In April, the Kunstmuseum Basel opened its new building. More recently, the Bündner Kunstmuseum in Chur followed suit, and in Zürich construction on the extension of the Kunsthaus is well underway. These building projects suggest long-term confidence in publicly funded art museums. But what understanding of “public” is conveyed here? An inspection in Basel.

On February 13, an anonymous petition called for the reinstatement of Beatrix Ruf as director of the Stedelijk Museum. The petition comes at a time when further investigations into the affair have not yet yielded any results that could shed some light on the current level of autonomy of public institutions in general—an issue that, in fact, begs debate.

This fifth SDUK broadsheet examines the multifaceted meanings of ACCOUNTING in the age of climate change. This issue considers accounting in its colloquial sense, pertaining to investment and economics, but also moves beyond the ledger book to consider what remains uncounted, and what is consciously left out. Throughout this issue, we find slippery concepts, things, and actors that pose a challenge to accounting as a means of representation and understanding. Beginning with economics, one might ask: What are the basic tools and assumptions on which accounting is based? In his ongoing unsettling of fundamental economic concepts, D.T. Cochrane looks at how ...

Walter Mignolo (1941, Córdoba, Argentina) is a semiotician and professor at Duke University, who has published extensively on semiotics and literary theory, and worked on different aspects of the modern and colonial world, exploring concepts such as global coloniality, the geopolitics of knowledge, transmodernity, border thinking, and pluriversality. In “Enacting the Archives, Decentring the Muses,” Mignolo reads through the Museum of Islamic Art and of Asian Civilizations Museum, attempting to decolonize the single story of western museums by showing how de-westernization works. The author’s argument will be that the de-colonial story of western museums through the appropriation of the museum model ...

Dan Perjovschi’s 2005 drawing that precedes these pages laconically addresses the hierarchies operative in an art institution’s value chains, and it does so on the basis of an inventory of whoever holds agency in this context. Strikingly, this list doesn’t at a first glance seem to be in any way exhaustive, as it apparently lacks a varied range of other roles and functions at play in art institutions, such as security guards, visitor and technical services staff—as well as gallery educators. Is their absence from the work due to their evanescent significance within the hierarchy Dan establishes in his diagram, ...

Against Art History critically evaluates decolonial art exhibitions and curatorial frameworks. It asks to what extent art history can be decolonial, when its disciplinary and architectural foundation, the museum, is an inherently colonial institution. Shirazi thus examines whether new curatorial frameworks, such as in Exhibitions Without Objects (EwO) which internationalise the modernist canon of non-Western arts, undo or amplify the violence perpetrated by Euro-American historical narratives.

An Anti-Catalog was the work of the Catalog Committee of the group Artists Meeting for Cultural Change (AMCC). A landmark publication of the 1970s, its purpose was to protest the Whitney Museum of American Art’s bicentennial exhibition, which was titled “Three Centuries of American Art.” The Whitney show featured John D. Rockefeller III’s collection of mainly eighteenth and nineteenth-century American art–a collection that featured only one African American and one woman artist. The Catalog Committee, which consisted of fifteen artists and two art historians, spent almost a year producing an eighty-page book containing articles and documents. Originally conceived as a critique ...

The wave of protests brought about by the Black Lives Matter movement, coming after the lockdown imposed by the spread of the coronavirus, invites a comparison between this political and epidemical moment and the context that prevailed in the late 1980s, when AIDS was causing so much death in Western countries. The art and activism of the period have been thoroughly revisited over the past few years by art institutions. In the following text, I have freely adapted the disidentification methodology of the American artist Bradley Kronz to navigate recent works, exhibitions, and institutional trends. The aim is to create ...

A small field, roughly 1760 miles as the crow flies from Zürich, in Shindisi, a village in Georgia. This is where the Tbilisi 16 project took place on September 1–4, 2016. “Extra muros”! — this is how the website of the Kunsthalle Zürich announced Tbilisi 16 during its occupation by Manifesta 11 What People Do For Money. Away from the institution, away from capital, “off to hear, see and feel what people do for no money…!”

“If you haven’t already done so, walk away from the desk where you picked up this guide and out into the great, high space of the atrium. Isn’t this a wonderful place? It’s uplifting. It’s like a Gothic cathedral. You can feel your soul rise up with the building around you.” These are the first words of the official audio guide at the Guggenheim Bilbao as heard on Andrea Fraser’s video Little Frank and His Carp (2001). Shot with hidden cameras, Fraser’s seven-minute video piece documents an unauthorized intervention into the museum designed by the architect Frank Gehry, the “Little ...

The first volume of the collection maps the work of the institutions and organisations involved in communicating the new and innovative thought and practice leading architecture today, highlighting the strategies they use and programmes they run to support this. Essays and interviews from the Museum of Architecture and Design, Ljubljana, the National Museum of XXI Century Arts, Rome, the Swiss Architecture Museum, Basel, CANactions, Kiev, Prishtina Architecture Week, Kosovo, the Lisbon Architecture Triennale and others give working examples of the roles that these organisations and institutions play in communication and education for those both within and beyond the field of architecture.

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 ...