Peter Osborne: Crisis as Form
Publisher: Verso Books
Price: 27,25€
Criticism of contemporary art is split by an opposition between activism and the critical function of form. Yet the deeper, more subterranean terms of art-judgment are largely neglected on both sides. These essays combine a re-examination of the terms of judgement of contemporary art with critical interpretations of individual works and exhibitions by Luis Camnitzer, Marcel Duchamp, Matias Faldbakken, Anne Imhof and Cady Noland.
Claire Bishop: Artifcial Hells
Publisher: Verso Books
Price: 27,99€
The award-winning, highly acclaimed Artificial Hells is the first historical and theoretical overview of socially engaged participatory art, known in the US as "social practice." In recent decades, the art gallery and the museum have become a place for participatory art, where an audience is encouraged to take part in the artwork. This has been heralded as a revolutionary practise that can promote new emancipatory social relations. What was it is really?
Ron Wakkary: Things We Could Design For More Than Human-Centered Worlds
Publisher: The MIT Press
Price: 40,00€
The book problematizes anthropocentric approach to design. It highlights its destructive consequences on a wider scale and offers potential solutions through the idea of sensible cohabitation.
Ana Ofak: Agents of Abstraction
Publisher: Sternberg Press
Price: 29,00€
As the Cold War gained momentum in Europe, Tito’s break with Stalin led to Yugoslavia being expelled from the Eastern bloc in 1948. Confronted with this new reality, the Yugoslav government decided to bridge the indeterminacy of its cultural politics through a creative strategy: it commissioned young artists and architects to draft the aesthetics of a non-Soviet form of socialism. Agents of Abstraction frames the liaison of socialist cultural politics and modernist artistic practice by interlinking ideas of decentralization, experiments in state-funded arts and architecture, non-representational forms, and self-reliance.
Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung: Pidginization as Curatorial Method, Messing with Languages and Praxes of Curating
Publisher: Sternberg Press
Price: 13,00€
In this compelling rethinking of curatorial practice, renowned museum director, curator, and writer Dr. Ndikung proposes that Pidgin languages and pidginization as a mode of being and doing offer a decolonialized reinvention of communicative practices.
Bassam El Baroni (ED.): Between the Material and the Possible, Infrastructural Re-examination and Speculation in Art
Publisher: Sternberg Press
Price: 24,00€
From questions around space settlements to the possibility of repurposing blockchain and financial instruments for redistributive purposes, from the diagrammatic potential of infrastructural thinking in artistic practices to scenario planning and economic strategizing, this collection of new essays brings together critical analysis from a broad group of contributors. Their interrogations span local and global relationalities, historical and political legacies, as well as future-oriented infrastructural hypotheses.
