The issue 1,2,3, — thinking about exhibitions combines discussions, interviews, and articles concerning recent discussions in Rotterdam and Hamburg. The symposium in Rotterdam, The Curators, at Witte de With emphasized the role of the curator-subject. This issue includes two interviews which critically review the contributions and results of the symposium, revealing different aspects and controversial facets of their topics. The two featured interviews include one with Nikolaus Schaffhausen and Zoe Gray, those responsible for the organization of the symposium, as well as one interview with Paul O’Neill, a contributor…

Let’s be clear about something: it is infuriating that most interesting artists are perfectly capable of functioning in at least two or three professions that are, unlike art, respected by society in terms of compensation and general usefulness. When the flexibility, certainty, and freedom promised by being part of a critical outside are revealed as extensions of recent advances in economic exploitation, does the field of art become the uncritical, complicit inside of something far more interesting?

‘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 ...

Today, many of us can remember the disappeared indigenous cosmologies as parts of ourselves, lost to colonialism, industrialization, communist revolutions, and capitalist wars. Many names have been given to ideological or historical grand narratives to soothe the pain of loss, to register those losses and render them searchable, but these memorializing mechanisms still fail to register the pain of losing something much larger that cannot be named—a deep relation to the world, to the cosmos, and to ourselves that gives us strength and sovereignty without need for any other earthly power of right or dominion. What if another kind of ...

The blockchain is Janus-faced. On one side its traits of transparency and decentralization promise much in terms of fairness and accountability, but on the other its monetary roots born as a financial payment system, albeit grounded in open-source software, mean its implementations are often stridently capitalistic. Furthermore, those involved in its development seem to oscillate between radical ethical standpoints and reductionist technological determinism. The blockchain engenders what has been called a “digital metalism” with the ability, like a modern philosopher’s stone, to transmutate life through a distributed ledger. That such a pecuniary minded technology is being touted as a new ...

A key figure of Swedish counterculture and the creator of the first digital arts laboratory in Nordic countries, Charlotte Johannesson has worked primarily with two tools: the artisan technology of the loom and digital IT programming technology, exploring and throwing into relief the connections, both conceptual and methodological, that exist between the two. Charlotte Johannesson. Take Me to Another World renders an account of the meticulous research process around colour and line that the artist executes in her textile and digital practice. It also spotlights the contribution of Danish writer and artist Amalie Smith, who set up a dialogue between Johannesson’s career ...

Key learnings, summaries of presentations, quotes, photographs, visualisations, stories and links to videos, audio recordings from first two DAOWO events. DAOWO is “a blockchain laboratory and debate series for reinventing the arts.” The DAOWO lab series invites artists, engineers, thinkers and practitioners to reflect on how blockchains might be used to enable a critical, sustainable and empowered culture. To transcend the emerging hazards and limitations of pure market speculation within crypto-economics. Intended as an iterative temporary laboratory for the eventual creation of a living laboratory and generative space for new knowledge production we take the following conditions as our starting position. This ...

Depletion Design suggests that ideas of exhaustion cut across cultural, environmentalist, and political idioms and offers ways to explore the emergence of new material assemblages. We, or so we are told, are running out of time, of time to develop alternatives to a new politics of emergency, as constant crisis has exhausted the means of a politics of representation too slow for the state of exception, too ignorant of the distribution of political agency, too focused on the governability of financial architectures. But new forms of individual and collective agency already emerge, as we learn to live, love, work within the ...

What does the democratization of image production really accomplish beyond opening channels of communication? Ironically, the liberation of the voice as a means of announcing oneself and one’s views can be seen as a way of absorbing the brunt of more pressing questions concerning the distribution of actual material resources, as an escape from the pursuit of more equitable relationships with regard not just to representation, but also to the distribution of property and knowledge—the power to determine one’s own circumstances. At stake is really a way of liberating the means to decide one’s own way of living, of being ...

It is now October, when the veils between worlds become thin. In this issue, there are human worlds and more-than-human worlds, and the university worlds, world wars, and art worlds that cross between them. Tam Donner plumbs the world we live in. Have you heard the one where universities give out honorary hoods to painters and warmongers alike? Take a look at the class pictures. Andreas Petrossiants follows the lead of Mount Etna, Europe’s oldest active volcano, where Pasolini may have seen a stage—or a screen—on which to feature the volcano’s ability to communize time, showing “linear, European time for ...

In a recent BBC documentary on “objectum sexuals”—people who have loving relationships with inanimate objects—Erika Naisho Eiffel spoke about her love affair with an archer’s bow: “We were just such a great team because we had that connection on every single level. I’d almost swear that my blood flowed from my arm and went right into him. And it felt like the molecules in him were flowing right back into my arm.” It’s no surprise that, before their love waned, Naisho Eiffel was a record-breaking world champion archer—a love story indeed. But more importantly, Naisho Eiffel’s example seems to suggest ...

Could it be that contemporary art is neoliberalism in its most purified form? At the center of our December issue is a constellation of unusually frank essays mounting an indictment of contemporary art’s complicity with gentrification and capital accumulation, with processes of divestiture and exploitation. We would like to see a way out of this, but questioning whether cultural work can actually have a real effect on power relations, or whether capital, public or private, should really be a measure of art’s civic or cultural value in the first place, only serves to accelerate the endless cycling—consuming life, finding work, making ...