AAA Public Programmes Curator Ingrid Chu explored the international phenomenon of the ‘art book bag’ in a short history of the art book bag (and the things that go in them). Using the last 15 years as a guide, the exhibition featured ‘the things that go in them’—art publications, magazines, and related ephemera—alongside a vast array of these popular totes in the AAA Library. Chu invited artists, curators, art book fair organisers, and print and online publishers to provide insight into the changing modes of knowledge production and circulation, and their influence on recent art of Asia. An associated public talk, ...

Fokus Grupa is an artist collective based in Rijeka, Croatia, founded by Iva Kovač and Elvis Krstulović in 2009. Borrowing their name from a contested research method, used equally for independent research as for PR purposes, they point to the social, economical and political frames of the art field. Their practice is collaborative and interdisciplinary, and it includes art, design and curating. Artistic strategies they use take political shape, without becoming a representational form of ‘political art’. Fokus Grupa concentrates on the relations between art and its public manifestations, in terms of working culture, aesthetics, and social and economic exchange values. Their work investigates ...

Hong Kong–based artist Samson Young moved through various locations in and around AAA by way of a roving sound station— doubling as a bookmobile and deejay booth—to generate a series of public broadcasts. His project AAAFM99.3 invoked classic radio programmes with news announcements, interview segments, and commercials incorporating ambient noise sourced from AAA’s audio collection.

The Bare Prison of Santo Stefano is the seventh issue of a new series of publications issued by Wilfried Lentz Rotterdam. Published as an accompaniment to the presentation at Frieze Art Fair 2011 from 13 october to 16 October 2011 by Wilfried Lentz Gallery. This publication is signed and numbered in an edition of 250 by Rossella Biscotti.

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 ...

People make their own history, but they do not make it of their own free will; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances but under immediate circumstances, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with transforming themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to ...

Biennials are each in their own way a complex constellation of different economical and geopolitical, and representational cultural aspects within its own power relations. With all their underlying deficiencies (canonical, hegemonic, colonialist, hot money-funded, politically influenced, hierarchical), biennials tend to establish international discourse, at best, rooted in local cultural specificities and contexts. With this edition of the journal, we wanted to include a variety of cases and research areas, not ordered along a historical trajectory, but rather, ordered by theme. With a mix of over sixty new contributions and reprints of important articles for the biennale discourse this issue is ...

This issue compiles a series of perspectives on art-making and curating that consider forms of production through contemporary digital networks as well as increased reliance on digital technologies. We consider the issue as a much-needed start to discuss curating under digital conditions on our platform. Each interview, artwork, and article thinks through contemporary practices that rework or examine what the relationship of place, automation, labour, and archives have in relation to technological effects in production under neoliberalism. Four interviews focus on art practice and digital art-making and also how the digital is an asset in the making and production of ...

In this text, Maite Garbayo-Maeztu seeks to think some of the first performances taking place in the 1970s in Spain, along with occupations of the street by feminist activism at the time. Artists like Dorothèe Selz, Fina Miralles, Àngels Ribé and Olga L. Pijoan would use veils, occultations and alterations that invited viewers to go beyond visuality.

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.

“Defacement” introduces twelve contemporary artists, and presents them in context alongside the “Situationist International,” an intellectual, social and artistic organization active from 1957-1972 which included Asger Jorn and Guy Debord. The Situationists aimed to critique the evolving mass-consumerist society resulting from the globalizing force of capitalism. At the core of the exhibition is a re-reading of the strategy détournement, specifically interpreting the concept of defacement. The exhibition includes painter Jacqueline de Jong, who was one of the original members of “Situationist International,” Andy Warhol, whose use of repetition negated the concept of preciousness and posed a question to our conception ...

Between the 1950s and seventies, Oscar Masotta (Buenos Aires, 1930 – Barcelona, 1979) was a key figure in the transformation of Argentina’s cultural scene. However, to date his work as a disseminator of Lacanian psychoanalytic theory and his active links with the counterculture during the four years he lived in Spain have been less obvious. His multiple and polymorphic interests included art, literature, comics, politics and psychoanalysis. From ideas such as the avant-garde, dematerialisation, discontinuity and the environment, Masotta constructed the tools for thinking about the categorical turn taking place in contemporary art. Perhaps the most relevant appropriation is the term ...