In spite of the heightened interest in the curatorial since the late twentieth century, the structural conditions and potentials underpinning its special sociocultural status have yet to be defined.

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.

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.

Unpayable Debt examines the relationship between coloniality, raciality, and global capital through a black feminist poethical framework. 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.

Alienation and dire frustration mount as an unnamed woman—a mother—struggles to survive in the face of state repression, neighborhood surveillance, extreme weather, and familial control.

Elizabeth 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.

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.

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?

Through Nida Sinnokrot’s agriculture research platform Sakiya and other ongoing projects that span moving image, sculpture, and socially engaged practice, Palestine Is Not a Garden examines the potential to develop counter-strategies that effectively decolonize the social, political, economic, and narrative structures that govern relationships to nature in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.

This first comprehensive survey of Joseph Kosuth’s work with public media centers on his pioneering project The Second Investigation (1968–74). The indexical work takes the form of anonymous advertisements in media based on a taxonomy of the world developed in the early nineteenth century by Roget for use in his thesaurus. Marking the start of Kosuth’s sustained engagement with public media, this work anticipated the media orientation of New York postmodernism beginning in the late 1970s.