to_oblivion.zip laments the death of Reyhaneh Jabbari, who was convicted and hanged in Iran on October 25, 2014 for the alleged murder of her rapist.

virgil b/g taylor: Minor Publics is a large-scale installation exploring the boundaries between art and memorial through research and poetic encounters with Sol LeWitt’s Black Form–Dedicated to the Missing Jews. Originally installed in Münster as part of the 1987 Skulptur Projekte, LeWitt later sold the sculpture to the city of Hamburg in 1989 and donated the fee. Black Form represents an oft-overlooked component of LeWitt’s work that extends beyond his conceptual and dematerialized methodologies to address deeply political and personal questions. The exhibition is framed by a core text by taylor that ruminates on the notion of a “bima”— a Greek and Hebrew architectural term ...

But we can understand Descartes’ premise of equality far more basically and radically, not as an assertion of fact, but as a presuppositional act: equality is a supposition we must make in advance. For it has nothing to do with the socially acquired capacity of reason (in which we are unequal, and about which we disagree). Equality pertains to a presupposition of reason. It does not refer to a capacity of reason that we possess, but to the potential for practical training in reason, for its acquisition. In that and that alone—in this potential—are we equal. Equality is an equality ...

Lauren Wetmore interviews Swiss American curator and writer Alexandra Stock about her scathing critique of Christophe Büchel’s 2019 Venice Biennale project Barca Nostra. Published that same year by the independent Egyptian online newspaper Mada Masr, Stock’s “The Privileged, Violent Stunt That is the Venice Biennale Boat Project” decries an “artworld that repels all criticism of it,” and describes the repercussion of being one of the first voices to publicly denouncing this high-profile artwork. Stock is an occasional writer, artist, and consultant based mainly in Cairo since 2007. She graduated from the Zurich University of the Arts with a BFA in Art Theory, participated in De Appel’s ...

To enter a collective archive is to carry an anonymous corpse on your shoulders. You are not investigating how this corpse met its death so much as feeling impelled, somehow, to fill in the gaps that render it anonymous. Whether or not you are hoping to tell the story and share it with others, you might be able to give this corpse a name and lend a meaning to its life. The corpse is the researcher’s question. Urgent, mysterious, distorted or even inconsistent, it is a question that issues from the present—the here and now—but which lacks the language required ...

A nuclear facility in Iran before and after an explosion, a village in Pakistan before and after a drone attack, a Cambodian river valley before and after a flood. The before-and-after image has become the tool of choice for analysing events. Satellite photography allows us to scrutinise the impact of war or climate change, from the safe distance of orbit. But one thing is rarely captured: the event itself. All we can read is its effect on a space, and that’s where the architectural expert is required, to fill the gap with a narrative. In this groundbreaking essay, Eyal and Ines ...

Sunday 25 March | Doors 7pm | Admission Free Louise-Michel, France (2008) 91mins directed by Gustave de Kervern & Benoît Delépine Laukaus tehtaalla AKA A Shot in the Factory, Finland (1973), 79 mins Directed by Erkko Kivikoski What to do when the workers of a factory have been laid off overnight? Louise has an original idea: why not pool the compensation money to… hire a hit man and to liquidate the boss? Motion accepted so Louise goes in search of the gem they need and unfortunately comes across Michel, a stinky security specialist. Michel, who is busted, gladly accepts the deal but proves so inept ...

Jaffna-based visual artist and art educator Thamotharampillai Shanaathanan responded to the AAA collection by drawing parallels between methods of archiving and art making, while delving into the idea of ‘home’ within the context of ethnic conflict.

Charles Mudede joins us from Seattle to read “White Knee, Black Neck,” published in the June 2020 issue of e-flux journal.

The word “classic” in the title of this special issue of Selva might seem to some a misnomer. Rather than consistently use any of the rich traditions of the concept from various sub-discplines of art history—say, Mesoamerican or Chinese—or address the contested self-identification of the academic field of “Classics” itself, I have thought about the operational role of this word in all the different art histories I have worked with. (I was for a few years responsible for creating and managing a non-Eurocentric introductory art history course with the help of colleagues and collaborators. My level of engagement in various ...

From the repurposed rubble of salvagepunk to undead hordes banging on shopping mall doors, from empty waste zones to teeming plagued cities, Combined and Uneven Apocalypse grapples with the apocalyptic fantasies of our collapsing era. Moving through the films, political tendencies, and recurrent crises of late capitalism, Evan Calder Williams paints a black toned portrait of the dream and nightmare images of a global order gone very, very wrong. Situating itself in the defaulting financial markets of the present, Combined and Uneven Apocalypse glances back toward a messy history of zombies, car wrecks, tidal waves, extinction, trash heaps, ...

As the Israeli bombs stop raining on Gaza and, with them, the outrage that this recent chapter of the continuous siege on this small land of Palestinian territory triggered, the last thing that we should wish is that things “go back to normal.” The normal is unacceptable, since it is made of the same violence than the bombings, only in a less spectacular manner. Throughout this text, I propose to use the oxymoronic phrase of “normal violence” in order to describe the (infra)structural subjection imposed on the Gaza inhabitants.