FEATURED TITLE

The Biennial Reader

Born as a vehicle for national propaganda, the art biennial today has become an outsize phenomenon mobilizing not only artists, curators and gallerists but sponsors, celebrities and politicians, commanding huge press attention and deciding the careers of artists worldwide. For a city to host a biennial today has colossal ramifications. This anthology on the art biennial gathers previously published seminal texts from around the world alongside commissioned contributions from the leading scholars, curators, critics and thinkers today--among them Carlos Basualdo, Daniel Buren, John Clark, Okwui Enwezor, Bruce Ferguson, Milena Hoegsberg, Ranjit Hoskote, Caroline A. Jones, Jakouba Konaté, Gerardo Mosquera and Rafal Niemojewski. Tracing the genealogy of the standard exhibition format--including biennials but also other recurrent exhibitions such as triennials and quadrennials--and examining some of the most famous examples of the twentieth and twenty-first century, from the Venice Biennale to the Johannesburg Biennial and the Havana Bienal to Documenta and the Asian biennials, this reader explores the artistic, theoretical, political and other ambitions of such large-scale exhibition projects. It is certain to be a vital resource for scholars, students, curators, artists and critics alike.  > more

A Brief History of Curating

Part of JRP|Ringer's innovative Documents series, published with Les Presses du Réel and dedicated to critical writings, this publication comprises a unique collection of interviews by Hans Ulrich Obrist mapping the development of the curatorial field--from early independent curators in the 1960s and 70s and the experimental institutional programs developed in Europe and the U.S. through the inception of Documenta and the various biennales and fairs--with pioneering curators Anne D'Harnoncourt, Werner Hoffman, Jean Leering, Franz Meyer, Seth Siegelaub, Walter Zanini, Johannes Cladders, Lucy Lippard, Walter Hopps, Pontus Hulten and Harald Szeemann. Speaking of Szeemann on the occasion of this legendary curator's death in 2005, critic Aaron Schuster summed up, "the image we have of the curator today: the curator-as-artist, a roaming, freelance designer of exhibitions, or in his own witty formulation, a 'spiritual guest worker'... If artists since Marcel Duchamp have affirmed selection and arrangement as legitimate artistic strategies, was it not simply a matter of time before curatorial practice--itself defined by selection and arrangement--would come to be seen as an art that operates on the field of art itself?"  > more

Time Action Vision

In Time Action Vision, Christian Höller, of the interdisciplinary Critical Curatorial Cybermedia program at the University of Art and Design in Geneva, conducts 12 conversations on the topics of cultural studies, postcolonialism, globalization, activism and cultural participation. His interlocutors are some of the most respected theoreticians and activists working today: groundbreaking Black Atlantic author Paul Gilroy, Birmingham School founder Stuart Hall (Resistance Through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Postwar Britain), prolific author Tariq Ali (The Clash of Fundamentalisms), former Weather Underground member (and famed Obama associate) Bill Ayers, Marxist geography scholar David Harvey (Social Justice and the City), London-based art theorist and critic Irit Rogoff, Israeli-born scholar of postcolonialism and transnationalism Ella Shohat, South African postcolonial theorist Achille Mbembe, French filmmaker (and Godard collaborator) Jean-Pierre Gorin, cultural studies scholar Lawrence Grossberg, Australian cultural studies scholar Meaghan Morris and Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman.  > more

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