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The artists Nomeda & Gediminas Urbonas are representing Lithuania at the 52nd International Art Exhibition La Biennale di Venezia. This book documents the artistic process of the Villa Lituania project, from its inception in 2006 through to the realization of the first performance event and pavilion exhibition in June 2007. It collects the archival material associated with the challenge of building a pigeon loft in Rome, and a visual and textual artists' diary. Nomeda & Gediminas Urbonas have established an international reputation for their socially inter-active and inter-disciplinary practice that engages with the fabric of everyday life, public social space, and even political space, focu...
Following half a century of neoliberalism, there appears to be a new ideology in the making, called 'commonism.' This book attempts to map these new ideological notions through examples and artistic practices, as well as critical reflection. How are the commons constituted in society? How do they shape the reality of our living together? What strategies and aesthetics do artistic commoners adopt? Is there an alternative and more just future imaginable through the political ideology of the commons? Commonism claims to be better aligned with the ecological and social reality of today than capitalism. Perhaps it is also closer to how social relationships actually function.
Artists and writers portray the disorientation of a world facing climate change. This monumental volume, drawn from a 2020 exhibition at the ZKM Center for Art and Media, portrays the disorientation of life in world facing climate change. It traces this disorientation to the disconnection between two different definitions of the land on which modernizing humans live: the sovereign nation from which they derive their rights, and another one, hidden, from which they gain their wealth—the land they live on, and the land they live from. Charting the land they will inhabit, they find not a globe, not the iconic “blue marble,” but a series of critical zones—patchy, heterogenous, discontinu...
This book challenges conventional notions of the Anthropocene and champions the Hydrocene: the Age of Water. It presents the Hydrocene as a disruptive, conceptual epoch and curatorial theory, emphasising water's pivotal role in the climate crisis and contemporary art. The Hydrocene is a wet ontological shift in eco-aesthetics which redefines our approach to water, transcending anthropocentric, neo-colonial and environmentally destructive ways of relating to water. As the most fundamental of elements, water has become increasingly politicised, threatened and challenged by the climate crisis. In response, The Hydrocene articulates and embodies the distinctive ways contemporary artists relate a...
The Baltic Atlas, a handsome in-depth reader published in conjunction with the Baltic States Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale 2016, asks two questions. The first: What is it possible to imagine? focuses on interpretations, fictional stories, analyses and reflections on ongoing processes, and proposals for the future. The second: What is possible? is an inquiry into the methods, resources, and parameters that define space. Over 30 texts explore what lies ahead as countries that have long suffered uncertainty regarding borders break from modernist ideologies. The chapters are configured like an atlas, with writings overlaid and positioned next to each other to illustrate the Baltic states region as an intensification of networks, agendas and ideas. Relevant on a global scale, Baltic Atlas highlights an open-ended ecology of practices, offering a taste of what is to
Global biennials have proliferated in the contemporary art world, but artists’ engagement with large-scale international exhibitions has a much longer history that has influenced the present in important ways. Going back to the earliest world’s fairs in the nineteenth century, this book argues that “globalism” was incubated in a century of international art contests and today constitutes an important tactic for artists. As world’s fairs brought millions of attendees into contact with foreign cultures, products, and processes, artworks became juxtaposed in a “theater of nations,” which challenged artists and critics to think outside their local academies. From Gustave Courbet’...
The Taste of Art offers a sample of scholarly essays that examine the role of food in Western contemporary art practices. The contributors are scholars from a range of disciplines, including art history, philosophy, film studies, and history. As a whole, the volume illustrates how artists engage with food as matter and process in order to explore alternative aesthetic strategies and indicate countercultural shifts in society. The collection opens by exploring the theoretical intersections of art and food, food art’s historical root in Futurism, and the ways in which food carries gendered meaning in popular film. Subsequent sections analyze the ways in which artists challenge mainstream ide...
"The curators of the ninth Lyon Biennial approached the task of mapping the moment in contemporary art playfully: by commissioning a polyphonic history and geography book. With 70 "players" from around the world, the "game" of how to define the decade unfolded via a series of delegations, invitations and programs in which artists proposed their responses and critics and curators sequenced and challenged them, in turn suggesting artists of their own. Reframing the unfolding present from within, creatively rethinking the role of the artist as well as that of serious play, and reconsidering the now-ubiquitous and decreasingly authoritative biennial exhibition, these myriad voices, framed by only a few rules, became participants in an exercise in collective self-determination. This lavishly illustrated publication, designed by the renowned Parisian firm M/M and edited by Biennial curators Hans Ulrich Obrist and Stephanie Moisdon, includes previously unpublished essays by Michel Houellebecq, Okwui Enwezor and Ralph Rugoff, and functions as a manual for "a decade yet to be named a present that is endlessly arriving.""--Publisher description.
Seeking a broad reexamination of visual culture through the lenses of ecocriticism, environmental justice, and animal studies, this compendium offers a diverse range of art-historical criticism formulated within an ecological context. Picture Ecology brings together scholars whose contributions extend chronologically and geographically from 11th-century Chinese painting to contemporary photography of California wildfires. The book's 17 interdisciplinary essays provide a dynamic, cross-cultural approach to an increasingly vital area of study, emphasizing the environmental dimensions inherent in the content and materials of aesthetic objects. Picture Ecology provides valuable new approaches for considering works of art, in ways that are timely, intellectually stimulating, and universally significant.
Feminisms have played a crucial part in art, art history and curatorial practices over the last forty years. Hence, it is by now imperative to scrutinize the history of feminist theories and methods within both fields. Feminisms is Still Our Name is an anthology that critically debates the current status of feminisms in visual art and its relation to past art histories and possible feminist futures. It brings together essays by leading scholars in order to meet the urgent need both for a critical historiography and for re-vitalizations of feminist practices within written as well as visual narratives of modern and contemporary art. From a variety of perspectives, the editors and contributors...