Tensta Museum: Reports from New Sweden was a kaleidoscopic curatorial project run by Tensta konsthall from 2013 to 2019 that dealt with the history and memory of the Stockholm suburb of Tensta and its inhabitants. The late-modernist suburb can also be said to be part of “New Sweden”—a place of diversity, struggle, contradiction, and solidarity distinct from the image of the twentieth-century social welfare state.

The choreographic turn in the visual arts from 1958 to 1965 can be identified by the sudden emergence of works created by different visual artists around the world. Dedicated to the renewed encounter between dance and performance and the institutions of global contemporary art, this publication proposes that a “new performance turn” has emerged in the second decade of the century.

This reader is the result of Joanna Warsza’s course at the Salzburg International Summer Academy of Fine Arts in 2015. It examines four recent cases of boycotts, presenting their political, ideological, and economic contexts, timelines, statements, as well as interviews with parties involved. It reflects on how certain biennials became the place where the power of art is renegotiated and why one simply “can’t work like this.”

A symbolic interruption of everyday life, Yael Bartana’s Two Minutes of Standstill was a political act, social sculpture, and collective performance. This catalogue reveals the ideas behind the work and the process that led to its realization. The book includes several essays that discuss possible interpretations and consequences of the artwork, questioning the role of history and commemoration in Germany today.

Focusing on the startling increase of nationalism across Europe—made palpable in manifestations of fascist tendencies and the cult of heritage—this project points to the possibility and power of art to imagine futures that are not irrevocably determined by the present, but are invested with struggles fought here and now.

We Are Living on a Star takes its title from a tapestry by Hannah Ryggen that hung in a government building known in Oslo until July 22, 2011. The events of July 22 transformed normality as we knew it and, consequently, the predictable as well. The artists and writers participating in We Are Living on a Star (the book and the exhibition it accompanies) contend with a range of issues relating to history, contemporaneity, normality, and expression.

Because the curatorial has clear performative sides, ones that seek to challenge the status quo, it also includes elements of choreography, orchestration, and administrative logistics—like all practices working with defining, preserving, and mediating cultural heritage in a wider sense. Is curating therefore essentially an act of translation? If so, with what purpose, and can it be performed elsewhere?