Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Contributions by Carl Andre, Charles Baudelaire, Walter Benjamin, Barbara Bloemink, Jan
Boelen, Louise Bourgeois, Sheldon Cheney and Martha Candler Cheney, Alex Coles, Anthony
Dunne and Fiona Raby, Hal Foster, Sigmund Freud, Dan Graham, Isabelle Graw, Sebastian
Hackenschmidt and Dietmar Rbel, Graham Harman, G. W. F. Hegel, Martin Heidegger, Dave
Hickey, Matthew Higgs, Donald Judd, Immanuel Kant, Frederick J. Kiesler, Sven Ltticken,
Alessandro Mendini, W. J. T. Mitchell, Jasper Morrison, Bruno Munari, Robert Nickas, Alice
Rawsthorn, Jeff Rian, Richard Rinehart, Anthony Vidler
This collection of more than thirty texts, which were originally published between 1790 and the
present day, explores mans rich relationship with material things. Devised largely in response to
the gradual breakdown of the divide between art and design that began over a century ago, this
book sheds light on the ways that the concept of the thing as idea has been considered over time.
Writers from different fields explore how things interact with materials, structures, and production
processes while defining and registering the intangible qualities of the material world. Each author
considers the different relationships between the context of a thing and its thingness, describing
the ways in which things and ideas intersect.
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Off now, little paper, around the world, and destroy the tyranny of money, so that gold, silver and
precious stones may one day cease to be the idols and tyrants of the world!
August Nordenskild, 1787
In the ancient art of alchemy, some elements can change to other states of matter while others
cannot. At least not without magic. And a touch of trickery. For some time now, Goldin+Senneby
have been interested in a utopian alchemist named August Nordenskild (17541792) who
sought to create enough gold from inferior metals to permanently abolish its value, and the
tyranny of money with it. But gold is not only money, just as money is not only gold. Gold is a
substance, and money is a measure of valuefor substances, feelings, ideasthat is open to
magical projections, deceits and impurities, faulty counts, stealthy hacks, and hasty cover-ups. In
The Exquisite Corpse of August Nordenskild, Goldin+Senneby initiate a parallel comedy of
interpretation. As in the surrealist parlor game cadavre exquis, each of the books seven
essaysby a historian of ideas, a sociologist of finance, a literary and cultural historian, a stage
magician, an artist, an anthropologist, and a poet, in precisely that orderresponds directly to the
preceding essay only. What is magic, after all, if not a story line performed in near darknesswith
little knowledge of what came before and even less of what will follow?
Brian Kuan Wood
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Contributions by Changho Choi, Chankyong Park, Chen Tong, Dongyoung Lee, Egon Hanfstingl,
Gabriele Sttzer / Knstlerinnengruppe Erfurt, Hans Haacke, Janet Grau, Kyungman Kim, Liu
Ding, Louwrien Wijers, Rory Pilgrim, Sora Kim
From December 11, 2015April 10, 2016 the German Library in Guangzhou, China became The
German Library Pyongyang, a reimagining of an initiative of the Goethe-Institut that originally
operated in North Korea between 2004 and 2009. This temporary intervention by Sara van der
Heide is an imaginary transformation of the current geography of the German Library in
Guangzhou. Van der Heides German Library Pyongyang project is a contemporary version of the
Goethe-Instituts original library initiative in North Korea, devised as a vessel to discuss national
cultural policy in a post-Cold War and postcolonial era that looks critically toward the parallel
histories of Germany and the two Koreas. The German Library Pyongyang offers a space for
critical questions, but it also functions as a context for transcending thinking that is prescribed by
the lines of the nation-state, language, and geography. The several subtle artistic, linguistic, and
graphic interventions in the library merge with the continuing activities of the German learning
center in Guangzhou, and all institutional printed matter in Chinese is replaced by Korean.
This publication brings together the four original exhibition booklets in German, Korean, English,
and Chinese. An additional reader is included with critical reflections, and documentation of the
exhibition and the organized seminar.
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Appropriation, storytelling, reenactment, and reportage are some of the strategies that Mario
Garca Torres deploys to highlight the limitations of factual evidence and the agency of historical
records and objects. An Arrival Tale detaches the Mexican artists works in the TBA21 collection
from their original contexts and offers them as a collection of narratives and artistic experiments
open for reinscription in order to address the conditions and urgencies of our contemporary
societies. It examines the space of arrival as a complicated and disjointed nexus between
departure, displacement, and return.
This publication follows the eponymous exhibition at TBA21 Augarten. While conceived in
relation to the exhibition, this book is not a documentation, but rather the start of a journey that
expands, explores, complicates, and undoes the thematic threads of spatial disjunction,
recollection, asynchronicity, fictionality, and the politics of visibility.
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What role does historiography play in the formation of the present? How does contemporary
experience inform the commemoration of historical events or lack thereof? Minouk Lim explores
history in the present tenseits media representation, collective memory, ritual, and trauma
through her exhibition, publication, and broadcasting station United Paradox. The South Korea in
Kims project is a nation with a hole in its chest: a nation of families divided by territorial disputes
and traumatized by civilian massacres, victims of an authoritarian power in service of ideological
control and economic growth. While reflecting on the representation and reappropriation of
historical events in South Korea, Lim and the contributors to this publication explore ways of
working through the past in a present that prefers to forget.
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In this collection of essays, art historian and critic Sven Lutticken focuses on aesthetic practice in
a rapidly expanding cultural sphere. He analyzes its transformation by the capitalist cultural
revolution, whose reshaping of arts autonomy has wrought a field of afters and posts. In a
present moment teeming with erosionswhere even history and the human are called into
questionCultural Revolution: Aesthetic Practice after Autonomy reconsiders these changing
values, for relegating such notions safely to the past betrays their possibilities for potential today.
Lutticken discusses practices that range from Black Mask to Subversive Aktion, from Krautonomy
to Occupy, from the Wet Dream Film Festival in the early 1970s to Jonas Staals recently
established New World Academy. Within these pages Scarlett Johansson meets Paul Chan,
Walid Raad, and Hito Steyerl, and Dr. Zira from Planet of the Apes mingles with the likes of Paul
Lafargue and Alexandre Kojve.
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In 1992, Helke Bayrle began videotaping the installation of each exhibition at the Portikus
exhibition space. These videos form a remarkable and intimate archive of the storied Frankfurt
contemporary art institution and the exceptional artists and personnel that have worked within it.
Coinciding with the launch of a website containing all of Bayrles Portikus videos, this publication
pays tribute to the artists extraordinary work, through a comprehensive timeline, video stills, and
statements by past and current directors and curators. Art critic and historian Kirsty Bell writes
about the history of Portikus and the meaning of Bayrles work. Also included in the book is a
conversation with the artist and Sunah Choi, who, since 2001, has edited the videos that
comprise Bayrles truly unique undertaking.
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After its first iteration in 2006, Watson designated the event a Dreaming, which meant that it
should be periodically repeated. The performance has since been restaged in 2009, 2012, and
2016, with Watson seeing it as an important act of Indigenous empowerment: a way of restoring
agency to the local Aboriginal people in bringing their past alive and allowing them to think that
the future has not been definitively determined.
Parallel to this recurring event is an evolving body of works in diverse media. At its core is
Baileys lateral research-based process, which combines a highly reflexive approach to language
with granular descriptions of material and cultural systems. The call-and-response collaboration
between Watson and Bailey and the many irreducibilities within it, generates an articulation of
place that is playfully extrapolative, yet politically and intellectually resistant.
This publication includes an introduction by its editor, Rex Butler, and an essay and detailed
timeline by CityCat Project curator, David Pestorius, which covers the activities of Bailey and
Watson both before and throughout their work together. In addition, art historian Sally Butler
reflects upon Watsons literary production, while curator Michele Helmrich sheds light on the local
historical context that significantly informs the collaboration.
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The Contour Biennale 8, Polyphonic Worlds: Justice as Medium, curated by Natasha Ginwala,
brings together twenty-five international and local artists and art collectives working in lens-based
media, sound, performance, drawing, and installation. Taking place in Mechelen, Belgium,
Polyphonic Worlds embraces the communal spirit of biennale by including the many-sided
voices that assemble in collective formations as well as discrete, individual creative positions.
This reader proposes a series of beginningsit is a polyphonic approach that borrows from
juridical and musical spheres. Hearings comprises texts orginally published on the eponymous
online journal that traces the artistic processes, conceptual methods, and historical research
through textual as well as image and video-based contributions from a range of artists, writers,
poets, anthropologists, and filmmakers. It is not a traditional exhibition catalogue but instead
complements what is in the biennale, engages with current ideas and discourses, and reorients
relationships around the artwork as a site of evidence and as a testimonial record.
Featuring texts and illustrated contributions by Agency, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Eric Baudelaire,
Rossella Biscotti, Hunter Braithwaite and Trevor Paglen, Filipa Csar, Cooking Sections, Council,
T. J. Demos, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Pedro Gmez-Egaa, Rana Hamadeh, Louis Henderson,
Adelita Husni-Bey, Ho Tzu Nyen, inhabitants, Arvo Leo, Sven Ltticken, Basir Mahmood, Samuel
Mareel, Dirk de Meyer, Otobong Nkanga, Pallavi Paul and Anish Ahluwalia, Elizabeth A. Povinelli,
Judy Radul, Beatriz Santiago Muoz, Ritu Sarin and Tenzing Sonam, Madonna Staunton, Ana
Torfs, Trinh Thi Nguyen, Susanne M. Winterling and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and Ghassan
Zaqtan.
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Edgar Leciejewski spent six months as an artist-in-residence with Fogo Island Arts in 2014.
Tones brings together new work stemming from the Leipzig-based artists time on the island,
including large-scale collages, photographs of natural elements, and precarious sculptures
composed of objects found on the shore. Taken together the works are a collection and an
archive of time shown in modern images, raising questions on how we contemplate ideas of
nature. This publication features essays by Bill Arning and Zo Gray, as well as a conversation
between the artist and Nicolaus Schafhausen.
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Contributions by Amanda Beech, Rony Brauman, David Campbell, Olivia Custer, Rosalyn
Deutsche, Thomas Keenan, Eric Kluitenberg, David Levine, Suhail Malik, Sohrab Mohebbi,
Sharon Sliwinski, Hito Steyerl, Bernard Stiegler, Tirdad Zolghadr
It is difficult to imagine making claims for human rights without using images. For better or worse,
images of protest, evidence, and assertion are the lingua franca of struggles for justice today.
And they seem to come in a flood, more and more, day and night. But through which channels
does the torrent pass? The Flood of Rights examines the pathways through which these images
and ideas circulateroutes that do not merely enable, but actually shape human-rights claims
and their conceptual background. What are the technologies and languages that structure the
global distribution of humanism and universalism, and how do they leave their mark on these
ideas themselves? Which narratives and imageries have proven easier to export and import, and
whose interests are at stake in the configurations in question?
The Flood of Rights draws on a conference of the same name, organized by the LUMA
Foundation and Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, which took place in Arles, France,
in 2013.
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In architectural history, just as in global politics, refugees have tended to exist as mere human
surplus; histories of architecture, then, have usually reproduced the nation-states exclusion of
refugees as people out of place. Andrew Herschers Displacements: Architecture and Refugee,
the ninth book in the Critical Spatial Practice series, examines some of the usually disavowed but
arguably decisive intersections of mass-population displacement and architecturean art and
technology of population placementthrough the twentieth century and into the present. Posing
the refugee as the pre-eminent collective political subject of our time, Displacements attempts to
open up an architectural history of the refugee that could refract on the history of architecture and
the history of the refugee alike.
Andrew Herscher is an Associate Professor at the University of Michigan with appointments in the
Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, Department of Slavic Languages and
Literatures, and Department of Art History.
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