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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...
Contributors consider the vital urgency of human cohabitation with other forms of life, beginning a dialogue with possible futures. It is not easy to define a swamp, even in biology. The term is frequently used to characterize marshes, bogs, mires, wetlands, meadows, and other grey zones between land and water. In that sense, “swamp” is a metonym for a variety of transitional ecosystems and functions. This book invokes that concept as a tool to address the vital urgency of human cohabitation with other forms of life, placing the swamp at the crossroad of disciplines and practices. It is more than a biological ecosystem; it is a milieu of manifold sympoietic relationships, a locus of imag...
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...
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
"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.
An unparalleled how-to guide to citizen-sensing practices that monitor air pollution Modern environments are awash with pollutants churning through the air, from toxic gases and intensifying carbon to carcinogenic particles and novel viruses. The effects on our bodies and our planet are perilous. Citizens of Worlds is the first thorough study of the increasingly widespread use of digital technologies to monitor and respond to air pollution. It presents practice-based research on working with communities and making sensor toolkits to detect pollution while examining the political subjects, relations, and worlds these technologies generate. Drawing on data from the Citizen Sense research group...
British photographer Tariq Zaidi presents a fashion subculture of Kinshasa & Brazzaville: La Sape, Societe des Ambianceurs et des Personnes Elegantes. Its followers are known as 'Sapeurs' ('Sapeuses' for women). Most have ordinary day jobs as taxi-drivers, tailors and gardeners, but as soon as they clock off they transform themselves into debonair dandies. Sashaying through the streets they are treated like rock stars - turning heads, bringing 'joie de vivre' to their communities and defying their circumstances.
Sixteen artists from 9 countries created works of art inspired by ecology and the environment that were specifically developed for the exhibition, in dialogue with the MAMBO curatorial team. Most of the artistic projects were specially commissioned for the 32nd São Paulo Biennial. "Incerteza viva is a collective process that began in early 2015 and brings together teachers, students, artists, activists, educators, scientists and thinkers in Brazil, Colombia and other places." --Page [1].
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’...