When the parasite sets in, small white bubbles rise up. They are warm, transparent and may appear anywhere. Cases have been documented in Boston, Cambridge and New York and the number is increasing. The appearance is not on the skin but on the sidewalks. New York artist Michael Rakowitz is the engineer of paraSITE, a temporary living space for the homeless. We may see homeless citizens every day, but now we see them unexpectedly, living inside what looks like a space age tent. paraSITE uses the warm air that escapes buildings to inflate and to provide night-time shelter. The cities and ...

This publication introduces the exhibition documenta (13) in Kabul as well as documents the preliminary seminars that were held between 2010 and 2012. The four main positions around which dOCUMENTA (13) is articulated—Siege, Hope, Retreat, and Stage—correspond to four possible conditions in which artists and thinkers find themselves acting in the present. These positions are not comprehensive and acquire their significance through their mutual interrelation and resonance. Kabul and Bamiyan together constitute a crossroad of these conditions. Here, simultaneously with the state of hope, artists frequently experience the condition of being under siege, as well as that of withdrawal and ...

Harrell Fletcher and Michael Rakowitz share a lively conversation largely composed of anecdotes and first person narratives that addresses central and shared concerns in both artists’ practice. Discussions about the pedagogy of art, social practice, story-telling, sincerity, community-oriented projects, and documentary strategies are interwoven with analysis of some of the artists’ key works. This item is publicly available as part of the Library Stack Public Branch at NN Contemporary Art.

My dear friend, Quite some time has passed since my last letter, and there are a few urgent matters that I would like to tell you about. One day, when I was writing the place-name “Kassel” on my smartphone, I made a mistake and the word was automatically corrected by the intelligent digital device to “Kabul.” This made me think of the conflicted relationship between the technologies of communication on the one hand, and intentionality and language on the other. In turn, that made me think about conflicts in general (that is, not just war), and then about the destruction of art ...

Strike the Empire Back is part of a larger body of work tracing links between Western science fiction and military-industrial activities in Iraq during and after Saddam Hussein’s regime.