Enter the New York art scene of the 1970s and ’80s with fresh eyes. Award-winning author and curator, Omar Kholeif, weaves us through the many worlds of Sonia Balassanian, an Iranian American artist of Armenian descent who came to renown with her political art in the 1980s and early ’90s. In these pages, the author delves into poetry and Lyrical Abstraction, as well as collage and portraiture developed in response to the American hostage crisis in Iran. Travel from the exhibition halls of MoMA, New York, to the monasteries of rural Armenia.

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.

A cross-disciplinary and critical inquiry into the forms and practices of assembly-making across histories and geographies, with contributions by artists, architects, activists, and scholars, explores the potential of assemblies to reimagine the way democracy is practiced.

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?

While machine learning—computer programming designed for taxonomic patterning—offers useful insights into racism and racist behavior, a gap is present in the relationship between machine learning and its connection to the racial history of science 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.