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…

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

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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…

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 first issue of Índex focuses on the question of artistic research, which it places at the heart of the Museum’s current concerns. To this aim this issue features collaborations by Bartomeu Marí, director of MACBA, the philosopher Christoph Menke, the editor of the magazine Chus Martínez, the historian and curator Piotr Piotrowski, the researcher Elizabeth Suzanne Kassab, the artists Julie Ault and Natascha Sadr Haghighian, the philosopher and director of MACBA’s Independent Study Programme Xavier Antich, and the art historian Johanna Burton.

The second issue of Índex features collaborations by the writer, teacher and media-activist Franco Berardi, the art historian, critic and curator Nataša Ilić, the editor of the magazine Chus Martínez, the philosopher and writer Reza Negarestani, the artistic collective The Otolith Group and the philosopher, professor and essayist José Luis Pardo.

Artist, curator and man about town, Jesse started and ran the iconic 247365 gallery that ran in the donut district alongside Primetime and Know More Games, which if you were around was definitely a moment on the New York scene between 2012-2017. We get into the relationship between his obsession with the malleability and seductive qualities of plastic as sculpture, we avoid the polemic political connotations between the material and the global market and network structure 😉 We also think through the comparison between that and the seduction process and the slippery performance of self that goes into curating and ...

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 ...

October 25, 2010 My dear friend, I have been away from home now for two years, and there are so many things to tell you. But information is not the obvious objective of any communication today. May I ask you where you are reading this, and whether you are comfortable? I read a story on the Internet the other day, when I was looking for some inspiration so that I could perform my daily exercise of writing to you, and I came across a tale of origins, which I would like to share. But before I tell you that tale, there are a ...

As places to enjoy art, as well as institutions that have become historic, museums can also be examined through the question of who exactly heads up these temples of art. What kinds of personalities have guided the fates of these large, traditional institutions? How have they done so, and what has motivated them? What galvanizes international curators or museum employees, and how have they risen to the challenge of opening their organizations to increasingly large numbers of visitors? Donatien Grau has conducted impressive conversations with influential museum operators. We have him to thank for these personal, art historical, cultural-political, and ...

For this episode, still circling the question “what’s changed, and what should?”, Lauren Wetmore spoke with Brussels-based curator Daniel Blanga Gubbay, the artistic co-director of the historic Kunstenfestivaldesarts. Gubbay has worked as an educator and an independent curator for public programs including Manifesta, Palermo (2018); and was head of the Department of Arts and Choreography (ISAC) of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of Brussels. He holds a PhD in Cultural Studies from Palermo and Berlin. Reflecting on the material consequences of halting a massive festival like his, and fighting to keep artists paid and visa applications underway, Gubbay warns ...

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 ...

Searching the Sky for Rain came out of a series of conversations over the past decade with artists, thinkers, and colleagues on questions around representation and abstraction, identity and identification, inclusion and exclusion, visibility and non-visibility. The language used to discuss the exhibition deliberately rejected the terminology usually used by institutions to address social positions and particularities. The exhibition brings together works by artists who disregard the ways in which the art industry regulates, classifies, compartmentalizes, and essentializes difference into sanctioned categories. This multicultural “appropriation/misappropriation” is, according to Gloria Anzaldúa, “an attempt to control difference by allocating it to bordered-off ...

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 developed from a research project by Lorenzo Sandoval and Emanuele Guidi that looks at artistic and curatorial practices so as to explore the role and potential of artistic and cultural institutional models. So far, Spaces of Anticipation has taken the form of a symposium with the same title at EACC (Castellón, Spain, 2014); the research exhibition Making Room. Spaces of Anticipation, and a second symposium and workshop (2015) both at ar/ge kunst (Bolzano, Italy). The term ‘anticipation’ aims at proposing an affirmative approach to the research as intends to elude the use of ‘post-isms’ and ‘future-ism’ terminology, which ...

Kevin Block takes a Harvard-designed online course on architectural theory; Brendan Cormier watches Frank Gehry’s MasterClass; and Yuki Higashino moves through episodes of Martin Beck’s Program.

Peder Anker and Nina Edwards Anker review Design Earth’s Geostories; Amelia Borg and Timothy Moore follow grey nomads in Australia; Shaka McGlotten takes their turn at intergenerational queer pedagogies; and Hamed Khosravi broadcasts from the world’s smallest micro-nation.