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.

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 ...

dos focuses on conversations in, about, and with exhibitions. dos commissions and edits conversations between two visitors to an exhibition to emphasize subjective experience and meaning-making at large. dos conversations can be streamed, followed as an RSS feed, or accessed as a podcast. dos conjures their listeners as eavesdroppers and vicarious visitors who experience exhibitions on their own time, partaking in a continuum of physical experience and shared interpersonal thinking.

dos focuses on conversations in, about, and with exhibitions. dos commissions and edits conversations between two visitors to an exhibition to emphasize subjective experience and meaning-making at large. dos conversations can be streamed, followed as an RSS feed, or accessed as a podcast. dos conjures their listeners as eavesdroppers and vicarious visitors who experience exhibitions on their own time, partaking in a continuum of physical experience and shared interpersonal thinking.

dos focuses on conversations in, about, and with exhibitions. dos commissions and edits conversations between two visitors to an exhibition to emphasize subjective experience and meaning-making at large. dos conversations can be streamed, followed as an RSS feed, or accessed as a podcast. dos conjures their listeners as eavesdroppers and vicarious visitors who experience exhibitions on their own time, partaking in a continuum of physical experience and shared interpersonal thinking.  

This episode of dos was recorded in The Classroom during the New York Art Book Fair, September 2017. dos focuses on conversations in, about, and with exhibitions. dos commissions and edits conversations between two visitors to an exhibition to emphasize subjective experience and meaning-making at large. dos conversations can be streamed, followed as an RSS feed, or accessed as a podcast. dos conjures their listeners as eavesdroppers and vicarious visitors who experience exhibitions on their own time, partaking in a continuum of physical experience and shared interpersonal thinking.

Curator Juana Berrío and artist Delcy Morelos visit the Gold Museum in Bogotá, which houses the world’s largest collection of pre-conquest gold artifacts. They talk about the cultural differences of valuing gold objects, highlighting intrinsic, economic, ceremonial or environmental aspects; the uses of plants with power; the poporo; human-animal bodies; and how to overcome the muteness of those distant objects made by eradicated ethnicities.

Collective Çukurcuma included video works of Funa Ye and the Istanbul Queer Art Collective as part of the FLOW OUT exhibition, hosted by Bilsart, Istanbul until June 30, 2019. The program is based on the common practice of thinking, expressing and writing collectively about the present. As co-authors, they continued to write the collective essay through email exchanges — no one is the owner of the piece, whereas each of them is a participant. FLOW OUT does not belong to a place, but it refers to contemporaneity, addressing the problem of authorship in a collaboration, and experimenting with the idea ...

Notes on what I would have liked to write and on what I only left as thoughts

Prologue to the Exhibition Upon entering the exhibition—any imagined example will suf ce for the time being—we enter on the loaded grounds of the exhibition space: a cultural eld of inter-human energy exchange. A space charged with relations between different actors—artists, curators, staff members, and visitors, among others—each with their different aims, ambitions and intentionalities, and what we might call objects of interrogation, reflection and interaction that have been brought forward and put on display. As an exhibition visitor, we move around in white spaces, roam through repurposed warehouses and grey hangars, and wander in and out of black boxes to have a lived experience ...

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?

In Part II of Explain Me, William Powhida and Paddy Johnson discuss the difference between relational aesthetics and social practice, the whims of the auction market and the perilous affect it can have on artist careers, and Doug Aitken’s train wreck of a show at 303 Gallery along with a handful of truly remarkable shows.

Hosts Paddy Johnson and William Powhida talk to art advisor Kenny Schacter about the art market at the upper levels and the art market in the middle and emerging tiers. Our central question: How Trumpian is the Art World. We learn about that, plus Schacter’s great love for art and dealers. A word of warning though: some of Schacter’s conclusions for struggling artists are bleak at best.

In this episode we discuss how the Frieze Art Fair’s failing air conditioning units won’t help global warming, sales strategies for emerging artists, and galleries that have come and gone.

In this episode of Explain Me William Powhida and Paddy Johnson talk about the 450 million dollar Leonardo Da Vinci of disputed authenticity and the Boyle Heights activists who follow artist Laura Owen’s from L.A. to New York to protest her non-profit 365 Mission while she visited The Whitney. Activists believe the presence of her gallery will lead to displacement.

Three shows. Three reviews. The Trevor Paglen exhibition at Metro Pictures is creepy as fuck. We take issue with New York Magazine critic Jerry Saltz’s review on the subject. Ellie Ga  at Bureau sensitively touches on the horror of the Syrian refugee crisis. Omer Fast at James Cohen produces some powerful videos about the role of the artist in times of crisis, but they are overshadowed by protestors. They believe his decision to transform the front of the gallery into a waiting room in a Chinese bus station amounts to yellowface. Our thoughts on this and just about everything else.

This week on Explain Me, William Powhida and Paddy Johnson talk with artist Kevin McCoy about Blockchain, Bitcoin and the Monegraph. This episode is your ultimate bitcoin/blockchain/monegraph explainer.

In part two of Explain Me William Powhida and Paddy Johnson discuss at the following exhibitions at the Spring Bresk Art Show: “Secret Identities” The Amazing Blackman and other comics by Kumasi J Barnett. Curated by Jac Lahav “Freedom School” by Elektra KB “A Pressing Conference” by Macon Reed. Curated by Helen Toomer “Bobby’s World” by Bobby Anspach “Psychic Pharmacy” by Howard Hurst curated by Helen Toomer “Hard or Soft Option” by Fall on Your Sword. Curated by Amber Kelly and Andrew Gori “Ours” co-curated by Dominic Nurre and Lynn Sullivan “Goodbye Columbus” a group show curated by Isaac Aden and Joseph Ayers “The Last Equestrian Portrait” a group show curated by Amanda ...

The inaugural episode of Explain Me, an art podcast with critic Paddy Johnson and artist William Powhida! A round of woos and hoos please! Explain Me looks at politics, money and the moral of responsibility of artists working in the art world. In this episode, we discuss Documenta’s massive overspending and near bankrupcy, the closure of Bruce High Quality Foundation University, and a new development along the 7 line describing itself as New York’s best installation. We also talk about a few shows we’ve seen recently in Chelsea, Kara Walker at Sikkema Jenkins, Christian Marclay at Paula Cooper, Tom Friedman at Lurhing ...