AAA Public Programmes Curator Ingrid Chu explored the international phenomenon of the ‘art book bag’ in a short history of the art book bag (and the things that go in them). Using the last 15 years as a guide, the exhibition featured ‘the things that go in them’—art publications, magazines, and related ephemera—alongside a vast array of these popular totes in the AAA Library. Chu invited artists, curators, art book fair organisers, and print and online publishers to provide insight into the changing modes of knowledge production and circulation, and their influence on recent art of Asia. An associated public talk, ...

“Reading inquisitively over each others’ shoulders, the poems, meditations, analyses and experiments in this volume respond with audacity and adventure to the challenge of characterizing what reading, this most familiar yet renewedly strange occupation, has been and may yet become.”

This sixteen page book is titled ‘Alif, after the first letter and numeral of the Arabic language, which are both written with a single stroke. The book contains a series of love poems possibly written by the seventh century arab poet Abu Nuwas, to his contemporary, the alchemist Jabir Ibn Hayyan. The poems are said to be carried out by the poet according to rigorous parameters set by the alchemist.

“One of the ways in which the Conceptual project in art has been most successful is in claiming new territory for practice. It’s a tendency that’s been almost too successful: today it seems that most of the work in the international art system positions itself as Conceptual to some degree, yielding the “Conceptual painter,” the “DJ and Conceptual artist,” or the “Conceptual web artist.” Let’s put aside the question of what makes a work Conceptual, recognizing, with some resignation, that the term can only gesture toward a thirty year-old historical moment. But it can’t be rejected entirely, as it has ...

A conversation between David Horvitz with David Senior.

This issue of OnCurating is dedicated to artistic ephemera on the occasion of the exhibition project They Printed It! Invitation cards, press releases, inserts and other forms of artistic (self-)marketing at Kunsthalle Zurich (21 November 2015 – 7 February 2016). Along with the presentation at the Kunsthalle, which will change on a weekly basis, the project also includes seminars for university students in Zurich, a blog, and a public workshop with international participants. The first part of this issue aims to contextualize the broad category of ephemera, including the invitations, press releases, and magazine advertisements mentioned in the title, and ...

“A fence’s integrity rests on its ability to enclose what one is unwilling or unable to offer.” Views from a performance of black fatherhood. “Fences” by Saretta Morgan is part of Resentment, the twenty-fifth issue of Triple Canopy, that is devoted to reclaiming—if not recuperating—resentment, especially as harbored by those who are used to fits of anger and bitterness being indicted as unproductive, petty, selfish, even pathological.

A meal in three courses, by Martha Rosler, 1985 by Seth Price, 2004

Gnosis (from the Latin gnosos meaning “knowledge” and nosos meaning “disease”) is an intriguing meditation on the subjectivity of perception. Composed by artist Sreshta Rit Premnath, it consists of eight collaged silhouettes accompanied by two found texts: a 19th century clinical description of the neurological condition anosognosia and a list of CIA counterintelligence categories used in the interrogation of suspects.

Showing together in Europe now for the second time, Wade Guyton, Seth Price, Josh Smith and Kelley Walker may not be the New Yorkiest band in the world, but if they were this would be their second album. Let’s call them fellow travelers and assume their grouping is at least partly a European construction. It’s their packaging and touring as Guyton, Price, Walker, Smith that allows for the production of something like a New York moment in the Kunsthalle and wherever such moments are in demand. And it could be that the objects and images on view here are not ...

The intercalations: a paginated exhibition series is conceived as a curatorial-editorial space to both host and critically reflect on the collaborations among members and affiliates of the SYNAPSE International Curators’ Network of the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, while enabling explorations of the book as a form of exhibition architecture in relation to other aesthetic practices in the Anthropocene. In addition to its function as a vehicle to document the collaborations of the SYNAPSE network, this book-as-exhibition series aims to expand the discourse of curatorial knowledge production within a broader multidisciplinary field of research and experimentation. The series gradually ...

The Wilson Exercises is a framework in which the artists Anna Craycroft and Marc Vives and the curatorial office Rivet have exchanged materials since fall 2012. It primarily involves developing a shared method and productive process that evades the evaluative and interrupts doing, making, and showing. Their exercise rhythm balances joint conversations against withdrawal into individual practice. Throughout, the curators have also put their analytical gaze on hold in favor of responses in an associative and fictional voice that engages with aspects of the artists’ material. The Wilson Exercises surfaced as a semipublic program at the Rogaland Kunstsenter in Stavanger, ...