Artistic and curatorial practices can be seen as the prime testimonies of transformative movements—on the one hand situated in a specific site and region, and on the other, transgressing disciplines, classes, norms—proposing new forms and relations of living and establishing these practices (building centres along the way) but at the same time always changing their positions, never staying at the centre, but instead unfolding on the periphery of social life. In this OnCurating Issue, we searched for and researched projects and institutions that hold at their core something between the lines of centres–peripheries with their transversal practices and modus operandi. For ...

As we continue to reflect upon the chain of political upheavals of 2011, it may be interesting to consider a particular shift in the status of information technology, now that it has been deployed as such a powerful force in facilitating the rise of a new popular voice. But first, how did this happen? How did a form of communication—developed in the late 1950s with a well-funded US Defense Department initiative in response to the Sputnik threat, then blossoming in the hands of engineer-entrepreneurs in the Silicon Valley of the 1970s into the center of accelerated hyper-capitalism in the 1990s—evolve to become ...

This book explores how cultural practitioners and institutions perceive their role in the post-truth era, by repositioning their work in relation to the notion of the “public”. The book addresses the multiple challenges posed for artists, curators and cultural activists by the conditions of post-factuality: Do cultural institutions have the practical means and the ethical authority to fight against the proliferation of “alternative facts” in politics, as well as within all aspects of our lives? What narratives of dissent are cultural practitioners developing, and how do they choose to communicate them? Could new media technologies still be considered as instruments ...

Collaborative work is of a special interest because it raises complexities questions on the fundaments of curating and artistic work through questioning the exhibitionary complexes. These concerns extend through to the biennale form where the thematic and their aesthetics move from formalist, object-bound sensibility to practices based on experimentation and agitation, processes, ephemerality, political and social ideas that are locally embedded. The practices represented in this issue are not collectives and collaborations in the traditional sense, but practices that follow more self-instituting strategies grounded in their immediate socio-political contexts. This issue of OnCurating consists of two parts: the first part ...

Progressive Art Institutions in the Age of Dissolving Welfare States “The final word of power is that resistance is primary.” —Gilles Deleuze The indissoluble link between power and resistance, as described by Foucault and Deleuze, is especially evident in the institutions of the art field. Progressive art institutions play a particularly exposed role here as buffers against the influence of state and capital on critical art practices and as machines of a soft instrumentalization of resistance at the same time. The essays in this edition discuss strategies and alliances between activist art practices and progressive art institutions that are capable of providing artistic ...

Shifter’s eighteenth issue gathers conversations and interviews between various cultural practitioners that elaborate on the subject of intention. To intend is to have a conception of the future. To direct and extend attention to a moment that is yet to arrive. To construct a contingent model of the future, while negotiating and adjusting it at any given moment against countless uncertainties, thus providing the greatest possible chance of this future’s arrival. To reflect upon an action and determine its intention is then to trace the arc of this willed movement – looking back, culling through layers of events, interactions, and gestures, ...

A book of metadiscourse, Withdrawn: A Discourse consists of 50 letters composed by Thom Donovan to the proper names of living personages which appear in his currently unpublished second book of poems, Withdrawn. In response to his letters and copies of Withdrawn in manuscript, thirty-two addressees offer images, letters, drawings, poems, essays, dream journal entries, art works, documents, and manifestos. Withdrawn: a Discourse also includes Donovan’s correspondence for the project; an essay regarding the “authorless” book; as well as a review of Withdrawn by poet and translator, Ian Dreiblatt.