Affidamento, or entrustment, is one of the most important and difficult practices enacted by the Milan Women’s Bookstore Collective, founded in 1975. Rejecting a narrative of equality and sisterhood, the Milan group sees difference, or disparity, as one of the most generative qualities of the personal and political relationships between women. Looking to historical examples of relationships of affidamento, and discussing how entrustment operates in our own lives, this session explores how practices of writing and narration give form to these exchanges and open up new spaces for feminist politics in the everyday…

“The definition of an ominous optimist is someone that goes through bad days in his life but is still optimistic for the future” says Mat Randol in “Ominous optimist ft. the solar system.” Such an affirmation synthesizes well the tone of this conversation with Mawena Yehouessi & Steffi Njoh Monny, respectively founder and editor-in-chief of the online platform Black(s) to the Future. In it, we discuss about the political role of science fiction and speculative visions for the African diaspora through humor and (terrestrial and extraterrestrial) gravity. Steffi Njoh Monny, as in Steffi Graf—same name, same date of birth, only twenty years earlier… ...

Labour of Listening by Kate Lacey is the first episode of the new podcast series Ages of Receivership: On Generous Listening, based on the 2022 symposium with the same title. In her contribution the author and Professor of Media History and Theory at the University of Sussex talks about the act of listening as a form of labor, about listening out and listening in and what it means to create a space, where speech and listening can take place. The podcast series Ages of Receivership: On Generous Listening emerges from the spring 2022 Master Symposium at the Institute Art Gender Nature, ...

Hallie Ayres speaks to Emily Apter and Aliza Shvarts. The conversation was scheduled following the opening of Aliza Shvarts: Purported at Art In General on February 20, 2020.

What would it be like if one day everyone you encountered said that they were you. Would you let them assume your identification, knowing that ultimately they can only be themselves. These questions are what Carroll provokes us with in All the Men Who Think They Can Be Me.

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 ...

For this episode of our “Criticism in Conversation” series, a writer and collaborative performer, Jacob Wren, speaks with artist Dayna Danger, about the line between empowerment and objectification and the meaning of community in both their work. Danger is a 2Spirit/Queer, Metis/Saulteaux/Polish artist whose images highlight and queer power dynamics, kinship, representation, and sexuality. Wren makes collaborative performances, exhibitions and literature, including 2014’s Polyamorous Love Song and this year’s Authenticity is a Feeling, a hybrid of history, performance theory, and memoir. Together they cover a lot of ground, from personal narratives and community relationships to speaking against silence and apathy. We ...

What happens when feminist activism turns art making into social practice? What happens when feminist conversations, at once joyful, contentious, conflictual, and generative, are being cared for through curatorial practice that mobilizes the archives of ephemeral, art-enabled conversations? Feminist artists of the 1970s concerned with developing a radical critique of heteropatriarchy used dinner parties and conversations for artistic exploration. The Dinner Party by artist Judy Chicago is the best-known example harnessing the representational power of a dinner party. Much less known is The International Dinner Party by Suzanne Lacy, who invited “sisters” around the world to hold dinner parties simultaneously ...

Episode 15: Attention The two days Symposium “Women in Space” at the Art Institute HGK FHNW in Basel thematized the roles of scale, space and power in envisioning women in the art system: space is an issue for everyone, yet, it has specific resonance for those who make exhibitions and run institutions, and for women in general. How we move through space, how we claim it, how we narrate and thematize it, how we fund it, how we labor in it, how we construct and deconstruct it. In this episode Chus Martinez & Quinn Latimer are in conversation with Mareike Dittmer, ...

Episode 1: Austerity Mareike Dittmer, Stefanie Hessler, Natascha Sadr Haghighian in conversation with Chus Martínez and Quinn Latimer. Promise No Promises is a podcasts series produced by the Women’s Center for Excellence, a research project between the Art Institute and the Instituto Susch—a joint venture with Grażyna Kulczyk and Art Stations Foundation CH. The Women’s Center for Excellence is conceived as a think tank tasked to assess, develop, and propose new social languages and methods to understand the role of women in the arts, culture, science, and technology, as well as in all knowledge areas that are interconnected with the field of culture today.

Beverly Buchanan’s Marsh Ruins (1981) are large, solid mounds of cement and shell-based tabby concrete, yet their presence has always been elusive. Hiding in the tall grasses and brackish waters of the Marshes of Glynn, on the southeast coast of Georgia, the Marsh Ruins merge with their surroundings as they enact a curious and delicate tension between destruction and endurance. This volume offers an illustrated examination of Buchanan’s environmental sculpture, which exists in an ongoing state of ruination. Amelia Groom illuminates Buchanan’s vision of sculptural ruination, and probes her remarkable work in terms of ideas of witnessing, documentation, landscape, and cultural ...

Episode 19: Big Bang (Disputaziuns Susch, The Magicians of the Mountains) The first episode in a series of chapters from Disputaziuns Susch, an annual conference scheme hosted by Art Stations Foundation CH and Grazyna Kulczyk, has Aleksandra Mir imagining an artist and a scientist sitting on a train where a conversation ensues about objective realities, space exploration, negative space and belief. Disputaziuns Susch, from the beginning in 2017, has been a multi-disciplinary annual endeavor, bringing together scholars and artists, philosophers and authors, neuroscientists and historians – thinkers who will be asking questions and counter questions – in its 2019’s editions circling around ...