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A critique of the discourse on the Anthropocene and the creative alternatives to it to be found through the arts, sciences, and humanities.Addressing the current upswing of attention in the sciences, arts, and humanities to the new proposal that we are in a human-driven epoch called the Anthropocene, this book critically surveys that thesis and points to its limitations. It analyzes contemporary visual culture—popular science websites, remote sensing and SatNav imagery, eco-activist mobilizations, and experimental artistic projects—to consider how the term proposes more than merely a description of objective geological periodization. This book argues that the Anthropocene terminology works ideologically in support of a neoliberal financialization of nature, anthropocentric political economy, and endorsement of geoengineering as the preferred—but likely disastrous—method of approaching climate change. To democratize decisions about the world''s near future, we urgently need to subject the Anthropocene thesis to critical scrutiny and develop creative alternatives in the present.

A tribute to Elisabeth Wild's kaleidoscopic and vibrant collages, with contributions that frame the importance of this singular artist's work and life. This beautifully designed monograph exhibits Elisabeth Wild's kaleidoscopic and vibrant collages. Using cutouts of commercial imagery from glossy magazines, Wild composes a dimensionless reality that is witty yet menacing, ancient yet immortal. Imagining figures that are structural and anatomical, her work presents a shimmering dream logic. Wooden totems and stone altars, woven rugs, and precious stones are the cosmic architectural inhabitants that unveil the artist's fantasies. Along with Wild's collages, this volume includes contributions by poet Negma Coy, curator Adam Szymczyk, art educator and writer Barbara Casavecchia, art historian and critic Noit Banai, and gallerist Karolina Dankow of Karma International, all which frame the importance of this singular artist's work and life. Born in Austria, Elisabeth Wild (1922-2020) fled to Argentina during WWII with her parents. In 1962 the family escaped the regime of Juan Peron and found a new home in Basel, Switzerland. Wild opened an antique shop at St. Johannstor which became the outlet for her creativity at the time and also supported her and her family financially. Until her death at the age of 98, Wild was carefully crafting her light-hearted, joyous abstract worlds walking the line between construction and deconstruction. Alongside her daughter, Vivian Suter, Wild has exhibited at Kunsthalle Basel, documenta 14, and the Powerplant in Toronto.

Amazonia as a place, a subject, a point of view, and a socio-ecological world. 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. In all their various lines (and circles) of ecological and epistemological thought, the artists, elders, writers, theorists, shamans, curators, poets, and activists whose ideas, images, and struggles compose this book, are concerned with Amazonia as both a place and a point of view. Through the weaving of voices, myths, ancestors, and territories, and all their radical subjectivities, we understand language in this anthology in an extended sense: as testimony, textile, painting, river, forest, animal, ancestor, song, spirit, and sacred medicine. Amazonia: Anthology as Cosmology inquires into decolonial feminisms and Indigenous temporalities, externalized memory and erasure, sacred plants in the shadow of pandemic corporate-state extractivism and systemic violence, the activist possibilities of the mythic imagination, and the common visual matrices of the Amazonian universe. The book also weighs the Western imaginary of the Amazon, both its colonial roots in racial capitalism and its corporate, technological, paternalistic present. Centered, however, is Amazonia itself, in all its many and numinous worlds and languages--visual, oral, botanical, ancestral, cosmological--by which it becomes narrated, passed on, and then narrated again. ContributorsMaria Thereza Alves, Christian Bendayan, Rita Carelli, Felipe Castelblanco, Carolina Caycedo, Hernando Chindoy Chindoy, Tiffany Higgins, Márcia Wayna Kambeba, knowbotique, Davi Kopenawa, Ailton Krenak, Renata Machado, Maurício Meirelles, Harry Pinedo, Aníbal Quijano, Djamila Ribeiro, Pamela Rosenkranz, Abel Rodríguez, Maria Belén Saéz de Ibarra, Barbara Santos, Paulo Tavares, Daiara Tukano, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro

How the shift from montage to navigation alters the way images--and art--operate as models of political action and modes of political intervention. Navigation begins where the map becomes indecipherable. Navigation operates on a plane of immanence in constant motion. Instead of framing or representing the world, the art of navigation continuously updates and adjusts multiple frames from viewpoints within and beyond the world. Navigation is thus an operational practice of synthesizing various orders of magnitude. Only a few weeks prior to his untimely death in 2014, Harun Farocki briefly referred to navigation as a contemporary challenge to montage--editing distinct sections of film into a continuous sequence--as the dominant paradigm of techno-political visuality. 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? Navigation Beyond Vision originated in a conference organized by the Harun Farocki Institut (HaFI) and e-flux at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) in Berlin in 2019. ContributorsJames Bridle, Kodwo Eshun, Jennifer Gabrys, Tom Holert, Ramon Amaro and Murad Khan, Doreen Mende, Matteo Pasquinelli, Laura Lo Presti, Patricia Reed, Mariana Silva, Nikolay Smirnov, Oraib Toukan, Brian Kuan Wood

How the world--and the world of visual culture in particular--creates itself in a creative act that knows no economic return.How does the world form itself? How does it create itself as a world? And how do we understand the role of the visual in this regard? Most responses to these questions within cultural theory and visual culture refer to the rise of globalization, thus highlighting the acceleration of exchanges, the proliferation of information and communication devices, and the multiplication of globally circulated goods and images that characterize the world we live in. Visual Cultures as World Forming takes a different approach by focusing on the taking place of the world, a creative act that knows no economic return. This taking place does not lead to more proliferation of goods, additional financial exchanges, further communications, or an increase in the distribution of visual material, but leads to the continued "worlding" of the world. This approach is predominantly, but not exclusively, inspired by the work of Jean-Luc Nancy. Through a reading of his work and of some of his contemporaries both inside and outside of the Western canon, Madani and Martinon attempt to expose how the world--and the world of visual culture in particular--creates itself and the ways in which each one of us is embodying this creation without economy.Copublished with Goldsmiths, University of London

Writings by exhibition maker and writer Jens Hoffmann, charting a highly unique curatorial trajectory.This volume brings together a wide selection of writings by exhibition maker and writer Jens Hoffmann that outline his deep understanding of the interconnections among art, curating, theater, film, and literature. The nearly fifty texts include essays on artists, exhibitions, and curating; reviews of large-scale international group exhibitions; catalogue texts from exhibitions Hoffmann curated; and interviews and conversations with artists and other cultural practitioners. Collectively, these texts map the development of Hoffman's thoughts and agenda, articulating a highly unique curatorial trajectory.

Seven years in twenty-first century contemporary art, as seen in a series of columns by curator and writer Maria Lind.Seven Years offers a subjective chronicle of contemporary art during the second decade of the twenty-first century, seen through a series of columns by curator, writer, and educator Maria Lind. Writing for the print edition of ArtReview, Lind considers individual artworks and exhibitions and contributes to conversations and debates developing in the art world and beyond. She explores work by Haegue Yang, Hassan Khan, Uglycute, Tania Perez-Cordova, and Walid Raad, among others, and discusses such exhibitions as dOCUMENTA (13), the Sharjah Biennial 12, the 3rd Ural Industrial Biennial, and several editions of the Venice Biennale.Lind's writings are accompanied by other texts: artists Goldin+Senneby discuss Lind's materialist approach through the use of the word "hand" in the introduction to the volume; Sofía Hernández Chong Cuy reflects on how writing can affect curatorial work, and vice versa; artist Ahmet Öğüt conducts an imagined interview with Lind; and Philippe Parreno weaves a summary of the years between 2010 and 2018, highlighting the notion of potentiality. A postscript by Lind's fellow curator Joanna Warsza compiles a glossary of the book's key ideas and terms.ContributorsGoldin+Senneby, Sofía Hernández Chong Cuy, Ahmet Öğüt, Philippe Parreno, Joanna Warsza

New spatial notational systems for protecting and regaining Indigenous lands in the United States.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. This 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. Kolowratnik focuses on the double bind in which Native Pueblo communities in the United States find themselves when they become involved in a legal effort to reclaim and protect ancestral lands; the process of producing evidence runs counter to their structural organization around oral history and cultural secrecy. The spatial notational systems developed by Kolowratnik with Hemish tribal members from northern New Mexico and presented in this volume are an attempt to produce evidentiary documentation that speaks Native truths while respecting demands on secrecy. These systems also attempt to instigate a dialogue where there currently is none, working to deconstruct the fixed opposition between secrecy and disclosure within Western legal systems.

Essays on the provocative 2008 film by Renzo Martens, Episode III (Enjoy Poverty).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. Throughout Critique in Practice, contributors explore the work''s legacy and how it relates to the politics of representation, uses of the documentary form, art criticism, the deployment of humanitarian aid, the impact of extractive forms of globalized capital, and the neoliberal politics of decolonization. The unconventional representation of acute immiseration throughout Enjoy Poverty generated far-from-resolved disputes about how deprivation is portrayed within Western mainstream media and throughout global cultural institutions. Using a range of approaches, this volume reconsiders that portrayal and how the film''s reception led Martens to found a long-term program, Human Activities.ContributorsAriella Aïsha Azoulay, Eva Barois De Caevel, Pieter Van Bogaert, Jelle Bouwhuis, JJ Charlesworth, T.J. Demos, Angela Dimitrakaki, Anthony Downey, Charles Esche, Dan Fox, Matthias De Groof, Xander Karskens, J. A. Koster, Kyveli Lignou-Tsamantani, Suhail Malik, Renzo Martens, Nina Möntmann, René Ngongo, Paul O''Kane, Laurens Otto, Nikolaus Perneczky, Kolja Reichert, Els Roelandt, Ruben De Roo, ka˛rî''ka˛chä seid''ou, Gregory Sholette, Sanne Sinnige, Ana Teixeira Pinto, Emilia Terracciano, Nato Thompson, Niels Van Tomme, Frank Vande Veire, Eyal Weizman, Vivian Ziherl, and Artur Z˙mijewski.

See the world through the eyes of a search engine, if only for a millisecond; throw the workings of power into sharper relief by any media necessary; reveal access points to other worlds within our own. In the anthology Fiction as Method, a mixture of new and established names in the fields of contemporary art, media theory, philosophy, and speculative fiction explore the diverse ways fiction manifests, and provide insights into subjects ranging from the hive mind of the art collective 0rphan Drift to the protocols of online self-presentation. With an extended introduction by the editors, the book invites reflection on how fictions proliferate, take on flesh, and are carried by a wide variety of mediums—including, but not limited to, the written word. In each case, fiction is bound up with the production and modulation of desire, the enfolding of matter and meaning, and the blending of practices that cast the existing world in a new light with those that participate in the creation of new openings of the possible. ContributorsJustin Barton, Delphi Carstens & Mer Roberts, Tim Etchells, Matthew Fuller, David Garcia, Dora García, M. John Harrison, Simon O''Sullivan, Erica Scourti, Jon K Shaw and Theo Reeves-Evison

According to the nineteenth-century teachings of Nikolai Fedorov—librarian, religious philosopher, and progenitor of Russian cosmism—our ethical obligation to use reason and knowledge to care for the sick extends to curing the dead of their terminal status. The dead must be brought back to life using means of advanced technology—resurrected not as souls in heaven, but in material form, in this world, with all their memories and knowledge. Fedorov''s call to redistribute vital forces is wildly imaginative in emancipatory ambition. Today, it might appear arcane in its mystical panpsychism or eccentric in its embrace of realities that exist only in science fiction or certain diabolical strains of Silicon Valley techno-utopian ideology. It can be difficult to grasp how it ended up influencing the thinking behind a generation of young revolutionary anarchists and Marxists who incorporated Fedorov''s ideas under their own brand of biocosmism before the 1917 Russian Revolution, even giving rise to the origins of the Soviet space program.    This book of interviews and conversations with today''s most compelling living and resurrected artists and thinkers seeks to address the relevance of Russian cosmism and biocosmism in light of its influence on the Russian artistic and political vanguard as well as on today''s art-historical apparatuses, weird materialisms, extinction narratives, and historical and temporal politics. This unprecedented collection of exchanges on cosmism asks how such an encompassing and imaginative, unapologetically humanist and anthropocentric strain of thinking could have been so historically and politically influential, especially when placed alongside the politically inconsequential—but in some sense equally encompassing—apocalypticism of contemporary realist imaginaries.ContributorsBart De Baere, Franco “Bifo” Berardi, Boris Groys, Elena Shaposhnikova, Marina Simakova, Hito Steyerl, Anton Vidokle, Brian Kuan Wood, Arseny Zhilyaev, Esther ZonsheimPublished in parallel with the eponymous exhibition at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin.Series edited by Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, Stephen Squibb, Anton VidokleDesign by Jeff Ramsey, front cover design by Liam Gillick

A look at how the internet and post-millenial technologies have transformed our ways of seeing and birthed a new form of culture.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. The internet has collectively bound human society, replacing the world as the network of all networks. In Goodbye, World! Looking at Art in the Digital Age, writer and curator Omar Kholeif traces the birth of a culture propagated but also consumed by this digitized network. Has the internet transformed the way we see and relate to images? How has the field of perception been altered by evolving technologies, pervasive distribution, and our interaction with screens? How have artists working in diverse contexts, from eBay auctions to augmented reality, created new ways of emoting that are determined by these technologies? Focusing on a cultural and artistic landscape that has taken shape since the year 2000, Kholeif aims to put into context a new language for seeing, feeling, and being that has emerged through post-millennial technologies, and argues for a nuanced understanding of the post-digital condition. Taking cues from John Berger''s Ways of Seeing and Alvin Toffler''s Future Shock, this book—part memoir, part critical analysis—should prove essential for anyone interested in the changing world of the internet.

An examination of contemporary art''s recent emphasis on “research” and “knowledge production,” and its claims to provide a novel access to “knowledge.”Questioning 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 such notions as “research” and “knowledge production.” Contemporary art is viewed here as a strategic bet on the social distinctions and value extractions made possible by claiming a different, novel access to “knowledge.” Contemporary art''s various liaisons with the humanities and the social and natural sciences, as well as its practitioners'' frequent embeddedness within transdisciplinary research environments and educational settings, have created a sense of epistemo-aesthetic departure, which concurs with the growing relevance of art as conduit or catalyst of knowledge. Discussing the practice of artists such as Christine Borland, Bureau d''études, Tony Chakar, Lina Dokuzović, Fernando García-Dory, Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Adelita Husni-Bey, Jakob Jakobsen, Claire Pentecost, and Pilvi Takala, writer and curator Tom Holert submits the gambit of conceptualizing contemporary art as an agent of epistemic politics to a genealogical analysis of its political-economic underpinnings—in times of cognitive capitalism, machine learning, and a renewed urgency of epistemological disobedience.

Coloniality, raciality, and global capitalism from a black feminist “poethical” perspective.Unpayable Debt examines the relationships among coloniality, raciality, and global capital from a black feminist “poethical” perspective. Inspired by Octavia E. Butler''s 1979 sci-fi novel Kindred, in which an African-American writer is transported back in time to the antebellum South to save her owner-ancestor, Unpayable Debt relates the notion of value to coloniality—both economic and ethical. Focusing on the philosophy behind value, Denise Ferreira da Silva exposes capital as the juridical architecture and ethical grammar of the world. Here, raciality—a symbol of coloniality—justifies deployments of total violence to enable expropriation and land extraction. This is the first volume in the On the Political series.

Painting has demonstrated remarkable perseverance in the expanding field of contemporary art and the surrounding ecology of media images. It appears, however, to have dispelled its own once-uncontested material basis: no longer confined to being synonymous with a flat picture plane hung on the wall, today, painting instead tends to emphasize the apparatus of its appearance and the conduits of its circulation. With contributions by Peter Geimer, Isabelle Graw, and André Rottmann, Thinking through Painting investigates painting''s traits and reception in cultural and socioeconomic discourse.ContributorsPeter Geimer, Isabelle Graw, André RottmannInstitut für Kunstkritik Series

The revisioning of our infrastructural futures, local and global relationalities, and historical and political legacies.Forming a comprehensive picture of the multiple processes, regulations, institutions, technologies, networks, and operations that we have come to understand as the distributed infrastructural arena in which we act, yield, and plot is a perennial challenge. 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. From questions around space settlements to the possibility of repurposing blockchain infrastructures and financial instruments for redistributive purposes, and from the diagrammatic potential of infrastructural thinking in artistic practices to scenario planning and economic strategizing, this collection of new essays brings together critical analysis from a broad group of contributors engaged in the revisioning of our infrastructural futures. Their interrogations span local and global relationalities, historical and political legacies, as well as future-oriented infrastructural hypotheses.