Nikolaus Hirsch

Philipp Misselwitz

Eui Young Chun

Jeong Hye Kim

"The eight follies present a 'detour into delirium' throughout the city of Gwangju, and at times they are even moving targets (on the metro or a mobile hotel), galvanizing the space between the everyday and the utopian, examining the present-day constitution of public space as a political arena"--Gwangju Biennale website.

Gwangju Folly II

Daniel Birnbaum

Isabelle Graw

Peter Geimer

Städelschule Frankfurt am Main. Institut für Kunstkritik

Introduction : remarks on contemporary painting's perseverance André Rottmann -- Painting and atrocity : the Tuymans strategy Peter Geimer -- Questions for Peter Geimer Isabelle Graw -- Response to Isabelle Graw Peter Geimer -- The value of painting : notes on unspecificity, indexicality, and highly valuable quasi-persons Isabelle Graw -- Questions for Isabelle Graw Peter Gaimer -- Response to Peter Gaimer Isabelle Graw.

Reflexivity and Agency Beyond the Canvas

Thinking Through Painting

Shveta Sarda

The Cybermohalla project takes on the meaning of the Hindi word mohalla (neighborhood) in its sense of alleys and corners, relatedness and concreteness, as a means for talking about one's "place" in the city. Initiated by the Delhi-based research institute Sarai/CSDS and Ankur, Nikolaus Hirsch and Michel Müller developed a project that involves approximately seventy young practitioners, the Cybermohalla Ensemble, who engage with their urban contexts through various media. Cybermohalla Hub, a hybrid of studio, school, archive, community center, library, and gallery is a structure that moves between Delhi and diverse art contexts including Manifesta 7 and, most recently, the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark. The Cybermohalla experiment has been engaged in rethinking urban life, and reimagining and reanimating the infrastructure of cultural and intellectual life in contemporary cities. The book not only documents the architecture of the project, which functions as an attempt to "build knowledge," but also publishes insights that have emerged from the project as a whole. Contributors Can Altay, Cybermohalla Ensemble, Rana Dasgupta, Hu Fang, Naeem Mohaiemen, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Jacques Rancière, Raqs Media Collective, Superflex, et al.

Cybermohalla Hub

Jason Waite

Documenting an invisible, inaccessible exhibition within the radioactive Fukushima exclusion zone. The twelfth volume of the Critical Spatial Practices series focuses on “Don’t Follow the Wind,” the acclaimed collaborative project situated in Fukushima’s radioactive exclusion zone. The book explores the long-term environmental crisis in the coastal Japanese region through this ongoing, inaccessible exhibition, which maintains traces of human presence amid the fallout of the March 2011 nuclear reactor meltdown that displaced entire towns. What can art do in a continuing catastrophe when destruction and contamination have made living impossible? The exhibition is located inside the exclusion zone, an evacuated radioactive area established after the nuclear disaster that forcibly separated residents from their homes, land, and community. In cooperation with former residents, participating artists installed newly commissioned works at sites in the exclusion zone. Although the exhibition opened in March 2015, the zone is still inaccessible to the public—the exhibition, like the radiation, is virtually invisible. The exhibition can only be viewed when restrictions are lifted and people are permitted to return. This might take several years or decades—a period that could extend beyond our lifetime. While nuclear contamination has displaced and ruptured communities, new temporary and translocal formations have emerged among the residents who have lent their sites, other former residents collaborating on the project, and the artists, curators, and cultural workers. This book includes new texts by feminist theorist Silvia Federici, art historians Noi Sawaragi and Sven Lütticken, and political philosopher Jodi Dean. The project was codeveloped and curated by the collective Don’t Follow the Wind, whose members include Chim↑Pom, Kenji Kubota, Eva & Franco Mattes, and Jason Waite. The participating artists include Ai Weiwei, Chim↑Pom, Nikolaus Hirsch & Jorge Otero-Pailos, Meiro Koizumi, Eva & Franco Mattes, Grand Guignol Mirai, Aiko Miyanaga, Ahmet Öğüt, Trevor Paglen, Taryn Simon, Nobuaki Takekawa, and Kota Takeuchi.

Don't Follow the Wind

Jesko Fezer

Christian Hiller

How can the housing question (Wohnungsfrage) be appropriately reformulated in an age in which the work / life distinction is becoming increasingly blurred? The Realism Working Group and the architecture firm Dogma – in consultation with Florian Schmidt, Studio Commissioner of the Kulturwerk bbk berlin – are developing new living and working spaces for artists that challenge traditional designs and their underlying economic frameworks.

Realism Working Group + Dogma

Anton Vidokle

Nick Axel

Daniel Barber

Examines how images of accumulation help open up the climate to political mobilization The current epoch is one of accumulation: not only of capital but also of raw, often unruly material, from plastic in the ocean and carbon in the atmosphere to people, buildings, and cities. Alongside this material growth, image-making practices embedded within the fields of art and architecture have proven to be fertile, mobile, and capacious. Images of accumulation help open up the climate to cultural inquiry and political mobilization and have formed a cultural infrastructure focused on the relationships between humans, other species, and their environments. The essays in Accumulation address this cultural infrastructure and the methodological challenges of its analysis. They offer a response to the relative invisibility of the climate now seen as material manifestations of social behavior. Contributors outline opportunities and ambitions of visual scholarship as a means to encounter the challenges emergent in the current moment: how can climate become visible, culturally and politically? Knowledge of climatic instability can change collective behavior and offer other trajectories, counteraccumulations that draw the present into a different, more livable, future. Contributors: Emily Apter, New York U; Hans Baumann; Amanda Boeztkes, U of Guelph; Dominic Boyer, Rice U; Lindsay Bremner, U of Westminster; Nerea Calvillo, U of Warwick; Beth Cullen, U of Westminster; T. J. Demos, U of California, Santa Cruz; Jeff Diamanti, U of Amsterdam; Jennifer Ferng, U of Sydney; Jennifer Gabrys, U of Cambridge; Ian Gray, U of California, Los Angeles; Gökçe Günel, Rice U; Orit Halpern, Concordia U; Gabrielle Hecht, Stanford U; Cymene Howe, Rice U; Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Simon Fraser U; Robin Kelsey, Harvard U; Bruno Latour, Sciences Po, Paris; Hannah le Roux, U of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg; Stephanie LeMenager, U of Oregon; Nashin Mahtani; Kiel Moe, McGill U; Karen Pinkus, Cornell U; Stephanie Wakefield, Life U; McKenzie Wark, The New School; Kathryn Yusoff, Queen Mary U of London.

The Art, Architecture, and Media of Climate Change

Accumulation

"This book is based on the conference 'Art and subjecthood: the return of the human figure in semiocapitalism' ... organized by the Institut f'ur Kunstkritik on July 1, 2011, at the Staatliche Hochschule f'ur Bildende K'unste/St'adelschule in Frankfurt am Main"--P. 6.

The Return of the Human Figure in Semiocapitalism

Art and Subjecthood

In several theoretical essays, dialogues on collaborative projects and reflections on his own work, the architect Nikolaus Hirsch explores the critical transformations of contemporary space and its effects on spatial practice. On the threshold to disciplines such as visual and performative arts ("Planning the Unpredictable" with William Forsythe) he questions the notion of "boundary" as a phenomenon of social and political discourse, as a conflict between collaboration and authorship, as well as a physical limitation that negotiates between stable and unstable conditions. Nikolaus Hirsch is an architect based in Frankfurt am Main, who teaches at the Architectural Association in London and at UPenn in Philadelphia. His work includes the internationally acclaimed Dresden Synagogue, the Hinzert Document Center, the European Kunsthalle in Cologne and United Nations Plaza (with Anton Vidokle) in Berlin. He has curated ErsatzStadt: Repräsentationen des Urbanen at the Berlin Volksbühne. His work has been awarded a number of prizes, including the World Architecture Award 2002, and has been shown in exhibitions such as New German Architecture in Berlin, Utopia Station at the Venice Biennial and Can Buildings Curate, AA London/Storefront Gallery in New York.

On Boundaries

Mark Wigley

Beatriz Colomina

A wide-ranging and challenging exploration of design and how it engages with the self The field of design has radically expanded. As a practice, design is no longer limited to the world of material objects but rather extends from carefully crafted individual styles and online identities to the surrounding galaxies of personal devices, new materials, interfaces, networks, systems, infrastructures, data, chemicals, organisms, and genetic codes. Superhumanity seeks to explore and challenge our understanding of “design” by engaging with and departing from the concept of the “self.” This volume brings together more than fifty essays by leading scientists, artists, architects, designers, philosophers, historians, archaeologists, and anthropologists, originally disseminated online via e-flux Architecture between September 2016 and February 2017 on the invitation of the Third Istanbul Design Biennial. Probing the idea that we are and always have been continuously reshaped by the artifacts we shape, this book asks: Who designed the lives we live today? What are the forms of life we inhabit, and what new forms are currently being designed? Where are the sites, and what are the techniques, to design others? This vital and far-reaching collection of essays and images seeks to explore and reflect on the ways in which both the concept and practice of design are operative well beyond tangible objects, expanding into the depths of self and forms of life. Contributors: Zeynep Çelik Alexander, Lucia Allais, Shumon Basar, Ruha Benjamin, Franco “Bifo” Berardi, Daniel Birnbaum, Ina Blom, Benjamin H. Bratton, Giuliana Bruno, Tony Chakar, Mark Cousins, Simon Denny, Keller Easterling, Hu Fang, Rubén Gallo, Liam Gillick, Boris Groys, Rupali Gupte, Andrew Herscher, Tom Holert, Brooke Holmes, Francesca Hughes, Andrés Jaque, Lydia Kallipoliti, Thomas Keenan, Sylvia Lavin, Yongwoo Lee, Lesley Lokko, MAP Office, Chus Martínez, Ingo Niermann, Ahmet Ögüt, Trevor Paglen, Spyros Papapetros, Raqs Media Collective, Juliane Rebentisch, Sophia Roosth, Felicity D. Scott, Jack Self, Prasad Shetty, Hito Steyerl, Kali Stull, Pelin Tan, Alexander Tarakhovsky, Paulo Tavares, Stephan Trüby, Etienne Turpin, Sven-Olov Wallenstein, Eyal Weizman, Mabel O. Wilson, Brian Kuan Wood, Liam Young, and Arseny Zhilyaev.

Nikolaus Hirsch

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