Marina Vishmidt – författare

The work of 38 established and emerging artists explore the creative potential of risk-taking and transgression in contemporary lifeThe unconventional theme underlying the art featured in this book is the struggle between risk-taking and the prediction algorithms that have become a feature of contemporary life. Does the influence of machine intelligence, and the coincident avoidance of risk, homogenize creative thought? These ideas are explored in the work of 38 established and emerging artists in a variety of media including painting, drawing, sculpture, sculpture, video art, computer art, and performance. Featured artists include Joëlle Tuerlinckx, Ed Atkins, Esther Ferrer, Mounira Al Solh, and Shezad Dawoud. The book takes its title from a town on the French-Belgian border with a history as a well-known customs outpost.Distributed for MercatorfondsExhibition Schedule:WIELS Museum for Contemporary Art Brussels(September 12, 2020–February 10, 2021)

In Speculation as a Mode of Production: Forms of Value Subjectivity in Art and Capital, Marina Vishmidt offers a new perspective on one of the main categories of capitalist life in the historical present. Writing not under the shadow but in the spirit of Adorno's negative dialectic, her work pursues speculation through its contested terrains of philosophy, finance, and art, to arrive at the most detailed analysis that we now possess of the role of speculation in the shaping of subjectivity by value relations. Featuring detailed critical discussions of recent tendencies in the artistic representation of labour, and a brilliant reconstruction of the philosophical concept of the speculative from its origins in German Romanticism, Speculation as a Mode of Production is an essential, widescreen theorisation of capital's drive to self-expansion, and an urgent corrective to the narrow and one-sided periodisations to which it is most commonly subjected.

As we search for ways to imagine a life beyond capital and its drive to extinction, the dream of the institution as a critical refuge from existing social relations becomes less and less credible. Infrastructural Critique proposes a new materialist counter-praxis. By treating the contemporary art institution as a resource base and site of struggle, Vishmidt reanimates critique by connecting it to the effort to erode capitalist authority over the means of our existence, build power and seize resources for new practices of social invention. A tour-de-force of Marxist philosophy, art criticism, Milanese radical feminism and AppleTV+ dinosaur documentaries, this book, edited in the wake of the author's tragic early death, weaves in the gaps of theory and praxis to assess the main infrastructurally critical artmakers at work today. Approaching their practices as 'crystal drills' - at once means of seeing, and practical cutting implements - the text showcases the light-bending, life-shaping thinking of one of the most playful, politically radical theorists of her generation.