If discourse is the foundation of democracy, how can the design of our cities empower and enable discourse? In 1981, Richard Sennett delivered six lectures about this relationship, and issued a call to action that remains relevant today.

First global exploration of contemporary forms of filmmaking from political and cultural self-determination movements of Autochthonous communities and peoples.

An essay-length book arguing for the autonomy of art in the present

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

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.

How architecture powered European energy politics in the postwar era and paved the way for today’s dependency on coal, steel, and nuclear power.

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.

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.

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.

Kafka for Kids contextualizes artist Roee Rosen’s film of the same name, the pilot episode of a TV series that perversely aims to make Kafka’s tales palpable for toddlers–but in fact offers a wild ride through our complex universe, politics, dreams, and traumas.

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 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?

What does the promise of “speaking nearby” rather than “speaking about” look like today? What are the politics of hospitality? What are the problematics of “postfeminism,” and how do we challenge the West as the authoritative subject of feminist knowledge? What are the ways that language can be a site of rupture? How do we generate mistrust in the “well-written,” and how can poetry be a radical act of refusal?

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.

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?

In The Language of Secret Proof, Nina Valerie Kolowratnik challenges the conditions under which Indigenous rights to protect and regain traditional lands are currently negotiated in United States legal frameworks. The tenth volume in the Critical Spatial Practice series responds to the urgent need for alternative modes of evidentiary production by introducing an innovative system of architectural drawing and notation.

As the Cold War gained momentum in Europe, Tito’s break with Stalin led to Yugoslavia being expelled from the Eastern bloc in 1948. Confronted with this new reality, the Yugoslav government decided to bridge the indeterminacy of its cultural politics through a creative strategy: it commissioned young artists and architects to draft the aesthetics of a non-Soviet form of socialism.

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.

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.

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. 

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?

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.

This book examines some of the usually disavowed but arguably decisive intersections of mass-population displacement and architecture—an art and technology of population placement—through the twentieth century and into the present.

In this collection of essays, art historian and critic Sven Lütticken focuses on aesthetic practice in a rapidly expanding cultural sphere. He analyzes its transformation by the capitalist cultural revolution, whose reshaping of art’s autonomy has wrought a field of afters and posts.

The original ideals of the Enlightenment research university and the rise of aesthetics in modernity have been decisive in shaping neoliberal capitalism. How, then, might we endeavor to change the academic status quo? Philosopher and political theorist Armen Avanessian argues that the ethical dimension of knowledge can produce a new reality.

The Silent University, initiated by artist Ahmet Öğüt in 2012, is an autonomous platform for academics who cannot share their knowledge due to their status of residence, because their degrees are not recognized or regaining access to academia is blocked for other reasons. It is a solidary school by refugees, asylum seekers and migrants who contribute to the program as lecturers, consultants and researchers.

“Miessen’s new book depicts in a challenging and projective manner the problem of politics in times of conceptual indeterminacy, where ‘participation’ of the civil society seems to become the salvation for the political mess we are in, especially in Europe.”

—Ulrike Guérot, political scientist, founder and director, European Democracy Lab, Berlin

Black transparency is an involuntary disclosure of secrets against a backdrop of systematic online surveillance, as large parts of contemporary life move into the digital realm. In their latest book, Metahaven embark on a journey of subversion while examining transparency’s intersections with design, architecture, and pop culture, as well as its ability to unravel the circuitry of modern state power.

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.

One common feature of the wave of recent revolutions and revolts around the world is not political but rather architectural: many erupted on inner-city roundabouts.  In thinking about the relation between protest and urban form, Eyal Weizman starts with the May 1980 uprising in Gwangju, South Korea, the first of the “roundabout revolutions,” and traces its lineage to the Arab Spring and its hellish aftermath.

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.

Truth Is Concrete: A Handbook for Artistic Strategies in Real Politics takes the possibility of concrete truth as a working hypothesis and looks for direct action and concrete knowledge: for an art that not only represents and documents, but engages in specific political and social situations—and for an activism that not only acts for the sake of acting but searches for intelligent, creative means of self-empowerment.

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.

An invitation to undertake an urgent architectural and political thought experiment: to rethink today’s struggles for justice and equality not only from the historical perspective of revolution, but also from that of a continued struggle for decolonization; consequently, to rethink the problem of political subjectivity not from the point of view of a Western conception of a liberal citizen but rather from that of the displaced and extraterritorial refugee.

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.

The second volume in the Critical Spatial Practice series presents a selection of conversations between Markus Miessen and political philosopher Chantal Mouffe. The dialogues attempt to unpack current dilemmas and popular mobilizations in terms of consensus-driven formats of political decision making.

The Nightmare of Participation calls for a format of conflictual participation—no longer a process by which others are invited “in,” but a means of acting without mandate, as uninvited irritant: a forced entry into fields of knowledge that arguably benefit from exterior thinking. Sometimes, democracy has to be avoided at all costs.

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.

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?

This book reexamines the legacies of modern theoretical and artistic iconoclasm in the context of the current religious-political image wars.

“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.

Thinking Worlds brings together contributions from a two-stage symposium organized in connection with the 2nd Moscow Biennial of Contemporary Art. These essays address questions of the sense and purpose of the “event” in contemporary artistic culture, of the current status of philosophy and aesthetic theory, and of the political significance of artistic interventions.

Europe, as a political space, is as conflictual as its constitution. It needs to be designed and negotiated. It is longing for an architecture of strategic encounters. Based on the curation of a space at the 2007 Lyon Biennial, London-based architect and writer Markus Miessen has drawn together a group of people to lead conversations around alternative notions of participation, the clash of democratic heterogeneities, and what it means to live in Europe today.

The Populism Reader accompanies Populism, an exhibition project in four European cities (Vilnius, Oslo, Amsterdam, Frankfurt am Main) exploring the relationships between contemporary art and current populist cultural and political trends.

The central theme of Changing Society: Lithuania is the state of transition in a Post-Soviet state, which has achieved political stability but is still looking for appropriate images to portray itself in the domestic spheres of politics and society.