Contemporary choreographic and curatorial practice have a somewhat contentious relationship, arguably ranging from co-operative exchanges at the vanguard of experimental artistic practice to more proprietary tensions within the neoliberal real-estate of major contemporary art institutions.  The context of this publication therefore examines the arc of curatorial frameworks that since the early 21st century continues to excavate Western contemporary choreographic practice for its potential to negotiate the systems that govern collectivity, transmission, embodiment, mediation, participation, and immaterial exchange under the ‘new’ performance turn. The performative qualities of both choreography and dance in the contemporary museum can easily be annexed under the affective ...

Curating Dance : Decolonizing Dance is one of the first publications within an international context to deal with the curation of dance as a performative art as well as a sociocultural practice. With this issue, we aim to develop the relevant theoretical and methodological foundations of curating dance with a particular focus on decolonization in the field of performing arts.

The somatic experience of sound is inspected from its potential for violence and torture to the transcendence of healing, by way of its actual physical form. A discussion on the ambiguity of the human relationship with sound through science, technology, and spirituality.

Dizziness is more than feeling dizzy. In this multidisciplinary reader, artists, philosophers, and researchers from a range of experimental sciences and cultural studies trace dizziness not only as a phenomenon of sensory input impacting our vestibular system, but also as a twofold phenomenon of “sense”—creating meaning and triggering emotions. It is an interdependence of sense and sensing, of cultural constructs and sensuality, of somatic and cognitive knowledge, that can only be conceived of as a complex relation of both formation and dissolution, habituations and transformations, pertaining to our shared reality and our individual experiences. This is further reflected in the ...

This sixth episode There is more than one community is based on a conversation with Australian-born and New York-based writer and scholar McKenzie Wark, who is known for her writings on critical theory and new media. Her latest book Reverse Cowgirl has been published by Semiotext(e) in 2020. Somehow, reading books starts always in reverse. We turn them over with our hands, looking for answers in advance on the back cover. However, Reverse Cowgirl is not a book made to satisfy questions, not even those of the author herself regarding her own biography. The conversation with McKenzie Wark does not provide ...

This paper is aimed to invoke a different direction to the crisis that digital life and the Anthropocene are forcing us to face as humanity: instead of a speculative imagination about egress, it will propose an intense recuperation of the potency of our sense of being nature, an extension of Earth, in our most immediate present. The shift that Western theory is making in order to think of an alternative to the irreversible damage we have provoked is to imagine a world-without-us. Would it be possible to imagine ways to avoid leaving our bodies, and instead to think, live, feel ...

I Think My Body Feels, I Feel My Body Thinks: On Corpoliteracy is a gathering of texts and textures from lyricists, theorists, organisers, artists and practitioners. The publication draws from recent programmes, acquisitions and trajectories within the Van Abbemuseum, alongside essays and new commissions to explore different modalities of – and relationships to – corpoliteracy. The book comprises writing, sound and video work, a queer sign glossary with sixteen video entries, and edited conversations. The term corpoliteracy was coined by curator and polymath Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung and speaks to a consciousness of mind and body rhythm-equity. Ndikung’s thinking has been ...

“INTRA! INTRA! details an ambitious and provocative project that explores human and posthuman forms of agency within a context of spatial research. The project situates itself around developments in artificial intelligence and technical advances in the mapping and creation of nonhuman subjectivities in relation to the presence of human and nonhuman bodies. The book develops forms of spatial occupation that are not a simulacrum of human movement, but suggest whole new forms of spatial practice and the everyday interactions that might occur between human and nonhuman bodies, and poses profound questions around how a future architecture could be developed and ...

The finale of Season 5 features a conversation between writer, art critic, and co-founder of ARTS.BLACK, Jessica Lynne, and Dr. Kemi Adeyemi about her new book Feels Right: Black Queer Women and the Politics of Partying in Chicago (Duke UP, 2022). An “art-adjacent academic,” Adeyemi is Associate Professor of Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies, and Director of The Black Embodiment Studio at the University of Washington. Lynne speaks to Adeyemi about writing an ethnography of how Black queer women in Chicago use dance to assert their physical and affective rights to the city. Their conversation looks at the pleasures (and ...

“As if all bodies are neutral—of equal value. As if all movements are available to all people at all times.” An artist and a performer exercise mime and mimicry to speak and be heard without language, to know and be known by the world, to pass information from body to body to body. A script, a video of rehearsals, and a series of illustrations.

Initiated by Prem Krishnamurthy in March 2020 to counteract isolation and support new forms of community, Present! is a live, collaborative, online event series that brings together artists, designers, curators, writers, musicians and other creative folks. This experimental format combines a virtual lecture, talkshow, and Sunday sermon with embodied activities (group karaoke, meditation, dance, movement therapy), alongside readings, screenings, performances, and discussion groups. Based in Berlin, Present! prototypes a diverse, participatory, and hybrid platform for sharing emergent tools and experiences across borders.

Symptom of the Present. Today, biology and the medical sciences are highly advanced in determining the physiology and neurology of sleep, and the emerging medicalization of sleep disorders has be- come a new site of “biocapital” accumulation. At the same time, our “twenty-four-hour society,” with its incessant production, communication, and consumption activities, makes sleep a problematic, uncertain element of everyday life, even perceived as a waste of time or as inertia in a mobile and pragmatic neoliberal social order obsessed by the idea of full employment of finite human existence.The anxiety around sleep (evidenced in the booming scientific research in ...