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.

“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 ...

In Splendide Hotel – 1887 there is one sole room and it is transparent, containing apparitions of all literary, musical, scientific and abstract sorts. From an internal monologue to quantum physics to the gramophone and bioluminescence, within this little book there is a collection of nearly all the references serving to rebuild this hotel within the Cristal Palace to reveal 1887 as the birth year of our universe.

The work cannot be grasped in one glance, it escapes the gaze and looks like the result of an explosion that has left the space, walls, floor and ceiling covered in fragments and motifs. Florentine Lamarche and Alexandre Ovize’s creations are totally heterogeneous. Rarely have so many materials and gestures been used to confront oppositions of textures, forms and colours. Their works cannot be read. They are visual shocks that create irrational, madcap territories in the actual space of the exhibition. They borrow from painting and sculpture, yet foil the aesthetic codes of their representation to engage them more in ...

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.

An Anti-Catalog was the work of the Catalog Committee of the group Artists Meeting for Cultural Change (AMCC). A landmark publication of the 1970s, its purpose was to protest the Whitney Museum of American Art’s bicentennial exhibition, which was titled “Three Centuries of American Art.” The Whitney show featured John D. Rockefeller III’s collection of mainly eighteenth and nineteenth-century American art–a collection that featured only one African American and one woman artist. The Catalog Committee, which consisted of fifteen artists and two art historians, spent almost a year producing an eighty-page book containing articles and documents. Originally conceived as a critique ...

In this episode, Aimi, Cassandra, and Jarah announce a new Critical Design Lab project: Crip Ritual. This project focuses on how disabled people use rituals to change daily life or broader structures.

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 ...

The process of signification gets through to different levels such as construction, deconstruction, reconstruction. My work presents itself to the audience as fragment and erosion of my cognitive process. In some way I build up ruins, as oblivion of my thought.

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.

I’m one of those ADD people. I’ve never touched art in a gallery, but that’s because it’s in a gallery, not because “it’s art.” Really good art is best appreciated by rubbing yourself all over it. So, this I Failed as a Visitor thing is a wee bit offensive. Modern art should be inviting visitor participation, not building up that wall of separation. posted by shii at 6:07 AM on December 9, 2009