Titled Divided We Stand, the 9th Busan Biennale in South Korea focused on the theme of divided territories caused by war, conflict, or colonization, and also considered individuals’ feelings of separation, anxiety, fear, or paranoia that result from such geopolitical traumas.

Too Much World gathers a series of essays and close readings of Steyerl’s films from the past ten years. Newly commissioned texts by Sven Lütticken, Karen Archey, Ana Teixeira Pinto, and Nick Aikens, alongside writings by Thomas Elsaesser, Pablo Lafuente, David Riff, and Steyerl, are spliced with over one hundred pages of color stills.

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.

When the flexibility, certainty, and freedom promised by being part of a critical outside are considered as extensions of recent advances in economic exploitation, does the field of art then become the uncritical, complicit inside of something far more compelling?

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.