Category: Reader

An Activist Neuroaesthetics Reader

An Activist Neuroaesthetics Reader

Activist neuroaesthetics attempts to make the processes of digital dominion and governmentalization—which are becoming more and more prominent in late-stage cognitive capitalism (or neural capitalism)—opaque, visible, and known.

Sedje Hémon – Emotion of Spirits

Sedje Hémon – Emotion of Spirits

Sedje Hémon (1923-2011) dedicated her life to showing the common origin and intersectionality of all arts and sciences, culminating in the development of a theory for the “integration of the arts.”

Imran Mir – A World that is not Entirely Reflective but Contemplative

Imran Mir – A World that is not Entirely Reflective but Contemplative

Imran Mir's (1950-2014) oeuvre can be interpreted as a constant refusal to provide comprehensive elaboration beyond what one experiences. The act of contemplation is a guiding principle to interpreting Imran Mir’s work, an approach that reverberates into a practice that grew out of conversations with a community of artists, activists, poets, relatives, and other thinkers in Karachi.

Abdias Nascimento – Being an Event of Love

Abdias Nascimento – Being an Event of Love

Abdias Nascimento (1914-2011) was a story-teller whose mediums of expression embraced as many forms as they could, borrowing the paths at hand to communicate ideas and reflect on the urgencies of his time and place.

On Trials | محاكمات قيد الفحص

On Trials | محاكمات قيد الفحص

In On Trials: A Manual for the Theatre of Law, Jasmina Metwaly and Philip Rizk explore the performativity of the law within Egypt’s spectral legal reality. The publication dissects material collected for their film On Trials, a work-in-progress that uses modes of documentary and fiction making.

Coming to Know

Coming to Know

Coming to Know asks how listening to the past together might transform our sense of the knowledge held in common. It sets aside the visual techniques of the archaeological site, the museum, and the larger project of colonial modernity, and instead constitutes itself as a resonant structure—a future-oriented monument to historically situated listening bodies as well as a dwelling place for community now.

A Slightly Curving Place

A Slightly Curving Place

A Slightly Curving Place asks what it means to listen to the past and its absence which remains. It responds to the practice of acoustic archaeologist Umashankar Manthravadi, whose life and work are a history of sound and technology through the second half of the twentieth century.

Becoming Van Leo

Becoming Van Leo

Becoming Van Leo is a study of the life and times of the late Armenian-Egyptian photographer. Born in 1921, Leon Boyadjian would come to be known as Van Leo, one of the most singular twentieth-century studio photographers in the Arab world.

The Many Headed Hydra Magazine #4

The Many Headed Hydra Magazine #4

The first in a series of publications emerging from the transoceanic platform a language where yesterday and tomorrow are the same word. Kal, kal RITUALS proposes queer and trans feminist ecologies, embodiments and mythmaking.

Momentography of a failure

Momentography of a failure

Momentography of a failure [Addis Ababa] brings essays, timelines, film, photography, and a series of conversations together to deal with Ethiopia’s controversial urbanisation and the transformative space of the city. It explores the gradual transition of rural-urban space, inner-city migration, emerging and disappearing spaces, and commoning in public space.

Not fully human, Not human at all

Not fully human, Not human at all

The project Not Fully Human, Not Human at All looks into processes of dehumanization that are are taking place in Europe. Dehumanization is generally understood as the degradation of human life, that human beings inflict upon each other. The artists taking part in the project question the the obsolete category of the human, by imagining concepts from a new vocabulary of the process that can be called re-humanization

Xenogenesis – The Otolith Group

Xenogenesis – The Otolith Group

The publishing of the first catalogue raisonné on the work of the Otolith Group is timely and comes at a pivotal point in their practice. The work of this London-based artist’s collective comprised of Anjalika Sagar and Kodwo Eshun covers politics of race and diversity and incorporates film making and post-lens-based essayistic aesthetics that explore the temporal anomalies, anthropic inversions, and synthetic alienation of the posthuman, the inhuman, the non-human, and the complexity of the envi-ronmental conditions of life we all face.

Helke Sander: I like chaos, but I don’t know, whether chaos likes me

Helke Sander: I like chaos, but I don’t know, whether chaos likes me

Die monografische Publikation „Helke Sander: I like chaos, but I don’t know, whether chaos likes me“ umfasst Texte aus „Frauen und Film“, der ersten feministischen deutschsprachigen Filmzeitschrift, die 1974 von Helke Sander gegründet und herausgegeben wurde. Die für die Publikation ausgewählten Texte fokussieren zentrale Fragestellungen der feministischen Filmarbeit, ökonomische sowie recht-liche Bedingungen und vor allem deren strukturelle Bedingtheit in gesellschaftlichen Verhältnissen und ihre radikale Kritik daran. 

PERVERSE DECOLONIZATION?

PERVERSE DECOLONIZATION?

New nationalisms, toxic patriotisms and systems of exclusion have been on the rise for the last decade, reinforced by technology and rooted in colonialism, slavery and class oppression. Our time offers a unique twist on these age-old structures: rhetorics of decolonization are now weaponized by autocratic regimes, just as they are normalized in the phantasmagoria of cultural practices.

PERVERSE DECOLONIZATION?

PERVERSE DECOLONIZATION?

Neue Nationalismen, toxische Patriotismen und Ausgrenzungssysteme sind auf dem Vormarsch, verstärkt durch Technologien und verwurzelt in Kolonialismus, Sklaverei und Klassismus. Unsere Gegenwart stellt eine einzigartige Verdrehung dieser uralten Strukturen dar. Die Rhetorik der Dekolonisierung wird heute von autokratischen Regimen missbraucht und durch immer gespenstischere kulturelle Praktiken normalisiert.

La ragione nelle mani

La ragione nelle mani

By drawing a connection between a local condition such as that of an alpine valley in Italy – the Valle Camonica – with its artisan knowledges and some untranslatable words belonging to languages from across the globe, artist Stefano Boccalini brings out territoriality and biodiversity as new-found precious awareness against loss and homologation.