in his New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis: The harmless dream-psychosis is the result of a withdrawal from the external world which is consciously willed and only temporary, and it disappears when relations to the external world are resumed. During the isolation of the sleeping individual an alteration in the distribution of his psychical energy also sets in; a part of the expenditure on repression, which is normally required in order to hold the unconscious down, can be saved, for if the unconscious makes use of its ...