“18 PARIS IV.70” was an exhibition organized by Michel Claura in Paris in 1970. Held at a temporary space on Rue Mouffetard that April, it was accompanied by this trilingual publication (in English, French, and German), edited by Claura and published and distributed by Seth Siegelaub. Claura invited a group of artists to each contribute a work to the exhibition. Having collected a series of artist proposals, Claura then sent this collection to each of the participants, after which they were allowed to change their initial plans. This publication includes a preface and a postface by Claura and a two-part entry ...

WHEREAS divers Persons are holden in Slavery within divers of His Majesty’s Colonies, and it is just and expedient that all such Persons should be manumitted and set free, and that a reasonable Compensation should be made to the Persons hitherto entitled to the Services of such Slaves for the Loss which they will incur by being deprived of their Right to such Services. – An Act for the Abolition of Slavery throughout the British Colonies; for promoting the Industry of the manumitted Slaves; and for compensating the Persons hitherto entitled to the Services of such Slaves, 1833. 3 & 4 Will. ...

6PM YOUR LOCAL TIME (#6pmylt) is a networked, distributed, one night contemporary art event taking place simultaneously in different locations, coordinated from one central venue and documented online via a web application. The project, conceived by Fabio Paris for the Link Art Center and developed in collaboration with Abandon Normal Devices (AND) and Gummy Industries, is an OPEN FORMAT and can be used by other organizations and individual curators to set up other #6pmylt events. The Link Art Center itself organized the first two events: 6PM Your Local Time UK, curated in collaboration with AND and coordinated from Furtherfield Commons, London, involving ...

74 million million million tons is an exhibition about the types of evidence that artworks can produce. Employing different methodologies to investigate, intervene, and assemble, the artists in the exhibition reveal subjects on the threshold of politics and the outskirts of legality: the robot, the refugee, the environment, the startup, and others. While their subject matter is divergent, the exhibition’s artists push against narratives put forth by corporate and government industries by producing specific knowledge and corroborative objects around un-mapped historical and political events. Directly intervening in the moments before such events coalesce into widely accepted narratives, they anticipate and ...

13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution Passed by Congress January 31, 1865. Ratified December 6, 1865. Section 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction. Section 2. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

A Disagreeable Object brings together 20 artists who employ and borrow from the methods and artistic practices that the Surrealists developed in the first half of the century. This is not an exhaustive survey, nor an attempt to re-consider our understanding of Surrealism as an historical movement. Rather, the exhibition offers a view of contemporary sculpture identifying influences and attitudes that have filtered through decades of cultural production. The works in A Disagreeable Object respond to a decidedly contemporary context…

What does it mean to possess a deep understanding of the material world around us? When so many of us spend countless waking hours engrossed in screens, “material intelligence” feels hard to come by these days. The most recent champion of the term, craft scholar Glenn Adamson, demands nothing short of a literal call to arms to “recover our literacy in the ways of the physical world”: do things with your hands, farm, weave, build furniture, construct a house! In Adamson’s historical thinking, our practical detachment from the environment is implicated in an ongoing denigration of manual skills and trades ...

Scaling is to move across different dimensions: a firm might be scaling down, nearing bankruptcy—its new dimension is to reach rock bottom; a doll house might be a scale model, where dimensions are kept proportional but decreased compared to a real house; a hand touching a map is, to paraphrase Tom Holert, a scaling device, where the graspable dimension of the map makes available the experience of exploring, traveling and possessing lands. For this publication of Taming the Horror Vacui, which includes content from three different sessions in the program, we put the wind and its manifestations through a process of ...

What is really the main shortcoming of art today? Where is the essence of its unfulfilled promise of a better world? According to Slovenian art theoretician Bojana Kunst1, a possible answer can be formulated with regard to the paradox that the artist personifies the ideal of the post-Fordist worker who produces using cognitive and affective powers in flexible working conditions without making a distinction between work and free time. Time is the neuralgic point of general precarisation symbolised by the image of the artist, which is the focus of the exhibition A Taste for Work by the Fokus Grupa art collective. ...

Active Ingredient brings together 22 artists working across a variety of media and disciplines to explore art’s tendency towards transformation, be it material, perceptual, or institutional. Taken from the language and practices of modern pharmacology, in which natural substances are decomposed to isolate useful properties that are then labeled and regulated once synthesized and mass-produced, Active Ingredient tests the conditions of artistic performativity, what it is that makes the work work. Insisting that spatial and institutional arrangements are at the heart of artistic meaning, artist and curator Alex Fleming takes his cue from Adrian Piper’s concept of catalysis, the insight ...

Writing in 1969, architecture historian Reyner Banham complains about the silence on mechanical services in contemporary architecture discourse, most specifically machines for the making of interior weather. Banham’s book The Architecture of the Well-Tempered Environment is full of little arguments against the superiority of the visual, that is, the exterior aspect of a building rather than, for example, its fabricated interior weather. His work today comes across as an apology for technology before an era of environmental or social concerns stemming from it. The present publication for Taming the Horror Vacui takes a less polemic yet more critical tone to explore ...

Two topics emerge from the third session of Taming the Horror Vacui. One is apparent, the other is fleeting. One is sought, the other is coincidental. Centred around the guided tour given by city planner Emiel Arends in Rotterdam in June 2020, the event firstly deals with the ways in which wind shapes the city and the city shapes the wind. The locations in the tour, explains Arends, are examples of how the city landscape interacts with its aeolian one, and is marked by specific architectural interventions. Rib’s focus on the material language of the city joins Haseeb Ahmed’s ongoing ...