The museum of contemporary art might be the most advanced recording device ever invented. It is a place for the storage of historical grievances and the memory of forgotten artistic experiments, social projects, or errant futures. But in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Russia, this recording device was undertaken by artists and thinkers as a site for experimentation. Arseny Zhilyaev’s Avant-Garde Museology presents essays documenting the wildly encompassing progressivism of this period by figures such as Nikolai Fedorov, Aleksandr Rodchenko, Kazimir Malevich, Alexander Bogdanov, and others—many which are translated from the Russian for the first time. Here the urgent question is: ...

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 ...

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 ...

This publication accompanies FUTURE LIGHT, including the exhibitions “Escaping Transparency” at the MAK Vienna, “Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz. Loving, Repeating” at Kunsthalle Wien as well as four off-site commissions within the framework of the VIENNA BIENNALE 2015: IDEAS FOR CHANGE (11 June−4 October, 2015).

The exhibition “In the Heart of the Country” is the first comprehensive presentation of the international collection of the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw. In a relatively short time—the Museum was established in 2005—the institution has acquired over 300 works. First and foremost, these are works purchased as part of the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage’s “International Collections of Contemporary Art” programme, as well as donations and temporary loans from artists, private individuals and businesses. Many of the collected works were commissioned by the Museum for its exhibitions and public projects (such as pieces by artists like Sanja Iveković, Zbigniew ...

The origin of the word “hybrid” can be traced etymologically to two sources: Latin hybrida (mongrel, bastard) and Greek hybris(pride, arrogance). Unions between plants, human beings, animals and technologies give rise to flexible hybrids; organic and synthetic materials mutate into amorphous, indefinite beings. Neuroscience, bioengineering and science fiction enter into tacit relationships of complicity, blurring the once clearly delineated boundary between the natural and the artificial. For her first institutional solo exhibition in Germany, Anicka Yi compacts the ground floor of the Fridericianum into an expansive installation. With sculptural and video works produced specifically for the exhibition Jungle Stripe, she creates ...

Queer Theory understands gender and sexuality as relational constructs, subject to significant historical and cultural variation. Refusing to stabilize these variations into any singular norm, queer curating thus presents a challenge to the museum as a normalizing, meaning-making entity and asks how these concerns can be addressed in museum-practices, that have, for the most part, silently and unknowingly reproduced and solidified contemporary heteronormative structures and desires. How have queer issues, queer curators, and queer exhibitions at one and the same time both shaken the foundations of traditional curatorial practice, and found their potential for intervention papered over or silenced? How ...

The symposium “Revisiting Black Mountain College: Cross-Disciplinary Experiments and Their Potential for Democratization (in Times of Post-Democracy)” asked questions in relation to anti-democratic tendencies in many countries worldwide. How can education still hold up democratic values, while at the same time presumably measuring its success by careers in the market? This issue brings together contributions from participants of the conference and adds further contributions by Andres Janser, Olga von Schubert, Caroline Adler, Boris Buden, Lucy Bayley, Sascia Bailer, Simon Fleury, Gilly Karjevsky, Asli Uludag, and Mieke Matzke.The interview by Ronald Kolb with Bitten Stetter, Brandon Farnsworth, Dorothee Richter, Jochen Kiefer, Martin ...

In Learning and Unlearning, which began as a series of discussions held from 2017-19, we ask questions about world-making. By unlearning our relationship to the places and temporalities we occupy, can we learn new ways of inhabiting the world? And by reconsidering our relation to work and well-being, can we find new ways to see, feel and understand the world? This recalibration of how we see the world and consequently how we live our lives is the central concern of the artists, educators and thinkers whose writings follow. Unlearning, for us, is not a reactionary opposition to intellectualism and the academy. ...

This issue of OnCurating takes political resistance and sanctuary as its subject, with Herman Melville’s nineteenth-century literary avatar Bartleby—famous for his refrain “I would prefer not to”—as its tutelary spirit. Forms of civil disobedience and tricksterism are coterminous agents in artistic and curatorial practices, both historical and contemporary. How to subvert and subvene, how to recast structural mechanisms of suppression and oppression, how to avoid, deny, magnify, spatially disjoint, and refute (earnestly, comically)? By what means can we, as cultural producers, refuse, while fostering a discourse of reparation? The activism now crucial in the face of ascendant political forces bent ...

This issue focuses on HIV, culture and curation, edited by scholar and organizer Theodore (ted) Kerr. The print and online issue features over 40 contributions—including essays, conversations, visual projects, reprints, and personal reflections—from artists, activists, academics, and writers from around the world, exploring AIDS-related culture in the 21st century, through four themes: forgetting, seeing, collecting, and making, all of which reflect on both the historical turn in contemporary AIDS cultural production, and the ongoing need to keep an eye on the present.