What is our future and whose voices will announce it? Museum director, curator, and writer Zdenka Badovinac argues that it is the situated voices of people, artworks, and exhibitions, rooted in the local, that can bring incisive, productive change. The call of these voices, in rethinking art, curation, and institutions, is the subject of this powerful essay.

Drawing on documentation from a community of gardeners, cooks, ceramicists, and creatives, Rochester Square in North London’s Camden is a case study for how urban spaces are finding new life.

This third volume in the annual A Series of Open Questions is informed by themes found in the work of artist Cecilia Vicuña, including ecofeminism, indigenous forms of knowledge, poetry and politics, dissolution and extinction, exile, dematerialization, regeneration, and environmental responsibility.

Curator without a System brings together, for the first time in English, a rich variety of essays by the curator Viktor Misiano written between 1988 and 2005. Working in Russia and internationally, Misiano was a key figure in the development of Moscow’s art scene after the breakup of the Soviet Union.

The notion of the handmade has shifted from the margins to center stage. Craft’s value is increasingly recognized across creative, economic, social, cultural, and political contexts. Because of its widespread appropriation, and the dissolution of disciplinary boundaries, the meaning of handicrafts is changing.

In this book, Jacob Lund explores how the conditions for politically engaged art and aesthetic practice, for questioning the present, have changed in recent decades, while considering how our historical present and its temporal quality differ significantly from previous presents.

In The Curatorial Condition, Beatrice von Bismarck considers the field of activity and knowledge that relates to the exhibiting of art and culture. The curatorial, in her analysis, is a domain of practice and meaning with its own conditions, rules, and procedures.

Solitary is a collection of texts written at a wellness center in South Korea designed as a mock prison. This facility is run by an organization called Happitory—a combination of “Happiness” and “Factory.” Happitory offers retreats for teenagers, company employees, government officials, and the general public.

What does it mean to become a gallery owner when you can’t see? How can you access art if you can’t rely on your eyes? In this memoir, Johann König recounts his unique upbringing and equally unique approach to art, one shaped by circumstance and ambition.

Through four case studies, this publication brings to the fore decolonial and other non-hegemonic approaches to the profession of curating in Sweden from the 1960s to the early 2000s, highlighting the work of Carlos Capelán, Elisabet Haglund, Gunilla Lundahl, and Jan-Erik Lundström.

Conversations with the curators, artists and participants from some of the lesser-known public art exhibitions of the 1980s and 90s in Europe and the US, which de-monumentalized public art, dealt with political, gender and social asymmetries, and introduced forms of non-extractivist curating.

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 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.

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?

Elizabeth A. 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.

While machine learning—computer programming designed for taxonomic patterning—provides useful insight into racism and racist behavior, a gap is present in the relationship between machine learning, the racial history of scientific explanation, and the Black lived experience.

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.

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.

It is not easy to define a swamp, even in biology. The term is frequently used to characterize marshes, bogs, mires, wetlands, meadows, and other grey zones between land and water. In that sense, “swamp” is a metonym for a variety of transitional ecosystems and functions. This book invokes that concept as a tool to address the vital urgency of human cohabitation with other forms of life, placing the swamp at the crossroad of disciplines and practices.