What is the role and function of contemporary art in economic and political systems that increasingly manage data and affect? Knowledge Beside Itself delves into the peculiar emphasis placed in recent years, curatorially and institutionally, on notions such as “research” and “knowledge production.”

Curatorial projects are increasingly understood as research projects with extended time frames and complex interactions across diverse sectors. This book presents “100 Years of Now,” a research project taking place at Berlin’s Haus der Kulturen der Welt (2015–19), as a critical investigation into the temporality of contemporaneity—both in terms of its structure and content.

Contemporary Research Intensive was an event organized in the context of the 57th Venice Art Biennale to investigate the concept of “contemporaneity.” The book is both part and result of the intensive sharing of ideas to produce something that captures the spirit of both discussions at that time and the publication process as a temporal form.

New Institutionalism’s dispersed and varied approaches to curating sought to reconfigure the art institution from within, reshaping it into an active, democratic, open, and egalitarian public sphere. What Ever Happened to New Institutionalism? reflects upon the aspirations of these curatorial strategies and assesses their critical efficacy today within the landscape of contemporary art and globalized culture.

This collection of essays and conversations is the quirky and exhilarating outcome of the collaborative endeavor to interrogate the very conditions of the current upsurge of the art/research articulation—the genealogical and political implications of the ways in which research rhetorics and policies are currently incorporated into the fields of contemporary art and art education.