This text is a recount of exploring the algorithmic intricacies of hovering interactions on YouTube video thumbnails. The explorative debugging practice used offers a glimpse into the material implications of hovering, seeing it as a form of exploited labor. Each hover activates a convoluted set of instructions resulting in hardcoded values for what is considered productive and unproductive hovering.
The institutional archive as a vessel for historical Black British sonic histories is one of precarity, absence and loss. Its failures are the catalyst for communal gatherings and the expansion of alternative research activisms such as the DWN (Decolonising Wikipedia Network), collectively using Wikipedia to reframe and add to the database under the «lens of anti-racism and decoloniality.»
Figures of speech are a tongue’s gift to the excessive. Some languages rely on this gift enough to turn its usage into an addiction, speakers into addicts, and poetic metaphors into national history. Consider this: is it possible to argue against metaphors—or some other linguistic devices like analogies or similes—without resorting to the thing itself, in some shape? If we can’t stop shaping (and figurating) or stage-designing with words, there can be no incorrect way to formulate such figurations. This is an appeal to use it all gloriously wrong.
One day, walking in the streets of Milan, the Brazilian composer Carlos Gomes happens upon an Italian translation of Il Guarany. The love story between an indigenous warrior and the daughter of a Portuguese nobleman seemed a perfect plot for a new opera, aligned with the imperial desire for compelling national narratives and the European fascination for everything exotic. But what the maestro didn’t know is that going back in time can have consequences, and together with the sixteenth characters he evoked, other forces came into play.
Scientific research and its communication are usually forced into a mold to be considered rigorous. How can poetry serve as a healer, to mediate between the cryptic language of academia and the rest of the world? «Closed Surveillance Circuit» merges poetry with an essayistic approach, exploring themes such as hardware, software, image theory, the obsolete natural-artificial binary, and the experience of life mediated by contemporary technological devices. The poems were originally published by the Barcelona-based publishing house Cielo Santo in 2024.
In this conversation, the editors of the journal issue «Imagination as a Site of Struggle» reflect on intersectional writing on art, media, and technology, thinking through ways of transgressing academic writing. Based on their respective backgrounds and practices, they discuss weaving together creative modes of critical knowledge production and engagement to look beyond the content of the writing to the practice of writing itself.
The question ‹Where are you from?› has typically linked whiteness to Europe and marked non-whites as perpetual outsiders. Black Local History along the Slash of the Im/Possible examines omissions and gaps in Swiss archives and historiography, as it relates to black lives, and calls for critical fabulations as a method and practice of redress, to re-imagine what was, as well as what could be.
Feminist care ethics teach us that digitizing archival collections is just the first step in series of ongoing relationships. Research at two different digital community archives—the South Asian American Digital Archive (SAADA) and the Texas After Violence Project (TAVP)—reveals that the impact of archives goes well beyond academic researchers, catalyzing profound emotional shifts in record creators, storytellers, community members, and future communities.
While the historical relationship between textile work and a gendered division of labor has recently gained prominence in art history, the parallels between the loom and the computer have received less attention. In this essay, I discuss Charlotte Johannesson’s solo show Save as Art? at Friart to explore the connections between weaving and coding as well as between radical leftist politics and 1960s–1970s countercultures.
Bea Schlingelhoffs Ausstellung Accounting Confessions im Neuen Berliner Kunstverein beschäftigt sich mit den architektonischen und finanziellen Rahmenbedingungen des Kunstvereins. Christina Irrgang zeichnet in ihrer Besprechung die Eingriffe der Künstlerin nach und fragt, wie diese es ermöglichen, Alternativen denkbar zu machen.
In this essay, Rose-Anne Gush discusses the exhibition Illiberal Lives at Ludwig Forum in Aachen, examining how unfreedom subtends art’s freedom, with attention given to its conflicted and ambivalent national impulses and representations. Her remarks center on the exhibition’s conceptualization and on specific positions within it that reveal this unfreedom in liberalism’s unfulfilled promises. The essay critically reflects on works evoking images and practices that attempt to exist beyond the capture of liberalism’s institutions.
Die Neuausrichtung der Shedhalle Zürich 1994 wäre ohne die Schule F+F und ihren Einfluss auf die Zürcher Kulturszene wohl nicht denkbar gewesen. Denn die Schule F+F kultivierte in Zürich die Haltung und das Kunstverständnis, jenseits vom Kunstmarkt selbstbestimmt aktiv zu werden und die Kunst mit gesellschaftlichen Fragen zu verknüpfen. Die Repolitisierung der Kunst in der Shedhalle nach 1994 kann als Weiterentwicklung und Aktualisierung dessen gelesen werden, was die Kunstschule F+F 1971 begonnen hat.
Was bedeutet es, auf dem Land zu leben? Wo und wie verlaufen die Grenzen zwischen gebauter und gewachsener Natur? Vom Innenleben einer Aussiedlerin erzählt der Film Horse Opera von Moyra Davey. Die kanadische Künstlerin präsentierte ihn auf der diesjährigen Berlinale – 73. Internationale Filmfestspiele Berlin – in der Sektion «Forum». Nach zwei Saisons Winterschlaf mutmasst diese Kolumne, Pick a Piece, warum dieser Film die gesamte Stimmungslage des Festivals repräsentieren könnte: die anhaltende Dringlichkeit neuer Formen von Empathie.
I traveled to Amsterdam with a group of students from IZK - Institute for Contemporary Art at Graz University of Technology, my colleague Philipp Sattler and friend, curator, Andrea Popelka, to view the exhibition Charging Myths by the artist collective On-Trade-Off and other configurations of artists and scholars critically investigating the energy transition. In our case, this research relates to an exploratory tunnel, dug 1.6km into the Koralm mountain range in the Austrian Alps, where lithium spodumene was found. European Lithium, a company headquartered in Australia, plans to make this mine (among others in the region) operational by early 2025, extracting the spodumene to send it for processing in Saudi Arabia. This review essay addresses the exhibition Charging Myths and its narrative of lithium extraction in relation to the global energy transition, its histories, social and material relations, and its aesthetic and political potential.
L’entretien ci-dessous a été mené par la curatrice et critique d’art Julie Pellegrin avec les artistes Catalina Insignares et Myriam Lefkowitz au fil de messages vocaux, de rencontres physiques et de sessions de pratiques, avec pour point de convergence la facultad, un projet artistique pensé pour des personnes en situation d’exil. Les trois interlocutrices y évoquent des expériences somatiques et sensorielles, des voyages imaginaires, l’amitié, leurs visions artistiques, mais aussi les changements de direction parfois nécessaires. Cet échange au long cours constitue un extrait de l’ouvrage (Non) Performance : pratiques artistiques et formes du refus qui sera publié par Julie Pellegrin chez T&P Publishing en 2024.
Prompted by interwoven structural and personal stresses, artist-filmmakers Henry Bradley, Solveig Qu Suess, and Blanca Pujals started having monthly meetings in January 2022 to share and collectively reflect on their practices. These regular exchanges provided a support structure, nurturing their individual practices and enabling change and mutual influence. In a recent screening and artist talk at the Critical Media Lab in Basel, they decided to intertwine their projects, tracing thematic threads across techno-scientific optics, intergenerational trauma, memory, and modeled futures, rather than displaying individual works. For Rehearsing Retreat, the artist-filmmakers reflect on the method they developed together and how it informs the design and conceptualization of film screenings and presentations.
The wooden chair sits hard under my bones, my neck is tense. My view is partly obstructed by the heads of students. The projection field is small compared to the size of the art space in Zurich West, where the public event takes place. On view is Andrea Fraser’s 2022 video performance This meeting is being recorded. The artist reenacts parts of Group Relations meetings she had held with other white- and female-identifying people about manifestations of internal racism in the U.S. I am following this well-tempered conversation. And while I analyze the group dynamics in the film from a certain distance, my chair suddenly begins to tremble. This piece is a field report on the collapsing boundaries between art work, audience and class room, on confused speakers-positions, shared silences and monophonic discussions.
In Eraser, ihrer ersten institutionellen Einzelausstellung in Deutschland, präsentiert Angharad Williams eine Serie grossformatiger Kohlezeichnungen verschiedener Automobilmodelle, die scheinbar schwerelos im Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf, zu schweben scheinen. Williams’ Darstellung des Autos verfremdet seine alltägliche Wahrnehmung, und im Zusammenspiel mit den weiteren Arbeiten – darunter ein Filmstill aus Zabriskie Point und einer Videoaufnahme eines Erwachenden – erscheint es nicht nur als Fetisch- und Liebesobjekt, sondern auch als politisches Vehikel.
Kunsthochschulen stehen in einem konfliktuösen Verhältnis zur Hochschullandschaft. Während im Ausland Kunsthochschulen ihre Abgänger:innen ein PhD verleihen können, sind wir in der Schweiz davon noch weit entfernt. Für die Publikation «Intelligences multiples du design» (MétisPresses 2022) seziert Rachel Mader die Situation und legt die Interessen der in die Diskussion involvierten Akteur:innen offen. In der KolumneInstitutional Diary veröffentlichen wir erstmals die deutsche Fassung des Essays.
Das Kunsthaus Glarus zeigt in zwei Räumen zwei Videos von Silvia Kolbowski: Who will save us? (2022) und Missing Asher (2019). Die Arbeiten widmen sich aus jeweils unterschiedlichen Perspektiven der Herausbildung dysfunktionaler Dynamiken in kapitalistischen und neoliberalen Gesellschaftsformen.
