The second in a series on intersubjectivity, this collection of essays considers the relationship between performance, subjectivity, and human agency. Contributions explore the ways in which performance is decoupled from human embodiment via forms of mediation, mechanical reproduction, or simulation. 

Jumana Manna’s work in film and sculpture explores how power is articulated through relationships, often focusing on the body and materiality in relation to narratives of nationalism and histories of place. This book includes stills from her film Wild Relatives (2018), a meditative documentary capturing the transit of seeds between the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Norway and the fields of the Bekaa Valley in Lebanon.

Through her videos, exhibitions, and photographic works, Kate Cooper explores the role of gender and what agency images might possess in and of themselves. Producing images becomes akin to building infrastructure; her computer-generated bodies are imbued with power and put to work. Cooper returns to the CGI models in her exhibition at KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, to create a new series of works within the fictional space of the lookbook.

The subject of this book is a deceased prop, an object of a particular color, the green of cinematic trickery and special effects. It edged itself into Shahryar Nashat’s work in 2011, first appearing in Factor Green, an installation the artist produced for the Venice Biennale.

We Are Living on a Star takes its title from a tapestry by Hannah Ryggen that hung in a government building known in Oslo until July 22, 2011. The events of July 22 transformed normality as we knew it and, consequently, the predictable as well. The artists and writers participating in We Are Living on a Star (the book and the exhibition it accompanies) contend with a range of issues relating to history, contemporaneity, normality, and expression.