The “Free-floating” Srinagar Biennale explores Kashmiri artists’ fractured sense of place through memory, nostalgia, loss and national belonging. Carlson delves into how the Srinagar Biennale adopts an innovative and free-flowing format that allows the Kashmiri community to assert a new visual narrative through a ‘rhizomatic’ approach by engaging viewers in a sensorial experience rather than a visual one.

Against Art History critically evaluates decolonial art exhibitions and curatorial frameworks. It asks to what extent art history can be decolonial, when its disciplinary and architectural foundation, the museum, is an inherently colonial institution. Shirazi thus examines whether new curatorial frameworks, such as in Exhibitions Without Objects (EwO) which internationalise the modernist canon of non-Western arts, undo or amplify the violence perpetrated by Euro-American historical narratives.

Descartes famously believed that animals were living machines; he was said to beat, torture, and vivisect dogs simply to demonstrate that they had no feelings. He interpreted the sounds emerging from the dog’s mouth as mere physical reactions, just the mechanical result of air passing through a windpipe, not indicative of emotional self-expression. According to Descartes and many of his followers, animals were inferior to humans because they lacked the capacity for language. While scientific evidence as well as popular opinion about the emotive actuality and potential of animals has proven that they have inner lives, most do not speak ...

Art Biennials and the Mediterranean Conundrum surveys the last twelve editions of Manifesta. Through this examination, the essay evaluates neocolonial strategies that can be used to promote decolonial thinking and exhibition-making. It also situates the biennial as a territory where both fabrication and rethinking of the periphery paradigm occur.

The Biennals in Pakistan explores popular political, religious and nationalistic dogmas that have influenced art-making in Pakistan since the 1990s. It addresses the gap between the conception and the reception of public art within Pakistani society that has arisen since the country began hosting visual art biennales and festivals in Lahore, Karachi and Islamabad.

Curators and their partners are working in a contested field, in which the meanings of institutions, their power structures and modes of participation can be debated and reshaped. The number and diversity of high-profile major museum exhibitions in the twenty-first century that have been devoted to the themes of feminist and women’s art has attracted an unprecedented critical attention to the practice of feminist curation. The diversity of the ways in which feminism has been represented in curatorial projects—from Womanhouse (1972) to Gender Battle (2007)—is explored here most fully in the essays by Amelia Jones and Hilary Robinson, which identify ...

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.

Does the activity of exhibiting resemble the process of assigning meaning in language? By showing cultural artefacts of different authors, one necessarily makes links. If an exhibition is presented to an audience and retold in conversation, its spatial choreography gives rise to a syntax. Experience and perception are translated into linguistic expression. Thus, the act of exhibiting has close ties with the communicative activity of organizing the show, and with texts and discussions. Design then adds an action-based level to this communicative dimension — actions which, as one walks through the exhibition space, are at least imaginable, and in some ...

On the occasion of documenta’s 14th edition, this special issue scrutinizes the ways in which the Kassel-based periodic exhibition has been contributing to curating the history of the present since its inception in 1955. From diverse perspectives, the authors engage with questions of how documenta’s iterations played a significant role not only in the making of a history of contemporary art but also in the canon of the relatively young field of curatorial and exhibition studies. Focusing on documenta’s engagement with artistic and broader cultural developments, as well as its implication in shifting socioeconomic and geopolitical contexts, the texts assembled ...

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 this episode of Explain Me, Paddy Johnson and William Powhida discuss the New Museum Triennial “Songs for Sabotage”. Both Johnson and Powhida agree this show has more of its fair share of bad art but only Powhida sees this as a dealbreaker. Debate ensues. The ad in which Pepsi and model Kendall Jenner create world peace gets a mention.