Afghanistan: A Lexicon uses the form of a lexicon to present a nonlinear narrative of twentieth-century Afghan history as a recursive loop of modernization attempts, revolts, collapses, and recoveries.The lexicon covers seventy-one terms, most illustrated by archival and original images, including: vocabulary unique to Afghan politics, like bi-tarafi, jirga, and nizamnamah; terms that have specific meanings or resonances in the Afghan context, like “infidel,” “martyr,” and spetsnaz; key players and places, from Bacha-i-Saqqao to Hizb-i-Islami and from the Bala Hissar to the Microrayan; and special entries on recurrent events and themes that form the weft and warp of the century, ...

Building on his research for his landmark 2018 publication Politigram & the Post-left, artist Joshua Citarella has been conducting a series of interviews with Gen Z users who post radical political content on social media, as part of a forthcoming Rhizome commission. This event brought together three of the most sophisticated figures he has encountered through this research, all of whom are associated with the fragmented online communities known as “post-Left.” For the event, each participant was asked to prepare micro-lectures describing possible and preferred scenarios for politics and society over the next twenty-five years, and to comment on the role of internet culture in shaping ...

After the Great Refusal offers a Western Marxist reading of contemporary art focusing on the continued presence (or absence) of the avant-garde’s transgressive impulse. Taking art’s ability to contribute to a potential radical social transformation as its point of departure, Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen analyses the relationship between the current neoliberal hegemony and contemporary art, including relational aesthetics and interventionist art, new institutionalism and post-modern architecture.

Law and art are oftentimes perceived as standing in opposition, and even seen in terms. The first is dismissed as provincial, rigid, and bureaucratic, while the latter is repeatedly characterized as global, flexible, and dynamic. Yet, closer observation and analysis reveal hidden links and layers, and substantial preoccupation by both legal and art practitioners in the visual and in the judicial. It is through the unraveling of spaces, gaps, and lacunae in which both fields of practice and knowledge intersect that this publication sets in motion an exploration of influences and interactions between law and art. Offering a new critical approach ...

We have been forced to live together. We have been kindly invited to be with one another, side by side, mutually observing each other. I think we know the motives too, and recognize the consequences which have derived from forcing this collective, planetary understanding of what we are expected to be. Even so, we haven`t lost the desire to live together. To bring about this obligation, modernity led the individual to be engaged with his own identity and his own consciousness, and simultaneously, with a control of foreign powers. What we are looking at here, isn’t just the decisive disengagement with these forms ...

Artist and media critic Alessandro Ludovico interviews the three artists named Janez Janša. It’s no coincidence that they have the same name and not by chance that they share it with the former Slovenian Prime minister: they deliberately and officially changed the names they’d had from birth to Janez Janša. They also joined the right-wing SDS party led by their homonymous counterpart. After that they experienced a “visible disappearance” from having canceled their previous names but simultaneously having gained huge visibility thanks to their radical gesture. Changing your name is similar to dying: it affects more people other than just ...

In this bold and expansive treatise, Marquis Bey seeks to define the shape of a Black anarchism—not, he says, by listing “all the Black people who are anarchists and the anarchists who are Black people,” but though a fluid and generative encounter between anarchism and Blackness. Classical anarchism tended to avoid questions of race—specifically Blackness—as well as the intersections of race and gender. Skeptical of satisfying himself with the usual finger-pointing this lack invites, Bey addresses it head on, not by constructing a new cannon of Black anarchists but by outlining how anarchism and Blackness already share a certain subjective relationship ...

This zine explores anarcho-surrealist imagination in midcentury and current-day USA, with particular emphasis on the Chicagoland scene.

Angela Nagle discusses Millennial values, Silicon Valley ideology, NGOs and moral fanaticism.

“Police killings captured on cell-phone video or photographs have become the hallmark of United States visual culture in the twenty-first century. In this book, I examine this transformation of visual culture from the deaths of Eric Garner and Michael Brown in the summer of 2014 to the inauguration of Donald Trump in 2017. As a person designated “white” by the color line in the United States, I do so from the perspective of anti-antiblackness. I study the formation of the space of appearance, that space where we catch a glimpse of the society that is to come—the future commons or communism. ...

For Nikolaos Patsopoulos, the current situation in Europe is similar to the one in Russia right before the revolution and so should be the architecture that accompanies these shift of social paradigms. We discuss about the role of the architect in revolutionary movements, as (s)he has probably more to unlearn than to teach in this matter. For Nikolaos however, each body that modifies the way the built environment (in particular the street) operates politically can be called architect. We therefore spend the time to contrast these two figures sharing the same name of architect, one that contributes actively to the production of ...