L’Internationale Online
Series Editors Moderna galerija, Museo Reina Sofía, MACBA, M HKA, Muzeum Sztuki Nowoczesnej w Warszawie, SALT, Van Abbemuseum
Exhibition catalogs and newly commissioned essays from L'Internationale, a confederation of seven modern and contemporary art institutions: Moderna galerija (MG+MSUM, Ljubljana, Slovenia); Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (MNCARS, Madrid, Spain); Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA, Barcelona, Spain); Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst Antwerpen (M HKA, Antwerp, Belgium); Muzeum Sztuki Nowoczesnej w Warszawie (Warsaw, Poland), SALT (Istanbul and Ankara, Turkey) and Van Abbemuseum (VAM, Eindhoven, the Netherlands). L'Internationale works with complementary partners such as Valand Academy (Gothenburg, Sweden) and the National College of Art and Design (NCAD, Dublin, Ireland) along with associate organisations from the academic and artistic fields. The confederation takes its name from the workers' anthem "L'Internationale", which calls for an equitable and democratic society with reference to the historical labour movement.
Series Titles
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Following the e-publication Austerity and Utopia, L’Internationale Online presents a second collection of interventions to think through two apparently distant concepts. Artists, thinkers and researchers were invited to reflect on a dissimilar pair of themes as fertile ground for thought and proposition. With this new issue of Degrowth and Progress, we would like to pursue a path of reflection to interrogate the ambivalence of a possible progression of degrowth, and attempt to stage a bastard/hybrid scenario of speculative thought and action. This collection draws upon the complexity of ethical, ecological and political frameworks and reveals other perspectives on the current ... -
This collection of essays, interviews and images results from L’Internationale’s current focus on the 1990s and, in particular, our wish to identify actions and alliances from that era that form constellations with our own. Most optimistic claims made during that period were hubristic – not least the promise that technology and post-Cold-War politics would turn the world into a super-connected ‘global village’, and that the ensuing spread of civic society and liberal democracy would usher in ‘the end of history’. Cultural institutions – including the museums and galleries that compose the L’Internationale confederation today – were charged with the task ... -
Austerity and Utopia is the first in a series looking at other potential narratives for mapping our current landscape through redefining the social, political and economic terms of engagement. It was planned a long time before the pandemic. Our current situation was unimaginable just a few months ago, but that it was not easily predictable does not mean that there were no elements pointing to a possible crisis of this nature. Yet the collective search for measures of care and climate justice in the attempt to redefine the neoliberal understanding of austerity and utopia – two major points of the ... -
The implications around climate change have far-reaching consequences but they can also have far-reaching benefits. The e-publication Ecologising Museums explores how museums and cultural institutions can face the issue not only head-on, but from all angles. To what degree are the core activities of collecting, preserving and presenting in fact attitudes that embody an unsustainable view of the world and the relationship between man and nature? -
Decolonising Museums is the second thematic publication of L’Internationale Online; it addresses colonial legacies and mindsets, which are still so rooted and present today in the museum institutions in Europe and beyond. The publication draws from the conference Decolonising the Museum which took place at MACBA in Barcelona, 27-29 November 2014 (among the contributors to this thematic issue, Clémentine Deliss, Daniela Ortiz and Francisco Godoy Vega participated at this seminar), and offers new essays, responding to texts published on the online platform earlier this year. -
The e-publication Decolonising Archives aims to show how archives bear testimony to what was, even more so than collections. Archives present documents that allow one to understand what happened and in which order. Today Internet technology, combined with rapid moves made on the geopolitical chessboard, make archives a contested site of affirmation, recognition and denial. As such, it is of great importance to be aware of processes of colonialisation and decolonisation taking place as new technology can both be used to affirm existing hegemonic colonial relationships or break them open. This item is publicly available as part of the Library Stack ... -
The editorial board began discussing this e-publication in the aftermath of summer 2015. The decision to put together this fifth edition, titled “Subjects and Objects in Exile”, was prompted by the many tragic displacements, fates and deaths of those seeking asylum in Europe and elsewhere. These enforced mass exiles are the result of civil wars in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan. The appalling and dehumanising management by European powers is having worrying economic, cultural, political and juridical implications. In this publication, we would like to address what has come to be called, not un-problematically we would argue, the European “refugee crisis”. ... -
Following the attacks on the creators of the controversial satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in Paris in January 2015, the shootings at a debate on free speech in Copenhagen, the punishment of the rights activist and blogger Raif Badawi in Saudi Arabia, and the subsequent massive civil mobilisation, the cultural field is forced to process the significance of these events and their wider implications for our work. In Paris and many other instances across continents, representation itself came under attack. Arguably, the field of representation has been in crisis for some time, yet the current context demands that we consider this crisis from ... -
The Heritage of 1989. Case Study: The Second Yugoslav Documentspresents a re-enactment of the last big art exhibition in Yugoslavia. Titled Yugoslav Documents ’89, it was curated by the artists Jusuf Hadžifejzović and Rade Tadić and realized under the auspices of the ZOI ’84 Olimpijski centar Skenderija in the 8,000-square-meter Skenderija Center in Sarajevo in 1989. This was surely one of Yugoslavia’s largest exhibitions, if not, indeed, the largest. This re-enactment is interested in Yugoslav Documents primarily because this was the largest exhibition that bore the label “Yugoslav”, a label that, among other things, was meant to strengthen the ideology ... -
In the early years of the 21st century, Europe seems uncertainly placed between a deep sense of its own historical importance and anxiety about where it may go in the future. The European project, which for many of our institutions was a guiding principle, has run aground on the rocks of neo-liberalism and an economic priority that forgot about society’s politi- cal and cultural dimensions. The national project, on which the foundations of our museums (along with most of Europe’s other cultural institutions) were based, retains little of its 19th century ambitions to progressive, democratic thinking. As a result, cultural ... -
In recent decades, the visual arts have witnessed an unprecedented development of performative practices. This has brought about both a heated academic and institutional debate about the notion of performance and the phenomenon of performativity – in relation both to ways of presenting performance in the exhibition space and to the problem of creating museum collections made up of performance works. This publication gathers the results of the many years of research work of the collection curators and performance scholars associated with the museum confederation L’Internationale aiming to address the following question: why museums should collect performance? The issue of how ... -
The compositions, essays, videos and architectural projects in this collection explore strategies and technologies of investigating beyond the predominantly Western modernist architectural format and the main framework for today’s uncontested architectural sites, trying to obscure, contradict or amplify on the notions of modernity. Echoing processual music terminologies, the dissonant practices and structures transform energy, twist and interfere with the virtual and physical context around, in a macro form on the territory of the complexity drive to change the ideologies of the fixed urban form. Through the approach of decolonial thinking being and doing one question that emerges is how to ... -
Is ‘identity politics’ still relevant or necessary in art? We wanted to see how and why artists today address issues of identification and subjectivity in their work. We’ve focused specifically on emergent practices, because we think they might help us, and our audience, to understand the here-and-now of art and to speculate on its future. -
What About Support and What About Struggle is edited by L’Internationale Online and Jennifer Hayashida, as a collection of poetic responses on the most essential topic of today: how to survive un/natural catastrophes? Starting from a collective reading of Francis Marie Lo’s volume of poetry A Series of Un/Natural/Disasters (Commune Editions, 2016), poets and artists Napo Masheane, Léuli Eshraghi, Merve Unsal, tacoderaya, Lukaza Branfman-Verissimo and Fernanda Laguna have resituated its critique of catastrophe discourse in other urgent pasts and presents through variety of poetic, visual, discursive and audio formats. What are the poetics we are left with when the un/natural ... -
In June 2015, Moderna galerija hosted a conference to coincide with NSK: from Kapital to Capital. This exhibition, an exhaustive project undertaken by Zdenka Badovinac, was an unprecedented coming together of the practices of the Neue Slowenische Kunst (NSK)’s members: the multi-media group Laibach, the artists IRWIN, Scipion Nasice Sisters Theatre, the design department New Collectivism, the Department of Pure and Applied Philosophy, Retrovision, Film, and Builders. -
The catalogue of the exhibition, The Welfare State exhibited at MuHKA. The welfare state has, generally speaking, become synonymous with the synthesis of a market economy and active government that characterises both ‘Western’ and ’emergent’ societies today. Yet there is little agreement among the many who operate and observe public social policy – politicians, civil servants, trade union leaders, social scientists, journalists, the public at large – about how the welfare state could or should be defined in more precise terms. -
The importance of women’s rights have sprung up in movements across the globe in the past few years, exacerbated by increasing social, environmental, technological and political polarities. Feminisms is the sixth in a series of online publications published by L’Internationale Online. This publication examines how women, or those who identify as female have been addressing not only inequalities – in reproductive rights, sexual rights, and in the right to equal pay – but also how plural feminisms have been and are being consistently re-thought, and how art museums can work with and respond to issues surrounding women’s rights. Feminisms play a crucial ... -
Class and Redistribution is the third in a series of e-publications edited by L’Internationale Online looking at concepts of political economy. Following the previous publications Austerity and Utopia and Degrowth and Progress, the present issue complicates two contested economic terms: class and redistribution. By inviting contributions from sociologists, political philosophers and artists, we seek to understand how these terms are utilised in institutional contexts and artistic practices. Our approach challenges orthodox definitions of economic categories. Since the universal, ahistorical use of these categories is debatable, we accept, following historian Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘the[ir] dual nature’, and interrogate their ‘intellectual and social ... -
Living with Ghosts: Legacies of Colonialism and Fascism is a constellation of essays, conversations and images that point to the manner in which the legacies of colonialism and fascism reverberate in our present conjuncture. The impulse for producing this issue was a question of whether it may be possible to trace the connections between the violences of the colonial project through the horrors of fascism to current forms of racism, identitarianism and populism – what we initially called ‘an arc’ of colonialism-nationalism-fascism. These shifts are palpable in the contemporary political uncertainties expressed in this collection of texts. Each of the contributors reflect ...
