On the advanced knowledge economy, which perpetuates patterns of discrimination and exclusion, and the threat of climate change devastation for both human and nonhuman entities.

This publication documents artist Leonor Antunes’s new installation at Lisbon’s CAM – Centro de Arte Moderna Gulbenkian

A meditation on sound, this book invites us to listen through the nose and open the mind to the musical potential in unpleasant odors.

Through a close examination of the political and aesthetic strategies that artist Ines Doujak employs in her work, this book explores the realities of the current economic, microbiological, and ecological crises.

Twenty renowned international curators write about one of their exhibitions or projects that transformed their ideas about curating.

Multivocal and anonymous, A Strange Adventure is oral-history-as-theater—the theater of memory, trauma, and torture.

What gets counted within the category of heritage, and who gets to do the counting?

How machine learning and computer vision generate images.

How the world—and the world of visual culture in particular—creates itself in a creative act that knows no economic return.

The first ever monograph on the groundbreaking work of artist and composer Raven Chacon.

A record of a symposium on the legacy of the late Luxembourgish artist Michel Majerus.

The Monadic Age offers a look into the playbook of the post-liberal mindset and defines how a new paradigm of self-sufficiency is about to force a reinvention of all social parameters.

The 15-year history of the production of a “German scotch” Black Whisky.

Tracing the relation between fascism and settler colonialism.

WONDERFLUX brings together a group of longtime contributors with graphic artists to collaborate on illustrated essays and develop a new pictorial language around some of the emergent consistencies and overarching issues that defined the first decade of e-flux journal.

Imagine art and contemporary as an organ. An organ that produces an experience of inexpressible realities that are fundamental to understand life and its processes.

For Farocki, the computer-animated, navigable images that constitute the twenty-first century’s “ruling class of images” call for new tools of analysis, prompting him to ask: How does the shift from montage to navigation alter the way images—and art—operate as models of political action and modes of political intervention?

The most significant critical, theoretical, and art historical texts by the artist, writer, and filmmaker Aria Dean.

On the themes found in the work of Lorraine O’Grady: Black female subjectivity, intersectional feminism, institutional critique, music, and translation.

The simultaneous emergence of the serial killer and the assembly line as expressions of the rationality of modern production methods.

The first book-length inquiry into the subject of the twisted romantic ballad, giving a sense of both its history and contemporary currency.

Newly commissioned texts frame extensive visual documentation of a series of exhibition episodes drawing on the legacy of the Eastern European neo-avantgarde and the work of artist Mladen Stilinović.

Curating has evolved into much more than creating interesting exhibitions, promoting artists, and selling artwork. Art worlds have fused with business worlds and transformed capitalism from the inside out. To “curate capitalism” implies new ways of management that go far beyond the simple commercialization of art and artist.

A compelling rethinking of curatorial practice that proposes that Pidgin languages and pidginization offer a decolonialized reinvention of communicative practices; a space in which the boundaries between disciplines of knowledge collapse and sociopolitical, economic, ethical, and spiritual concepts and questions are renegotiated.

The first publication to document Ana Hoffner ex-Prvulovic’s* artistic work to date. Her* practice offers an aesthetic and political redefinition of gendered relations.

What comes after end-of-world narratives: visions of just futurity and multispecies flourishing.

On the aesthetic and intellectual affinities between recent art and conspiracy.

A collection of Dan Graham’s interviews and conversations with a wide array of individuals from various backgrounds and disciplines. Includes “The Museum in Evolution,” an essay he finished just before his death.

A diaristic novel on contemporary friendship and its importance.

In the context of INLAND’s Academy at documenta fifteen, Microbiopolitics of Milk presents the grounding basis for a research project around milk as a bio-cultural substance.

An exploration of the realities of environmental and social catastrophe through art practices that take apart Western anthropocentric models, legacies of patriarchal violence, and enduring colonial and racist discourses.

A South Korean wellness center designed as a mock prison: on sensory deprivation, monastic life, the wellness industry, the prison-industrial complex, and the history of solitude.

Going beyond tensions between individuals and institutions, Artistic Ecologies: New Compasses and Tools examines avenues for engaged pedagogies, collective learning, and artistic ecologies that can engender new institutionalities.

Through four case studies, this publication brings to the fore decolonial and other non-hegemonic approaches to the profession of curating in Sweden from the 1960s to the early 2000s, highlighting the work of Carlos Capelán, Elisabet Haglund, Gunilla Lundahl, and Jan-Erik Lundström.

This third volume in the annual A Series of Open Questions is informed by themes found in the work of artist Cecilia Vicuña, including ecofeminism, indigenous forms of knowledge, poetry and politics, dissolution and extinction, exile, dematerialization, regeneration, and environmental responsibility.

Drawing on documentation from a community of gardeners, cooks, ceramicists, and creatives, Rochester Square in North London’s Camden is a case study for how urban spaces are finding new life.

Tomo Savić-Gecan’s performance piece for the Croatian Pavilion at the 59th Venice Biennale 2022.

While machine learning—computer programming designed for taxonomic patterning—offers useful insights into racism and racist behavior, a gap is present in the relationship between machine learning and its connection to the racial history of science and the Black lived experience.

Forms of Abstraction engages with abstraction not as a formal option in art, or as an airy theoretical speculation, but as an operational force that has redesigned our world, and continues to do so.

The current ecological crisis brings about a new relational landscape: an unprecedented collapse of distances creates interspecies promiscuities and a crisis of the human scale. In his latest book, Inclusions, Nicolas Bourriaud proposes that artists are the anthropologists of this new era.

A cross-disciplinary and critical inquiry into the forms and practices of assembly-making across histories and geographies, with contributions by artists, architects, activists, and scholars, explores the potential of assemblies to reimagine the way democracy is practiced.

What if art holds solutions to the ecological crises of our time?

Curator without a System brings together, for the first time in English, a rich variety of essays by the Russian curator Viktor Misiano offering an overview of the global cultural dynamics of the post-1989 world, as well as providing a different perspective on Western narratives of institutional critique, relational aesthetics, and socially engaged art.

What is our future and whose voices will announce it? Museum director, curator, and writer Zdenka Badovinac argues that it is the situated voices of people, artworks, and exhibitions, rooted in the local, that can bring incisive, productive change. The call of these voices, in rethinking art, curation, and institutions, is the subject of this powerful essay.

Elizabeth A. Povinelli’s anthropology of the otherwise locates itself within forms of life that run counter to dominant modes of being under late settler liberalism. In these essays, she considers the emergence of new worlds and the extinguishment of old ones, seeking to develop a social imaginary that can sustain radical potentiality without turning a blind eye to our deep interdependence.

In this book, Jacob Lund explores how the conditions for politically engaged art and aesthetic practice, for questioning the present, have changed in recent decades, while considering how our historical present and its temporal quality differ significantly from previous presents.

Over the past decade, a growing number of artists, theorists, curators, and researchers have moved from “institutional critique” to “infrastructural critique,” or toward “infrastructural speculation,” in which they explore the potential of creative infrastructure-related visions and scenarios. In attempts to counter the impasse of “the cancelled future,” art has immersed itself in systemic critiques and propositional thinking, addressing major challenges, such as the rampant financialization of the economy and runaway climate change.

Unpayable Debt offers a black feminist reading of the political architecture of the global present. Inspired by Octavia E. Butler’s novel Kindred, the concept of the unpayable debt relates post-Enlightenment versions of ethical and economic value to colonial and racial subjugation.

This collection of essays, conversations, and artworks explores how technology now mediates our encounters and, in doing so, forms alternate, networked subjectivities. It asks how intersubjective intimacy might be theorized epistemologically, aesthetically, philosophically, and politically, and considers how such relative intimacy might connect physical matter and cybernetic systems or forge new subjectivities.

Topologies of Air and Lesions in the Landscape are two major bodies of work by Shona Illingworth. Informed by the artist’s long-term investigations into individual and societal amnesia, these projects critically examine the devastating psychological and environmental impacts of military, industrial, and corporate transformations of airspace and outer space.

What happens when feminist and queer care ethics are put into curating practice? What happens when the notion of care based on the politics of relatedness, interdependence, reciprocity, and response-ability informs the practices of curating?

Training for the Future is a training camp where audiences are turned into trainees to “pre-enact” alternative scenarios and reclaim the means of production of the future. This handbook gathers training manuals, interviews and documentation of the various training camps that took place from 2018 to 2021.

Amazonia: Anthology as Cosmology is devoted to Amazonia, its peoples, allies, and nonhuman spirits, and their myriad material and immaterial practices, from certain cosmopolitics and visual languages to past and present forms of resistance.

Economic Ekphrasis proposes a new model for arts-based business education. Using the Stockholm-wide exhibition “Standard Length of a Miracle” by conceptual artist duo Goldin+Senneby as a case study, the book rethinks relevant business studies with art created inside the back-office realities of financialized capitalism.

Fires burn around the world. Systemic discrimination persists, precarity is increasing, and the modern democratic project faces challenges from all sides. Art writing helps us to understand art, which in turn helps us to understand such crises. But art writing itself is in crisis.

This book could have been called “The Contemporary Condition of Sleeping and Reading in the Heart of (and in Spite of) the Logosphere and Various Media Streams,” but frankly, “I Can’t Sleep” sounds better, plus it’s true.

Canonical within the Yugoslav New Film of the late 1960s and the 1970s, Želimir Žilnik’s Early Works (1968) follows the female revolutionary Jugoslava as she leaves her lumpenproletariat family to spread the teachings of young Marx and Engels among the peasants and factory workers.

Everything Passes Except the Past takes an artistic and discursive approach to coming to grips with a colonial past that remains present in museums, public space, and image archives. The contributions in this book propose visionary theoretical, practical, and ethical foundations for future museums based on artistic and curatorial remediation of ethnographic collections.

This exhibition catalogue and research project delves into the cultural diplomacy of the Cold War, when modernist art became a flagship of freedom and democracy in the West, and took on the role of a symbolic overcoming of fascism.

With its capacity to unsettle our sense of the temporal—through montage, doublings, hauntings—visual culture can enable a sense, or theory, of time travel. It invites us to consider the visual outside the realm of art, and to think beyond the technocratic and colonial tropes of science fiction. It can send us tumbling through deep space, into the past, or toward other speculations.

The twelfth volume of the Critical Spatial Practices series focuses on “Don’t Follow the Wind,” the acclaimed collaborative project situated in the radioactive Fukushima exclusion zone. The book explores the long-term environmental crisis in the coastal Japanese region through this ongoing, inaccessible exhibition, which maintains traces of human presence amid the fallout of the March 2011 nuclear reactor meltdown that displaced entire towns.

Framed by a Zoom background of a rose garden, Jenny Odell spoke about the role of design in a suspended moment marked by uncertainty. Odell’s message, itself a timely reflection on observation, embraces the standstill and its potential to deepen our individual and collective attention and our sensitivity to time, place, and presence—in turn, perhaps, enabling us all, amid our “new” virtual contexts, to better connect with our natural and cultural environments.

In response to recent discussions about the value assigned to artworks, art critic and theorist Isabelle Graw introduces the term “value reflection.” Rather than an objective quality, value reflection is the potential for the specific artistic labor expended for artworks to be found in them. This book focuses on the artistic production of writer Francis Ponge and artists Jack Whitten and Banksy, and engages with the different types of value reflection detected in their work.

Since the late 1940s, the term cybernetics has been used to describe self-regulating systems that measure, anticipate, and react in response to changing conditions. Initially relevant mostly in the fields of administration, planning, criminology, and early ecology, cybernetics has become an economic factor under digital capitalism. In such a cybernetic totality, art must respond to the new situation: a cybernetics of the poor.

Digital and data technologies are actively transforming the archives of contemporary warfare. Bringing together a range of scholarly perspectives and artistic practices, (W)archives investigates digital archiving as an integral technology of warfare and how artists respond to these changes.

In elegantly written miniatures, Graw captures radical political, social, and cultural changes that occurred between 2014 and 2017, analyzing how these macro-shifts reach into her own life. She addresses topics ranging from the general turn to the political right, as seen in Brexit and Trump, to #MeToo, men with beards, and Balenciaga. While registering the symptoms of a world that clearly feels different, Graw also meditates on irretrievable personal losses.

The Currency is a vinyl EP of rap music written and performed in French, Mandarin, and German by Musquiqui Chihying (Taipei/Berlin), Elom 20ce (Lomé, Togo), and Gregor Kasper (Berlin).

Our series of shared excerpts continues with a fourth installment focusing on issues of representation and decolonization. The late Senegalese artist and poet Issa Samb questions the “representativeness” of race and art in a 1989 text reprinted in his monograph WORD! WORD? WORD!; art historian Nomusa Makhubu writes about depictions of South African eco-racism in Uriel Orlow’s monograph Theatrum Botanicum; artist Pedro Neves Marques looks toward alternative Indigenous science fiction in the anthology Futurity Report; artist and theorist Denise Ferreira da Silva identifies the disco’s black light as a device for Black feminist thought in Otobong Nkanga’s monograph Lustre & Lucre; media theorist Andrea B. Braidt turns to queer subjectivity and affect in the anthology On Productive Shame, Reconciliation, and Agency; and art historian T. J. Demos links global geopolitics and visual culture in Against the Anthropocene.

Camnitzer explains his trajectory since 1960s Uruguay in the introduction to this volume of texts, many published here for the first time. A singularly authoritative, yet anti-authoritative gathering of a life’s work in art, education and activism.

The second packet includes chapters from Hubert Fichte’s The Black City: Glosses, Ingo Niermann’s Solution 295–304: Mare Amoris, and Charlotte Birnbaum’s Bon! Bon! On the Charms of Sweet Cuisine, as well as the introduction to Red Love: A Reader on Alexandra Kollontai, edited by Maria Lind, Michele Masucci, and Joanna Warsza. 

Not long ago, a melancholic left and a manic neoliberalism seemed to arrive at an awkward consensus: the foreclosure of futurity. Whereas the former mourned the failure of its utopian project, the latter celebrated the triumph of a global marketplace.

The first selection of Social Distances includes María Belén Sáez de Ibarra’s “Cosmopolitics of the Living” from What about Activism?, edited by Steven Henry Madoff; Martin Herbert’s “On and Off the Grid: Agnes Martin,” from Tell Them I Said No; as well as Fernando García-Dory’s “Inside Us: A Dinner as an Aesthetic and Agro-political Excursion” and Chris Fite-Wassilak’s “Species of Specialties: St. Louis’s Provel Cheese”—both featured in Politics of Food.

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.”

For three weeks in October 1968, Stockholm’s Moderna Museet was transformed into a sprawling adventure playground that was free to access for children: Gunilla Lundahl and Palle Nielsen’s The Model: A Model for a Qualitative Society concatenated art, research, and urban activism into a visionary hybrid framework.

It was the concept of the ocean as a global commons, free for everyone—first formulated by Hugo Grotius in his 1609 treatise, Mare Liberum—that stimulated a free global market. Today, the free market and the free ocean both suffer from rigorous, exploitive use. Solution 295–304: Mare Amoris proposes nine new practical, technological, and metaphysical scenarios of how to fall in love with the sea, and, eventually, have the sea fall in love with us.

Alexandra Kollontai was a writer, a revolutionary, and after the 1917 October revolution the people’s commissar of social welfare as well as one of the first female ambassadors in the world.  This reader, in which artists and thinkers revisit Kollontai’s legacy, asks: How to read Kollontai’s vision of love today and relate it to current feminist struggles?

Does art possess the power to cause structural and meaningful changes in daily life? By means of a critical essay, correspondence with kindred spirits from the field, and visual impressions, this book reflects on the possibility to merge art and life, fiction and reality, and on the importance of this process for the future of artistic practice.

The last decade has witnessed a proliferation of artists and artist collectives interrogating the global politics and ethics of food production, distribution, and consumption. As an important document of new research and thinking around the subject, this book, published with Delfina Foundation, contains reflections on food by prominent artists, anthropologists, chefs, and activists, among others.

Investigating the economic value of one of the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s most lucrative exports (namely, poverty), Renzo Martens’ provocative film Episode III: Enjoy Poverty (2008) remains a landmark intervention into debates about contemporary art’s relationship to exploitative economies.

Exhibitions are tightly intertwined with the processes of historiography, creating dynamic and plural relations between and beyond all participants, both human and non-human. Thus they are able to connect different histories while writing history themselves, their reciprocal relationships making them a complex object of and transforming agent in historical research.

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.

The questioning of thingness is an integral part of presentation and has informed and shaped the social relevance of the field of the curatorial. Immanent to presentation as a mode of being (public) in the world, the curatorial has the potential to address, visualize, and question the central effects of the changing status and function of things.

Lassen sich die ethnologischen Beobachtungen und Empfindungen eines deutschen Schriftstellers zu afro-diasporischen Kulturen „restituieren”? Welche Möglichkeiten eröffnet und an welche Grenzen stößt der Einsatz von Selbstreflexion und schwuler Sexualität als Forschungswerkzeuge? Das Ausstellungs- und Publikationsprojekt Hubert Fichte: Liebe und Ethnologie  diesen Fragen entlang Fichtes Romanzyklus nachgegangen.

A penchant for abstraction when it comes to complex social conditions, a drive to effect change, and a resilience of analysis and representation are all characteristic of Hungary’s art scene since the 1960s, and especially of its “abstract artists.” The abstracted visual language of Hungarian artists is thematized by the Künstlerhaus in the 2019 exhibition “Ábstract Hungary.”

This volume investigates the cut-up as a contemporary mode of creativity and important global model of cultural production. The term cut-up thereby serves as an open container for a long list of terms and actions that describe the combination and reassembly of existing motifs, fragments, images and ideas from diverse and disconnected origins into newly synthesized entities.

The Museum Is Not Enough is the result of collective reflections on architecture, contemporary social concerns, institutions, and the public undertaken by the Canadian Centre for Architecture in recent years.

Through four essays by critics and curators, as well as texts and images of the works on exhibit—more than eighty works by nearly sixty artists—the book aims to present a vital component of the Chinese art world which is under-represented on the global art scene, namely the contemporary art production from the Pearl River Delta.

With the global rise of a politics of shock driven by authoritarian regimes that subvert the rule of law and civil liberties, what paths to resistance, sanctuary, and change can cultural institutions offer? In this book, more than twenty leading curators and thinkers about contemporary art present powerful case studies, historical analyses, and theoretical perspectives that address the dynamics of activism, protest, and advocacy.

As Oliver Marchart claims, there has always been an activist undercurrent in art. In this book he traces trajectories of artistic activism in theater, dance, performance, and public art, and investigates the political potential of urbanism, curating, and “biennials of resistance.”

One of the most significant shifts in contemporary art during the past two decades concerns artists and collectives who have moved their artistic focus from representation to direct social action. This publication shows why this transition might change our understanding of artistic production at large and make us reconsider the role of art in society.

Resonating with the ethos of open dialogue and the experimentation of women artists’ collectives in the ’70s and ’80s, Of Other Spaces constructs a dynamic, open, and collaborative arena that foregrounds practices of resistance, collectivity, and self-organization. The book seeks out the lodestone of a volatile politics that calls for and instigates urgent alternatives to the cultural, political, and economic machineries of power that haunt this world.

The publication developed from the exhibition and research project The Place Is Here (2016–19), which traced the urgent and wide-ranging conversations taking place between black artists, writers, and thinkers in Britain during the 1980s. Within the context of Thatcherism and a racist art establishment, a new generation of black artists and intellectuals produced some of the most compelling ideas and images in recent British cultural history.

Jill Johnston—cultural critic, auto/biographer, and lesbian icon—was renowned as a writer on dance, especially on the developments around Judson Dance and the 1960s downtown New York City scene, and later as the author of the radical-feminist classic Lesbian Nation (1973). This book collects thirty texts by Jill Johnston that were initially published in her weekly column for The Village Voice between 1960 and 1974.

Steering her analysis from the newspaper obituary in and out of literature and past cinema, Melissa McCarthy investigates a fundamental aspect of the human condition: our state of being between life and death, always in precarious and watery balance. Sharks, Death, Surfers observes how sharks have been depicted over centuries and across cultures, then flips the lens (and dissects the cornea) to consider what sharks see when they look back.

This book tells the story of Katarina Taikon’s life in three parts. The first is a 2012 biography by journalist Lawen Mohtadi. The second is Taikon in her own words: the first volume of her autobiographical children’s book series, Katitzi.

Herewith the Clues continues Boy Vereecken’s research into mass-market literary culture, which began with Signature Strengths (2016). The volume includes two text contributions: a contemporary take on the whodunit novel by Shumon Basar, followed by a tour of the history of the Crime Dossiers by Laura Herman. The book is illustrated with a photo series from Antoine Begon who has unpacked and photographed the pieces of evidence.

Para-Platforms investigates the social, spatial, and material reality of right-wing populism. Three case studies—presented in a symposium at the Gothenburg Design Festival in November 2017—form the core of this collection: journalist Hannes Grassegger on Trump and Brexit; architectural theorist Stephan Trüby on spaces of right-wing extremism in Germany; and Christina Varvia on Forensic Architecture’s investigation of the murder of Halit Yozgat. 

This book outlines a critical global fashion theory from a postcolonial perspective. It analyzes fashion as a cultural, historical, social, and political phenomenon involved in and affected by histories of colonial domination, anti-colonial resistance, and processes of decolonization and globalization. Stemming from a range of different disciplines, the contributions in this book reflect the multidisciplinary and diverse nature of postcolonial fashion research today.

Iman Mersal intricately weaves a new narrative of motherhood, moving between interior and exterior scapes, diaries, readings, and photographic representations of motherhood to question old and current representations of motherhood and the related space of unconditional love, guilt, personal goals, and traditional expectations. What is hidden in narratives of motherhood in fictional and nonfictional texts as well as in photographs?

Translated into English for the first time, The Black City is a portrait of New York written by Hubert Fichte between 1978 and 1980. Fichte researched the city as the center of the African diaspora, conducting interviews and composing essays about syncretism in culture and the arts, material living conditions in the city, and political and individual struggles based on race, class, and sexuality. 

Hegel after Occupy is a Western Marxist analysis of different attempts to understand the present historical situation and the way theories of postmodernity, globalization, and contemporaneity implicitly or explicitly conceptualize the relationship between the historical present and political action.

Profit over Peace in Western Sahara examines the role of natural resources in the occupation of the Western Sahara, a territory considered by the United Nations to still be awaiting decolonization. Its liberation from colonial rule has come to a standstill due to Morocco’s continued military occupation of a part of the territory. Meanwhile, the EU has ignored basic principles of international law in the region due.

The way we see the world has changed drastically since NASA released the “blue marble” image of the earth taken by Apollo 17 in 1972. No longer a placid slow-moving orb, the world is now perceived as a hothouse of activity and hyper-connectivity that cannot keep up with its inhabitants.

What Is Different? is the title of 2017’s edition of the Jahresring, guest-edited and designed by Wolfgang Tillmans. Circling around contemporary issues of newly resurfaced right-wing populism, the phenomenon of fake news, and the backfire effect, Tillmans, rather than analyzing the status quo, focuses on what has changed in the past ten, twenty, thirty, forty years. Why are societal consensus and institutions now under attack?

Walking, that most basic of human actions, was transformed in the twentieth century by Surrealism, the Situationist International, and Fluxus into a tactic for revolutionizing everyday life. Each group chose locations in the urban landscape as sites—from the flea markets and bars of Paris to the sidewalks of New York—and ambulation as the essential gesture.

The “economization of art” began to take shape in the wake of the crisis of capital in 2009. In this book, first delivered as a lecture at Kunsthalle Bern in April 2016, Diedrich Diederichsen follows Marx’s labor theory of value and counters the symbolic economies dominating the art field, as well as economic exceptionalism or calculation, with systems of recording and reading out.

Was ist anders? ist der Titel der 64. Ausgabe des Jahresrings, die Wolfgang Tillmans als Gastredakteur konzipiert und gestaltet hat. Der Jahresring stellt sich der Problematik eines neu formierten Rechtspopulismus, dem Phänomen Fake News und präsentiert psychologische Forschungsergebnisse wie beispielsweise den Backfire-Effekt.

Communists Anonymous understands the historical incarnations of communism as substantially incomplete in thought and practice, and places communism where it originated—in the realm of fiction. Only as fiction can communism manifest itself again beyond doubt.

Sam Thorne’s School: A Recent History of Self-Organized Art Education is a chronicle of self-organized art schools and artist-run education platforms that have emerged since 2000.

Addressing the current upswing of attention in the sciences, arts, and humanities to the proposal that we are in a human-driven epoch called the Anthropocene, this book critically surveys that thesis and points to its limitations.

It is often said that we no longer have an addressee for our political demands. But that’s not true. We have each other. What we can no longer get from the state, the party, the union, the boss, we ask for from one another. And we provide. Let’s see how need and care and desire and admiration have been cross-examined, called as witness, put on parole, and made the subject of caring inquiry by e-flux journal authors since 2009.

Quinn Latimer’s arresting writings find expression in literature and theory as well as contemporary art and its history. This collection of Latimer’s recent essays and poems examines issues of genealogy and influence, the poverty and privilege of place, architecture’s relationship to language, and feminist economies of writing, reading, and art making.

Over the past quarter century, artists have made powerful interventions in debates around globalization, addressing various dimensions of cross-border exchange, from mass migration to the dynamics of translation, and devising new ways of conceptualizing them. Marcus Verhagen’s Flows and Counterflows tells the story of those interventions, dwelling on projects that draw out both the dangers and the tangible or imaginable benefits of global exchange.

This reader is the result of Joanna Warsza’s course at the Salzburg International Summer Academy of Fine Arts in 2015. It examines four recent cases of boycotts, presenting their political, ideological, and economic contexts, timelines, statements, as well as interviews with parties involved. It reflects on how certain biennials became the place where the power of art is renegotiated and why one simply “can’t work like this.”

This issue comprises various outlooks on “perspective.” This might be taken to mean something as specific as a particular opinion or as general as an axonometric projection; in short, different ways and means of looking at the world.

In the fourth volume of the series Visual Cultures as…, Helge Mooshammer and Peter Mörtenböck analyze the networked spaces of global informal markets, the cultural frontiers of speculative investments, and recent urban protests, and discuss crucial shifts in the process of collective articulation within today’s “crowd economy.”

A curatorial situation is always one of hospitality. This publication analyzes the curatorial within the current sociopolitical context, through key topics concerning immigration, conditions along borders, and accommodations for refugees.

Revising his well-known histories of contemporary art, Terry Smith argues that we must respond to the compelling need for coeval composition at a time defined by the contemporaneity of divisive difference. This book traces how—despite many obstacles—visual artists across the globe are rising to this challenge.

Marxist geographer David Harvey opened his lecture with a fact: between 2011 and 2013 China consumed 50 percent more cement than the United States had in the entire twentieth century. In Abstract from the Concrete, he asks why. Spiraling outward—geographically and materially—Harvey travels from the building industry in China to the foreclosed housing market in the United States to the automobile industry in São Paolo and back again.

What do we mean when we say that something is contemporary? And what should the designator “contemporary art” refer to? An immediate response would be that contemporary art is an art of the present, that it somehow addresses and expresses the present. But what is this present? This first book in the Contemporary Condition series introduces some of the key issues concerning contemporaneity as a defining condition of our historical present.

Intersubjectivity, a two-volume collection of essays, is concerned with a new account of our ideas of what subjects are, and what it means for them to meet. The project explores these concepts in the context of the interaction of non-sentient beings, attempting to move beyond anthropomorphic theories of objectivity and materiality, as well as subjects whose boundaries resist definition.

Brutalist Readings is a significant intervention into recent debates on the place of literature and writing in the context of contemporary art. Featuring essays on the highs and lows of the conceptual turn in poetics, avant-garde literary genealogies, and monographic pieces on Paul B. Preciado, Chris Kraus, and Pierre Guyotat, among others, Brutalist Readings explores the radical histories of writing, as well as its potential now.

Rare Earth is an attempt to define the spirit of an age. Exploring how today’s myths, identities, and cosmologies relate to current advances in technology—through reference to the material basis to our most developed weapons and tools; a class of seventeen rare earth elements from the periodic table—Rare Earth challenges the rhetoric of immateriality associated with our hypermodern condition.

This publication is devoted to the phenomenon of the artist novel, and whether it can be considered to be a medium in its own right within the visual arts. Thanks to the contributions of a selected group of artists, writers, curators, and scholars this publication strives to demonstrate that literature, when treated by visual artists, can take place well beyond the space of the book.

Pink Labor on Golden Streets: Queer Art Practices builds on an exhibition and conference at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna that explored the contradictory standpoints of queer art practices, conceptions of the body, and ideas of “queer abstraction,” a term coined by Judith Jack Halberstam that raises questions to do with (visual) representations in the context of gender, sexuality, and desire.

In the fall of 2013, Dan Graham and Mieko Meguro traveled with Donatien Grau to a town in the French Alps to meet Michel Butor, one of the foremost innovators of postwar literature. This is their conversation.

Having furnished solutions for Germany and Dubai, Ingo Niermann takes a new look at what nationhood can mean and accomplish today, finding inspiration, of all places, in North Korea. Now that the promise of global prosperity and abundance can technically be fulfilled, the time has come for a minimalist rethink of society.

On November 27, 2012, world-renowned pastry chef Pierre Hermé arrived at Harvard University. He brought five chefs, 600 sheets of gelatin, 150 eggs, 68 pounds of caster sugar, 40 pounds of unsalted butter, 11 pounds of grated wasabi, and the alchemic techniques to transform these ingredients into an elaborate “lecture de pâtisserie.” The Architecture of Taste recaptures this night and the physiological effects of Hermé’s pastry visions.

This issue is smaller than large and larger than small: *medium*. Produced under the auspices of the exhibition “Transmitting Andy Warhol” at Tate Liverpool, it includes a history of the relations between drugs and groups by Ian Svenonius, an e-mail exchange between Paul Elliman and pioneer of voice synthesis Richard T. Gagnon, and a collage of voices that conjure Warhol’s aura by Michael Bracewell.

In Hystericizing Germany, Manfred Hermes provides an excursive analysis of the potential of narration within the paradoxes of cinematic representation, with Fassbinder’s miniseries forming both beginning and end point.

Focusing on the startling increase of nationalism across Europe—made palpable in manifestations of fascist tendencies and the cult of heritage—this project points to the possibility and power of art to imagine futures that are not irrevocably determined by the present, but are invested with struggles fought here and now.

This issue concerns itself with “numbers,” ranging from a brief note on “The Psychology of Number” by John Dewey and John McLellan, to Vincenzo Latronico’s historical overview of the ongoing attempt to conjure “truths from thin air” (such as proof of the existence of god).

This book excavates the notion of forensis (Latin for “pertaining to the forum”) to designate the role of material forensics in articulating new notions of public truth. The condition of forensis is one in which aesthetic practices, new technologies, and architectural research methodologies bear upon the legal implications of political struggle, violent conflict, and climate change.

Objects in This Mirror posits a polemical defense of intellectual and cultural generalism and curiosity. The collection of essays rewardingly navigates such diverse subjects as the writings of W. G. Sebald and Roland Barthes to the history of cravat-tying manuals and the search for a cure to the common cold.

Sweet Sixties is a long-term trans-regional research initiative working between art, research, media, and educational contexts around the world. Involving a particular group of experimentally oriented arts and research groups as well as individual artists, researchers, and media, Sweet Sixties investigates hidden histories or underexposed cultural junctions and exchange channels in the revolutionary period of the 1960s.

The exhibition “The Whole Earth” is an essay composed of cultural-historical materials and artistic positions that critically address the rise of the image of “One Earth” and the ecological paradigm associated with it. The accompanying publication includes image-rich visual essays that explore key themes: “Universalism,” “Whole Systems,” “Boundless Interior,” and “Apocalypse, Babylon, Simulation,” among others.

Living Labor considers the increasing subordination of life to work. In response to the eroding boundaries between work and life, and against the historic backdrop of the Scandinavian labor movement, the writers gathered in Living Labor propose viable forms of refusal and imagine prospects for a post-work future.

Undoing Property? examines complex relationships inside art, culture, political economy, immaterial production, and the public realm today. In its pages artists and theorists address aspects of computing, curating, economy, ecology, gentrification, music, publishing, piracy, and much more.

The contemporary art world has become more inhospitable to “serious” intellectual activity in recent years. Set against this context, Gavin Butt and Irit Rogoff raise the question of “seriousness” in art and culture. What is seriousness exactly, and where does it reside? Is it a desirable value in contemporary culture?

Memory has become a major preoccupation in the humanities in recent decades, be it individual and collective memory, cultural and national memory, or traumatic memory and the ethics of its representation. Drawing on these complex concerns, Astrid Schmetterling and Lynn Turner focus on distinct films—11’09”01 – September 11 (2002), and Richard Linklater’s Tape (2001).

Largely due to the “linguistic turn” that has dominated the humanities since the mid-twentieth century, many contemporary scholars and artists habitually equate works of art with highly coded texts to be deciphered, deconstructed, or otherwise interpreted. Within this quest to consider art differently, Jorella Andrews and Simon O’Sullivan pay attention to the asignifying character of art, or simply its affective qualities.

Recent encounters between art and real life, the ubiquity of images of violence and humiliation in visual culture and the media, and the persistence of controversial debates on public and participatory art projects are raising fundamental questions about the importance of ethical decisions in art and curating.

In this collection of essays Martha Rosler embarks on a broad inquiry into the economic and historical precedents for today’s soft ideology of creativity, with special focus on its elaborate retooling of class distinctions.

In Douglas Coupland’s writing, the doldrums of a world afflicted by the pains of dotcom booms and busts, the ascendency of subcultures to pop cultures, and the subsequent struggle for identity are counterbalanced by droll, personal, and incisive analyses. This collection of nonfiction essays provides an illuminating meander through what we call culture today.

In the wake of failed states, growing economic and political inequality, and the ongoing US- and NATO-led wars for resources, security, and economic dominance worldwide, contemporary artists are revisiting former European colonies, considering past injustices as they haunt the living yet remain repressed in European consciousness.

Martin Beck’s exhibition “Panel 2—‘Nothing better than a touch of ecology and catastrophe to unite the social classes…’” draws on the events of the 1970 International Design Conference in Aspen and the development of the Aspen Movie Map to form a visual environment that reflects the interrelations between art, architecture, design, ecology, and social movements. The Aspen Complex documents two versions of Beck’s exhibition.

Paper Exhibition is an anthology of writings by curator and writer Raimundas Malašauskas.

In 1985, the body of Josef Mengele, one of the last Nazi war criminals still at large, was unearthed in Brazil. The ensuing process of identifying the bones in question opened up what can now be seen as a third narrative in war crime investigations—not that of the document or the witness but rather the birth of a forensic approach to understanding war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Cultures of the Curatorial assumes a curatorial turn in contemporary cultural practice and discourse. Coming from a variety of disciplines and professional backgrounds, the contributors exemplify the entanglement of theory and practice, consider recent developments within the curatorial field, allow self-reflexive analysis, and explore the conditions—disciplinary, institutional, economic, political, and regional—under which art and culture become public.

In Hito Steyerl’s writing we begin to see how, even if the hopes and desires for coherent collective political projects have been displaced onto images and screens, it is precisely here that we must look frankly at the technology that seals them in.

Joan Sallas, a virtuoso of the fold, has meticulously researched and mastered the history and techniques of the art of the fold. With the banquet table as setting, his expertise and philosophy pour forth in the form of splendid, folded linen.

Devised by Stuart Bailey, Lars Bang Larsen, Angie Keefer, and David Reinfurt, this bulletin is based on Larsen’s just-completed PhD dissertation at the University of Copenhagen, A History of Irritated Material: Psychedelic Concepts in Neo-Avantgarde Art. The idea was to contrive a popular version of his academic thesis by editing it psychedelically.

In September 2011, Nikolaus Hirsch and Markus Miessen invited protagonists from the fields of architecture, art, philosophy, and literature to reflect on the single question of what, today, can be understood as a critical modality of spatial practice.

One of the greatest challenges for art and culture, sounded by intellectuals and also by funding bodies, is to represent diversity. But what precisely does this term mean and why does it so often placate rather than produce what it names?

Welcome to Finland, a young land of rapid aging, where newly founded institutions are already outmoded and geographic impediments are a constant crippling agent. As part of Ingo Niermann’s Solution Series, Solution Finland: The Welfare Game by architect Martti Kalliala with writer and curator Jenna Sutela and architect Tuomas Toivonen, addresses the Nordic country’s numerous predicaments.

As part of Ingo Niermann’s Solution Series, Solution Japan, or The Book of Japans, makes a case for the rehabilitation of the idea of the “far.” The Book of Japans restores a sense of wonder—along with a plethora of imagination-triggering inaccuracies—by taking the reader on a trip not just through space but also time.

Solution 196–213: United States of Palestine-Israel is an anthology of texts proposing a doable solution for the region. With contributors based in Ramallah and Tel Aviv-Jaffa, Beirut and Jerusalem, New York and Bethlehem, Nazareth and Warsaw, the book offers solutions that will make life better, and proposes ways to do it.

In 1668, Queen Christina of Sweden was greeted in Rome with three spectacular banquets that surpass all historical precedents and successors in the register of extravagant gastronomy. As the first publication of her series On the Table, Charlotte Birnbaum presents Antonio degli Effetti’s newly translated seventeenth-century text, which elaborately describes the three feasts in all their sumptuous and performative glory.

When the flexibility, certainty, and freedom promised by being part of a critical outside are considered as extensions of recent advances in economic exploitation, does the field of art then become the uncritical, complicit inside of something far more compelling?

Class inevitably raises awkward questions for the protagonists of contemporary art—about their backgrounds, patrons, and ideological partialities. Lapdogs of the Bourgeoisie investigates this latent yet easily overlooked issue, which has been historically eclipsed by gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and nationality.

Solution 168-185: America is the fourth book in the Solution Series. Opting for the United States of America—which the author says is “still the most proficiently colonial place” [he knows]—Tirdad Zolghadr provides a compilation of highly entertaining “solutions” for a nation suspicious of progressive politics yet rich in its history of harboring and cultivating the avant-garde.

The first in the series of e-flux journal readers to be written by a single author, Going Public brings together a collection of influential essays by Boris Groys.

Compiled here for the first time, the critic, artist, gallerist, dealer, translator John Kelsey’s selected essays gamesomely convey some of the most poignant challenges in the art world and in the many social roles it creates.

Writer, DJ, and sound artist Jean-Yves Leloup has followed the evolution of electronic music from its first appearance in Europe at the end of the eighties. A fortunate witness to the electronic scene, he is also interested in all questions relative to contemporary art and digital technologies.

I like to stand with one leg on each side of the wall. Maybe this is a schizophrenic position, but none other seems to me real enough.
—Heiner Müller, The German Issue

The selection of essays included in this book seeks to highlight an ongoing topical thread that ran throughout the first eight issues of e-flux journal. It aims at providing a fresh approach to the function of an art journal as something that situates the multitude of what is currently available, and makes that available back to the multitude.

In Solution 1-10: Umbauland, Ingo Niermann devises ten provokingly simple ideas which would see Germany work it out after all, including a new grammar, a new political party, assigning allotment gardens to unemployed people and retirees, and the Great Pyramid, the tallest building of the world which would serve as a democratic tomb for millions of people.

Drawing on fresh readings of Marxist and postmodern thought, renowned German cultural critic Diedrich Diederichsen compares the abstract and climbing values of artworks with the plunging value of music—a traditionally immaterial art—in order to formulate a broad reflection on the current “crisis of value in the arts.”

“East Coast Europe,” which took place during Spring 2008, is a project about the perceptions of contemporary European identity and its relation to spatial practices and international politics.

Canvases and Careers Today brings together contributions from the eponymous conference organized by the Institut für Kunstkritik, Städelschule, Frankfurt am Main. Its goal is to provide deeper insights and more complexity to current debates on the relationship between criticism, art, and the market.

The Uncertain States of America Reader constitutes a unique compilation of writing around art and cultural politics in America since 2000.

In the essay Postproduction. Culture as Screenplay: How Art Reprograms the World, French writer and curator Nicolas Bourriaud discusses how, since the early nineties, an ever increasing number of artworks have been created on the basis of preexisting works; more and more artists interpret, reproduce, re-exhibit, or use works made by others or available cultural products.