A magazine about art and social engagement. A Blade of Grass (ABOG) was founded to support and deepen understanding for socially engaged artists who are enacting social change within a community.

The second issue of Field Notes continues to address AAA’s core questions, examining the manifestations of Asia, its methodologies, maps, networks, and geographies. This issue proposes the archive as a method to illustrate the way in which initiatives like AAA are taking the archive to counter, complicate, and reimagine systems in which narratives of modern and contemporary art are being produced, circulated, and understood. How do archives of today respond to contemporary conditions through practice? What can an archive look like – what forms does it take (published anthologies, network of archives, physical archive, exhibition platform, online database)? Who are the ...

In this issue, we’re looking at how socially engaged artists are challenging mainstream habits of seeing and doing that exclude the lived experience and creative potential of large swaths of people who do not fit into—or rather, who have been systematically oppressed by—the social norms and physical expectations of capitalist society. Rather than view difference in negative terms, these artists are using their work to affirm physical, sensory, emotional, and cognitive difference as “to be expected and respected on its own terms as part of ordinary human experience,” as Colin Cameron wrote in a 2001 article on Disability Arts that ...

In-depth discussion of the aesthetic, political, historical architectural, and passional dimensions of artist Yves Mettler’s work on urban squares whose names invoke a multitude of concepts and visions of Europe. With Mettler himself and Atlas Europe Square contributors Stephen Zepke, Teresa Pullano, Neil Brenner, and Reza Negarestani addressing the many dimensions of the project, and with designers Emmanuel Crivelli and Ernesto Luna of DUALROOM about the process of transforming it into a book.

This edition of On-Curating.org places ontological and political perspectives on notions of community at the centre of its debate. We believe that such an explicit discussion of community on a theoretical level is an urgent requirement in the context of ‘curating’ since cultural articulations always implicitly or explicitly address and produce communities. It was Jacques Rancière in particular who in The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible pointed out the importance of access to visibility and audibility since these are what enables or prevents access to a community. “The distribution of the sensible makes visible who can participate ...

This twelfth SDUK broadsheet examines the diverse means by which individuals and communities build lasting or fleeting bonds. Coinciding with the conclusion of Crossings: Itineraries of Encounter, the Blackwood’s 2021–22 lightbox series, this issue, BONDING, echoes themes seen throughout Crossings: migration, diaspora, borders, and archives. Where the lightbox exhibitions examine image-making practices, this SDUK issue engages print culture in new and recurring formats including visual storytelling, poetry, a letter exchange, and a recipe. Food is the source of many enduring cultural bonds, and thus one might be tempted to start from the gut: See Diasporic Dumplings (p. 27) for a site-responsive ...

Last year, the young London-based urban design group Assemble won the Turner Prize. Their claim to function as a ‘studio’ and for the non-art status of their work makes their new found place in art’s discourses an interesting symptom of the critical gaps and lacks in the growing attention paid to art collectives. This article briefly maps out some of the key issues and missing tools that critics still need if we are to adequately understand how art collectives both re-make their own non-identity and make artworks as, in tandem, a doubled-up form of co-artworking.

A conversation with Maia Ruth Lee and Guadalupe Rosales about making reparative and discursive space for others and the importance (and tensions) of cultural representation. Maia Ruth Lee Maia Ruth Lee is a New York based artist and educator born in Busan, South Korea. Lee’s first solo exhibition in New York was at Eli Ping Frances Perkins in 2016, followed by her solo exhibition at Jack Hanley Gallery two years later. She has participated in numerous group exhibitions including at CANADA gallery (New York), Salon 94 (New York), Roberts & Tilton Gallery (Los Angeles), and Parisian Laundry Gallery (Montreal). Lee participated in ...

Since the last decades and especially since the financial crisis of 2008, financial companies and private investors have (re)discovered real estate as an profitable investment object and asset. However, it is not so much the built structures as the underlying land, which has become the object of speculative investments. As a result, land prices, and the rents of the buildings built upon them, have risen continuously. According to economist Ottmar Edenhofer, around 80% of the rise in housing costs is due to land price developments (Trares 2018). Consequently, the provision of affordable housing is becoming increasingly difficult, especially with regards ...

The enemy of my enemy is my friend. Turn the proverb around a time or two and you might be able to locate yourself and your allies in the confusing terrain of the present. The question of how to define an enemy as distinct from a friend has been a longstanding preoccupation of politics. Today, some conventions for deciphering alliances have become complicated. For instance, you can’t look into someone’s eye or shake their hand while safely practicing physical distancing, and still others are intensified as the ability to track a person’s positions through the convoluted archive that is the internet. ...

Creative Networks explores the dawn of the Internet culture in the age of network society from the perspective of Eastern Europe. From a theoretical angle the networks are introduced and interpreted as complex socio-technical systems. The author analyzes the development of these networked self-organized formations starting off with ‘virtual communities’ of ‘creative networks’, which emerged during the early phase of the Internet, up to the phenomena of today’s online ‘social networks’. Along with the translocal case studies of Nettime, Syndicate, Faces and Xchange networks (as well as with the other important facets of the 1990s network culture in Europe), the ...

Dan Graham’s Rock My Religion (1982–84) is a video essay populated by punk and rock performers (Patti Smith, Jim Morrison, Black Flag and Glenn Branca) and historical figures (including Ann Lee, founder of the Shakers). This coming together of several narrative voice-overs, of singing and shouting voices, of jarring sounds and text overlaid onto shaky, gritty images, proposes a historical genealogy of rock music and an ambitious thesis on the origins of America. In this illustrated book, Kodwo Eshun examines this landmark work of contemporary moving image in relation to Graham’s wider body of work and to the broader culture of ...