Tom Holert

An examination of contemporary art's recent emphasis on “research” and “knowledge production,” and its claims to provide a novel access to “knowledge.” Questioning the role and function of contemporary art in economic and political systems that increasingly manage data and affect, Knowledge Beside Itself delves into the peculiar emphasis placed in recent years, curatorially and institutionally, on such notions as “research” and “knowledge production.” Contemporary art is viewed here as a strategic bet on the social distinctions and value extractions made possible by claiming a different, novel access to “knowledge.” Contemporary art's various liaisons with the humanities and the social and natural sciences, as well as its practitioners' frequent embeddedness within transdisciplinary research environments and educational settings, have created a sense of epistemo-aesthetic departure, which concurs with the growing relevance of art as conduit or catalyst of knowledge. Discussing the practice of artists such as Christine Borland, Bureau d'études, Tony Chakar, Lina Dokuzović, Fernando García-Dory, Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Adelita Husni-Bey, Jakob Jakobsen, Claire Pentecost, and Pilvi Takala, writer and curator Tom Holert submits the gambit of conceptualizing contemporary art as an agent of epistemic politics to a genealogical analysis of its political-economic underpinnings—in times of cognitive capitalism, machine learning, and a renewed urgency of epistemological disobedience.

Contemporary Art's Epistemic Politics

Knowledge Beside Itself

Brian Kuan Wood

Hito Steyerl

Thomas Elsaesser

Doris Krystof

Teresa Castro

Nora M. Alter

Mark Terkessidis

Vanessa Joan Müller

Florian Ebner

Marcella Lista

Films and Installations

Hito Steyerl - I Will Survive

How the relationships between education and outer space have developed historically is exemplified in an incisive way by the decades that followed the "Sputnik shock" of 1957. The wake-up call that resulted from the Soviet space program set the global landscape of learning in motion. New schools and universities came into being against the backdrop of the reform euphoria and mood of catastrophe. At the same time, traditional pedagogical concepts were severely called into question—including the call to do away with institutions of education. What is shown in the architectures of learning is not only a politics of space, but also the educational shock that intensively shook up the global societies of the 1960s and 1970s, while they were gradually being transformed into knowledge societies.

Architecture and the Education Shock of the 1960s and 1970s

Politics of Learning, Politics of Space

Maria Hlavajova

Featuring contributions by artists and theorists such as Kader Attia, Diedrich Diederichsen, Tom Holert, Isabell Lorey and Brian Kuan Wood, Marion von Osten: Once We Were Artistsoffers a critical mapping of the work of Marion von Osten (born 1963). Von Osten and her work sit between several disciplinary boundaries. Based in Berlin and Vienna, Von Osten is an artist as much as a curator, an organizer-facilitator as much as a theorist and a teacher as much as an editor (at e-fluxjournal, among others). This book charts her versatile and thus far under-analyzed work and methodology. The reader anthologizes commissioned essays and three in-depth conversations on various aspects and fields of von Osten’s holistic practice revolving around issues of feminism, economic theory, education and postcolonialism.

Once We Were Artists

Marion Von Osten

Anselm Franke

Neolithic Childhood examines how in the interwar years the artistic avant-gardes in Europe and beyond reacted to the "crisis" of almost everything, from the barbarism of technological mass war to the hypocrisies of colonial discourse. The perceived need to re-establish European civilization after the disaster of the First World War led to an interminable reconstruction of origins and beginnings - making ground zero the limiting function of modernity. Based on the writings of the anti-academic art historian Carl Einstein (1885-1940), the exhibition is devoted to despair over the present and the pressing interest in altering humanity, as manifested from the 1920s to the 1940s in the artistic avant-gardes and the sciences. Exhibition: Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, Germany (13.04.-09.07.2018).

Art in a False Present, C. 1930

Neolithic Childhood

Krieg als Massenkultur im 21. Jahrhundert

Entsichert

Tom Holert

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