Vasif Kortun

Signs Taken in Wonder highlights the narrative aspects of contemporary artistic production in Istanbul, both in art and in literature. The essays and works of art from three generations of authors and artists reflect the city’s cultural status in the contemporary art world.

Dutch artist Gabriel Lester, born in 1972, incorporates elements of film, drama, music and rhythm in his installations. He began his career as a rapper and worked in the film industry while studying art during the 1990s. He continues to use montage, suspense, viewpoint and special effects in his work.

The rise of globalism has created tremendous challenges to old economic, political and cultural paradigms, changes that are increasingly reflected in diverse artistic practices across the planet. If disciplinary boundaries are now crossed as easily as geographic ones, how does the new internationalism that we are facing affect aesthetics and artistic production? Is there a link, for example, between the rise of video works and the global availability of digital media? Does the global information age facilitate an international language of art and an alternative reading of history, from art history toward art histories? From the perspective of a museum of modern and contemporary art--a purely European construct--the art institution has to overcome a major contradiction, one that exists between its mission of permanence and its mission of change. How can cultural institutions contribute to the revamping of their own structures now that the hegemony of Western modernity is being challenged? How can museums connect with new audiences through different practices, different scholarships, and different interpretive strategies that grow out of the sedimentation of their own history? To invite and encourage such dialogue, How Latitudes Become Forms looks at current scholarship on globalism and changing curatorial practices, and identifies critical models provided by artists themselves, featuring thought-provoking essays and conversations by curators, critics, and cultural programmers from across the world, as well as multidisciplinary artworks by more than 40 artists from Brazil, China, India, Japan, South Africa, Turkey and the United States.

Foci gathers together interviews with ten of the most renowned curators working internationally in the field of contemporary art. The interviews are rich with wide-ranging dialogue and cover issues such as the relationship between the exhibit and its location, art as the barometer for the age, the role of architecture, fashion and design in shaping art, the notions of national and gender identity in art, as well as more specific issues concerning personal curatorial styles. Interviews with Kasper Koenig, Rosa Martinez, Hou Hanru, Harald Szeemann, Vasif Kortun, Maria Hlavajova, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Dan Cameron, Yuko Hasegawa and Barbara London give the reader a fascinating insight into the work and thought process of some of the most creative individuals in today's art world.