In 1985, the French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard curated a groundbreaking exhibition called Les Immatériaux at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. The exhibition showed how telecommunication technologies were beginning to impact every aspect of life. At the same time, it was a material demonstration of what Lyotard called the post-modern condition. This book features a previously unpublished report by Jean-François Lyotard on the conception of Les Immatériaux and its relation to postmodernity. Reviewing the historical significance of the exhibition, his text is accompanied by twelve contemporary meditations. The philosophers, art historians, and artists analyse this important moment in the history of media and theory, and reflect on the new material conditions brought ...

A Disagreeable Object brings together 20 artists who employ and borrow from the methods and artistic practices that the Surrealists developed in the first half of the century. This is not an exhaustive survey, nor an attempt to re-consider our understanding of Surrealism as an historical movement. Rather, the exhibition offers a view of contemporary sculpture identifying influences and attitudes that have filtered through decades of cultural production. The works in A Disagreeable Object respond to a decidedly contemporary context…

In 2016 the Aerocene Foundation was invited to Exhibition Road for an interdisciplinary artistic project co-produced by members of the Exhibition Road Cultural Group: a partnership of the leading cultural and educational institutions in London, among them Serpentine Galleries, Imperial College London and The Natural History Museum. Between October and December 2016, the Aerocene Foundation activated a collaborative research platform between Exhibition Road members and wider communities by organizing two hackathons and the ‘Aerocene Campus’ in which participants engaged in debates on metabolic, social and environmental dimensions of the Aerocene epoch. During this period, experts as well as developers, designers, artists, ...

I’m one of those ADD people. I’ve never touched art in a gallery, but that’s because it’s in a gallery, not because “it’s art”. Really good art is best appreciated by rubbing yourself all over it. So, this “I Failed as a Visitor” thing is a wee bit offensive. Modern art should be inviting visitor participation, not building up that wall of separation. posted by shii at 6:07 AM on December 9, 2009

Artistic and curatorial practices can be seen as the prime testimonies of transformative movements—on the one hand situated in a specific site and region, and on the other, transgressing disciplines, classes, norms—proposing new forms and relations of living and establishing these practices (building centres along the way) but at the same time always changing their positions, never staying at the centre, but instead unfolding on the periphery of social life. In this OnCurating Issue, we searched for and researched projects and institutions that hold at their core something between the lines of centres–peripheries with their transversal practices and modus operandi. For ...

People make their own history, but they do not make it of their own free will; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances but under immediate circumstances, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with transforming themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to ...

A note is a trace, a word, a drawing that all of a sudden becomes part of thinking, and is transformed into an idea. This publication project follows that path, presenting the mind in a prologue state, in a pre-public arena. As a prelude to, and central element of dOCUMENTA (13), the publishing project 100 Notes, 100 Thoughts took the form of one hundred “notebooks,” comprising facsimiles of existing documents, commissioned essays, collaborations, and conversations. With contributions by authors from a range of disciplines, such as art, science, philosophy and psychology, anthropology, economic and political theory, language and literature studies, ...

This book has been produced to accompany the ICA exhibition Double Agent, an exhibition of collaborative projects in which the artists use other people as a medium. All of the works raise questions of performance and authorship, and in particular the issues of ethics and representation that ensue when the artist is no longer the central agent in his or her own work, but operates through a range of individuals, communities, and surrogates. One of the starting points for the exhibition was the recent and conspicuous rise of interest in performance and performative gestures among con- temporary artists. But today’s generation of artists, unlike their ...

This draft edition of OnCurating began life by a group of scholars and researchers asking a series of questions about the nature of art production and curating today and what role, if any, biennials play within this paradigm. We wanted to examine and question the underlying assumptions and factors that are generally attributed to the rise in the number of large-scale recurring exhibitions and create a draft-working document that may spur further research and analyses by practitioners and scholars in the field. Is the biennial format really a worldwide phenomena? And if so, to what extent? Do biennials look the ...

For the Summer 2012 issue of e-flux journal we are very pleased to present a special “Animism” issue guest-edited by Anselm Franke, curator of the exhibition by the same name. Even if you missed Animism on tour in Europe since it began at Extra City and MUHKA in Antwerp in 2010, you have probably learned of its encompassing mobilization of the systems of inclusion and exclusion defining “science” and “culture.” The various stages of the exhibition have shown the discourse of animism to be a crucial skeleton key for releasing the deadlocks formed by the repressed religious, teleological, and colonial ...

Upon entering the exhibition—any imagined example will suf ce for the time being—we enter on the loaded grounds of the exhibition space: a cultural eld of inter-human energy exchange. A space charged with relations between different actors—artists, curators, staff members, and visitors, among others—each with their different aims, ambitions and intentionalities, and what we might call objects of interrogation, reflection and interaction that have been brought forward and put on display. As an exhibition visitor, we move around in white spaces, roam through repurposed warehouses and grey hangars, and wander in and out of black boxes to have a lived experience of and encounter ...

The Gift of the Past 1. History is layered. But the layers are not stacked neatly. The disrupting force of the present puts pressure on the past, scattering pieces of it forward into unanticipated locations. No one owns these pieces. To think so is to allow categories of private property to intrude into a commonly shared terrain wherein the laws of exclusionary inheritance do not apply. The history of humanity demands a communist mode of reception…