Released on October 8, the second issue of the Occupied Wall Street Journal included an editorial note entitled “No list of demands,” responding to the perceived absence of strong messaging offered by the movement. The note specified that: The exhausted political machines and their PR slicks are already seeking leaders to elevate, messages to claim, talking points to move on. They, more than anyone, will attempt to seize and shape this moment. They are racing to reach the front of the line. But how can they run out in front of something that is in front of them? They cannot. For Wall Street ...

These days, it is fairly clear that we consider art to be a trans-disciplinary field in a position to nurture other disciplines, and to be nurtured by these other disciplines in turn. As promising as this might sound, the terms for this exchange become significant, because it remains unclear what exactly we presume art to offer to the world. When hard pressed, we usually prefer not to prequalify the nature of artistic contribution at all, because in fact artists reserve the right to offer nothing other than doing work on their own terms. This requires a delicate balance, and it ...

It’s worthwhile to question the field of art from time to time, to demand to know its basic motives and intentions. Where is all this production actually heading? How do we locate the work of the work, as it were? But finding a resolution or consolidating art’s meaning into some form of criteria is probably not the point. Perhaps it makes more sense to simply continue asking, in as many ways as possible, the question of what art should do, and how it might do it. These questions can produce a degree of clarity when posed from outside of the usual ...

This first book-length study shows how Germany tried to reconcile the horrendous experiences of the First World War through the films made in 1919-1933. Drawing on the analysis of twenty-five such films, and covering a wide range of documentaries as well as feature films on the reasons for the outbreak of the war, life at the front, war at sea and the home front, the author sketches out the historical and cultural context, including reviews and censors’ reports, in which these films were made and viewed.

This conversation is the first one of an Archipelago series in the Western Balkans. Recorded in Sarajevo with Selma Porobić, it introduces the historical context of the 1992-1995 war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the ethnic cleansing of the Bosniak population by the Serbian militias, and the 2 million displaced people inside and outside the country. Twenty years after the Dayton Peace Agreements, many refugees have not yet returned, often because of local and regional strategies discouraging if not preventing this return. The second part of the conversation addresses the geographical position of the Western Balkans, at the gates of “Fortress ...

“I thought we’d wake the snipers / Thought we’d wake the birds / I thought we’d wake Allah himself and he’d come down to dance / Oh man, he did, he did, he did….” A suite of songs about a Syrian sculptor who carves stone, takes up arms, dances in the ruins of Homs, confesses on camera, and seeks official status, performed by Aliana de la Guardia and Ganavya Doraiswamy.

This discussion with local architect Miloš Kosec about three (hi)stories of ruins in WWII Slovenia uses the structure of his Master’s thesis research on this topic. After an introduction about the sometimes problematic fascination one might develop for ruins, we begin our specific conversation with the example of the ruins of entire ethnic German areas in southern Slovenia emptied of their inhabitants after they were encouraged to move back to Germany by the Reich administration. The second example is found in the numerous medieval castles burnt by the partisans in their fight against the Axis in what appear to Miloš ...

A Brief Visual History in the Time of ISIS is curated by Magnum photographer Peter van Agtmael and includes an essay and timeline by Peter Harling, an expert on the Middle East, formerly of the International Crisis Group, and founder of Synaps. The work of nineteen photographers is included in this first newspaper, and the images range from those taken in the final years of the French mandate in Syria in 1941 to the fall of Mosul in 2017.

In this conversation, Derek Gregory shares with us a few aspects of his simultaneously broad and precise knowledge of the ways war function. We examine together the current so-called “war on terror” in which the United States and their allies have engaged since 2001. Derek distinguishes three spaces that need to be produced in order for war to operate physically and apparently legitimately. We first consider a drone as an object crystalizing both the paradigm of contemporary war, but also the vessel of all wrongly posed questions that perpetuate the status quo. All disciplines are mobilized for war: geography, technology, architecture, ...

We cannot meaningfully criticize the destruction of cultural heritage in the Middle East if we do not question the apparatuses, institutions, and mindsets that lead to terror and destruction in the first place. Just as state apparatuses can make the deaths of enemies ungrievable, cultural and educational institutions can make demolished buildings into something un-memorable.

As Ukrainian forces enter a third week of fighting off Russia’s full-force invasion, artist Vova Vorotniov reports from Kyiv, sharing details from life in the city during wartime, a primer on corruption (both bad and “good”), and what terms he sees for possible resolution (spoiler: Russia go home). This item is publicly available as part of the Library Stack Public Branch at NN Contemporary Art.

Anastasiya Osipova, a scholar of Soviet and contemporary Russian Culture at the University of Colorado Boulder and co-founder of Cicada Press, speaks with NM from Kyiv, sharing her first-person insights on the Ukrainian/Russian border conflict as well as what the prospect of war does to one’s ability to communicate clearly, and how that shift impacts a society over time. Recorded in 2 parts: Jan 29 / Feb 8