The most significant critical, theoretical, and art historical texts by the artist and writer Aria Dean.

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?

INTRA! INTRA! details an ambitious and provocative project that explores human and posthuman forms of agency within a context of spatial research. The project situates itself around developments in artificial intelligence and technical advances in the mapping and creation of nonhuman subjectivities in relation to the presence of human and nonhuman bodies.

In response to recent discussions about the value assigned to artworks, art critic and theorist Isabelle Graw introduces the term “value reflection.” Rather than an objective quality, value reflection is the potential for the specific artistic labor expended for artworks to be found in them. This book focuses on the artistic production of writer Francis Ponge and artists Jack Whitten and Banksy, and engages with the different types of value reflection detected in their work.

In elegantly written miniatures, Graw captures radical political, social, and cultural changes that occurred between 2014 and 2017, analyzing how these macro-shifts reach into her own life. She addresses topics ranging from the general turn to the political right, as seen in Brexit and Trump, to #MeToo, men with beards, and Balenciaga. While registering the symptoms of a world that clearly feels different, Graw also meditates on irretrievable personal losses.

Dizziness is more than feeling dizzy. In this multidisciplinary reader, artists, philosophers, and researchers from a range of experimental sciences and cultural studies trace dizziness not only as a phenomenon of sensory input impacting our vestibular system, but also as a twofold phenomenon of “sense”—creating meaning and triggering emotions.

The questioning of thingness is an integral part of presentation and has informed and shaped the social relevance of the field of the curatorial. Immanent to presentation as a mode of being (public) in the world, the curatorial has the potential to address, visualize, and question the central effects of the changing status and function of things.

In 1985, the philosopher Jean-François Lyotard curated “Les Immatériaux” at Centre Georges Pompidou. Through its experimental layout and hybrid presentation of objects, technologies, and ideas, this pioneering exploration of virtuality reflected on the exhibition as a medium of communication, and anticipated a deeper engagement with immersive and digital space in both art and theory.

Stop and Go: Nodes of Transformation and Transition is a research project by architect and artist Michael Hieslmair and cultural historian Michael Zinganel that focuses on the transformation of the informal hubs, terminals, and nodes along Pan-European transport corridors in Eastern Europe and Vienna.

The seventh volume in the Fogo Island Arts publication series accompanies the eponymous exhibition curated by Alexandra McIntosh and Nicolaus Schafhausen and presented at the Fogo Island Art Gallery in 2016.

This book outlines a critical global fashion theory from a postcolonial perspective. It analyzes fashion as a cultural, historical, social, and political phenomenon involved in and affected by histories of colonial domination, anti-colonial resistance, and processes of decolonization and globalization. Stemming from a range of different disciplines, the contributions in this book reflect the multidisciplinary and diverse nature of postcolonial fashion research today.

Merlin Carpenter considers how “The Outside Can’t Go Outside” has been inserted into contemporary art theory following the financial crisis of 2007/8. The book focuses on the idea that the value of art is located in unpaid mental, educational, and communicational labor that is gradually accrued and then exploited according to the logic of Marx’s central thesis on exploitation.

Following the tradition of classical theories of painting based on exchanges with artists, Isabelle Graw’s The Love of Painting considers the art form not as something fixed, but as a visual and discursive material formation with the potential to fascinate owing to its ability to produce the fantasy of liveliness.

Border Thinking: Disassembling Histories of Racialized Violence aims to question and provide answers to current border issues in Europe. Central to this investigation is a refugee crisis that is primarily a crisis of global Western capitalism and its components: modernization, nationalism, structural racism, dispossession, and social, political, and economic violence.

Rethinking Density considers new perspectives related to the category of density, which for a long time has been part of urban-planning discourses and is now regaining the attention of artists and practitioners from a number of different disciplines. In an interplay of models, this publication combines research from cultural studies, artistic research, sound studies as well as architectural and urban theory.

In this collection of essays, art historian and critic Sven Lütticken focuses on aesthetic practice in a rapidly expanding cultural sphere. He analyzes its transformation by the capitalist cultural revolution, whose reshaping of art’s autonomy has wrought a field of afters and posts.

Edgar Leciejewski spent six months as an artist-in-residence with Fogo Island Arts in 2014. Tones brings together new work stemming from the Leipzig-based artist’s time on the island, including large-scale collages, photographs of natural elements, and precarious sculptures composed of objects found on the shore. Taken together the works raise questions on how we contemplate ideas of nature.

A curatorial situation is always one of hospitality. This publication analyzes the curatorial within the current sociopolitical context, through key topics concerning immigration, conditions along borders, and accommodations for refugees.

Spaces of Commoning: Artistic Research and the Utopia of the Everyday is the outcome of a research project pursued by a group of artists, architects, and social theorists. In the face of an exhilarating politics of accumulation and dispossession, the group explores commoning as the subject as well as the means of its study.

This publication focuses on the practice of curating in Southeast Asia, a region experiencing a time of increased global visibility as well as nation and institution building. The diversity of voices in this publication mirrors the complexity of the region itself: its various curatorial spaces, infrastructures, and political systems.

Grey light is a major new work by London-based artist Hannah Rickards commissioned by Fogo Island Arts. The publication features texts by Melissa Gronlund and Will Holder and striking new photographic imagery drawn from the installation’s physical materials and production process. Like Rickards’s work, the publication aims to bridge the distance between visual experience and its expression in language, whether spoken, written, or gestural.

Although the format of the rehearsal is used across a number of disciplines—film and theater as well as fine arts—it has been scarcely considered in historical and contemporary art discourses. With this in mind, Putting Rehearsals to the Test investigates the role and function of the rehearsal as a methodology, modus operandi, medium, site of representation, and reflection on processes of artistic production.

In her innovative take on early video art, Ina Blom considers the widespread notion that video technology was endowed with lifelike memory and agency. Blom documents, among other things, video’s emergence through the framework of painting, its identification with biological life, its exploration of the outer limits of technical and mental time control, and its construction of new realms of labor and collaboration.

In response to recent developments in pictorial practice and critical discourse, Painting beyond Itself seeks new ways to approach and historicize the question of the medium. Reaching back to the earliest theoretical and institutional definitions of painting, this book focuses on the changing role of materiality in establishing painting as the privileged practice, discourse, and institution of modernity.

The question of life has always been one of modernity’s main preoccupations, but it was the advent of the camera—with its ability to record moving creatures—that initiated a new phase in the human investigation of animal behavior. In the world of contemporary art, animals now occupy center stage. This volume brings together theory and art, showing how both turned to animals to find new ways of problematizing “life.”

Pink Labor on Golden Streets: Queer Art Practices builds on an exhibition and conference at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna that explored the contradictory standpoints of queer art practices, conceptions of the body, and ideas of “queer abstraction,” a term coined by Judith Jack Halberstam that raises questions to do with (visual) representations in the context of gender, sexuality, and desire.

With sculpture as a leading reference, the contributions address theory, aesthetics, and technology: Do current philosophical movements such as new materialism and object-oriented ontology affect our notion of the art object? Does so-called post-Internet art have a future? And how does the Internet of Things relate to objects and things in art?

This unique publication, filled with annotated images, presents an inventory of design, furniture, and textiles produced for Fogo Island Inn. Each piece is a collaborative effort between artisans and craftspeople living on the island and designers from various parts of the world who were invited to engage with the history and communities of Fogo Island and Change Islands in Newfoundland, Canada.

First published in German in 1987, this is artist and writer Jutta Koether’s meditation on painting. In novella form, f. follows several disembodied female characters as they consider velvet, coral, the curtain, money, color, red.

Not Now! Now! engages with the politics of time in art: historical narratives and memory, the unforeseen rhythms of time, and the challenge of visualizing time. The book connects the postcolonial and queer debate around chronopolitics with artistic strategies that introduce breaks, stutter time, use citations and anachronisms, and introduce deferrals and collapses between time and meaning.

This fourth publication in the series with Fogo Island Arts includes stunning color photographs of Kevin Schmidt’s installation and film EDM House (2013) plus reflections on Schmidt’s practice from leading writers.

Focusing on time instead of the typically predominant category of space, this publication—the second volume in the Cultures of the Curatorial series—takes up the key aesthetic, social, political, and economic issues of the early twenty-first century running through the field and framed by the axes of exhibiting and the temporal.

Performing the Sentence brings into dialogue the ways that “performative thinking” has developed in different national and institutional contexts, within different disciplines in the arts, and the conditions under which it has developed in experimental art schools. This anthology is a collection of twenty-one essays and conversations that weave in and out of the two key areas of research and teaching within performative fine arts.

Throughout the 1980s and early ’90s, Kim Gordon—widely known as a founding member of the influential band Sonic Youth—produced a series of writings on art and music. Ranging from neo-Conceptual artworks to broader forms of cultural criticism, these rare texts are brought together in this volume for the first time.

The work of art has often been a battleground—its decorative and formal aspects positioned against its nature as an embodiment of cognitive acts. Leonardo da Vinci’s claim that art be a “cosa mentale” is winning at last: recent debates around art schools and their methods, of which this book is a vast survey, demonstrate that, now more than ever, art is considered the result of a thinking process.

Based on the findings of an interdisciplinary research project, Transcultural Modernisms maps out the network of encounters, transnational influences, and local appropriations of an architectural modernity manifested in various ways in housing projects in India, Israel, Morocco, and China.

An invitation to undertake an urgent architectural and political thought experiment: to rethink today’s struggles for justice and equality not only from the historical perspective of revolution, but also from that of a continued struggle for decolonization; consequently, to rethink the problem of political subjectivity not from the point of view of a Western conception of a liberal citizen but rather from that of the displaced and extraterritorial refugee.

This catalogue accompanies Taylor’s exhibition “The Story of Stripes and Dots (Chapter 5)” at Fogo Island Gallery, which follows his two-part residency with Fogo Island Arts in 2010 and 2012. Featuring essays by Zoë Gray and Saelan Twerdy, and Taylor in conversation with Patrick Staff and Robin Simpson, the book also presents the artist’s portfolio An Index Describing the Individual 19 Thoughts about Stripes and Dots Arranged on a Vitrine Made of Brass and Glass.

In the last two hundred years, “art” has become one of the most fetishized concepts in Western civilization. The idea according to which certain people—also known as artists—would provide the world with their inner vision is a modern myth, but has proved to be a contemporary reality. Since so much art now considers itself as cultural production, mystical creation has been turned into a minority paradigm.

In Kate Newby’s site-responsive installations, handcrafted and found objects are often combined with words or phrases to form artworks that engage with the particularities of place. The New Zealand artist’s intimate engagement with materials and nonhierarchical involvement with space exhibit a sophisticated understanding of the role that architecture plays in the shaping of thought and perception, our sense of self in the body and in community.

We have entered a post-post-studio age, and find ourselves with a new studio model: the transdisciplinary. This volume delves into four pioneering transdisciplinary studios—Jorge Pardo Sculpture, Konstantin Grcic Industrial Design, Studio Olafur Eliasson, and Åbäke—by observing and interviewing the practitioners and their assistants.

In Playing the City: Interviews, Matthias Ulrich, curator of the Schirn project, asks fifty-one of the involved artists ten central questions about the participatory and collaborative art context. Their answers and comments provide a telling picture of the multiple forms of interactive, cooperative, and interdisciplinary practices in contemporary art.

Tecoh is a sprawling series of buildings designed by the artist Jorge Pardo deep in the Yucatán jungle. Taking over six years to fabricate, and engaging existing ruins of a nineteenth-century hacienda, the project is by far the artist’s most ambitious work to date. This book offers the only available glimpse of the project, as it was primarily conceived as a private residence.

Cultures of the Curatorial assumes a curatorial turn in contemporary cultural practice and discourse. Coming from a variety of disciplines and professional backgrounds, the contributors exemplify the entanglement of theory and practice, consider recent developments within the curatorial field, allow self-reflexive analysis, and explore the conditions—disciplinary, institutional, economic, political, and regional—under which art and culture become public.

Painting has demonstrated remarkable perseverance in the expanding field of contemporary art and the surrounding ecology of media images. It appears, however, to have dispelled its own once-uncontested material basis: no longer confined to being synonymous with a flat picture plane hung on the wall, today, painting instead tends to emphasize the apparatus of its appearance and the conduits of its circulation.

Sanctuary is a fiction set in the ruins of a Modernist building on the outskirts of a city in Northern Europe. The structure, a Catholic seminary built in the 1960s and abandoned twenty years later, embodies the failure of certain ambitions: architectural, civic, and spiritual.

For the last decade, Markus Weisbeck has been redefining the prevailing client-designer relationship and subsequently challenging what constitutes a graphic design practice today. This pocket book presents a selection of seminal graphic design projects developed by Weisbeck and his firm, Surface, over the last ten years.

Net Pioneers 1.0 discusses media art history with a new, interdisciplinary look at the historical, social, and economic dynamics of our contemporary, networked society.

The Mechanical Copula is the first collection of short stories by Maria Fusco. Stripping bare the accord of culture and commodity, this sequence of stories tracks the slimy path of social mobility with serious playfulness and an eye for the absurd.

Compiled here for the first time, the critic, artist, gallerist, dealer, translator John Kelsey’s selected essays gamesomely convey some of the most poignant challenges in the art world and in the many social roles it creates.

Comprised of a lecture by Christoph Menke and two respective responses to it by Daniel Loick and Isabelle Graw, The Power of Judgment both attests to the importance of judgment in art criticism and argues against its determining verdicts.

Nakano Sakaue documents a series of photographs realized by Olaf Holzapfel during a residency in Tokyo. The artist has depicted a kind of residue from the city’s buildings: neon lights, images, and street signs, which are featured as so many promises for orientation.

“Crimes against humanity,” especially genocide, have been excluded from amnesty since the Nuremburg Trials. On a cultural level, oblivion by decree becomes an obligation to remember. This reversal is well-intended, but it opens up critical questions: Can memory be permanently established? Is it possible to maintain it in a monument?

If modernism was a return to the origin of art or of society, to their purification with the aim of rediscovering their essence, then our own century’s modernity will be invented, precisely, in opposition to all radicalism, dismissing both the bad solution of re-enrooting in identities as well as the standardization of imaginations decreed by economic globalization.

Documentary practices make up one of the most significant and complex tendencies within art during the last two decades. This anthology seeks to overcome the existing dispersion of texts on these practices and offer new perspectives on this crucial theme.

Daniel Birnbaum’s The Hospitality of Presence is a study of the concept of otherness in Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology. In the late 1990s it gained international attention in academic circles. It was reviewed favorably in specialized philosophy journals such as Review of Metaphysics and quoted extensively, most notably by Paul Ricoeur in one of the legendary French thinker’s last books.

This is the first extensive survey catalogue of the work of Vancouver-based artist Ian Wallace—a key figure of the extraordinary artistic ferment in the Canadian city of Vancouver and a pioneer and theorist of its internationally regarded tradition of photo-conceptualism.

Since the mid-1990s, contemporary art has been booming like never before. There is more of everything—more artists, more collectors, more galleries, more art fairs, more museums, more biennials … with one exception: criteria with which the art of the moment can be understood, judged, praised and, if need be, damned.

Canvases and Careers Today brings together contributions from the eponymous conference organized by the Institut für Kunstkritik, Städelschule, Frankfurt am Main. Its goal is to provide deeper insights and more complexity to current debates on the relationship between criticism, art, and the market.

Under Pressure gathers together the contributions to the same-titled conference held at the Institut für Kunstkritik from 2006–07. Starting from the premise that cultural producers are currently more exposed to external pressures, the conferences proposed that today these external constraints have to be considered as an integral part of artistic production.

A philosophical essay on time, phenomenology and beyond, Daniel Birnbaum’s Chronology was reviewed in frieze as a “compelling and sophisticated take on the common theme of Deleuzian immanence.”

Higgie’s prose is fragmentary yet lucid, and the novel evokes the inextricable beauty and terror of Dadd’s sensory journey, while raising some of the philosophical questions it poses about art, language and other minds. Bedlam is a mystery story in which we search for clues as to how an individual might go from precocious talent to parricide.
Oliver Harris, Times Literary Supplement

In all of his works the Danish artist demonstrates an interest in an expanded notion of ecology, one that encompasses cultural history and sociopolitics as well as natural resources.

This book provides a theoretical and critical framework for examining how contemporary art and cinema can still hold out against an experience of vision and of the “visual.”

Pecafil discusses issues of art in public space and the social-political implications of Michael Beutler’s work.

A philosophical essay on time, phenomenology and beyond, Daniel Birnbaum’s Chronology was presented in frieze as a “compelling and sophisticated take on the common theme of Deleuzian immanence.”

Written in seven chapters and seven styles, this book constitutes the first novel by the Israeli artist and filmmaker Keren Cytter (*1977).

In the essay Postproduction. Culture as Screenplay: How Art Reprograms the World, French writer and curator Nicolas Bourriaud discusses how, since the early nineties, an ever increasing number of artworks have been created on the basis of preexisting works; more and more artists interpret, reproduce, re-exhibit, or use works made by others or available cultural products.

Giving the Story a Treatment is the first comprehensive publication on Canadian artist Alex Morrison. Best known for his documentations on the skater culture, Morrison’s videos, photographs and drawings reveal the growing aestheticisation of the political within the cultural spectrum.

Cosmograms is conceived as an extension of Melik Ohanian’s film Seven Minutes Before (2004), a cinematic allegory of both the exhaustion of a certain narrative form and the new privilege accorded to space over time. Collecting twenty-three texts by authors from diverse fields of investigation and research, Cosmograms attempts to map the multiple coordinates of this new spatial paradigm.

“Cerith Wyn Evans” provides a comprehensive overview of the artist’s body of work.

In Four or Five Roses, some 45 narratives by children are presented in the form of a monologue. Edited from numerous interviews and conversations recorded on playgrounds in South Africa, Peter Friedl creates a hybrid genre that is both fictionalised speech and serious counter-voice.

Adorno: The Possibility of the Impossible (Vol. I) comprises theoretical essays which investigate the relevance of Adorno’s critical theory for the present.

How can the events in which we are supposed to participate be translated into experience? How can we represent ourselves in a History that is being written in terms of the economy and the stock market? Along these questions, author Jean-Charles Massera discusses the works of various artists (Vito Acconci, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Pierre Huyghe, et al.) and film-makers (Jean-Luc Godard, Wong Kar-wai, Pier Paolo Pasolini, et al.).

The exhibition deutschemalereizweitausenddrei (german painting two thousand and three) is a response to the needs and social circumstances that have given rise to painting’s present (return to) popularity, and to the strategies young artists are developing to meet this.

In his seminal essay, author George Baker links Gerard Byrne’s work to theater and notes that the presence of avant-garde dramatist Bertolt Brecht has never been less discussed, but more widely explored, than in the last decade of artistic practice.

Adorno. The Possibility of the Impossible (Vol. II) documents the Adorno exhibition which looks at the connection between contemporary art and Adorno’s writings, with the visual arts becoming a central platform for comparison to Adorno’s main subjects.

Gebärden und Ausdruck (Gestures and Expression) is the first comprehensive publication on the work of German artist Kai Althoff.

“Odenbach’s art … criss-crosses the structural hybridization of video-based conceptualism with reflection on the lived experience of globalization.”

—Kobena Mercer

Always There offers a comprehensive survey of American artist Julia Scher’s work. The artist’s installations and performances have always featured a complex relation to techno-social control, demonstrating our complicity in the proliferating technologies used to surveil both our physical and virtual identities.

Anthony Vidler interprets contemporary buildings and projects in light of the uncanny as a metaphor for a fundamentally “unhomely” modern condition.

Non-Places questions the redefined relationship between public and private space as well as the phenomenon of modern “nonplaces,” which appear to be everywhere and nowhere at the same time: airports, shopping malls, anonymous new suburbs, or international franchise companies.

The central theme of Changing Society: Lithuania is the state of transition in a Post-Soviet state, which has achieved political stability but is still looking for appropriate images to portray itself in the domestic spheres of politics and society.

The exhibition New Heimat documents how the phenomenon of globalization does not necessarily lead to the disappearance of local cultures, but can instead give birth to new, hybrid cultures, in which Western influences experience transformation and traditional cultures are assimilated.

Neue Welt (New World) documents a group show which investigates the political and social restructuring of recent years. Going beyond one-dimensional statements, the texts discuss the redefinition of public space and the effects of a globalized economy.

“Nachdruck / Imprint” brings together a selection of writings produced by Harun Farocki over the past three decades. They provide an insight into Farocki’s filmic work and its underlying querying of the status, production, and perception of images conveyed technically and through media.

Neue Kunstkritik (New Art Criticism) documents a symposium held at the Frankfurter Kunstverein in September 1999.

This publication constitutes the first comprehensive documentation of the work of British artist Liam Gillick. With numerous illustrations and a seminal essay by Michael Archer, the book traces Gillick’s works from the beginning in the late 1980s up to the present.

Urlaub constitutes Genzken’s multilayered inquiry into the meaning of work and leisure. “Artists never take vacations,” Genzken says, “but the entire art system urgently needs a vacation.”

five or six contains texts selected from more than 100 reviews, articles, and catalogue essays published by Liam Gillick since 1989. The book includes some of the formal, social, and ideological concerns that have merged in Gillick’s “What if? Scenario.”

Dutch artists Jeroen de Rijke and Willem de Rooij received international recognition for their seemingly luxurious and self-reflexive 35mm films. This first comprehensive monograph discusses how Dutch painting, Minimal Art, and film conventions become the backdrop for a “cinema in its decontextualized form.”